Extremism in Focus

Berlin police said Sunday that 16 neo-Nazis were arrested during a demonstration that was held to show support for the jailed lead singer of banned skinhead rock group Landser.

The event took place amid concerns far-right extremists are becoming more active, and more violent.

Some 750 neo-Nazis and other far-right supporters turned gathered Saturday outside of a Berlin prison to call for the release of Michael Regener, who has been jailed since 2003, when a Berlin court found his rock band Landser, or Foot Soldiers, guilty of spreading hate against Jews and foreigners in their songs.

The demonstration was organized by the far-right National Democratic Party, which last month won representation in the state legislature of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. The party, which is growing in popularity in the former East Germany, also holds seats in Saxony's state parliament, where another extremist party is also represented.

'Jews do not feel safe'

Meanwhile, on Saturday the Israeli ambassador to Germany called the rise of far-right organizations in Germany "worrying" and said Jews in the country "do not feel safe."

"Antisemitism, the number of neo-Nazis and the tendency towards violence have risen," Shimon Stein told the Neue Osnabrucker Zeitung, which published the interview in full on its website.

"The current trend is worrying and calls for a mobilisation of the whole society," he said. The governing coalition in Germany decided on Friday to increase the budget for fighting right wing extremism by 5 million euros ($6.3 million) next year.

'Beyond marginal'

Commenting on the the entry of far-right deputies into three regional parliaments, the ambassador said "it is not a threat to democracy, but I think that it has gone beyond the stage of being a marginal phenomenon."

"I have the feeling that Jews in Germany do not feel safe. They are not always able to practice their religion freely," he said, particularly noting the strict security measures necessary at religious gatherings. "The desire for normality remains frustrated."

Bernd Wagner, a Berlin-based expert on extremist movements and leader of the Center for Democratic Culture in Berlin, said right-extremist parallel societies are a phenomenon that exists "in many German states." It is just stronger in some and weaker in others, he told the Mitteldeutsche Zeitung newspaper over the weekend.

'Not all brown'

However, he said it is not true that all of the former East Germany "is colored brown," referring to Hitler's brown-shirted army. Germany needs to deal in a differentiated way with the threat, depending on where it is coming from: sometimes with education and social work, sometimes with the police.

Wolfgang Tiefensee, federal minister for urban affairs, told the Saarbrücker Zeitung newspaper over the weekend that he was worried about the "shockingly good" organization of the right-wing scene in some of Germany's states. "There is right-wing extremism in the West and the East. I am very much behind the idea of clearly calling the problem in the East by name," he said.