Haaretz
Adar 19, 2007
BERLIN - A German court gave five
far-right supporters in eastern Germany nine-month suspended sentences on
Thursday for ceremonially burning a copy of the diary of Holocaust victim
Anne Frank.
The five men, aged between 24 and 29, were found guilty
of incitement and desecration of the dead by a court in the eastern town
of Schoenebeck. Two other defendants were acquitted for lack of
evidence.
The incident took place in February of last year during a
summer solstice celebration in the eastern German village of Pretzien near
Magdeburg.
According to news reports, one of the men cast the diary
into the flames and said: "I commit Anne Frank to the fire," borrowing
words used by the Nazis in 1933. They also burned an American
flag.
The gathering, which is estimated to have been attended by
more than a hundred people, was organized by the Heimat Bund Ostelbien - a
group that grew out of an earlier right-wing group in the area, according
to the interior ministry of the eastern state of Saxony Anhalt.
One
defendant admitted having thrown the book into the fire, saying he had
acted alone. The man argued that he had not intended to trivialize Anne
Frank's death but rather wanted to get rid of an "evil chapter" of German
history.
Known in English as "Anne Frank: the Diary of a Young
Girl," the journal chronicles the Jewish girl's two-year period in hiding
in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands.
The secret annex she lived in
with her family was raided in 1944, after which she was taken to Germany's
Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she died at the age of 15. The
diary became one of the world's most widely read books after it was
published in 1947.
Jewish groups in Germany have warned in recent
weeks of an increase in anti-Semitic violence.
On March 1,
right-wingers threw a burning object through the window of a Jewish
nursery school in Berlin and defaced the building with anti-Semitic
graffiti, drawing condemnation from German Chancellor Angela
Merkel.