Germany today banned two regional far-right organisations suspected of denying the Nazis’ slaughter of six million Jews and launched early morning raids against their members.

Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said the groups outlawed were the Collegium Humanum and the Association for the Rehabilitation of Those Persecuted for Questioning the Holocaust (VRBHV)”.

Based in Germany’s most populous state of North Rhine-Westphalia, the neo-Nazi groups are “collecting pools for organised Holocaust deniers”, the ministry said in a statement.

“The groups’ activities consist of publishing anti-Semitic propaganda and glorifying the National Socialists’ (Nazis’) brutal dictatorship.