Ten days prior to those incidents, in Berlin, a Nazi band desecrated the Holocaust Memorial at the Brandenburg Gate. “We need to march again,” a woman sang in the back, waving her right fist clenched. It was the wrong hand, but that made little difference to the image she clearly intended to convey. From the roof of the memorial, two neo-Nazi performers chanted: “We walk united in the war against the Zionists in the European Union… We proudly carry the faith in our hearts, for our freedom, for our victory.”
Two days earlier, on March 6, German residents of Krefeld received in their mailboxes a Holocaust denial pamphlet stuffed into an envelope that appeared to be that of a local Jewish newspaper – one that moved to Berlin 16 years earlier.