BERLIN // Should you be allowed to compete at the Olympics for Germany if your partner is a neo-Nazi?
The country has been agonising over that question since last Friday when Nadja Drygalla, a member of the women's rowing eight team, left the Games in London early after it emerged that her boyfriend, Michael Fischer, was a leading right-wing extremist in the eastern city of Rostock
Drygalla, 23, vowed on Sunday that she does not share her boyfriend's views. "I must say very clearly that our relationship was very heavily burdened by that and that I said clearly in many discussions that I don't share this view and don't support him in that," she told the dpa news agency on Sunday, fighting back tears.
Her case has triggered a national debate about whether she is being subjected to a witch-hunt or is unfit to represent her country.
Drygalla's defenders say personal relationships and politics should be kept out of sport and that she is being declared guilty by association - a common practice during the Nazi period. Critics argue that even if she disagreed with her partner's views and actions, she evidently tolerated them enough to share her life with him.
Tagesspiegel, a Berlin newspaper, commented that Ms Drygalla "is either unbelievably naive or stupid or infected by Nazi demons herself" and suggested she was far from "a model sportswoman".
Awareness of the threat of neo-Nazism has grown since last November when the nation was shocked to discover the existence of a terrorist cell that had murdered 10 people, most of them Turks, in assassination-style shootings across the country between 2000 and 2007.
The authorities' failure to stop the terrorist trio, called the National Socialist Underground, has led to parliamentary enquiries. For years, police ignored appeals from the victims' families to investigate a possible far-right motive.
Opposition politicians have called for an inquiry into when sports bodies found out about Drygalla's relationship. The German Olympic Sports Confederation said it did not know until last week, but her local rowing association had known for years.
Regional authorities in her home state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania also knew about it at least since last year, when she was pressured into resigning from the police force.
She said she wants to continue competitive rowing but her sponsorship will be reviewed after the Games. There are also renewed calls to force German athletes to declare their commitment to democracy in future.
"If her relationship with a former neo-Nazi was known, Frau Drygalla should not have been selected for the German Olympic team," said Michael Hartmann, a member of parliament for the opposition Social Democratic Party.
But many politicians have rushed to her defence. The interior minister, Thomas de Maiziere, said the uproar was exaggerated. "Must we demand that sportswomen and sportsmen reveal who they are friends with, what they think? Where does one draw the line?" he said.
Michael Fischer, a former competitive rower himself, ran for the regional parliament last year as a candidate for the far-right National Democratic Party, which the domestic intelligence agency says is racist and sympathetic to National Socialism.
He was also a leading figure in the National Socialists Rostock, a radical group. According to public broadcaster NDR, he was part of a group of neo-Nazis who disrupted a memorial ceremony in February for Mehmet Turgut, one of the 10 victims shot dead by the NSU.
Mr Fischer told dpa on Monday that he had decided before the London Olympics "to take the step to stop being a neo-Nazi". He added that he regretted the problems he had caused his partner. But several German newspapers and anti-racism groups question whether he is indeed a reformed character.
While in London to watch Ms Drygalla compete at the Games, he wrote a sarcastic comment on Facebook: "I am delighting in international understanding. Sitting next to blacks and Pakis on the train."
Nikolaus Schneider, the head of the Protestant Church in Germany said Ms Drygalla deserved a second chance but added: "I found it a bit regrettable that Frau Drygalla commented about it so late."
He said that "it is of course right that this debate is taking place now because right-wing extremism is not acceptable".
His views chime with those who argue that Germany as the country that committed the Holocaust should hold itself to the highest standards in the fight against the far right, and that a top athlete's relationship with a known Nazi should not have been ignored.