Neo-Nazis gather in Berlin, 37 hurt in Hamburg

May 01, 2000 - 10:02

HAMBURG, Germany, May 1 (Reuters) - Leftists clashed with police in the port city of Hamburg on Monday, injuring 12 police and 25 protesters in the first of a feared wave of May Day violence across Germany, officials said.

Protesters threw stones at banks, broke shop windows and set fire to several cars in the city centre after midnight.

Police charged the demonstrators and one officer suffered a broken arm. Three police were treated in hospital, a spokesman said. Leftists said 25 protesters were hurt.

Authorities across Germany were bracing for trouble on Monday, and a total force of more than 6,000 police deployed across the capital, Berlin. Reinforcements guarded government buildings in the city centre.

Authorities were especially wary about an approved neo-Nazi demonstration in a section of east Berlin, where 300 mostly young men aged between 16 and 25, many of them skinheads, had gathered.

"We as Germans are being plundered. The money to set up our future is being taken," said Andreas Storr, a spokesman for the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party.

Storr said demonstrators want to highlight the inability of institutions such as the European Union to address German needs. "The EU is a Europe of capital and not of the people," he said, as some carried banners reading "Work for Germans first".

The NPD had called on members from all over Germany to converge on Berlin for the marches, but initial turnout was not especially strong. Some carried old imperial German flags; Nazi flags and symbols are illegal in Germany.

Police outnumbered the neo-Nazis by nearly 10 to one, with 2,500 police on duty in the Hellersdorf region of east Berlin where the neo-Nazis gathered. Many of the police wore riot gear, and vans with reinforcements waited nearby.

"It's possible that anger will spill out and riots could happen," police spokesman Hans Zeretzke said. "Massive violence is also possible."

"In recent years there has always been violence, and people are always injured," he said. "I can't say why this happens, but people react aggressively."

Running street battles between right-wing extremists, neo-Nazis and skinheads on one side and socialists and extreme left-wingers known as "Autonomists" on the other are a traditional feature of Berlin's May Day holiday.

The Autonomists have pledged to take their anti-capitalist struggle to the streets of the newly restored centre of Berlin and to demonstrate against "imperialist centres and the lures of capital."

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