Riots in Hoyerswerda

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The riots in Hoyerswerda were several racially motivated attacks in the Saxon city ​​of Hoyerswerda between September 17 and 23, 1991. A dormitory for contract workers and a refugee hostel were attacked. Sometimes up to 500 people stood in front of the homes and took part in the attacks. The police were unwilling to stop the attacks. The German media reported extensively on the events. The Hoyerswerda riots formed the prelude to a series of xenophobic riots in Germany in the early 1990s.

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Attacks on the contract workers' dormitory

On September 17, 1991, at least eight mostly young neo-Nazis attacked Vietnamese traders on the market square in Hoyerswerda. The victims then fled to a dormitory for contract workers . The eleven-story building on Albert-Schweitzer-Strasse was home to around 120 contract workers , mainly for what was then Lausitzer Braunkohle AG , from Mozambique and Vietnam , whose employment contracts with Lausitzer Braunkohle AG had been terminated at the end of September and December 1991, respectively. Within a few hours, three to four dozen young neo-Nazis appeared in front of the building and began shouting slogans and throwing stones. The residents then began to defend themselves, sometimes using force. After two hours at the earliest, the police arrived and cordoned off the building. On the evening of September 18, several dozen neo-Nazis attacked the dormitory with stones and Molotov cocktails . Local residents joined them and either stood idly by or applauded. The police hardly intervened. The attackers also included many colleagues from contract workers from the open-cast lignite mine.

Eventually the contract workers were evacuated. 60 people were brought by bus from Hoyerswerda on September 20, accompanied by the police. Almost all contract workers were transported directly to Frankfurt am Main or Berlin and deported from there.

Attacks on the refugee hostel

After the attacks on the contract workers' dormitory, there were also attacks on a refugee dormitory on Thomas-Müntzer-Strasse, in which around 240 refugees, among others, have been living there since the early summer of 1991. from Vietnam , Romania , Ghana , Iran and Bangladesh were accommodated. In the weeks before, they had been repeatedly attacked by neo-Nazis. On September 20, the Hoyerswerda District Office came to the following “assessment of the situation”: “There is a unanimous view that a final solution to the problem can only be created by the departure of foreigners”. On the evening of September 20, neo-Nazis and sympathizers marched in front of the refugee home and pelted it with stones and Molotov cocktails. Foreigners were then physically attacked by neo-Nazis, for which a mob of residents and sympathizers further fueled the violent criminals with shouts and applause. A smaller proportion of the citizens present from the neighborhood tried to calm the mob, but - like the police - remained largely unsuccessful.

On the morning of September 21, the refugees were distributed by buses to accommodations in the surrounding area, accompanied by SEK . Most of them fled on to Berlin and Lower Saxony on their own initiative. In Berlin, some of them were accepted into a parish. The Technical University of Berlin and the Berlin City Hall were also occupied later . The then governing mayor of Berlin, Eberhard Diepgen ( CDU ), then promised help for those refugees who could prove that they had been attacked.

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32 people were injured in the riots. There were 82 preliminary arrests, but only four people were convicted of the suspects. The following weekend there were 78 racist attacks in Germany.

On September 27, 1991, an anti-fascist demonstration against the riots took place in Hoyerswerda with 4,000 to 5,000 participants.

The attacks in Hoyerswerda were followed by further attacks on refugee homes in Germany, including in 1991 in Thiendorf (Saxony) with eight people injured and arson attacks in Freital (Saxony), Bredenbeck (Lower Saxony), Münster (North Rhine-Westphalia), March (Baden-Württemberg) ) and Tambach-Dietharz (Thuringia). On the night of October 11, 1992, the temporary waitress Waltraud Scheffler was so badly injured in an attack on a bar in Geierswalde near Hoyerswerda that she died 13 days later. Scheffler had tried to persuade the skinheads who came in with shouts of "Sieg Heil", whereupon one of them hit her on the head with a wooden slat. On February 19, 1993, another right-wing extremist fatality occurred in Hoyerswerda when the 22-year-old Mike Zerna was beaten up in front of the youth club “Nachtasyl” during an attack by right-wing extremist skinheads on young people. The attackers, including three previous convictions for xenophobic acts of violence, beat concertgoers and the driver and technician of the Christian gothic metal band Necromance from Spremberg and then overturned a car on Zerna, who was lying on the ground and died six days later from his injuries. According to the Bautzen Regional Court , the police and paramedics were jointly responsible for his death, as they had only arrived at the scene an hour after the attack.

