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<br />German trial over Anne Frank book<br />Diary of Anne Frank on judge's desk<br />The Diary of Anne Frank was displayed on the judge's desk<br />A suspected German neo-Nazi has admitted publicly burning a copy of Anne Frank's diary, at the start of his trial with six others.<br /><br />The suspects are accused of inciting racial hatred and disparaging the dead.<br /><br />rosecutors in the eastern German city of Magdeburg said Lars Konrad, 25, threw the book onto a bonfire during a summer solstice party in June 2006.<br /><br />Anne Frank wrote her diary while she and her family hid from the Nazis in an attic in Amsterdam during World War II.<br /><br />The indictment says the public burning took place in Pretzien, near Magdeburg, and that the accused, aged from 24 to 29, glorified the Nazis.<br /><br />Denying the Holocaust and incitement of racial hatred both carry maximum jail terms of five years under German law.<br /><br />Mr Konrad's lawyer argued that he was merely trying to expiate an evil chapter in German history.<br /><br />But state prosecutor Arnold Murra said the defendants "ridiculed Anne Frank and all those who died in the concentration camps".<br /><br />The case shocked Germany, fuelling fears that neo-Nazism was on the rise in poor areas of the former East Germany.<br /><br />Anne Frank's diary, found after the war, has moved millions of readers.<br /><br />She died just before her 16th birthday in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945. |
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