Griffin billed to speak at German nazi rally

| Friday, 1 April 2005 Source: Searchlight

Nick Griffin, the British National Party leader, was lined up to speak at a nazi rally in eastern Germany in March. Although he pulled out at the last moment, the National Democratic Party (NPD) had already sent out programmes featuring his picture.

Most of Germany's leading nazis spoke at the rally entitled "Germany will live – National Awakening in the 21st Century". The theme of Griffin's talk was to be Britain's "Struggle between Cultures".

Other speakers included the former Waffen SS officer Franz Schönhuber, now the NPD's media adviser, and Harald Neubauer, a former MEP and member of the outright nazi NSDAP-AO and now co-publisher of the SS-founded Nation & Europa.

Griffin's billing at the nazi rally was revealed in the Daily Mirror on 30 March. Searchlight's chair, Gerry Gable, told the Mirror: "Let people be under no illusions who the suave and softly-spoken Mr Griffin is, and who his nazi friends are".

The BNP said: "Nick was invited to a conference of the NPD, who we don't believe are Nazis, but was too busy to go".

Griffin might have been too engaged in electioneering to attend this time but he has been a regular visitor to NPD functions for some years, where he has shared platforms with the NPD leader Udo Voigt and two convicted terrorists, Horst Mahler and Roberto Fiore.

Mahler, a lawyer, became prominent in the extreme right after a career with the Baader-Meinhof terrorist gang in the 1970s, which later became the Red Army Faction. Fiore organised the NAR, an armed fascist group, in Italy in the 1970s and 1980s. Some of its members were responsible for the Bologna railway station bombing in 1980 in which over 80 people died.

In August 2002 Griffin attended a festival put on by the NPD's newspaper Deutsche Stimme (German Voice), where he was photographed with Voigt and the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. Later that month he took part in an NPD summer school with Mahler and Voigt. In May 2003 Griffin was billed to speak alongside Voigt, Fiore and the NPD's lawyer Jürgen Rieger, but failed to turn up.

Griffin organised a BNP demonstration outside the German embassy when the German Government tried unsuccessfully to ban the NPD. When Griffin and other BNP officers were arrested last December on suspicion of causing race hate, the NPD website called for support for them.

Griffin has posed in front of a Battle of Britain Spitfire outside the RAF museum in Hendon in a mockery of genuine patriotism, but in February his friends in the NPD led 7,000 nazis in a march through Dresden on the 60th anniversary of the Allied bombing of the city. Banners referred to the bombing as the real holocaust, a genocide and the German Hiroshima. Other slogans called the Allies war criminals and promised that the day of revenge would come.

Both the NPD and the BNP have exaggerated the numbers killed in the raids on Dresden. Allied and German sources put the toll at 21,000 to 35,000, but the nazis speak of over 200,000.

Griffin's links with Fiore go back to Fiore's time in exile in Britain, a fugitive from Italian justice. Long before Griffin joined the BNP, Fiore helped Griffin build his Political Soldiers group after it split from the National Front. At the time they were running around East Anglia in the late 1980s somebody desecrated the war graves there of some of the 55,000 US flyers who died in the air war against the Nazis.

Britain also lost 55,000 air crew fighting the Nazis. The BNP's relationship with the NPD is a stab in the back for our brave war dead and insults their memory in this sixtieth anniversary year of the defeat of the Nazis.