Bonn - Germany's Jewish leader, Mr Ignatz Bubis, said yesterday he could hardly believe that an elite military academy invited a convicted neo-Nazi bomber to give a talk to trainee officers without knowing who he was.
Mr Manfred Roeder (68), a former lawyer who served eight years in jail for a racist bomb attack in the 1980s, was invited to give a talk in 1995 at the academy in Hamburg on the subject of German resettlement in what was East Prussia before the second World War.
The affair, which came to light at the weekend, prompted the Defence Minister, Mr Volker Ruehe, to suspend a lieutenant-general who headed the academy at the time and order disciplinary proceedings against a colonel. Col Norbert Schwarzer, who asked Mr Roeder to speak, failed to report who his guest was to senior officers, including the head of the academy.