Informationsdienst gegen Rechtsextremismus

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The Informationsdienst gegen Rechtsextremismus (IDGR) has been a privately financed German project on the Internet set up to counter anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, similar to the Nizkor Project. Founded in 1998 by political scientist Margret Chatwin, a former contributor to Nizkor,^[1] IDGR was widely regarded as the main German-language source of information on right-wing extremism. On September 27, 2006 the editor decided to stop the service.

1 Mission
2 Structure
3 Controversies
4 Further reading
5 External links
6 References

[edit] Mission

The mission of the IDGR was to unmask anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial and to provide reliable information about the Holocaust, its perpetrators, and its background. This included providing in-depth analyses of news reports and revisionist literature, as well as references to books or Internet pages.

[edit] Structure

The main part of the website was a regularly updated collection of texts dealing with different topics in the field of Nazism and extremism. The articles cover related issues such as the history of the Colonia Dignidad or White Supremacy movements in the United States.

One subsection of the homepage has been the "Lexicon of Right Wing Extremism", consisting of about 300 files. It contained detailed information about right-wing activists (such as Erich Priebke), organizations, (National Alliance), publications, and Holocaust deniers (Ernst Zündel, Germar Rudolf and David Irving).

[edit] Controversies

Groups associated with German New Right (Neue Rechte) and the right wing of the Christian Democratic Union accuse the IDGR of trying to undermine democratically inclined groups by linking them with right-wing extremism for ideological reasons. Claus Wolfschlag, an author of the weekly Junge Freiheit^[2] (described by the IDGR as being an extremist right-wing publication), has criticised the IDGR as serving mainly to defame personalities on the political right.^[3] He and others also view some of the IDGR's authors as left-wing extremists.