Free Republic

In Germany's Lower Saxony and Bavaria, citizens are now barred from publicly displaying the letter "Z," which has become a symbol used by the Russian army during the war. Anyone who displays the symbol at demonstrations or publicly showcases it on cars or buildings could now face a fine or up to three years in jail, according to the Moscow Times. "It is incomprehensible to me how this symbol 'Z' could be used in our country to condone this crime," Boris Pistorius, Lower Saxony's interior minister, said in a statement, according to the news outlet. Similarly, Bavaria's Justice Minister Georg...

A 3,300-year-old treasure trove of gold found in northern Germany has stumped German archeologists. One theory suggests that traders transported it thousands of miles from a mine in Central Asia, but other experts are skeptical. Archeologists in Germany have an unlikely new hero: former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. They have nothing but praise for the cigar-smoking veteran Social Democratic politician. Why? Because it was Schröder who, together with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, pushed through a plan to pump Russian natural gas to Western Europe. For that purpose, an embankment 440 kilometers (275 miles) long and up to 30 meters (100 feet)...

A 2,600-year-old corpse has been discovered in the moors of northern Germany. It's not the only one. Such finds are frequent, but have posed an increasingly large riddle: Why were so many of the bodies victims of violence and dismemberment? Its blade plunging into the earth, the peat-cutting machine crept slowly through the Grosses Uchter Moor (Great Uchte Moor) in the northern German state of Lower Saxony. A worker stacked the sections of turf sliced free by the guillotine-like blade. Suddenly he paused, something having caught his eye. "What's this? An old leather jacket?" It wasn't. In fact, what the...

Bog Mummy Mistaken for Murder Victim By Rossella Lorenzi, Discovery News June 27, 2005— The body of a teenage girl thought to be the victim of foul play has turned out to be one of Germany's oldest and best-preserved mummies, German archaeologists announced at a press conference last week.Bog Mummy's Hand Found in September 2000 in a peat bog in the town of Uchte, in Lower Saxony, the corpse was first examined by the police homicide unit. Though it had been fragmented by the peat machine, the body appeared to belong to a teenage girl. Investigators thought it could be...

A senior official at the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) allegedly granted asylum to more than 1,200 applicants without valid legal reasons for their approval. She has since been removed from her position. The employee headed the BAMF office in Bremen and worked with three lawyers who assisted her in wrongfully granting asylum to refugees from other federal states, according to joint research conducted by Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), NDR and Radio Bremen. Many of the applicants were said to have been Yazidis, a Kurdish religious minority living mainly in northern Iraq and northern Syria. During the reign of...

Elections in Lower Saxony have complicated German Chancellor Angela Merkel's federal coalition calculus as her conservative party finished second in a close race to the Social Democrats.

This Sunday's Lower Saxony regional election could bruise Chancellor Angela Merkel as she tries to forge her next federal coalition government. A new survey shows the northern state's governing Social Democrats ahead.

The case of a Muslim pupil refusing to remove her niqab triggered debate in Lower Saxony. Now a new law may mean that full-face Islamic veils will no longer be allowed in state schools. The state of Lower Saxony is expected to announce a ban on face veils such as burqas and niqabs in schools in August, following a unanimous decision by the state parliament on Thursday to amend current education policies, reports the Branschweiger Zeitung. A niqab covers the whole body except for a slit for the eyes, whereas a burqa fully covers the body including the eyes. The...

Two men arrested in Göttingen earlier this month over suspicions that they were plotting an “imminent” terror attack are no longer under investigation due to insufficient evidence, but they will still be deported. State prosecutors said on Tuesday that though the two men had discussed attack plans, there was not enough evidence to support authorities’ initial suspicion that the men were “preparing a serious crime against the state”. The Nigerian and Algerian citizens — both in their 20s and born in Germany — were arrested on February 9th in a police raid in the Lower Saxon university town, as well...

An employee of the state reception authority (LAB) in Lower Saxony has been fired after revealing 300 cases of migrants cheating the German benefits system to the police. The unnamed female employee was responsible for the creation of various documents for asylum seekers and handing out their state benefits in the city of Brunswick. She became alarmed when she found a large number of asylum seekers collecting multiple benefits under different names, reports Kronen Zeitung. According to reports, some of the migrants had two identities but others had up to six different benefits claims. The woman first brought the matter...

