The interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, ordered the deportation of all foreign nationals found guilty of participating in the riots, including those with residence permits. “When one has the honor to have a permit, one should not be caught provoking urban violence,” he said.

Copycat arson attacks were reported in Germany and Belgium for the third day running, though police said they were small-scale incidents and not gang related.

Nine cars have been set alight in Berlin since the weekend, compared with hundreds a night in France. “These appear to be individual acts,” said a German police spokesman. “Our situation is nothing like Paris. There is only a marginal connection.”

Despite some media criticism and fears that the emergency measures — never before used in mainland France — would prove a further provocation, a poll for Le Parisien newspaper showed that a large majority of French people back the government’s stance: 73 percent said they supported the decision to give selected local officials the power to impose nighttime curfews.

Major cities such as Marseille, Strasbourg, Lyon and Toulouse, as well as the Paris suburbs, were given emergency powers, in force for the next 12 days. Only half a dozen towns had actually imposed curfews, on minors, by late Wednesday.

An extra 1,000 police were brought in overnight, bringing the total on duty across the country to 11,500. Residents in several towns organized patrols, taking turns in standing guard with fire extinguishers over apartment buildings, car parks and local facilities such as schools and social centers.

The government released details of a package of measures to improve conditions in the suburbs of major cities, aimed mainly at ensuring that the education system serves North African and black youths better and improves their chances of getting a job. All unemployed people under 25 and living in one of the 750 sensitive suburbs will be assessed by job centers and given guidance and work placements. Benefit claimants will get a one-off 1,000-euro payment to return to work as well as 150 euros a month for 12 months. Companies will be given tax breaks if they set up on or near these suburbs.

Some 5,000 extra teachers and educational assistants are to be recruited for schools serving the suburbs concerned, 10,000 scholarships will be awarded next year to encourage academic achievers to stay at school, and 10 boarding schools will be created for those who want to study away from their suburb. The school-leaving age will be lowered to 14 for underachieving pupils eager to take up an apprenticeship.

A national agency for “social cohesion and equality of opportunity” is to be set up, and an extra 100 million euros allocated to community organizations active in youth and social work.

There were growing signs Wednesday that the riots may unsettle the French economy. The euro came under pressure as concerns grew about the impact of the riots on tourism and consumer confidence.

This article has been provided by the Guardian through a special arrangement with Salon. ) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005. Visit the Guardian’s Web site at http://www.guardian.co.uk.

The library in Weimar where the music was stored for several centuries recently burned down, but by chance, the box containing the score had already been removed. Two weeks ago a member of the Bach Archive in Leipzig, Germany, Michael Maul, stumbled on the composition while looking through material relevant to Bach’s tempestuous but thinly documented life. The box contained more than 100 poems and verses, together with a mysterious “strophic aria.”

Proof that the work was genuine came when experts compared the hand-penned manuscript with Bach’s writing.

“After Michael and I had identified it as Bach’s, we opened a very expensive bottle of Champagne,” Peter Wollny, head of research at the Bach Archive, in Leipzig, said Tuesday. “Michael came back from Weimar two weeks ago and said he had found something interesting. We got the microfilm of the score last week. We compared it with Bach’s known compositions — and bingo.”

He added: “The last time anything by Bach was discovered was 80 years ago. So far we’ve only heard it on the computer. But it’s a charming little work, written for one singer — a soprano — and a harpsichord. There’s a little postlude at the end for a string ensemble — two violins, a viola and a cello. It takes just four or five minutes to play.”

British conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner, who has been asked by the Bach archive to perform and record the aria, said: “It’s so exciting. Maul has been sleuthing away, looking at the records in Weimar, which is something of a forgotten town in terms of Bach’s history.”

Gardiner believes the aria is likely to be part of a longer cantata. “It is absolutely beautiful. So many of Bach’s cantatas went missing after he died. His son Wilhelm Friedemann Bach was pretty profligate with his father’s stuff. He sold manuscripts off, lost them, used them as fire lighters. So when something like this turns up it is wonderful.

“It’s a reflective, meditative, soothing piece, as Bach’s church music so often is. It’s not going to set the world alight — enough of Bach’s music from this early to mid-period has survived to give us a sense of his musical personality at that time — but it’s just great to have this because every one of his cantatas and arias is on a completely different level from all of his contemporaries.”

Gardiner plans to record the piece before Christmas and perform it at London’s Cadogan Hall on Dec. 18.

Wollny Tuesday said that the composition sheds fresh light on Bach’s enigmatic early career in Weimar, a small town in central Germany, which was later made famous by Goethe but at the time boasted just 5,000 inhabitants.

Born in 1685 into a highly musical family, Bach worked as court organist in Weimar from 1708 to 1717. He was also a member of the town’s chamber orchestra, which he led from 1714. During this period he was rapidly becoming famous, not just for his compositions but as Germany’s greatest organist. His storming performances frightened the organ builders.

“We hardly know anything about Bach from this period because very little has survived,” Wollny said Tuesday. “There are very few compositions. It fills a black hole in his artistic career. It also tells us a great deal about his musical and vocal style during the Weimar period.”

So delighted was the Bach Archive by its discovery that it Tuesday flew in professor Christoph Wolff, the world’s leading expert on Bach, from Harvard University. Wolff said he was convinced the work was genuine, and described it as “an exquisite and highly refined strophic aria, Bach’s only contribution to a musical genre popular in late 17th century Germany.” Other stunning Bach discoveries could follow, he predicted.

The box where the manuscript was discovered, said Wollny, was only removed from the library because the researcher, a bookbinder, was interested in the rare marble paper on which the work was written. “Otherwise it would have been burned down in the fire. Nobody would have known that it existed,” Wollny said.

