East German Women Are Heading West

Young, educated women are fleeing eastern Germany—and Neo-Nazi parties are flourishing in the vacuum  they leave behind. One-and-a-half million people, two-thirds of them women, have left left the economically stagnant east since the mid-1990s, a new study shows.

Radical, right-wing parties parties prey on what the study's authors call "a new, male-dominated underclass," unmarried, underemployed, and susceptible to the neo-Nazi message.  And their foothold may be difficult to reverse: high unemployment keeps women from returning, and 100,000 eastern babies have already been born in the west. (More Germany stories.)