BERLIN, Dec 1: Anti-Nazi activists began gathering in Berlin Saturday to try and prevent an anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi party from marching through Berlin’s traditional Jewish neighbourhood, police said.

Some 400 people had gathered in the city centre, and a much larger rally, including the city’s Social Democratic mayor Klaus Wowereit, was due to take place later.

Meanwhile it was still not clear whether the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD) had been ordered to re-route its march in order to avoid the Jewish neighbourhood, which is known as the Scheunenviertel.

Police had not confirmed a report published Saturday in the daily Berliner Zeitung, which said the neo-Nazis had been told to avoid the area.

Most political leaders at both the national and local level have strongly condemned the NPD, but both the city and the federal government had said they could not prevent the march taking place on the grounds of freedom of speech.

Government spokesman Uwe-Karsten Heye on Friday told reporters the rally was “a painful but necessary part of our public debate” and that the government “stood by the Jewish community and the Berliners who are holding a counter-demonstration”.

The government had also called the planned march an “intolerable provocation,” but had refused on legal grounds to ban it.

The aim of the neo-Nazi march is to protest against an exhibition, reopened this week in the Jewish neighbourhood, that challenges many Germans’ long-held belief that the Nazi-era German army, the Wehrmacht, was not involved in the crimes committed by the Nazi regime and its political structures, such as the SS.

The NPD, which the German government is attempting to outlaw for allegedly inciting violence against minorities, chose to call the march on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath. It had said it expected to draw 5,000 demonstrators from across Europe.—AFP