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Intro­duc­tion: The broad­cast begins by high­light­ing the change in atti­tude expe­ri­enced by young “Euro-Nazis” toward their polit­i­cal belief sys­tem. Viewed as losers a few years ago, they are now gain­ing accep­tance by their peers. Suc­cess­fully using Nazi rock out­lets, the inter­net and other “new media,” the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion of Nazi youth are suc­cess­fully mar­ket­ing their ide­ol­ogy to con­tem­po­raries in the cur­rent socio-economic climate.

Facil­i­tat­ing this skill­ful use of “new media” by Euro-fascists is a court deci­sion that will allow the NPD–Germany’s largest “neo-” Nazi party to dis­trib­ute CD’s to school children.

In Hun­gary, the far-right Job­bik Party has estab­lished itself as a fix­ture on the Hun­gar­ian elec­toral land­scape, reca­pit­u­lat­ing that nation’s fas­cist past under the Arrow Cross orga­ni­za­tion (allied with the Third Reich). [Job­bik mem­bers are pic­tured at right. The party’s logo is dis­played at lower right.] Severe eco­nomic down­turn and resul­tant, com­men­su­rate social dis­lo­ca­tion are dri­ving Hun­gar­ian polit­i­cal sen­ti­ment in a dis­turbingly famil­iar direc­tion. The Hun­gar­ian Job­bik Party suc­cess­fully reca­pit­u­lates much of the ide­ol­ogy, sym­bol­ogy and para-political street method­ol­ogy of the Hun­gar­ian Arrow Cross Party, mas­ters of Hun­gary for part of World War II. Job­bik gained sig­nif­i­cantly in the Hun­gar­ian elec­tions. Arrow cross vet­er­ans played an impor­tant role in the syn­the­sis of the Nazi/fascist Repub­li­can eth­nic out­reach mech­a­nism.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: The Nazi past of Carl Lund­strom, the Swedish patron of a pop­u­lar music down­load site; the reopen­ing of the inves­ti­ga­tion of the appar­ent mur­der of a young Briton by ele­ments asso­ci­ated with the LaRouche orga­ni­za­tion in Ger­many (that was orig­i­nally cov­ered up by the Ger­man author­i­ties); revival of Nazi ide­ol­ogy in Bosnia; review of the ele­va­tion of Nazi and SS col­lab­o­ra­tor Stephan Ban­dera to the sta­tus of “Hero” of the Ukraine; review of the Ger­man government’s ini­tial deci­sion to with­hold release of its intel­li­gence file on Adolph Eich­mann.

1. The first story high­lights the change in atti­tude expe­ri­enced by young “Euro-Nazis” toward their polit­i­cal belief sys­tem. Viewed as losers a few years ago, they are now gain­ing accep­tance by their peers. Suc­cess­fully using Nazi rock out­lets, the inter­net and other “new media,” the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion of Nazi youth are suc­cess­fully mar­ket­ing their ide­ol­ogy to con­tem­po­raries in the cur­rent socio-economic climate.

They sell CDs of lit­tle girls who sing softly about white pride to a pub­lic of pre-adolescents, video games where it is essen­tial to shoot all those who are dark-skinned, and t-shirts with cryp­tic slo­gans. They are British, Roma­ni­ans, French and Swedes. They mis­trust the var­i­ous media and, instead, cre­ate their own press agen­cies to pro­duce and broad­cast their infor­ma­tion. Gabriele Adi­nolfi, the co-founder of terza posizione (‘third posi­tion’, Italy) con­firms that: ‘Today, the only way of being fas­cist is by being pragmatic.’

The ‘right to cen­tre right’ par­ties are in the process of change hav­ing been unre­spectable for a long time. The EU has been look­ing to fight against acts of racism and xeno­phobes, and to bring leg­is­la­tion into line in mem­ber states on the mat­ter of strength­en­ing police co-operation. The extreme right has had a resur­gence over the years in France, Aus­tria and Italy and has had to face up to reac­tions from pub­lic opin­ion. The extreme right has there­fore moved with the times.

