THE INDEPENDENT: East German Communists confront their guilty secret: anti-Semitism
By Tony Paterson in Berlin
Published: 13 April 2007
Communist East Germany officially took pride in its “anti-fascism” yet party youth members used Nazi salutes, the Holocaust was virtually ignored and Jewish cemeteries were flattened to make way for car parks.
A dark and little known aspect of East Germany emerged yesterday at a Berlin exhibition which exposes the communist state’s role in creating a fertile breeding ground for anti-Semitism, right-wing violence and xenophobia.
Entitled “We never had any of that ” in an ironic reference to the official Communist Party boast that East Germany was Nazi- free, the exhibition is the result of eight months’ research by historians and pupils in provincial archives.
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