German clothier outrages with shop name similar to Norway killer

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A German clothing brand said to be popular with neo-Nazis has opened a store with a name similar to the Norwegian extremist who stalked and killed scores of people in a ruthless attack last summer.

The Thor Steinar clothing shop is named ‘Brevik,’ which has stirred up memories of the horrific attack by Anders Behring Breivik, who ranted online against Islam before detonating a car bomb outside Oslo government offices and hunting down young people at a political summer camp.

The name spurred outrage in the German city of Chemnitz where the shop opened.

‘A shop with a name like that is absolutely out of the question,” Chemnitz spokeswoman Katja Uhlemann told the German newspaper Die Welt.

‘We’ve already contacted the landlord and we will be taking all necessary steps to see that the store is closed as fast as possible,’ Uhlemann said.

The company said the name, like those of its other stores, was simply based on a Norwegian town, Die Welt reported. Brevik, one letter away from Breivik, is a town south of Oslo.

The Thor Steinar brand is associated with the Neo-Nazi scene, the German magazine Der Spiegel reports. The company once used a logo that looked similar to symbols worn by Nazi officers, leading to bans on the clothing in the past.

Right-wing extremism is especially sensitive in these eastern stretches of Germany. Last year, Germans were unnerved to discover that a neo-Nazi terrorist group had been at work for more than a decade in the nearby eastern town of Zwickau, killing Turkish immigrants.

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-- Emily Alpert in Los Angeles