They are now made up of a myr­iad of small groups, and when the dots are all joined up they form a ‘show­case’ polit­i­cal party. The extreme right have placed them­selves into the mass media (via music, cloth­ing and mer­chan­dis­ing), and are now impos­ing them­selves on the media-related net­works across the EU. This strat­egy is pay­ing off; the extreme right is the lead­ing polit­i­cal party amongst 15–30 year olds in Hol­land, Aus­tria and Czech Repub­lic. Their influ­ence is grow­ing everywhere.

His strat­egy is called ‘metapol­i­tics’; it’s the art of doing pol­i­tics with­out it hav­ing the look of pol­i­tics. In line with those who think like Guil­laume Faye (nou­velle droite or ‘new right’ party in France), the extreme right is ‘surf­ing’ on being anti-politically cor­rect, the loss of impe­tus by gov­ern­ment par­ties in putting for­ward new venues on the out­side of offi­cial cir­cuits. Métapé­dia was cre­ated in 2007 by young Swedes based on the model of a well-known mass ency­clopae­dia; the Wikipedia mod­er­a­tors then gath­ered up the pages and excluded them.

The extreme right is now in nine coun­tries in the EU and their ambi­tion is to ‘have an influ­ence on polit­i­cal and philo­soph­i­cal debates and they way in which art and cul­ture are pre­sented’. Alter­me­dia offers a plat­form for 17 dif­fer­ent EU coun­tries to dif­fer­ent cir­cles of influ­ence with a right wing iden­tity (from rad­i­cal chris­tians to anti-capitalist pagans), who want to chal­lenge the chal­lenge the tra­di­tional left wing supremacy in the domains of ideas and cul­ture. It’s Denis Diderot who wel­comes the vis­i­tor to Meta­pe­dia France, and the author and poet Mihai Emi­nescu who wrote Emperor and Pro­le­tar­ian, on Meta­pe­dia Roma­nia.

Jacques Vassieux is the Rhône-Alpes regional advi­sor to the French FN Party (‘national front’). He has taken charge of the national asso­ci­a­tion obser­va­toire et riposte inter­net (‘inter­net obser­va­tory and riposte’) from French far-right politi­cian Jean Marie Le Pen, and cre­ated Nations Presse in 2008. The site gets 350, 000 hits a month and has 25 con­trib­u­tors; two of which are pro­fes­sional jour­nal­ists. ‘It is more than evi­dent that we are treated badly on the inter­net, and on a daily basis too,‘explains Vassieux. ‘This is one of the rea­sons, essen­tially, why pro­ceeded to cre­ate our site and this asso­ci­a­tion. We can admin­is­ter the anti­dote on a daily basis too.’

Clau­dio Laz­zaro is the author of the doc­u­men­tary Nazirock. ‘The extreme right has made itself more straight­for­ward,’ he says. ‘It takes what it needs and changes it in order to com­mu­ni­cate with­out mak­ing it sub­tle.’ Laz­zaro advo­cates dia­logue with the extreme right as long as this dia­logue ‘does not seek to jus­tify their fas­cist ideas.’ He also finds it alarm­ing that ‘fas­cism and neo-fascism are devel­op­ing in par­al­lel on two fronts, as if it’s about choos­ing ‘a pri­ori’ (with­out prior knowl­edge) more than ratio­nal thought and reflection.’

Noua Dreapta (‘new right’) is spear­head­ing the Roman­ian extreme right; they’re not reg­is­tered as a party but present them­selves as a ‘move­ment’, hav­ing been in exis­tence since 2000. It’s a way of declin­ing elec­toral con­fronta­tion in order to bet­ter place their sym­pa­this­ers into the train­ing which is being read­ied for them. The British national party (BNP) have swapped their Doc Martens for suits and ties, they dis­trib­ute guides amongst their fol­low­ers on how to speak prop­erly, made space for women (in the party) in order tone down their image and have estab­lished the birth rate as one of their ‘call to arms’.

