By
Isaac Stanley-Becker
August
19, 2017
“There is
only one side — the good side,” cried Eva Kese, mustering a smile as she fought
back tears. “Your hate has no place here.”
Kese, 30, stood Saturday facing a crowd
of about 500 neo-Nazis. They were gathered on the outskirts of the
German capital to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the death of
Rudolf Hess, a deputy to Adolf Hitler. The demonstration marked another, more
recent anniversary: one week since a march by neo-Nazis and white supremacists
in Virginia left
one counterprotester dead.
Kese held
up a sign with a hand-drawn pink heart to the neo-Nazis, who countered with a
giant banner of their own, reading, “I regret nothing.”
Choosing
her words carefully, she repeated: “There is only one side.”
President Trump, she said, had drawn her to
the streets of the German capital to counter the demonstration. She was
incensed by his reaction to the violence in Charlottesville last weekend, in
which he blamed “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides.”
“Donald
Trump brought me here today,” said Kese, a mother of two who was born in
Germany. “You can't stand for an ideology that says one side is inferior.”
The rally in Berlin was planned before global attention turned
to Charlottesville, but it took on new meaning after a week dominated by
discussion of the Nazi past. Counterprotesters said they felt new urgency
to denounce Germany's dark history — particularly in the former capital of
the Third Reich — after watching it reemerge like a
phantom and haunt an American college town.
“It's dangerous everywhere, not just in Germany,” said Sabine
Sauer, 55.
Among the
crowd of neo-Nazis, most of whom declined to be interviewed, an elderly man
with glasses and a button-down shirt under a white T-shirt said he had been
watching events in the United States with delight.
“They're
finally standing up,” said the man, who declined to give his name as other
members of the crowd encircled him, preventing him from speaking further.
Refusing media interviews was among the directives issued to demonstrators by
organizers of the march, German media reported.
The
guidelines for the march stipulated by authorities were also extensive — and
made for a scene starkly at odds with the violent confrontation in
Charlottesville. Speech is more strictly policed in Germany than it is in the
United States, in large part to keep Nazi ideology at bay.
Following strict
laws put into place after World War II, demonstrators were forbidden
from chanting Nazi slogans, displaying swastikas and wearing certain military
uniforms. They couldn't carry weapons.
Torches were also forbidden, an organizer announced before the
march, and only one flag was allowed for every 50 people.
The Hess apologists were restricted in how they could talk
about the prominent Nazi politician, who was convicted of crimes against peace
after the war. They were barred from quoting him or playing his speeches.
The
destination of the march was the former site of Spandau Prison, where Hess
committed suicide in 1987. Soon after, it was demolished — ground to powder
that was scattered in the North Sea — to prevent it from becoming a pilgrimage
site for neo-Nazis.
That
didn't stop it from being the focus of Saturday's march, whose
participants advance the conspiracy theory that Hess was killed covertly
by the British.
But the
neo-Nazis never reached the location of the former prison. They proceeded
haltingly, flanked by police who kept counterprotesters behind metal
barricades. The neo-Nazis remained mostly quiet, carrying the black,
white and red flags of the German Empire.
“Nazis
out,” counterprotesters shouted, as a large crowd moved to block the
road.
After a
two-hour stalemate, in which opposing sides were separated by a 30-yard no
man's land guarded by police, authorities led the neo-Nazis away from their
intended destination, down a side street and back around to the transit station
where they had begun.
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