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Shofar FTP Archive File: camps/buchenwald/press/ap.072494



Archive/File: camps/buchenwald/press ap.072494 people/b/bubis.ignatz/press ap.072494 
Last-Modified: 1994/08/17

APn  07/24 1450  Germany-Buchenwald

Copyright, 1994. The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

By LARRY THORSON, Associated Press Writer

   BERLIN (AP) -- A gang of 22 neo-Nazis went on a rampage at the site
of the Buchenwald concentration camp, throwing stones, shouting Nazi
slogans and threatening to burn a woman who works there, police said
Sunday.

   A tour bus carrying 21 young men and one woman pulled up Saturday
evening at the former camp, now a national memorial to the 56,000
people who died there between 1937 and 1945.

   They shouted "Sieg Heil" and gave the stiff-armed Hitler salute.
They broke a window in a barracks building and pulled out a cart that
was part of an exhibit on inmates' labor.  And they threatened a staff
member.

   "One of them said to this woman, `I'll burn you with my own
hands,'" Weimar policeman Oswin Werner said in a national television
interview.

   All 22 were detained briefly for questioning.  Police said only
one, a 23-year-old from Erfurt, remained under arrest Sunday.

   Prosecutors were considering whether to bring charges of disturbing
the peace and making threats.

   On Friday, 14 youths aged 18 to 20 were arrested in the eastern
city Magdeburg for marching around and singing Nazi songs.  They may
face charges of spreading propaganda of the illegal Nazi party.

   On May 12, neo-Nazis hunted for foreigners during riotous marches
in Magdeburg, 75 miles west of Berlin.

   The head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Ignatz Bubis,
said the Buchenwald rampage showed the need for strict enforcement of
Germany's laws banning Nazi paraphernalia and propaganda.

  "These attacks are not just adolescents showing off.  We're well
past that stage, these are planned actions," Bubis said in an
interview with the Mitteldeutsches Express, an eastern German daily.

   Police were called out three other times during the weekend to deal
with noisy neo-Nazi groups in eastern Germany, ARD national television
reported.

   During World War II, the Nazis held some 238,000 Jews, Gypsies,
Soviet prisoners of war, German political prisoners and others at
Buchenwald, which lies in a forest on a hillside overlooking Weimar, a
city 120 miles southwest of Berlin.

   The memorial, consisting of the few buildings remaining from the
concentration camp, is being remodeled in preparation for next year's
50th anniversary of its liberation in the last weeks of World War II.

   Officials have said security was strengthened early this year
following isolated instances in which neo-Nazis insulted Israeli
visitors to the camp.

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