Twenty extreme rightists shouting Nazi slogans smashed windows at a home for refugees in southwestern Germany, a state prosecutor said Wednesday.
The attack Tuesday night came as nearly 20,000 people joined protest marches throughout Germany against the spiraling attacks on foreigners.Simon Wiesenthal, famous for his relentless pursuit of Nazi war criminals, said in a radio interview that violent radical rightist groups in Germany should be outlawed.
Germany is reeling from the killings of a Turkish grandmother and two young Turkish girls on Monday in the northern town of Moelln.
During a parliament debate in Bonn, Hans-Ulrich Klose, the parliamentary leader of the opposition Social Democrats, condemned the Moelln attack as "horrible and shameful."
Opposition leaders, Jewish groups and others have blamed Chancellor Helmut Kohl for failing to stop the violence. There have been more than 1,700 radical rightist attacks this year, mostly against foreigners.
In the town of Weisenheim, about 65 miles southwest of Frankfurt, a group of 20 extreme rightists attacked the home of 35 Polish and Romanian asylum-seekers late Tuesday, state prosecutor Klaus Puderbach said.
He said no one was injured, and the attackers fled before police arrived.
Wiesenheim is in Kohl's home state of Rhineland-Palatinate.
Wiesenthal, the hunter of fugitive Nazis, said the German government should ban the rightists as it did leftist terrorists in the 1970s.
"One should not wait or delay it as a theme for discussion," Wiesenthal said in an interview with Saarland state radio.
German officials were "strong and energetic," in dealing with the leftists terrorists, Wiesenthal said, because their attacks were against top government and other powerful officials.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said 16 people have died this year as a result of neo-Nazi attacks and German officials have "strongly condemned these incidents."
"We share the outrage expressed by German leaders at these heinous crimes of hatred."