In August 1992, a mob of neo-Nazis hunted for days Vietnamese and Roma who had fled to Rostock. It was the largest pogrom since the end of the Nazi era.
When the incendiary devices broke the window panes, the fear of death spread everywhere. A house was burning. One hundred Vietnamese, the immigration officer of the city of Rostock and a television crew were trapped. It is August 24, 1992. The fourth day of the racist pogrom against the residents of a facility for asylum seekers and Vietnamese contract workers in the East German port of Rostock. The district of Liechtenstein is a densely populated area. Huge high-rise blocks with the “architectural charm” of what was once the German Democratic Republic.
Accommodations for foreigners are decorated with colorful tiles. They have the pattern of a sunflower. The sunflower house is called the apartment building. Now it’s on fire. The TV crew records the horror in the building. Fire. Thick smoke. Locked doors. Crazy. Desperation.
“Now we’re going to roast you!”
A celebration has been set up in front of the house. “Now we’re roasting you,” the mob shouts at the trapped. Thousands of people besiege the high-rise building. Neo-Nazis and strangers. Young and old. Men and women. Any incendiary device that fuels the fire is cheered. Nazi salutes. War flags of the Reich. Bliss and beer. A politician tries to calm the situation: “They are people too!” he says. The crowd roars in his face: “These are not people!”
The police are gone. He retires. And the fire department cannot get through the burning building of the trapped people. The cheering crowd blocked the way for the rescuers. “Germany for the Germans, foreigners out!” they shout The state allowed hatred to reign. Only by miracle no one dies.
“This was shocking to me,” recalls Hajj Graf Wijthum von Eckstedt. He participates in the Rostock club “Bunt statt Braun”. The cross-party initiative fights right-wing extremism. “It was one of those excesses that had to happen. Federal and local government had failed,” he says. Wijthum von Ekstedt is still upset by the events when he recalls them to this day. Rostock-Lichtenhagen was the first pogrom after the end of the National Socialist reign of terror. For him it is clear that the politicians in Rostock did not just look away: “The politicians used the event.”
Times of upheaval
Germany experienced turbulent times in the early 1990s. Helmut Kohl ruled the country for ten years. After the reunification frenzy in 1990, East Germany’s economy collapsed. And then the entire East German society. At the same time, the country experienced a sharp increase in immigration. With the fall of the Wall, so did the Iron Curtain of the Cold War. Hundreds of thousands of people from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe immigrated to Germany.
But the climate in society was explosive. Far-right skinheads have tried to take over the streets in both the West and the East. Violent attacks occurred across the country. “At that time there was a lot of resistance against foreigners and immigrants, against the Sindi and the Roma,” recalls Hayo Graf Wijthum von Eckstedt. “And the politicians let it explode at that moment for their own interests.”
The Kohl government has long been working on a drastic tightening of the German asylum law. Asylum laws were created in 1949 from the lessons of the Nazi dictatorship and offered permanent and unlimited protection to those who were politically persecuted. And they were enshrined in the constitution. Even then, political observers suspected that the conservative federal government under Helmut Kohl wanted to use the riots and protests to pressure the Social Democrats into agreeing to a constitutional amendment limiting the right to asylum. Their reasoning was lest they lose votes. “Rival” Social Democrats would feed into mob hatred, curtail the basic right to asylum and thus drastically limit immigration to Germany.
Racism by calculation
In Rostock, politics let hatred explode. And she watched idly for a long time. In the months before the pogrom, Sindi and Roma from Romania were locked up in front of the reception center for asylum seekers in the Lichtenhagen area, in front of the sunflower house. The arrival of asylum seekers was overwhelming the authorities, with the result that people had to camp in front of the facilities on the green spaces. But the city refused to act. No portable toilets were set up. The policy condemned Romanians to fall victim to insults and attacks.
For the Federal Government’s anti-discrimination commissioner, Mehmet Daymagüler, this case is also part of a devastating tradition of discrimination against the Sindi and Roma in Germany. And that’s because the hundreds of thousands of Sindi and Roma murders during the Nazi era were never investigated and remedied. “Their persecution continued in a different form even after the Nazi era”, he emphasizes.
Reunification – not for immigrants
Mehmet Daymagüler has been fighting racism and right-wing extremism for years as a lawyer, book writer and journalist. The pogrom of 1992 shocked him too. “It cast a shadow over the joy of the reunion.” He experiences what many Germans from immigrant families experience: being denied their German homeland. That national pride in reunification goes hand in hand with a new quality of racism and hatred against a section of society. “The reunification was done by Germans for Germans and we immigrants were not part of it. We did not sit at any of the round tables – neither in the West nor in the East. They treated us as they saw us. For these people we were irrelevant.”
In 1992, immigrants were generally still classified as foreigners, even if Germany was their home and they had been born here. The law of blood, the so-called “Ius Sanguinis”, was applied. Only those who have German parents are German.
Michael Friedman was one of the first representatives of civil society to be there at that time. He was then General Secretary of the Central Council of Jews. It accompanies its president, Ignats Bubis. Both are horrified. “The guilt of so many for not preventing it is a cruel thing,” they say. An uproar ensues. A Christian Democrat councilor from Rostock denies that Bubis and Friedman are German because they are Jewish. Today, Michael Friedman works as a lawyer and journalist and for Deutsche Welle.
The Rise of the “Mishumans”
What did Germany learn in the thirty years since the pogrom? “What has improved,” summarizes Michael Friedman, “is that civil society is committed to human dignity.” Hajo Graf Wittghum von Eckstet agrees but skepticism is great. Mehmet Daymagüler’s opinion is similar: “If society had learned, then we wouldn’t have so many dead after the racist attack in Lübeck in 1996, we wouldn’t have the series of murders by the self-proclaimed group “Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund”, we wouldn’t have the attacks of of right-wing extremists in Munich in 2016 and in Hanau in 2020″.
Many people in Germany are still at risk because, according to Michael Friedman, “the misanthropes are more powerful than they were in 1992.” With the AfD, a party was founded that shows its far-right stance more and more openly. “The wolves have dropped their sheep,” he says.
The aftermath of the pogrom has changed Germany to this day. On 29 May 1993, the Federal Parliament voted in favor of extensive restrictions on the right to asylum. Three days later, neo-Nazis murder five people of Turkish origin in the town of Solingen. They set fire to their house.
DW / Hans Pfeiffer / Editor: Efthymis Angeloudis
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