After supporters of the Lazio Rome football club were seen on Monday evening, doing Nazi salutes in the Munich brewery where Adolf Hitler had the Nazi Party’s program adopted in 1920, the German police announced on Tuesday March 5 that they had opened an investigation. “An operation at the Hofbräuhaus can be confirmed. Due to the ongoing investigation, nothing further can be said at this time.”Munich police told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
German police confirmed to AFP on Tuesday that an 18-year-old Italian had been “found and provisionally arrested” for saluting but was released after posting bail.
“There were already yesterday, Monday March 4, Lazio supporters in Munich [avant le match de mardi contre le Bayern], in several places in the city and also at the Hofbräuhaus. From 6 p.m., the Munich police were in front of and inside the Hofbräuhaus. This takes place routinely before a football match or a major event.declared the brewery to AFP. “If unconstitutional or xenophobic behavior should have taken place, we strongly condemn it”added brewery officials.
“These images are shameful”
On amateur videos broadcast online and others sent to AFP, recorded around 10:30 p.m. in the brasserie, we can see several dozen supporters in Lazio Rome tracksuits in the Hofbräuhaus making Nazi salutes or fascists, right arm raised and extended in the air.
On a video published on the Instagram account from the Italian daily La Repubblicawe also see and hear Lazio supporters singing: “We don’t care about the prison, the Blackshirts will triumph. If they do not triumph, it will be a mess with batons and grenades. Duce! Duce! Duce! » The Blackshirts refer to the militia of Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime.
“These images are shameful, they tarnish the image of the club, of all its supporters and of Rome”lamented Alessandro Onorato, the deputy in charge of sports at Rome town hall, in a press release.
In recent years, Lazio supporters have regularly been singled out for racist or anti-Semitic behavior. In 2017, they notably distinguished themselves by hijacking an image of Anne Frank, a German Jewish teenager who died in the Nazi concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen, in Germany, which they had displayed wearing the AS Roma jersey .
Founded at the end of the 16the century, the Hofbräuhaus is a Munich brewery, where Adolf Hitler presented in February 1920 the twenty-five points of the program of the German Nazi Party (NSDAP).