Germany:A suspected neo-Nazi admitted in a German court yesterday to burning a copy of The Diary of Anne Frankat a midsummer festival last year to loud cheers from his friends.
But the 25-year-old defendant, identified only as Lars K, denied he wanted to insult the memory of Frank, who was deported from Amsterdam to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she died in March 1945 aged 15. Instead the defendant's lawyer said he wanted to "liberate himself of this evil episode of German history".
On June 24th last year, Lars K and six friends aged between 24 and 29 attended the festival in Prezien, a small town near Magdeburg. The young men, dressed in T-shirts reading "Wehrmacht Prezien", had been drinking heavily and began shouting extreme-right slogans. Then they began throwing objects on the bonfire, including an American flag and a copy of the book.
Lars K told the court it was a spontaneous idea of his: he phoned his girlfriend from the party and told her to dig out their copy of the book from the attic and bring it round. He denies witness testimony that, as the book burned, he shouted it was "all lies anyway".
Public prosecutor Arnold Murra said: "They mocked Anne Frank, and in her name, every victim of the concentration camps." The seven men went on trial in Magdeburg yesterday charged with sedition and disparagement of the deceased. Holocaust denial is a punishable offence in Germany carrying a jail sentence of up to five years.
Thomas Heppner, director of the Anne Frank Centre in Berlin, has described the case as a horror story.