http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,784686,00.htmlNeo-Nazis have been left to thrive in the northeastern German state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, where the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD), which includes prominent members who have glorified the Third Reich, won up to a third of the vote in some districts in Sunday's regional election, say analysts and anti-racism groups.
Far-right supporters are firmly ensconced in rural communities, where they staff the local fire departments, run leisure activities for young people and even provide citizen's advice for welfare claimants. They live in a vacuum, in small towns and villages abandoned by mainstream democratic parties and by overstretched, underfunded local authorites, and are often free to express their ideology unhindered by the police or courts.
The village of Jamel, dominated by neo-Nazis, is a case in point. A signpost by the roadside shows the distance to Hitler's birthplace in Braunau am Inn. A reporter recently recorded a video of a rusty barbecue inscribed with the words "happy holocaust" -- a flagrant breach, many would argue, of Germany's tough laws against incitement to hatred. But there it stands, behind a barbed-wire fence in the garden of the local NPD office.
The NPD won 6.0 percent of the overall vote in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania on Sunday, enough to remain represented in the state parliament for a second five-year term. The NPD, which has five seats the Mecklenburg parliament, has been described by the German domestic intelligence agency as being a "racist, anti-Semitic, revisionist" party bent on removing democracy and forming a Fourth Reich. However, the party has not yet succeeded in landing any seats in the federal parliament, the Bundestag.
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