This new gen­er­a­tion of young edu­cated lead­ers have a per­fect com­mand of 21st cen­tury com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and know their pub­lic well. Rock con­certs have replaced grand­dad meets. Project School­yard is a series of com­pi­la­tions pro­duced by the neo-nazi music label Panz­er­faust Records; their elo­quent slo­gan is ‘we don’t just enter­tain racist kids, we cre­ate them’.

The EU is strug­gling to keep up with the dec­la­ra­tions of ‘good inten­tions’ and a real lack of involve­ment from the mem­ber states; the major­ity are ‘con­tin­u­ing to escape from con­trol of their indi­vid­ual poli­cies and prac­tises at EU level’. The 2009 report on the sit­u­a­tion of fun­da­men­tal rights in the EU was panned. It has to be said that the extreme right’s elec­toral plat­form greatly inter­ests the right wing of the gov­ern­ment. When the right fail to vis­i­bly woo their vot­ers, they don’t hes­i­tate in tak­ing the extreme right’s cam­paign themes. A few ‘iden­tity’ rock con­certs have closed national front and casa delle lib­ertà (CDl, ‘house of freee­dom’) cam­paign meet­ings. As for the left, they seem hin­dered by their own con­tra­dic­tions. From now on they cham­pion the upper and mid­dle classes but haven’t been known to lis­ten to their tra­di­tional vot­ers when grap­pling eco­nomic dif­fi­cul­ties, and the ten­sions stir­ring up amongst com­mu­ni­ties in work­ing class areas.

The epi­cen­tre of this ‘renewal of nation­al­ity’ is now cen­tral and east­ern Europe. ‘Ten years ago we were ‘losers’ to be nazis, now it’s ok to be a nazi. Who knows where we’ll be in ten years time?’ con­cludes Peter, a cam­paigner for the national demo­c­ra­tic party (NPD) in Bavaria, Germany.

“Europe’s Far-Right Youth: ’10 Years Ago, We Were ‘Nazi Losers.’ Now It’s OK to be a Nazi.’” by Cleo Schweyer; cafebabel.com; 7/15/2009.

2. NPD–Germany’s largest “neo”- Nazi party has been given the OK to dis­trib­ute CD’s to school chil­dren. The savvy media tech­niques for dis­sem­i­nat­ing fas­cist ide­ol­ogy alluded to in the pre­ced­ing arti­cle can be seen at work here.

The neo-Nazi National Demo­c­ra­tic Party will be allowed to dis­trib­ute CDs out­side schools with inter­views and music by party mem­bers because author­i­ties have no legal grounds to stop them, a report said Saturday.

The Fed­eral Depart­ment for Media Harm­ful to Young Per­sons said the disc merely con­tained polit­i­cal opin­ions, daily Süd­deutsche Zeitung reported.

The depart­ment there­fore found no basis on which to ban the disc, the report quoted direc­tor Elke Monsen-Engberding as saying.

The NPD is Germany’s lead­ing far-right party. It pro­motes an anti-immigrant agenda and is con­sid­ered by the country’s domes­tic intel­li­gence agency to be a threat to the constitution.

On its web­site, the NPD wel­comed the decision. . . .

“Neo-Nazi Party Given Green Light to Tar­get School Chil­dren”; thelocal.de; 2/6/2010.

3a. The patron of Pirate Bay–a pop­u­lar music down­load site–has Nazi affiliations.

But as Andrew Brown, author of the auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal Fish­ing in Utopia, points out, no Eng­lish lan­guage cov­er­age of the trial has men­tioned this. Thanks to Brown’s blog, we know a lit­tle more about Lundström.

For exam­ple, Lund­ström was linked to a gang of skin­heads that attacked Latin Amer­i­can tourists in Stock­holm in the mid-1980s. [Expo.se report (Swe) — 2005]. Over the years, Lund­ström has switched his sup­port from Keep Swe­den Swedish to the far-right head­bangers party New Democ­racy — but was thrown out for being too right wing. He’s cur­rently bankrolling 100 can­di­dates for the Swedish equiv­a­lent of the BNP.

