David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader, white supremacist and Louisiana politician, was arrested and taken into custody in Cologne on Friday, prior to a planned speech to a right-wing extremist group, German police said Monday.
The statement by the Cologne police department said that Duke, 61, is “obliged to leave German territory without delay.” In a message on his website, Duke said he had been released from jail and requested financial assistance from his followers to fight the deportation.
“To fight this case will cost a lot of money, time and effort,” he wrote.
The arrest appears to be tied to Duke’s expulsion from the Czech Republic in 2009, following his detention there on suspicion of denying the Holocaust, a crime in many European countries, including Germany. The Cologne police statement said that Duke “was not entitled to stay in Germany” because of a travel ban against him in another, unspecified European country.
Duke, a former neo-Nazi who unsuccessfully ran for the U.S. presidency in 1988 and 1992, served a year in prison in 2003 and 2004 after pleading guilty to tax fraud and stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from supporters to pay gambling debts.
Since his release from prison, Duke has traveled and lectured widely, including a 2006 appearance at a Holocaust denial conference in Tehran, Iran. The conference featured numerous speeches denouncing the Holocaust as a “myth.” At the conference, Duke voiced support for discredited, fringe scholars imprisoned in Europe for denying the use of gas chambers against Jews during the Holocaust.
In the United States, Duke continues to speak regularly at gatherings of prominent right-wing groups and writes for Stormfront, a leading white-supremacist website.
The Cologne prosecutor’s office did not respond to a request for comment about Duke’s arrest. A woman who answered a phone number on Duke’s website confirmed the arrest but declined to be identified.
In the statement on his website, Duke said that German authorities had arrested him in order to silence his “message of heritage and freedom.”
Germany has struggled recently with a resurgence of nationalist groups, some which have been tied to violence against minorities and immigrants. Several days before Duke’s arrest, German prosecutors announced a new investigation into a neo-Nazi gang tied to eight murders, including six Turkish immigrants and a police officer. The group, which had escaped detection for over a decade, is also suspected in attacks in Cologne and Duesseldorf that injured more than 30 people, mostly immigrants and foreigners.
“We all have a responsibility to ensure that extreme-right, nationalistic and anti-Semitic groups and networks are not able to again come together,” Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, the German justice minister, said in a statement, according to the Associated Press.
(Source: Huffington Post)
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7 Responses
It’s illegal to be a Nazi in Germany. Not to mention the fact that most Germans have decided that the Third Reich was one whopper of a mistake, and really prefer not to be reminded about it.
The new Germany…30 years ago I was working in the Mayor’s Office in a large City…while there it was a German graduate student intern who persuaded me, and then helped me, to seek family archives from Duisburg and Franfurt. A college friend (non-Jew) married a German boy..in both cases the emotional responsibility and sensitivity of these people really surprised me.
Later I read an article that described how there was a defined branch of adolescent clinical psychology in West Germany in the late 60s and eartly 70s that dealt exclusively with the guilt and anger towards their parents that many Germans in my generation felt growing up in Post-War Germany.
Finally, there was an amazing hand written, personal letter I received in 1985 from then West German President Richard Karl von Weizsäcker. Earlier that year he made a speech debunking the notion that War era Germans didn’t have any idea what was the Nazis were doing in Holocaust…saying that Germany had to take reponsibility for its history. In response, I wrote him saying that I often wanted to visit Duisburg, my father’s home townk, and Heidelburg & Freiburg, university towns he lived in before fleeing Germany in 1934…BUT…that I still read too many stories about Waffen SS reunions where, and these were my words, “…toasts are made to the glorious days of the Third Reich when men were men and Jews were dogs…” – I couldn’t yet visit Germany.
Von Weizsäcker wrote back with hand written full page letter in which he expressed both a really sensitive understanding for my feelings, and his hope that later in my life things in Germany would have changed enough for me to feel comfortable visiting my fathers birthplace.
@YonasonW – What a great comment. Thank you so much for sharing that.
Thank you NY Mom 🙂
#2- Thirty years ago there were many Germans who remembers World War II. At that point (1981) Germany was still being run by World War II veterans (as was the United States – we didn’t elect a President who didn’t remember the war until 1992, and it wasn’t until 2000 that we had two boomers running for president). The youngest veterans of World War II are now in their 80s. The overwhelming evidence is that anti-Semitism in Germany today comes primarily for post-war immigrants, and somewhat from left wing groups (whose ancestors were either exiled or underground during the war).
It is important to remember the past, but also to remember that it is the past. Indeed some of the countries that in the past were very intolerant of Jews, such as the one we live in (most of the original 13 colonies were officially “Judenrein” and Jews didn’t get full political rights until well after the revolution), have changed, and we would be foolish not to realize that things change.
David Duke is a jerk, whom the Germans quite rightly (not being hung up by American-style free speech rules) rounded up and deported (he would have been jailed had he been a German).
He is described as a “former” neo Nazi, but, he still is a Nazi and just as bigoted as ever.
American colonies Judenrein!? Eegads man, do you have your history wrong. There were thriving Jewish communities in New York, Newport, Philadelphia and elsewhere during the colonial period.