Following the riots, Hoyerswerda was described by neo-Nazis as the “first city free of foreigners ”, based on the Nazi term “ Jew-free ” . This term became a synonym for the riots in Hoyerswerda and in 1991 the first non-word of the year chosen by the Society for the German Language . The city tried to influence the public image positively and to act against neo-Nazism. In 2006, the then Lord Mayor Horst-Dieter Brähmig announced in response to an anti-racist demonstration on the 15th anniversary of the Hoyerswerda pogrom: "We Hoyerswerdaers reserve the memory of these 15 years for ourselves". On the same day, city officials inaugurated a memorial stele with the inscription “In memory of the extremist riots of September 1991”. Civil society initiatives such as the Kulturfabrik Hoyerswerda or the RAA Hoyerswerda are involved, for example, with the project “Wanted in the know” to educate young people about the riots.

In the appearance of Hoyerswerda, the presence of right-wing radical youth has decreased, but the city is still considered a center of right-wing radical groups and activities; For example, the NPD founded the new Kamenz / Hoyerswerda district association there in 2006, and the associated youth organization JN is one of the most active in Saxony. The local JN organized a memorial march with 200 participants in 2006 to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the riots. The police temporarily arrested more than 50 counter-demonstrators. Such memorial marches were also carried out in other cities.

During filming for the WDR magazine Cosmo TV on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the riots in front of the former guest workers' hostel, there was again mobbing and insults against those previously affected.

Further attacks against foreigners

literature

  • Detlef Pollack : 'The xenophobic riots in Hoyerswerda ten years ago.' Berliner Debatte INITIAL, No. 16 (2005), pp. 15–32.
  • David Anbich: Hoyerswerda and Lichtenhagen. Primal scenes of racist violence in East Germany . In: Heike Kleffner , Anna Spangenberg (ed.): Generation Hoyerswerda: The network of militant neo-Nazis in Brandenburg . be.bra, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-89809-127-5 , pp. 32-44.
  • Christoph Wowtscherk: What happens when the time bomb goes off ?. A socio-historical analysis of the xenophobic riots in Hoyerswerda in September 1991 (= reports and studies of the Hannah Arendt Institute for Research on Totalitarianism . No. 66). V&R unipress, Göttingen 2014, ISBN 978-3-8471-0324-0 .
  • Hunting season in Saxony . In: Der Spiegel . No. 40 , 1991 ( online ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Guest contribution of the initiative Pogrom 91: Missing processing. In: Antifascist Info Sheet No. 92, Berlin. September 15, 2011, accessed September 18, 2013 .
  2. ↑ Refugees return to Hoyerswerda fr-online.de from February 3, 2014
  3. ↑ a b c d e Five days in September 1991. In: Antifaschistisches Infoblatt No. 92, Berlin. September 15, 2011, accessed September 18, 2013 .
  4. ↑ "Everyone is a foreigner, somewhere in the world" . wasistwas.de, accessed on December 9, 2011, link  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.wasistwas.de
  5. ↑ What are they doing here again? - Interview with former contract workers from Hoyerswerda in September 2011. In: Antifascist Info Sheet No. 92, Berlin. September 15, 2011, accessed September 18, 2013 .
  6. ^ Christian Fuchs, John Goetz : The cell. Right Teror in Germany. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2012, p. 54.
  7. ↑ Don't look away - look or go? In: Antifaschistisches Infoblatt No. 92, Berlin, September 15, 2011. Accessed on September 18, 2013 .
  8. ↑ a b Frank Jansen, Johannes Radke, Heike Kleffner , Toralf Staud : Deadly hatred: 137 victims of right-wing violence. In: Der Tagesspiegel . May 31, 2012, accessed September 18, 2013 .
  9. ↑ a b Simone Rafael: Climate change in Hoyerswerda - How an active civil society fights for the children of their city. Federal Agency for Political Education, July 6, 2007, accessed on September 18, 2013 .
  10. ^ Rupert von Plottnitz : Mutmacher - Kulturfabrik Hoyerswerda and the RAA Hoyerswerda . In: Courage against right-wing violence , November 6, 2012.
  11. ↑ Lara Fritzsche: Only away - Ronny and Monique did not want to leave their hometown Hoyerswerda to the Nazis - and were therefore themselves the target of threats and agitation. Süddeutsche Zeitung, October 16, 2013, accessed on October 17, 2013 .
  12. ↑ Right-wing extremists are active in Hoyerswerda. In: Lausitzer Rundschau . July 13, 2007, accessed September 18, 2013 .
  13. ↑ redok.de ( Memento from November 30, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  14. ↑ Ghanaians mobbed again after 20 years. In: Lausitzer Rundschau. September 13, 2011, accessed September 18, 2013 .
  15. ↑ WDR , Cosmo TV , 20 years of Hoyerswerda, What has changed since then? dated September 18, 2011