Lund­ström is alleged to own 40 per cent of The Pirate Bay — the largest share — and gave it servers and band­width to get going. As one of the four defen­dants, been a reg­u­lar attendee in court. But the pres­ence of this sig­nif­i­cant national polit­i­cal player hasn’t been wor­thy of a WiReD men­tion since the trial kicked off. Or a men­tion any­where else. Why would that be?

For me, there are two inter­est­ing aspects to this pecu­liar, and very selec­tive silence. . . .

One is that anti-copyright activists like to think of them­selves as thor­oughly decent, forward-thinking pro­gres­sive peo­ple — because the inter­net is a new democ­racy, they’re reflect­ing a fairer world. They like to con­trast the hygenic effi­ciency of the tech­nol­ogy with the old (and implic­itly cor­rupt) copy­right busi­nesses. It’s almost a badge of moral superiority.

But like the Futur­ists a hun­dred years ago — the orig­i­nal Free­tards — they don’t mind jump­ing into bed with neo-Nazis when it suits them. In this case, that’s so long as the free music and movies keep flowing. . . .

“Pirate Bay’s neo-Nazi Sugar Daddy” by Andrew Orlowski; The Reg­is­ter [UK]; 2/26/2009.

3b. Of inter­est, also, is the asser­tion by “Wikipedia” that Lund­strom made a for­tune sell­ing his fam­ily busi­ness to the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pany Sandoz–one of the com­pa­nies in the I.G. Far­ben car­tel com­plex. As we have seen in Mar­tin Bor­mann: Nazi in Exile, the var­i­ous ten­ta­cles of the I.G. Far­ben octo­pus con­tinue to oper­ate on behalf of the Under­ground Reich and the Bor­mann cap­i­tal net­work.

NB: Although “Wikipedia” is mas­sive and can be use­ful, it must be cross-checked, as it has been demon­strated to con­tain errors, some­times delib­er­ately inserted by peo­ple inter­ested in obscur­ing, not reveal­ing, the truth.

. . . Carl Lund­ström is the son of Ulf Lund­ström and the grand­son of Karl Edvard Lund­ström, founder of the world’s largest crisp bread pro­ducer Wasabröd. When his father Ulf Lund­ström died in 1973, Carl Lund­ström was one of five heirs to Wasabröd and its sub­sidiary OLW. In 1982 Wasabröd was sold to the Swiss phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pany San­doz, mak­ing Lund­ström a fortune. . . .

“Carl Lund­strom”; Wikipedia.

4. In Hun­gary, the far-right Job­bik Party has estab­lished itself as a fix­ture on the Hun­gar­ian elec­toral land­scape, reca­pit­u­lat­ing that nation’s fas­cist past under the Arrow Cross orga­ni­za­tion (allied with the Third Reich).

