Refugees save ‘neo-Nazi’
Less than a week before Daesh militants bombed Brussels, killing at least 31people and again raising fears about refugees in Europe, a much more hopeful story — one, perhaps, destined to be forgotten — played out on the rolling green hills of Friedberg, a German town of 28,000 north of Frankfurt.
There, a right-wing politician known for his anti-refugee rhetoric and sometimes referred to as a “neo-Nazi” crashed his car into a tree, was knocked unconscious — and was rescued by two Syrian refugees.
The report of Stefan Jagsch’s March 16 accident appeared to first surface in the German news outlet Frankfurter Rundschau, and was confirmed by Der Spiegel and reported by The Associated Press.
The cause of the accident was not known; it was reported Jagsch was “seriously injured.” The refugees who came to his aid, who happened to be passing the scene of the accident in a bus, were not identified, but reportedly pulled Jagsch from the car, performed first aid and waited until an ambulance arrived. They were gone by the time police arrived.
In a Facebook post, Jagsch — a 29-yearold member of the anti-immigrant National Democratic Party (NPD) who has posted statements such as “the boat is full” and “integration is genocide” on his Facebook page, as Bild reported — said he couldn’t confirm that the men who helped him were refugees.
“I cannot comment in this regard, because I was not at the time of salvage conscious,” a translation of his post read. “So I cannot confirm that it was a Syrian refugee who pulled me out of the vehicle, nor refute! For this reason, I give no opinion on the matter.”
Jean Christoph Fiedler, an NPD leader, said Jagsch was still in the hospital, but “doing well, considering the circumstances.” Fiedler also reportedly thanked the refugees for their “very good, human actions.”
For the NPD, this was high praise. A translation of the party’s website reads, in part: “The terrorist attacks by Islamists in Europe have highlighted the danger brings mass immigration for internal security.”
Earlier this month, it was reported that Germany’s highest court was considering banning the NPD.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has called the NPD “an anti-democratic, xenophobic, anti-Semitic, anti-constitutional party.”