31 October 2006
Customs officers in Poland have intercepted a parcel containing hundreds of neo-Nazi CDs on its way from the United States to Germany, the news service "European Jewish Press" (EJP) reports. Officers in Wroclaw opened the package to find 300 CDS with neo-Nazi lyrics and illustrations, after they were posted on by a Polish resident, named only as Bartosz J, in the south-western town of Opole. Most of the records had extreme imagery on their covers, including pictures of Adolf Hitler, barbed wire from Second World War concentration camps and a canister of Zyklon B, the gas used to murder inmates at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The lyrics, penned by notorious German neo-Nazi groups, such as Hassgesang and Landser, also broadcast fanatical rightwing ideology. According to the sleeve notes one of the CDs also includes "marches and war songs from the European Nazi movement and SS volunteers." A police spokesman said that packages such as the one found in Wroclaw were quite common. "A considerable amount of fascist material is sent here from the UK and USA," Pawel Biedziak told EJP. "Though we cannot talk of a permanent smuggling route." Bartosz J. faces two years in prison for propagating Nazi material.