The rally in a school hall in the nor­mally sleepy town of Dunakeszi was packed with hun­dreds of sup­port­ers. They cheered as Mr Vona promised to rid Hun­gary of cor­rup­tion and crack down on for­eign inter­ests.
He spoke about stop­ping Roma, the country’s biggest eth­nic minor­ity, from spong­ing off the state — forc­ing any­one claim­ing ben­e­fits to per­form pub­lic ser­vice in return. He promised to “give back Hungary’s national pride and iden­tity”.
The enthu­si­asm showed that Mr Vona has come a long way since Job­bik launched seven years ago. Its fierce nation­al­is­tic agenda and far-right rhetoric were soundly rejected by the elec­torate then. In national elec­tions in 2006 it polled a mis­er­able 2.2 per cent, fail­ing to get a sin­gle mem­ber of par­lia­ment elected.
But now as Hun­gary pre­pares for cru­cial new elec­tions the tide has turned, and it is flow­ing strongly Jobbik’s way. To the hor­ror of democ­rats who thought Hun­gary had shaken itself free of polit­i­cal extrem­ism in 1989 with the fall of com­mu­nism, Job­bik is on course to become the sec­ond biggest party in par­lia­ment.
With one week to go before the coun­try goes to the polls for the first of two rounds of vot­ing, Job­bik has reaped the ben­e­fit of the spec­tac­u­lar demise of Hungary’s left-wing MSZP gov­ern­ment. Accused of ram­pant cor­rup­tion and cas­ti­gated from all sides for mis­man­age­ment of the worst reces­sion since 1989, the gov­ern­ment faces a humil­i­at­ing defeat at the hands of the Right.
Most polls sug­gest that the centre-right Fidesz party, headed by for­mer prime min­is­ter Vik­tor Orban, will wipe out the MSZP, and per­haps even scoop up more than half the vote. The belea­guered social­ists are also in dire dan­ger of being pushed into third place by Job­bik. Polls pre­dict Mr Vona’s party could win as many as one vote in five.
Yet while the fail­ings of the Left have helped, Job­bik has also gained from dis­il­lu­sion­ment with the econ­omy. Hun­gar­i­ans expected more growth, and bet­ter gov­ern­ment, after the fall of com­mu­nism.
Heavy indus­try has col­lapsed, the pri­vati­sa­tion bonanza that brought both rev­enue and for­eign investors has run its course, and the global reces­sion has hit hard. Unem­ploy­ment has soared to a 16-year high of 11.2 per cent, and in late 2008 the coun­try was forced to go cap in hand to the IMF for $25 bil­lion in emer­gency fund­ing.
The old polit­i­cal class is blamed for eco­nomic fail­ures, and for endemic cor­rup­tion. Jobbik’s mes­sages of oppos­ing cor­rup­tion and stand­ing up for the lit­tle man have struck a chord.
“The other par­ties serve for­eign inter­ests and fos­ter cor­rup­tion. They are anti-Hungarian,” said Las­zlo Soos, who runs a small home-security busi­ness. Last time he voted Fidesz but on April 11 he will back Job­bik. “This is the only party that is pre­pared to stand up for Hun­gar­ian inter­ests and not for for­eign ones.“
But Jobbik’s grow­ing sup­port has revived dis­turb­ing mem­o­ries of the bloody wartime past, when Hun­gar­ian fas­cists grabbed power and enthu­si­as­ti­cally shipped off Jews and gyp­sies — as Roma are com­monly known — to Hitler’s death camps.
The new party is eager to solve what it calls the “Roma prob­lem”, though it empha­sises that this should be through social mea­sures and it does not espouse vio­lence. Some mem­bers have made com­ments por­trayed as anti-Jewish, despite the party leadership’s efforts to look mod­ern and Euro­pean as well as tough.
Its accept­able face is Krisztina Mor­vai, a blonde work­ing mother of three and for­mer lawyer who was last year elected as an Mem­ber of the Euro­pean Par­lia­ment. She has com­plained bit­terly that the rest of Europe sees her as a Nazi.
That is in part because of the Hun­gar­ian Guard who are allies of the party, and also Jobbik’s red and white-striped ban­ner. This bears an unnerv­ing sim­i­lar­ity to the emblem of the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross Party, which seized power for a bru­tal few months in 1944.
For those old enough to remem­ber the suf­fer­ing of the war, the rise of Job­bik feels like a fright­en­ing case of deja vu. “Though I was only six years old in 1944 when the Arrow Cross came to power, I remem­ber the reign of ter­ror that fol­lowed,” said Maria Juhasz, a Budapest pen­sioner. “I remem­ber when they took away the Jews, includ­ing our vil­lage doc­tor, and the young men they hanged at the side of the road with plac­ards round their necks say­ing ‘This is the fate of desert­ers’. The Hun­gar­ian Guard and Job­bik, the uni­forms, the lan­guage and rhetoric all remind me of the Arrow Cross and that era.“
Accu­sa­tions of racism or anti-Semitism are dis­missed by Jobbik’s lead­ers, who argue that rad­i­cal poli­cies are needed to lift Hungary’s 500,000 Roma out of poverty.
Mr Vona, a sur­pris­ingly bland and modest-looking leader for such an extreme party, was a found­ing mem­ber of Job­bik in 2003. His youth appeals to Hun­gar­ian vot­ers who are sick of the old polit­i­cal class. His qui­etly spo­ken per­son­al­ity seems to reas­sure vot­ers, although in July last year he was arrested at a demon­stra­tion in cen­tral Budapest. . . .

