These measures, really just slaps on the wrist, did nothing to cow the neo-Nazis. Following German unification and the decision to transfer the government to Berlin, the “National Alternative” became bolder than ever. Through Kühnen the group received support from elderly Nazi widows, who saw in these young thugs the advance guard of the Fourth Reich. With their widow-money the boys bought all manner of weaponry, including bazookas, machine guns, and grenades, from Russian soldiers in Berlin. The skins talked of destabilizing the democratic state through dramatic strikes and assassinations. Their hit list included Gregor Gysi, Ignaz Bubis, and even Helmut Kohl. Although these plans never got beyond the talking stage, the skins continued to attack foreigners in the streets. In 1990 they threw Molotov cocktails at a shelter for foreign workers in Lichtenberg. The police intervened only after considerable damage had been done. A few days later the city closed down the shelter.
The skinheads’ brutal attacks on foreigners, and the Kohl government’s inadequate countermeasures, generated a growing crescendo of negative publicity for newly united Germany. By 1992 the government began to take sterner measures, banning neo-Nazi groups and shutting down skinhead squats, including the one in Berlin’s Weitlingstrasse. In the following year Bonn organized a giant rally against antiforeigner violence in Berlin. Some 300,000 citizens joined in this well-meaning demonstration, which took place on the anniversary of Reichskristallnacht. The event, however, turned out to be an embarrassing fiasco, both for Germany and for its future capital. About 300 leftists castigated the assembled dignitaries as “hypocrites” and pelted the main speaker, President Richard von Weizsäcker, with eggs, tomatoes, and paint bombs. When Helmut Kohl joined a march down Unter den Linden, he too was pelted with eggs. The demonstration ended in disarray, with Kohl stalking off in disgust. Commenting on the scene, the
On June 18, 1994, Berlin witnessed another government-sponsored spectacle: a giant parade in honor of the Allied troops, whose departure from the city was scheduled to be completed by September of that year. An estimated 75,000 people watched soldiers from America, Britain, France, and Germany parade down Unter den Linden. Overhead flew a lone DC-3, representing the planes that had participated in the Berlin Airlift forty-six years before. The Russians had asked to be included in this event but were politely told by the German hosts that it would be better if they held their own good-bye ceremonies. The rebuff was hardly surprising, since the Kohl government and most citizens of western Berlin held Moscow responsible for the division of the city. Most eastern Berliners did so as well, and they had never exactly snuggled up to their Russian “protectors.” On the other hand, many Ossis saw this snub of the Russians as yet another blow to their own self-esteem. As one commentator noted: “The residents of the GDR had to suffer a lot more during the division of Germany than [those of the FRG]; now even their conquerors were to get a second-class departure ceremony.”
Although the departure of the Allied powers was another step in Berlin’s return to “normalcy,” and essential to its future role as national capital, many Berliners, especially of the older generation, watched the exodus with a certain sadness. “The Allies came as saviors and stayed on as protectors,” said one seventy-seven-year-old lady. “They liberated us from one dictatorship and saved us from another one,” she added. “Without [the Western Allies],” averred another oldster, “we’d all be Russians now.” Sadder still over the Allied departure were the leaders of the city’s various ethnic communities. As Douglas Jones, a U.S. State Department official, noted: “The withdrawal of Allied forces from Berlin filled ethnic community leaders with dread, because they had come to regard the Allies as protecting powers not from the Russians, but from the Germans.”
