Times Online - Universities provide foil for thuggish neo-Nazis

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. (...) Now the neo-Nazis, emboldened after winning representation in the Saxony parliament, want to swell their ranks with duelling graduates. (...) A key NPD politician in Saxony is Jürgen Gansel, who studied history at Giessen and who belonged to the Normannia Duelling Club. He first was registered in police files when he fired an air pistol at neighbours of the club to stop them complaining about the raucous shouts of “Heil Hitler” from the students’ residence. The charges were dropped later.