Syrian refugees rescue German neo-Nazi after car crash: Reports
BERLIN – Agence France-Presse
A German neo-Nazi politician who crashed his car into a tree was rescued by Syrian refugees who happened to be passing, German media reported on March 22.Stefan Jagsch, 29, a member of the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD), was badly injured in the crash last week, local newspapers and national news agency DPA said.
The first responders were two Syrian asylum seekers from a passing minibus that stopped at the crash site near the town of Büdingen in the central state of Hesse.
They pulled Jagsch from the wrecked car and administered first aid, a spokesman for the local fire brigade told DPA, confirming eyewitness reports from March 16.
Büdingen hosts one of many new refugee shelters set up across Germany since more than one million asylum seekers from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere arrived in Europe’s top economy last year.
The record influx has sparked a xenophobic backlash from which far-right parties, including the NPD, have benefited.
The party scored 10 percent of the vote in March 6 municipal elections in Büdingen and in nearby Altenstadt, where Jagsch was the NPD’s main candidate.
The NPD’s Hesse state chief Jean Christoph Fiedler called the rescue effort “apparently a very good, humane act,” adding that Jagsch himself could not clearly remember the accident, the Frankfurter Rundschau daily reported.
Germany’s constitutional court is currently considering a parliamentary request to ban the NPD, which Chancellor Angela Merkel’s office has labelled an “anti-democratic, xenophobic, anti-Semitic and anti-constitutional party.”
Social media were abuzz with users noting the irony of foreigners coming to the aid of a member of the openly-racist NPD party.
“Now the foreigners are even taking away our first aid,” quipped one user on Facebook, while another commented that “destiny has a sense of humor.”
