Fire and Blood in Germany

After the arson murder of three Turkish women in the town of Moiln last fall, the worst appeared to be over in Germany. Demonstrations and candlelight marches of hundreds of thousands against racism and xenophobia seemed to prove that Germans overwhelmingly reject neo-Nazi violence and far-right appeals to racial hatred. Only six months later, in the wake of the arson that left five women burned to death on May 29 in Solingen, a prosperous West German industrial town, such optimism is as scarce as a lone foreigner on most German streets after dark. Nightly arson attacks have become epidemic, and neo-Nazi skinheads bolder and more lethal. Hundreds of hate crimes have been reported since the Solingen murders, and for the first time, Turkish residents rioted. In the town of Aschaffenburg, Turkish youths reacted with a violent attack on the political headquarters of the Christian Social Union. The specter of Los Angeles on the Ruhr haunts Germany.

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