“Rise of Hungary’s Far-Right Job­bik party Stirs Dis­turb­ing Echoes of the 1940s” by Matthew Day; Telegraph.co.uk; 4/3/2010.

5. Rel­a­tively suc­cess­ful in the recent Hun­gar­ian elec­tions, Job­bik has elicited more than one com­par­i­son with the fas­cist move­ments of the 1930’s and 1940’s.

Severe eco­nomic down­turn and resul­tant, com­men­su­rate social dis­lo­ca­tion are dri­ving Hun­gar­ian polit­i­cal sen­ti­ment in a dis­turbingly famil­iar direc­tion. The Hun­gar­ian Job­bik Party suc­cess­fully reca­pit­u­lates much of the ide­ol­ogy, sym­bol­ogy and para-political street method­ol­ogy of the Hun­gar­ian Arrow Cross Party, allies of Nazi Ger­many and mas­ters of Hun­gary for part of that con­flict. Job­bik gained sig­nif­i­cantly in the Hun­gar­ian elec­tions. Arrow cross vet­er­ans played an impor­tant role in the syn­the­sis of the Nazi/fascist Repub­li­can eth­nic out­reach mech­a­nism.

Oppo­si­tion leader Vik­tor Orban, who spurred the pop­ulist pol­i­tics that have led to the rise of the far-right in Hun­gary, believes his party is set to win a two-thirds major­ity after Sunday’s par­lia­men­tary elec­tions. But it is the right-wing extrem­ist Job­bik party that is set­ting the hate­ful tone of the campaign.

The state author­i­ties have their backs up against the wall in front of St. Stephen’s Basil­ica in Budapest. Three police offi­cers, posi­tioned in the shadow of an Art Nou­veau palace, watch motion­lessly as Hungary’s National Front marches before their eyes.

Mem­bers of cit­i­zens’ mili­tias and neo-Nazi groups have taken over patrolling the streets on this day. In com­bat boots, cam­ou­flage or black mil­i­tary uni­forms, they form human chains and divide the crowd.

Fifty thou­sand peo­ple have gath­ered in front of a speaker’s plat­form. An east­erly wind rat­tles the flags — red and white striped, much like the arm­bands worn by mem­bers of Hungary’s fas­cist Arrow Cross Party dur­ing World War II. The sound of speak­ers preach­ing nation­al­ist beliefs rever­ber­ates from the loudspeakers.

“Hun­gary belongs to the Hun­gar­i­ans,” the crowd hears. One speaker claims that Israeli investors and their local agents are in the process of buy­ing up the coun­try with its 10 mil­lion inhab­i­tants. The speaker argues that the gov­ern­ment doesn’t care where the money comes from and that they’re let­ting these peo­ple “buy Hun­gary up.” The cur­rently gov­ern­ing Social­ists, another speaker warns, will be “oblit­er­ated from the face of the Earth” and Roma will be encour­aged to emigrate.

“They should leave,” the crowd chants in uni­son. “They should leave.” . . .

“Hun­gary Pre­pares for Shift in Power” by Wal­ter Mayr; Spiegel Online; 4/9/2010.

6. Next, the pro­gram updates the re-opening of an inves­ti­ga­tion into the appar­ent mur­der of a young British man, covered-up with the col­lab­o­ra­tion of the Ger­man author­i­ties. Of sig­nif­i­cance here is the fact that Jere­miah Dug­gan had trav­eled to Ger­many to work with the LaRouche orga­ni­za­tion, a fas­cist net­work based in Ger­many that has made sig­nif­i­cant inroads into the so-called pro­gres­sive com­mu­nity in the United States.

