Vintage

East German Communists confront their guilty secret: anti-Semitism

“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.

Annette Kahane, head of the Berlin-based Amadeu foundation, which organised the project, said yesterday: "The exhibition's findings do a lot to explain why extreme right-wing political parties and right-wing violence have grown in the east since reunification."