llion dollar lawsuit after low level security personnel at his compound opened fire on a passing vehicle. Aryan Nations has since lost its headquarters and paramilitary training grounds and split into three separate organizations, two of which claim to be the true successor to the group, but all of which are significantly reduced from the sum of the former groups parts.
Many Neo-Nazi groups also espouse Holocaust denial or Historical revisionism, claiming that the Holocaust slaughter of 6,000,000 Jews is a lie, and that the German Nazi government had no extermination policy, or at least that the extent of the Holocaust is greatly exaggerated. It is not known whether Neo-Nazi Holocaust revisionists believe these claims or if it is simply a means to make their ideology more palatable by removing the blemish of the Holocaust.
Significant people in the effort to revive Nazism include Colin Jordan, George Lincoln Rockwell, William Pierce, Savitri Devi, and David Myatt.
Neo-Nazi desecration of a Jewish cemetery in France
Neo-Nazism in Germany
Nazi iconography remains to this day heavily restricted in Germany. As German law forbids the production of Nazi devotionalia, such items come mostly (illegally) from the USA and northern European countries. Current Neo-Nazi websites mostly depend on hosting in the USA and Canada, and use other terms for Nazi ideas and symbols -- for example, the swastika may be referred to as a sun disc, sun wheel, hooked cross, wolf's cross, wolf's hook, black sun, or dark star.
In Germany immediately after World War II, Allied forces and the new German governments attempted to prevent the creation of new Nazi movements through a process known as denazification. With this and the total defeat of the Nazi regime, there was little overt neo-Nazi activity in Europe until the 1960s. Some former Nazis retained their ideology and racist beliefs, however, and passed them down to new generations.
Neo-Nazi in Germany in 2000
In the 1990s, after German reunification, Neo-Nazi groups succeeded in gaining more followers, mostly among teenagers in Eastern Germany. Many were new groups that arose amidst the economic collapse and subsequent high unemployment in the former East Germany. The activities of these groups resulted in several violent attacks on foreigners and creating a hostile atmosphere for foreigners in some towns. The violence manifested itself especially in attempts to burn down the homes for people in search of asylum in Germany.
("Arson attack" is a translation of the German word Brandanschlag, which implies throwing Molotov cocktails into houses (fire-bombing), and attempts to burn a house down.)
These events preceded demonstrations (Lichterketten; candle chains) with hundreds of thousands of participants against right-extremist violence in many German cities. These further precipitated other massive neo-Nazi demonstrations later on, which continue today. Demonstrations often erupt in violence as Nazis and their anti-Fascist counter-protestors clash in the streets.
The official German statistics for the year 1990 record 178 right-extremist motivated violence crimes(Gewalttaten), in 1991 there were 849 and in 1992 there were 1,485, with a significant concentration in the eastern Bundesländer (1999: 2,19 crimes per 100,000 inhabitants in the eastern Bundesländer and 0,68 in the western ones). After 1992 the numbers went down, although have risen sharply again in subsequent years. Because the strong public opinion and media coverage concerning Neo-Nazi ideologies is still extremely negative, large scale organizations by such groups are often attempted by local authorities to be surpressed in some way (sometimes unsuccessfully, and almost always only temporarily) when they reach a certain size.
A trial was held before the Bundesverfassungsgericht (Federal Constitution Court), the highest court in Germany, about the prohibition of the NPD (National Democratic Party), considered (though not proven to be) a neo-Nazi party. In the course of the trial it was discovered that some high-ranking party members who