Far-right protest turns violent
BERLIN — Protesters flashing Nazi salutes and shouting “Foreigners out” clashed Monday night with counterdemonstrators chanting “Refugees welcome,” in a second night of violence in the east German city of Chemnitz that left several people injured and a country dismayed over images of rioting.
The police in Saxony said Tuesday that several people had been treated for injuries suffered in the clashes Monday night. Ten people were being investigated for giving the Hitler salute, they said.
The violence first broke out Sunday, after nationalists and far-right soccer fans called on supporters, including on social media, to take to the streets to “defend” their country from immigrants after the killing of a 35-year-old German man.
Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed her condolences to the victim’s family and condemned the violence, telling reporters in Berlin on Tuesday that she had seen videos of demonstrators “going after people, riotous assemblies and hate in the streets.”
“I can only stress that this has nothing to do with the rule of law in this country,” Merkel said. “There can be no place in our streets for such rioting.” She also welcomed the offer by her interior minister, Horst Seehofer, to support authorities in Saxony in ensuring the rule of the law in Chemnitz.
A 21-year-old Iraqi and a 22-year-old Syrian were arrested Monday on suspicion of having stabbed the victim during an altercation with him and two other men, both of whom were injured, Christine Mücke, a prosecutor in Chemnitz, said Monday. The case was later taken over by a special prosecutor for handling extremism in the state of Saxony.
Chemnitz was celebrating its 875th anniversary over the weekend, but a street festival had to be shut down Sunday. Police officers trying to ensure security at the festival were overwhelmed as hundreds of people joined the protests and counterprotests, and police scrambled to call in reinforcements.
Videos from Sunday night showed a white man dressed in black chasing a darker-skinned young man down the street as someone shouted “You aren’t welcome here!” in the background.
After a tense lull in the violence most of Monday, the confrontations resumed in force late in the day. Videos from Monday night showed several thousand demonstrators brandishing German flags and shouting, “We are the people” and “Chemnitz is ours — foreigners out,” and neo-Nazis gathered in the city, raising their right arms in the Nazi salute.
On the opposite side of a wide boulevard, a smaller group shouted “Nazis out.”
Saxony is home to a strong faction of the Alternative for Germany party, known as AfD. Recent polls show the party firmly in place as the secondstrongest force in the state, closing in on Merkel’s conservatives.