GERMANY: A teacher in an eastern German school called in the police yesterday after three teenage students forced a classmate to parade through the schoolyard wearing a sign bearing an anti-Semitic slogan from the Nazi era.
The sign around the 16-year-old's neck read: "I'm the biggest swine in town/Because I associate with Jews," which was used by Nazi authorities in the 1930s to intimidate anyone who had a relationship with German Jews.
"It's not clear whether the teenagers were actually aware of the meaning but, at 16, I think they should have been," said a police spokesman in the town of Parey, in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt.
The spokesman said the student forced to wear the sign had been attacked once before by the three students, who were already known to police. He declined to say whether investigators believed the incident had an extreme-right motivation.
The episode has shocked teachers and politicians and raised questions about the effectiveness of history lessons on the Nazi era in German schools.
"It is appalling that young people in our country think that they can do such a thing today," said Holger Hövelmann, state interior minister.
Norbert Bischoff, a local Social Democrat (SPD) politician said the incident was "no stupid student trick" but "new evidence of the increasing extreme right attitudes among young people".
Others suggested it was more an indication of how little many German students knew about the Nazi era and its state-sponsored anti-Semitism.
"I don't think these students were extreme right but that they went for the means to break the greatest taboo," Klaus Schröder, an experton extremism, told the DDP news agency.
Leading members of Germany's Jewish community reserved their harshest criticism for the attitude of the authorities towards such incidents.
"When it came to dealing with the murderous left-wing RAF . . . [Red Army Faction] huge security measures were taken for a small band of political criminals. The republic has never shown the same energy for the enemies of democracy from the right," German-Jewish author Ralph Giordano told Spiegel Online.
The incident comes at a time when extremists continue to make inroads into German politics: extreme right parties are represented in three of Germany's 16 state parliaments.
Of particular concern was the 15 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds who voted for the extreme right NPD in a recent state election in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, where the chancellor, Angela Merkel, has her constituency.