It was the kind of phone call every mother dreads. At 4.24am on 27 March 2003, Erica Dug­gan was woken by her son Jere­miah, a nor­mally ebul­lient 22-year-old. “Mum, I’m in trou­ble,” he said. In hushed tones, he told her he was in Ger­many and began spelling the let­ters of the place he was stay­ing, “W, i, e, s ...”. Then the line went dead.

The next call came from the police. Ger­man offi­cers had found Jerry’s body three hours later on the side of the B455, a busy dual car­riage­way run­ning south-east out of the city of Wies­baden towards the Rhine. Wit­nesses said a man had scram­bled into the cen­tre of the road and was hit by a brown Peu­geot 406, and then a blue Volk­swa­gen. By the time para­medics and police arrived, Jerry was dead of head injuries.

The sub­se­quent police inves­ti­ga­tion was per­func­tory, clas­si­fy­ing his death as a sui­cide. Wit­nesses were allowed to leave the scene, cars were moved before being pho­tographed and an exter­nal post-mortem was con­ducted at a nearby mor­tu­ary with­out any detailed foren­sic checks.

Few par­ents would find it easy to accept that their child has com­mit­ted sui­cide but for Mrs Dug­gan, a retired teacher from north Lon­don whose Jew­ish fam­ily fled the Nazis in the late 1930s, the idea that her son took his life did not make sense.

“He had so many plans for the future and never showed even the slight­est inkling of depres­sion,” she told The Inde­pen­dent, in her mother’s home in Gold­ers Green. “But it’s more than just that. The call I got from him just before he died, that was from some­one who des­per­ately wanted to live, who was try­ing to sur­vive. It wasn’t from some­one intent on killing himself.”

Mrs Dug­gan, in deep doubt of the Ger­man police belief that her son’s death was sui­cide, hired pri­vate inves­ti­ga­tors and foren­sic experts to look at the evi­dence again, even­tu­ally sell­ing her house to pay the costs and mov­ing in with her age­ing mother. Their reports have cast seri­ous ques­tion marks over the offi­cial por­trayal of Jerry as sui­ci­dal, sug­gest­ing instead a man who was either des­per­ately try­ing to escape unknown assailants when he stum­bled out on the dual car­riage­way, or who had been attacked before he got there.

Yes­ter­day, armed with this new evi­dence, the Dug­gan family’s lawyers went to the High Court after the Attor­ney Gen­eral, Baroness Scot­land, took the highly unusual step of grant­ing them per­mis­sion to seek a sec­ond inquest into Jerry’s death.

The first inquest, in 2004, rejected the Ger­man police sui­cide sug­ges­tion, and returned an open ver­dict, find­ing instead that he had died in a “state of ter­ror”. But inves­ti­ga­tors failed to look wider. Sup­port­ers hope a fresh inquest will finally force Ger­man police to rein­ves­ti­gate why a British Jew died in mys­te­ri­ous cir­cum­stances after spend­ing five days with a far-right polit­i­cal cult led by a con­victed fraud­ster who is known for his vir­u­lent anti-Semitic views.

Jerry had been a stu­dent at the British Insti­tute in Paris but he had trav­elled to Wies­baden to attend what he thought would be an anti-Iraq war con­fer­ence. “He was an ide­al­is­tic boy who wanted to change the world,” his mother said. “He was angry about the upcom­ing war and wanted to do some­thing about it. But he was also excited because he was begin­ning to learn about politics.”

The con­fer­ence was organ­ised by the Schiller Insti­tute, an extrem­ist polit­i­cal think-tank linked to a right-wing con­spir­acy the­o­rist, Lyn­don LaRouche. He is an 87-year-old con­victed fraud­ster who has made eight unsuc­cess­ful attempts to run as an inde­pen­dent can­di­date in the US pres­i­den­tial elec­tions. Some of LaRouche’s more unusual claims include that the British monar­chy and MI6 are behind the global drugs trade.

In the States, he is largely regarded as an amus­ing sideshow whose apoc­a­lyp­tic writ­ings attract vul­ner­a­ble peo­ple look­ing for answers. But under­ly­ing much of his work is a deep anti-Semitism that describes the world as being con­trolled by a mass Zion­ist con­spir­acy of bankers, lob­by­ists and politicians.

