World Bulletin / News Desk

Germany's right-wing extremist National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) has been supporting the Ukrainian nationalist party Svoboda in the crisis-hit eastern European country, it has been claimed.

NPD leader Holger Apfel, who showed up in Germany's Saxony state parliament with a "parliamentary delegation" from Ukraine last year, had then told NPD parliamentarians that the Svoboda party was "one of the most important European right-wing parties."

Svoboda has also enjoyed support from German political foundations affiliated with Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives financed by German taxpayers such as the German Society for International Cooperation (GIZ), Spiegel reported.

Germany's Left Party presented a parliamentary query into the Svoboda-NPD connection, prompting a response from the Interior Ministry, which stated that the the NPD was networking with other right-wing extremist organizations in eastern Europe.

Stating intel from the Anti-Fascist Information Center in Munich, the Spiegel report claimed that Svoboda has also established chapters in Frankfurt, Cologne and Munich and have been active in electing a Munich student of Ukrainian descent as the chairman of a Catholic parish hall in August 2013.