The German police said yesterday that they had seized 7,500 CDs in their first strike against one of the most visible - and audible - manifestations of eastern Germany's neo-Nazi youth culture: race-hate rock. Some of the discs impounded during raids in the hours before dawn had cover photographs of Adolf Hitler. Others had pictures of hanged Turks.
On one a group sang about killing blacks. "You've got 30 seconds to run for your life, nigger," the lyric ran. Then, after the sound of a machine gun, the group continued: "Oh. That feels good. That feels good - to kill a nigger."
Last week a court in the eastern city of Halle convicted three young neo-Nazis of beating and kicking a Mozambique-born immigrant so savagely in June that he died of his injuries.
Alberto Adriano was the latest victim of the kind of far-right barbarity which Germany's centre-left government has said it is determined to stamp out. But the scale of the task it has set itself was underlined by some of the details released yesterday by the police.
They said they had disrupted the activities of two distributors of far-right rock music in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, but that between 50 to 70 others were still operating in other parts of Germany. There is also a flourishing cross-border trade in neo-Nazi CDs put on sale in Poland.
The government's main initiative so far has been to announce that it will be applying for a ban on the most radical of Germany's legal rightwing groups, the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD). It has also promoted a campaign urging ordinary people to stand up to the extreme right.
Experts in the field, including sociologists, voluntary workers and officials of Germany's internal intelligence service, have all argued that the true problem is a rejectionist skinhead culture, which is particularly prevalent in the formerly communist east.
The sort of music sought in the raids reported yesterday is an important underpinning of that culture, and Saxony-Anhalt is the part of the east where the culture seems to be most embedded.
It has the highest rate of violent and far-right crime, and the capital, Magdeburg, is one of the few cities in Germany where extreme rightwingers have seats in the council chamber.
The raids occurred last week, but the police said they had held back details until yesterday because the investigation was continuing. They said they had swooped on 11 locations in the early hours of August 30.
The confiscated items included computers with mailing lists of customers, videos and posters showing swastikas, and neo-Nazi paraphernalia. They said the material clearly violated German laws prohibiting the incitement of racial hatred and the use of emblems linked with anti-constitutional movements. But only one arrest was made. The suspect was later released on bail of 25,000 marks (£8,400).
The army, which has been struggling to stamp out racism in its ranks, said earlier that it was investigating a non-commissioned officer suspected of making racist remarks. The tabloid daily Bild had reported that a staff sergeant was accused of sending messages to the cellphone of a recruit of Turkish origin.
One read: "When Ali is swinging from the oak tree, when Mehmet staggers through the gas chamber, when the swastika is once again used to tar our streets, that's when Germany will be worth living in again."