The Schiller Insti­tute, run by his German-born wife, spreads that mes­sage around Europe; on the night Jerry died, LaRouche addressed the con­fer­ence in Wies­baden. In Jerry’s notes on the five days he spent there, Mrs Dug­gan dis­cov­ered that her son had become aware of the anti-Semitic agenda of many LaRouche fol­low­ers and had spo­ken out against them. “There were a lot of com­ments blam­ing the Jews for Iraq and he got up to say that he was Jew­ish and he didn’t sup­port the war,” she said. “What­ever hap­pened it’s clear he fell out with these peo­ple very quickly.”

La Rouche blames the CIA, MI6 and the KGB for any polit­i­cal or media crit­i­cism aimed in his direc­tion. He described the Dug­gan case as a hoax con­trived by “admir­ers of [for­mer US Vice-President] Dick Cheney and Tony Blair”. Mrs Duggan’s efforts to inves­ti­gate her son’s death is, he says, a “smear”.

Paul Can­ning, a for­mer Scot­land Yard foren­sic offi­cer, has stud­ied the 79 pho­tographs taken by Ger­man inves­ti­ga­tors of the crash site and Jerry’s body. Ger­man police said he was hit by the Peu­geot, then run over by the Volk­swa­gen. But Mr Can­ning could not find evi­dence of tyre marks on the body. Nor was there any blood, flesh or hair on either car.

Mr Can­ning, who has inves­ti­gated hun­dreds of road fatal­i­ties, believes this is “incon­ceiv­able”, report­ing that he had never come across a high-speed col­li­sion of a car and pedes­trian where no traces of blood are found. “I do not believe the images depict how Jerry came to meet his pre­ma­ture death,” he added. “It is pos­si­ble that Jerry lost his life else­where, prior to being placed at the scene.”

Ter­ence Mer­ston, another for­mer Met Police inves­ti­ga­tor who has stud­ied the pho­tographs, backs Mr Can­ning. “Based on my years of expe­ri­ence in attend­ing thou­sands of crime scenes as a foren­sic scene exam­iner, it is my opin­ion that the evi­dence at the scene points towards Jeremiah’s death being extremely sus­pi­cious and not a road traf­fic acci­dent,” he said. “It is also my view that the dam­age to the Peu­geot car has been delib­er­ately caused.”

But how did Jerry sus­tain the head injuries that killed him? A post-mortem by a British pathol­o­gist, Dr David Shove, dis­cov­ered defence wounds on Jerry’s arms as well as blood in his lungs and stom­ach. At the speed that wit­nesses say he was struck, he would have been killed instantly, but the blood in his lungs and stom­ach (caused by breath­ing in and swal­low­ing after a major haem­or­rhage) sug­gest he was alive for some time, after intense trauma.

Mrs Dug­gan said: “What we really need is for Ger­many to look again at my son’s death.” But the Ger­man author­i­ties are reluc­tant to act. A bid by Ger­man lawyers claim­ing police breached human rights laws by fail­ing to inves­ti­gate prop­erly has floun­dered for four years in the country’s high­est court, the Fed­eral Con­sti­tu­tional Court. Police in Wies­baden have refused to rein­ves­ti­gate, or reopen their files.

Now, a British inquest is the best oppor­tu­nity the Dug­gan fam­ily has for find­ing out what really hap­pened to Jerry. “It’s been a long and dif­fi­cult jour­ney but I’m begin­ning to think we may be near­ing the end,” a vis­i­bly exhausted Mrs Dug­gan added. “From the moment I got that call it’s been a seven-year fight for jus­tice. I can’t stop now.”

“Mys­tery of the Dead Briton and the Right-Wing Cult” by Jerome Tay­lor; The Inde­pen­dent [UK]; 2/27/2010.

7. The rest of the pro­gram reca­pit­u­lated sto­ries pre­sented in the sec­ond half of FTR #707.