THOUSANDS of Neo-Nazis waving black flags and brandishing flickering torches on a silent, spectral march hijacked a sombre day of remembrance yesterday for the victims of the British and American bombing of Dresden.

It was probably the biggest display of Neo-Nazi strength since the war and — although the 6,000 marchers were disciplined — it mocked the message of forgiveness and reconciliation that was echoing from the pulpits of Dresden’s churches.

The 60th anniversary of the firestorm that killed more than 35,000 people on the night of February 13 has become the focus for Germany’s mourning of the wartime dead.

As a result, there was an astonishing groundswell of sympathy for the Neo-Nazis as they trooped from the restored Semper Opera House across the River Elbe.

“It is time that the British apologised,” Elfriede Dobberstein, of the right-wing National Alliance, said. “Only when they apologise can we forgive.” She was holding aloft a lurid poster that showed British aircraft shooting at women among the burning rubble of Dresden.

There were indeed British gestures of remorse. Sir Peter Torry, the British Ambassador to Germany, laid a wreath at the monument marking the mass graves in Heide Cemetery; later a cross made of iron nails was presented by a delegation from Coventry to the Dresden Frauenkirche, which has only just been restored.

But as soon as the British Ambassador and the US Ambassador had laid their wreaths, politicians from the far-Right National Party of Germany (NPD), from the equally extremist German People’s Union and from organisations representing bomb victims in Hamburg and other German victim-groups moved forward to lay their flowers.

Some of the ribbons read: “To the 350,000 innocent dead of Dresden” — a huge exaggeration of the fatalities. The ultranationalists thus took over a ceremony that for the past six decades usually involved only a handful of locals with no special political agenda. The resentment against the British always lurked in the city, but for the first time it has taken concrete political form.

The trickle of Neo-Nazis at the cemetery became a torrent throughout the day. Activists from all across the country gathered behind a big red banner which read: “The Bomb Holocaust — it cannot be denied”. Three thousand black balloons were handed out and floated across the river as, with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony blaring through the loudspeakers, the Neo-Nazis wound their way through the city.

Left-wing anarchists, wearing bandana handkerchiefs, booed and yelled on the flanks, but the police — who at one point deployed water cannon lorries to clear away the Neo-Nazis — kept them at a distance.

“Bomber Harris — do it again!” shouted teenagers, hoping to provoke the Neo-Nazis into open street fighting. Others held up the Union flag or yelled: “Remember Stalingrad”, the battle that marked a devastating defeat for the German Army. These skirmishes on the fringes of the massive Neo-Nazi rally tended to steer the sympathy of uninvolved Dresdners in the direction of the right-wingers. “At least they are mourning with some kind of dignity,” Johannes Appenzahler, a retired schoolteacher, said. “They are not really Nazis — nobody can believe that stuff any more — they are Germans who don’t want to forget.”

Gerhard Schröder, the German Chancellor, condemned the Neo-Nazi protests and across the mainstream political parties deputies were quick to emphasise that the far-Right was not representative of the German mood. About 10,000 Dresdners were preparing to hold up candles as a symbol of reconciliation. Church bells rang out across Dresden at the exact hour of the air raid.

There was no doubting, though, the cynicism of the Neo-Nazi ploy. The full leadership of the different right-wing groups in Germany attended the rally, and the point was plainly to mobilise support before regional elections next week in the northwest German state of Schleswig-Holstein. The NPD has a chance there of entering parliament — that would be a clear sign of the spreading power of the far-Right, whose revival so far has been mainly concentrated in eastern Germany.

As darkness fell the people of Dresden began to realise that the Neo-Nazis were in effect stealing their tragic day.

FROM BLITZ TO THUNDERCLAP

In 1956 Dresden twinned with Coventry, which itself had been blitzed by German bombers

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