Two German women have been arrested for giving a Hitler salute and singing a neo-Nazi song to foreign tourists on their way to Germany’s Sachsenhausen concentration camp museum, prosecutors said on Thursday.
“The tour group was joined on a commuter train platform by two women who marched alongside them, sang the song ‘White Aryan resistance’ and gave them the Hitler salute,” the prosecutors office in Neuruppin, Germany, said in a statement.
The 18- and 19-year-old women, who were under the influence of alcohol at the time, were taken into police custody, the prosecutors said. Germany has strict laws banning the use of Nazi symbols and expression of Nazi ideas.
The 36 tourists given the Hitler salute were travelling under the motto “Concentration Camp Memorial Tour” and came from the United States, New Zealand, Canada, the Netherlands and Singapore, the statement said.
The incident took place in Brandenburg, a state in the former communist East, where far right parties get a much larger share of the votes than they do in the West.
An official at the prosecutors office told Reuters that he was unable to provide further details about the incident because the investigation was still at a very preliminary stage.
Six million Jews were killed by the Nazis during World War II. Nazi concentration camps were located in Poland, Austria, Germany and elsewhere in central and eastern Europe.
