No room for neo-nazis

Saturday, October 27, 2007 at 3:34 | Posted in Germany, Politics | Leave a comment
Tags: npd

Spiegel Online International writes that the German ultra right-wing party NPD lost their court appeal in Lower Saxony to force a convention hall in Oldenburg, Weser-Ems-Halle, to accomodate the party’s annual conference:

The case in Oldenburg had nothing, technically, to do with the NPD’s legal right to assemble — it’s an established, if radical, German party with elected representatives in four eastern state legislatures. The case dealt instead with whether the Oldenburg convention hall was legally bound to rent space to the NPD. Lower Saxony law says that any state-run convention hall must make its rooms available for annual party congresses — but the court found that the Weser-Ems-Halle, where the NPD had tried to make reservations, was privately run.

The NPD caucus of the state parliament in Saxony in its turn tried to rent convention rooms at Holiday Inn Dresden. Several blogs, among others StoiBär and Sagichdoch by Sven publish a letter by Mr. Johannes H. Lohmeyer, CEO of MACRANDER HOTELS GmbH & Co. KG, to the NPD parliamentary caucus in Saxony. Mr. Lohmeyer writes that the neo-nazis are not welcome to the hotel and he is trying to make the booking agency Hotel.de cancel the reservation. Should this be impossible due to contract reasons, Mr. Lohmeyer advices the NPD caucus that any revenue from the venue is going to be donated to the Synagogue in Dresden which was demolished by nazis during the Crystal Night of 1938.

As Spiegel OnLine International points out the neo-nazi party is entitled to receive tax payer funded contributions thanks to getting a few MP’s elected into parliaments of four eastern states:

The handful of elected NPD members in eastern states puts the NPD in line for federal money. Last year German taxpayers shelled out €1.4 million ($1.9 million) to a party most of them find repulsive, due to its overt anti-Semitism and vocal sympathy with Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party.

Funding the party by public spending is one thing but forcing private companies to make business with them is obviously another. The businesses in Oldenburg and Dresden sure made a point of it and left the neo-nazis out on the street.