(13 Feb 2005) SHOTLIST
1. Security
2. National Democratic Party (NPD) supporters being checked
3. NPD supporter with flag
4. NPD supporters with banners reading: 'Holocaust Bombing'
5. Banner reading: 'No Matter How Many Years, Murder is Murder'
6. SOUNDBITE: (English) Udo Voigt, Leader of NPD in Saxony:
"You have to decide whether people are guilty or not guilty and I think women, old men and children are not guilty and are not responsible for the war and so I think it was a very, very hard thing that the American and British bombing command, just at the end of the war, did."
7. NPD supporters with crosses reading: 'Vietnam' 'Bagdad'
8. Various of supporters
9. Anti-Nazi demonstration
10. NPD supporters carrying crosses
11. NPD supporters scuffle with police
STORYLINE
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder warned Germans against forgetting history on Sunday as supporters of the far-right rallied in Dresden to protest a devastating Allied bombing in World War II that killed an estimated 35-thousand residents 60 years ago.
The rally - and fears of street clashes - cast a shadow over a day of remembrance and reflection on the U.S.-British air raids, which set off firestorms and destroyed the centuries-old city centre.
Schroeder vowed to fight attempts by neo-Nazis to blur the historical context of the Feb. 13-14, 1945, attack.
Commemorations began with the U.S. and British ambassadors to Germany silently laying wreaths at a Dresden cemetery where some of the bombing's victims are buried.
In another part of town, some four thousand far-right activists rallied at the Saxony state legislature and then marched through the city.
The nationalistic, anti-immigrant National Democratic Party, which entered the legislature last fall, helped organise the event, and police were out in force.
Dozens of marchers carried flaming torches, and one banner described the attack as a "bomb Holocaust." Eager to avoid violence, police removed several hundred counter-demonstrators from a bridge along the route of the far-right march.
Dresden's destruction by three waves of British and U.S. bombers resonates in Germany particularly deeply, in part because of the city's history as a cultural centre - "one of Europe's most beautiful cities," Schroeder said.
But the National Democratic Party, known by its German initials NPD, has caused widespread consternation with its heightened public presence and rhetoric in recent months.
Its state leaders in Saxony caused an uproar last month by appearing to compare the bombing of Dresden with the Holocaust.
The party's national leader, Udo Voigt, expressed admiration for Hitler in a weekend newspaper interview.
He denied that his party models itself on the Nazis.
The German government failed in 2003 to have the party outlawed by the country's supreme court, and politicians are now debating whether to make another try.
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