Religious News Online - Neo-Nazi youths murdered boy, 17, for looking like a Jew

Three young neo-Nazis went on trial in east Germany yesterday charged with the "bestial murder" of a schoolboy. The teenager was tortured and killed after his attackers decided that his baggy trousers and dyed blond hair made him "look like a Jew".

The men aged 17, 18 and 24 faced charges on separate counts of causing grievous bodily harm, coercion, attempted murder, and murder by a court in the town of Neuruppin. They are accused of killing Marinus Schoeberl, 17, a white German, whose mutilated body was discovered in a farm silage pit near the isolated village of Potzlow, north of Berlin, last November, four and a half months after his death.

Gerd Schnittcher, the chief state prosecutor, said: "The accused are part of an extreme right-wing scene. Acts of violence are nothing new, but we are dealing with a new dimension here. The details of the murder are so cruel that I can hardly bring myself to describe them. It was bestial."

The court was told how in July last year, Schoeberl had joined a group of young people in a flat in Potzlow where they got drunk. The three neo-Nazis in the group took exception to the boy's dyed hair and trousers. "They saw this as a provocation," state prosecutors said. Schoeberl was punched and kicked by the three who forced him to "confess" that he looked "like a Jew". The boy was taken to another flat in the village and beaten further before being dragged to a derelict pigsty on a deserted farm.

There, the prosecution said, Schoeberl was tortured according to methods shown in the film American History X, in which a neo-Nazi brutally murders two black men. In their confessions yesterday, the accused admitted to kicking Schoeberl's head repeatedly, which was propped up against a stone block.

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