- guardian.co.uk, Sunday February 25 2001 03.21 GMT
Leading neo-Nazis will be given financial and practical assistance in the search for jobs and accommodation, as well as guaranteed protection from other activists.
A telephone hotline is also to be set up to target young people who have been lured into the scene against their will. Efforts will be made to turn some skinheads into informers and, if necessary, to give them new identities.
Interior Minister of the coalition Social Democrat and Green government, Otto Schily, has called for the 'outing' of some penitent extreme right-wingers to be made public 'in the hope of destabilising the scene'.
Police figures released last month showed that the level of right-wing extremist crimes to be at a record high, having risen by 45 per cent to 13,753 between 1999 and last year.
A survey published last week showed that 54 per cent of young east Germans had anti-foreigner feelings, while 20 per cent held far-right views. Nationwide there are believed to be around 50,000 neo-Nazi sympathisers.
The new measures have come under fierce attack from conservative politicians and human rights groups. Erwin Marschewski, opposition spokesman on home affairs, said: 'The possibility can't be ruled out that the chance of financial help for abandoning the far-right scene may also make joining it more inviting.'
The Institute of Race Relations (IRR), a London-based educational charity, published a report last month expressing serious reservations about the German government's approach to combating extreme-right violence. The institute has called the programme 'totally unworkable'.
'It is a crazy and bizarre idea, and at best naive,' said Liz Fekete of the IRR. 'They're basically rewarding you for being a Nazi and showing sympathy towards you, whereas the real victims are the foreigners who have suffered from racist attacks at their hands. What do they get, apart from maybe discovering that a leading Nazi is about to move into a flat next door?'
