Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

NEO-NAZIS • 481imprisonment although he was released in 1999. In the course of histrial it was revealed that Lauck had spoken in engagements beforejunior officers in the German army on a number of occasions. InDecember 1997 the German defense minister, Volker Rühe, revealedthat Manfred Roeder, the convicted neo-Nazi terrorist of theDeutsche Aktionsgruppen, or Action-Front of National Socialists,had given lectures to soldiers and others at an officers’ academy inHamburg in 1995 during the course of which soldiers had been videotapedmaking the Hitler salute and denigrating Jews. Roeder hadbeen convicted in 1982 as an accomplice in a bomb attack that killedtwo Vietnamese refugees and had been imprisoned until 1990.According to former neo-Nazi Ingo Hasselbach, young neo-Naziswere undergoing military training in deserted former East Germanarmy training grounds in forests outside Berlin and on the island ofRügen where they learned how to use grenade launchers and automaticweapons. In February 1998 German police discovered a bombmakingfactory in Jena, in the eastern German state of Thuringia,which Helmut Roewer, head of the Office for the Defense of the Constitution,said denoted a qualitative leap in the level of violence beingpursued by neo-Nazi groups in the former East Germany. Accessibilityto e-mail and devotion to racist rock bands that play on a concertcircuit known as “Blood and Honor” have helped to consolidate feelingsof group solidarity among the skinhead component of the neo-Nazi underground in Germany. Several neo-Nazis have grown longhair and infiltrated leftist organizations on the orders of their leadersto gather intelligence. Neo-Nazis also compiled hit lists of 280 Germanleftists and liberals to be “punished.” On 19 December 1998,neo-Nazis bombed the headstone of the grave of Heinz Galinsky,the Jewish leader who had survived Auschwitz, who was buried inCharlottenburg cemetery in Berlin. On the weekend of 2–3 October1999, neo-Nazis vandalized or overturned more than 100 headstonesand memorials at the Weissensee Jewish cemetery in Berlin.In other countries neo-Fascist organizations have developed thatmay not openly identify with Nazism but that have a similar ideologyand political program and whose membership contains manyneo-Nazis. In Great Britain the now-defunct National Front was anexample, while in France the European Nationalist Fascists (FNE)is another, whose members have included former functionaries of theVichy regime of Nazi-occupied France.