File: /u/pd0/text.fascism/cologne.0193
Source: Globe & Mail, Jan. 11, 1993 (Pg. A9)

Handicapped Germans join neo-Nazi fight
Reuters News Agency

BONN, Germany -- Handicapped Germans, fearing they could be the next victims
of neo-Nazi attacks, have joined the fight against intolerance by organizing
a "chain of light" to illuminate the Rhine River in Cologne.

Up to 50,000 people, their candles and sparklers reflected in the murky
water, formed an 11-kilometer chain Saturday night from the city's cathedral
along both banks of the river and over four bridges, organizers said.

"We want to stand up for tolerance, against discrimination and
anti-Semitism, and for a society where the able and disabled, foreigners and
Germans, can live together in peace," said Club 68, a group of handicapped
people and their supporters.

Four Vietnamese refuges in the east German town of Erfurt were beaten up by
a gang of thugs in the most recent attack of a wave against foreigners,
police said yesterday.

Fears have grown among Germany's five million disabled that extremists who
have killed 17 people in such attacks since unification in 1990 could turn
on them next.

Adolf Hitler's Nazis, the idols of many of today's extremists, persecuted
not only Jews but the handicapped, sick, Slavs, gypsies, communists and
anyone who disagreed with them.

Some Germans in wheelchairs say they have already been spat at in the
streets by young thugs, beaten up and told: "Under Hitler you would have
been gassed."

Wheelchair-bound people joined in the Cologne rally, the first major protest
organized by disabled people, which eneded with a peal of bells from the
city's vast Gothic cathedral.

Hundreds of thousands of Germans have taken part in anti-racist marches in
recent months to protest firebombings and violent attacks, which have mainly
been aimed at refugees, immigrant workers and Jewish monuments.

The rallies have transformed the mood of a country horrified by the
parallels with Nazi brutality.

Depressed east Germany has been the most fertile recruiting ground for
right-wing extremists, who have exploited a void left by the disappearance
of authoritarian communism -- and jobs.

Chancellow Helmut Kohl chose onec-divided Berlin for the first big protest
march in November, when he led 350,000 people.

But it was not until three Turks were killed by neo-Nazi firebombers later
that month in west Germany that grassroots protests spread across the
country.

Huge crowds of young and old, many of whom have never marched for or against
anything before, took to the streets.

Two neo-Nazi groups were banned, and the frequency of attacks seems to have
diminished. But the problem is in no way over.

A Cologne newspaper said passers-by had stood watching as a skinhead
viciously beat a 16-year-old Turkish girl on a city street last week. An old
man eventually came to her rescue.

Hans-Ludwig Zachert, head of the federal crime office, said rising German
crime had been charaterized by an "enormous burst of aggression."

In Berlin, police said more than 40,000 people took part in a traditional
rally yesterday, commemorating German communist pioneers murdered in 1919.
This year the rally was dedicated to fighting rascism and intolerance.

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