East German Communists confront their guilty secret: anti-Semitism

Communist East Germany officially took pride in its "anti-fascism" yet party youth members used Nazi salutes, the Holocaust was virtually ignored and Jewish cemeteries were flattened to make way for car parks.

A dark and little known aspect of East Germany emerged yesterday at a Berlin exhibition which exposes the communist state's role in creating a fertile breeding ground for anti-Semitism, right-wing violence and xenophobia.

Entitled "We never had any of that " in an ironic reference to the official Communist Party boast that East Germany was Nazi- free, the exhibition is the result of eight months' research by historians and pupils in provincial archives.

Annette Kahane, head of the Berlin-based Amadeu foundation, which organised the project, said yesterday: "The exhibition's findings do a lot to explain why extreme right-wing political parties and right-wing violence have grown in the east since reunification."

More than 100 people have been killed by xenophobic far-right violence - much of it in the east - since Germany reunified in 1990.

Researchers unearthed files complied by the notorious Stasi secret police which showed that Nazi sympathisers in the East began vandalising Jewish cemeteries as early as 1946.

Hushed up by the Communist Party, police and state-controlled media, the practice continued right up to the last days of East Germany in 1989 - when neo-Nazis daubed anti-Semitic graffiti over gravestones in one of East Berlin's largest Jewish cemeteries and dumped a maggot-ridden pig's carcass on the site. The People's Police routinely dismissed such incidents as the work of " rowdies".

The files also contain photographs of a covert 100- member "Nazi- SS" organisation that flourished on the East German Baltic coast in the 1970s and 1980s, attacking citizens they felt behaved "like Jews". The pictures show one member standing to attention in a black uniform and sporting a home-made swastika armband.

The exhibition documents how Stasi officers were "concerned" by reports that members of the Communist Party Free German Youth movement in Potsdam near Berlin routinely used the Nazi salute to greet each other and insulted their critics as " Jewish Pigs". Another example showed how officials in Hagenow demolished a 150-year-old Jewish cemetery to make way for a municipal car park and used the gravestones as the steps for its pedestrian entrance. In schools, the Jewish aspect of the Holocaust was downplayed or ignored.

At the same time propaganda routinely criticised Israel, comparing its actions to the Nazi genocide. The communist regime gave its unreserved backing to the Palestinian cause.

"East Germany practised a very aggressive form of anti-Semitism by remaining completely silent about the fate of Jews, even the ones who lived in the east," Mrs Kahane, who grew up in the east, said yesterday, "People liked to say: 'Oh yes the Jews allowed themselves to be led to their slaughter like lambs - they could have fought'."

The project's organisers said official attitudes ensured that many older East Germans had been led to believe that they represented Germany's "socialist victory" over fascism and that their part in the rise of Nazism was reduced to that of bystanders. The idea that Jews rather that communist resistance fighters suffered in the death camps was often dismissed as "capitalist propaganda". "East Germany suppressed the Nazi era in its own special way," said Mrs Kahane.