Around 6,000 Germans attended a Neo-Nazi rock concert in the small Thuringian town of Themar this weekend. According to local media reports, 1,000 police officers were present to secure the event and prevent clashes with protesters.
Roadblocks were set up around the area and visitors were checked by police who worked to keep the Neo-Nazis and protesters in separate areas.
According to a report by MDR Thüringen, police recorded 23 crimes during the concert, including "threats, insults, material damage, violation of the Narcotics Act, and resistance to law enforcement officers” as well as two cases of the use of banned symbols.
According to the Jerusalem Post, concertgoers were seen sporting tee shirts with slogans such as “I love Hitler” and "Swastika.”
According to Deutsche Welle, there were almost one hundred Neo-Nazi concerts in Germany in the first half of 2016 alone. The far-right music scene is frequently used by ultra-nationalists to recruit young people.
In June, the German parliament voted overwhelmingly to cut off federal funding to the far right National Democratic Party (NPD) party, only months after the country’s Federal Constitutional Court declined to ban the far right movement.
Widely considered a Neo-Nazi party, the NPD has minimal popular backing in Germany, with around seventy percent of respondents in a 2006 poll indicating that they believed that its existence caused damage to Germany’s standing abroad. According to the Associated Press, only 1.3 percent of Germans voted for the NPD in 2013.
As reported by Spiegel Online, the new measure, which was passed 502 to 57, prohibited the federal government from funding parties whose goal is to “combat the democratic freedom of the democratic order or the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany and thus to promote the elimination of order from which they benefit.” NPD received more than one million Euros in state money last year alone.
