German far-right party member sentenced to 4-month imprisonment for Holocaust denial

PanARMENIAN.Net - A court in western Germany sentenced a member of a far-right party to four months in prison on Tuesday for denying the Holocaust.



Marcel Woell, the regional chairman of the National Democratic Party in Hesse state, was convicted of incitement for comments that he made in March during a meeting of a local assembly where he has a seat.



Another local politician filed a criminal complaint against Woell, 24, after he called for subsidies for school trips to sites of Nazi crimes such as the Auschwitz death camp to be scrapped.



He referred to "sites of the so-called National Socialist terror" and contended that the school trips served for "brainwashing" students.



Delivering the verdict at the administrative court in Friedberg, north of Frankfurt, judge Markus Bange said the comments were a "planned provocation," the IHT reports.



The National Democratic Party of Germany is a German nationalist political party. The party, founded on November 28, 1964, is a successor to the German Empire Party (Deutsche Reichspartei, DRP). The NPD is viewed by its opponents and the mainstream media as a de facto neo-Nazi party, which only denies such ideology to avoid being banned by the German government. The accusations of neo-Nazism arise from the party's policies of intense opposition to non-white, Jewish and Muslim immigrants and minorities.