Universities provide foil for thuggish neo-Nazis

Times
From Roger Boyes in Berlin



NEO-NAZIS are shifting from brawn to brain by recruiting from Germany’s traditionally conservative student duelling clubs.

“The aim seems to be to build up an intellectual elite,” says Lutz Irrgang, head of the police unit monitoring right-wing extremism in the state of Hesse, where universities have been targeted.

About 157,000 Germans belong to university student clubs and while some of these closed associations describe themselves as “liberal”, most are conservative and demand strict and humiliating initiation rites for aspiring members.

Graduates, many of them deliberately scarred on the cheek after a ritual fencing duel, have gone on to become senior figures in politics, diplomacy and business.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,172-1495913,00.html