Police in Lower Saxony have said that sporadic group sexual assaults have been reported at swimming pools in 2016, what they call a “new phenomenon.” […] This type of crime is “notable” because sexual crimes are usually “almost exclusively” committed by people acting alone. In all the instances of crimes carried out by groups — what the police describe as “a new form of criminality” — the perpetrators were not German, police say. …

The Lichtenstein Cave is a short drive away from Manfred's village, deep in the Harz mountains. This is the spot where Manfred's relatives, dating back 3,000 years, were buried. The cave remained hidden from view until 1980, and it was only later, in 1993, that archaeologists discovered 40 Bronze Age skeletons. The 3,000-year-old skeletons were in such good condition that anthropologists at the University of Goettingen managed to extract a sample of DNA. That was then matched to two men living nearby: Uwe Lange, a surveyor, and Manfred Huchthausen, a teacher. The two men have now become local celebrities.

Cavemen and their relatives in the same village after 3,000 years Uwe Lange meets a recreation of one of his Bronze Age ancestors Roger Boyes in Berlin The good news for two villagers in the Söse valley of Germany yesterday was that they have discovered their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents — give or take a generation or two. The bad news is that their long-lost ancestors may have grilled and eaten other members of their clan. Every family has its skeletons in the cave, though, so Manfred Hucht-hausen, 58, a teacher, and 48-year-old surveyor Uwe Lange remained in celebratory mood. Thanks to...

Archaeologists have found more than 600 relics from a huge battle between a Roman army and Barbarians in the third century, long after historians believed Rome had given up control of northern Germany. "We have to write our history books new, because what we thought was that the activities of the Romans ended at nine or 10 (years) after Christ," said Lutz Stratmann, science minister for the German state of Lower Saxony. "Now we know that it must be 200 or 250 after that." For weeks, archeologist Petra Loenne and her team have been searching this area with metal detectors,...

Archaeologists from Freie Universität Berlin made a spectacular discovery in their excavations of a Roman-Germanic battlefield at the Harzhorn in Lower Saxony. While exploring the area near Kalefeld in the Northeim district north of Göttingen, the researchers, headed by Prof. Dr. Michael Meyer, found the chain mail of a Roman soldier from the Third Century AD. It was the first time that such a well-preserved piece of body armor was excavated on a Roman-Germanic battlefield. This piece of equipment, worn on the body, made it possible to reconstruct an individual story in the battle, a close-up image of the war,...

Archaeologists have discovered an ancient roman battlefield from the third century near Göttingen that will rewrite history, Lower Saxony's department for preservation of historical monuments said on Thursday. “The find can be dated to the third century and will definitely change the historical perception of that time,” Dr. Henning Haßmann told The Local. The amazing discovery allows an insight in what must have been a dramatic battle between Romans and Germanic tribes. “The find indicates a massive Roman military presence,” Haßmann said. So far historians believed that the battle of the Teutoburg Forest, which took place in 9 AD, resulted...

'A Scotsman who married in a kilt, supports Rangers, likes white pudding and drinks Irn-Bru is now being tipped as the possible ruler of Germany. After climbing high and fast through the ranks of Germany’s CDU conservative party, pundits speculate great things lie in store for 41-year-old David McAllister, who is up for re-election as governor in the state of Lower Saxony later this month. The son of a German mother and a Scottish father from the tough Gorbals area of Glasgow, he is recognised as one of the leading figures in Germany's ruling Christian Democratic Union party. He has...

To judge from its state election campaigns, Germany's governing parties are flirting with recklessness. THE blows were struck in Bavaria but the impact was felt as far away as Hesse. On December 20th a young Greek and his Turkish companion answered a pensioner who told them to stop smoking on the Munich underground by beating him up. “We have too many young foreign criminals,” responded Roland Koch (above, with Angela Merkel). Mr Koch is fighting to be re-elected for a third term as Hesse's premier. Foreign miscreants, he declared, should be deported; young ones should be taught a lesson with...

German Proposes Tagging Islamic Militants By REUTERS BERLIN, Dec. 28 (Reuters) - Known Islamic militants should be electronically tagged so their movements could be tracked, a regional German interior minister proposed Wednesday. "This would allow us to monitor the roughly 3,000 Islamists who are prone to violence, hate-preachers and fighters trained in terrorist camps," the Lower Saxony interior minister, Uwe Schünemann, said in an interview with the newspaper Die Welt. Mr. Schünemann said electronic tagging was a viable alternative to holding the militants in protective custody, as suggested by the former German interior minister, Otto Schily. Mr. Schünemann was quoted...

On the surface there would seem to be little to unite the Aryan racialists of the neo-Nazi movement with the terrorists of radical Islam. To the neo-Nazis, Muslims are almost all members of ``inferior`` races; and to the Islamic terrorists, the neo-Nazis are almost without exception either atheists or members of fringe quasi-Christian sects. But the reality is that there has been close cooperation between Muslim extremists and Fascists ever since the founding of the Nazi movement in the 1920`s. For all of their differences, Muslim extremists and Nazis have always been united by a common group of beliefs and...