SEVEN holidaymakers received hospital treatment after right wing youths attacked three campsites in the north eastern state of Mecklenburg, eastern Germany, at the weekend.
In the most serious incident, 50 young extremists wielding base ball bats and iron bars set upon members of a west German Catholic youth group who were camping near one of Mecklenburg's most picturesque lakes.
The trouble started when the group's leader told three drunken skin heads to leave the campsite because they were harassing girls as young as 12.
Police charged six youths with breaching the peace, causing bodily harm and damaging property but they insisted that they were not treating the incident as a right wing extremist act.
Mecklenburg's interior ministry contradicted this view yesterday, describing the perpetrators as "members of the extreme right wing political scene". Some of the youths shouted "Sieg Heil" and other Nazi slogans as they attacked the campers and some of those arrested were carrying right wing propaganda literature.
The Green Party in Mecklenburg accused the police of being "blind in the right eye" and called for a special sitting of the state parliament to discuss the violence. A Social Democrat politician, Mr Siegfried Friese, said that the interior ministers of all 16 federal states in Germany should meet to find a solution to right wing hooliganism.
There have been more than a dozen serious attacks on camp sites in Mecklenburg during the past two years, winning an unwelcome reputation for a state that has struggled to rebuild its economy since unification. Tourism has grown in recent years but local politicians fear that the latest violent incidents will deter Westerners from booking holidays anywhere in eastern Germany.
