Schroder pledges £25m to combat neo-Nazi attacks

The German government, reacting to the relentless drumbeat of daily atrocities, yesterday announced the first of its sweeping measures to combat the far right. Some DM75m (£25m) has been earmarked for a programme that seeks the de-Nazification of German youth.

The German government, reacting to the relentless drumbeat of daily atrocities, yesterday announced the first of its sweeping measures to combat the far right. Some DM75m (£25m) has been earmarked for a programme that seeks the de-Nazification of German youth.

More steps will be unveiled by Gerhard Schröder when he returns from his holidays at the weekend. What seemed like a gentle comeback for the chancellor promises to be a gruelling chore: he will be touring the east of the country for the next two weeks, visiting some of the worst hot-spots of the resurgent far right.

The programme unveiled yesterday is intended to be just the beginning of what promises to be the most concerted attack on right-wing extremism since the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. The money is to be spent on extra lessons for children on German history and on the threatening concept - often denounced by mainstream conservatives - of "multi-culturalism".

A hotline for reporting racist violence will be set up. Private groups and charities combating ignorance and xenophobia on shoe-string budgets can look forward to a windfall of public funds. The government will train staff who work on public transport not to look away when foreigners are being harassed and hire computer experts to track down neo-Nazi web sites on the internet.

For more than a decade social workers have been arguing that poor education, especially in the east, was one of the main causes of the hatred of foreigners. Their pleas have until now fallen on deaf ears. Racism is most acute in parts of the east where youths have no experience of immigrants. Two years ago nearly 13 per cent of voters in the eastern Land of Saxony-Anhalt voted for a far-right party, even though only 2 per cent of the region's population was of foreign origin.

But extra lessons will not be enough. Renate Künast, one of the Greens' co-leaders, yesterday called for retraining of teachers in the east, because they are seen as part of the problem. The communist authorities started the myth that Nazism had been the work of an isolated bunch of people, successfully purged from the workers' paradise but still lurking in the decadent West. Many east German teachers therefore have an ambivalent attitude to the Third Reich and fail to see similarities between today's xenophobic banter in the classroom and the chain of events that led to the rise of Hitler.

It will take more than DM75m to eradicate the misconceptions of two generations. The opposition Free Democrats say DM300m should be spent on a national brain-washing programme at schools.

The government is also expected to set up a panel of eminent people to co-ordinate the intellectual drive against far-right tendencies. The real problem, as many politicians are increasingly prepared to admit, is that the dislike of foreigners is anything but a marginal phenomenon. Xenophobia is socially respectable. Crime, for instance, is routinely portrayed by the media and leading politicians as a foreign pursuit.

Such an initiative was launched this week in Germany's most populous Land, North Rhine-Westphalia. The regional capital, Düsseldorf, was the scene last month of a bomb attack that injured 10 immigrants from the former Soviet Union, including six Jews. Wolfgang Clement, the Land prime minister, is pressing the local police and judiciary to act tough on hate crime.

This line of attack, coupled with moves to ban the far-right National Democratic Party, is expected to be at the centre of Mr Schröder's plan to rid the country of neo-Nazi violence.

Despite the uproar over Düsseldorf and a string of outrages, every day brings news of fresh attacks. Yesterday, for instance, came reports from Hamburg of a neo-Nazi youth stabbing a Turkish man.