There has been no previous record of, or reference to, the composition, which has the words “aria,” “soprano solo” and “ritornello” written at the top. The last time an undiscovered piece by Bach turned up was when a cantata was found, but the work was a mere fragment.

In an interview with the Guardian, Flegel, now 93 and living in a nursing home in northern Germany, Sunday described how she began working as a Red Cross nurse at the Reichs Chancellery in Berlin in January 1943. She had been transferred there from the eastern front.

As the German army collapsed, Hitler stayed in Berlin continuously from November 1944, eventually retreating into the bunker with his entourage. From then on, Flegel saw him frequently. “I was in the building and someone said, ‘The Führer is here,’” she said. “The first time it didn’t particularly affect me. He was away from Berlin for a long time before someone announced again, ‘The Führer is back.’ Hitler shook hands with all the people he hadn’t greeted before. After that he talked to us regularly.

“His authority was extraordinary. He was always polite and charming. There was really nothing to object to.”

As the Russians approached, and Berlin came under direct artillery fire, the mood in the bunker changed. “The circle got increasingly small. People were pushed together. Everyone became more unassuming.”

Flegel’s existence only emerged after the transcript of an interview she gave to American interrogators in November 1945 was declassified four years ago by the CIA. The Guardian discovered her insider’s account of Hitler’s final hours in a Washington vault and published it.

But her fate remained a mystery. Two months ago a Berlin-based newspaper, the BZ, tracked down her relatives via the German Red Cross and war archives. To the paper’s astonishment, her family revealed that Flegel was still alive. She is the last surviving female witness to have been inside the bunker. Traudl Junge — Hitler’s secretary, whose memoirs provided the inspiration for the Oscar-nominated film “Downfall,” and who gave numerous interviews to journalists and historians — died in 2002. The only other survivor, 88-year-old Rochus Misch, Hitler’s telephonist, refuses to talk.

Speaking at her nursing home, which has a picturesque river view, Flegel Sunday said that as the Russians drew closer to Berlin, those inside the bunker began to live “outside reality.”

In the middle of April 1945, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazis’ propaganda chief, his wife, Magda, and their six children moved in. Flegel, whose original job had been to look after wounded S.S. soldiers, said she had got to know Magda Goebbels well. When it became clear that the situation was hopeless, she had tried to persuade her to send her children out of Berlin.

“She was a brilliant woman, on a far higher level than most people,” Flegel told the Guardian. “I wanted her to take at least one or two of them out of the city. But Mrs. Goebbels simply said, ‘I belong to my husband. And the children belong to me.’

“One evening she told me, ‘I have to go to the dentist and can’t be with them. I would like you to say goodnight to the children.’ I said, ‘Of course. I’ll do it. Don’t worry.’”

Flegel, then 33, sang the children to sleep. “The children were charming. They would have delighted anybody. They played with each other in the bunker,” she said. “They should have been allowed to live. They had nothing to do with what was going on around them. Not to spare the children was madness, dreadful.”

Hitler was fond of them, she added, and drank hot chocolate with them and allowed them to use his bathtub.

Magda Goebbels, meanwhile, tolerated her husband’s frequent and well-known infidelities. “She didn’t say anything. Nobody liked Goebbels. There were always people who hung around him, of course. They included many women who were young and pretty, who had an easier time of it than the rest of us. I don’t know the details. It was all gossip and trash.”

In her original testimony, Flegel also described how in the final days before his suicide on the afternoon of April 30, 1945, Hitler had begun to crumble before her eyes. “When parts of Berlin were already occupied, and the Russians were coming closer and closer to the center of the city, one could feel, almost physically, that the Third Reich was approaching its end,” her statement said.

“Hitler required no care; I was exclusively there for the care of the wounded. To be sure, he had aged greatly in the last days; he now had a lot of gray hair, and gave the impression of a man at least 15 to 20 years older. He shook a good deal; walking was difficult for him; his right side was still very much weakened as a result of the attempt on his life.”

Sunday Flegel said that before his wedding to Eva Braun on the night of April 28, Hitler “sank into himself.”

In her statement she gives a shrewish portrait of Braun, whom she dismisses as “a completely colorless personality.” She would not have been conspicuous among a crowd of stenographers, she said. Hitler’s decision to marry Braun made it “immediately clear to me that this signified the end of the Third Reich,” she added, claiming that the death of Hitler’s wolfhound Blondi “affected us more” than Braun’s suicide.

Sunday Flegel made little effort to hide her dislike of a woman who, she suggested, was little more than a Hitler groupie. “Oh dear God. She didn’t have any importance. Nobody expected much of her. She was just a young girl, really,” she said of Braun, who was only six months her junior. “She wasn’t really his wife.”

By April 29, the once mighty German Reich had been reduced to an area the size of a large football field, stretching between Potsdamer Platz and Friedrichstrasse. Heavy fighting engulfed the city center. Radio communications with the outside world ceased. Shock troops brought news of the latest Russian positions.

At 10:30 p.m. that evening, Flegel was summoned with the rest of the medical team to line up and take their leave of the Führer. “He came out of the side room, shook everyone’s hand and said a few friendly words. And that was it,” she told the Guardian.

During her interrogation after the war she said: “At the end we were like a big family. The terrific dynamics of the fate which was unrolling held sway over all of us. We were Germany, and we were going through the end of the Third Reich and the war. Everything petty and external had fallen away.”

The next afternoon Hitler shot himself. Braun took prussic acid. “There were a few people who heard it [the shot]. Others didn’t,” Flegel said Sunday. “The remaining staff then had to decide whether to stay or not stay. I knew that Hitler was dead because there were suddenly more doctors in the bunker. I didn’t see his body. But it was taken up to the chancellery garden and burned.”

The next morning the survivors were told that they were released from their oath of loyalty and some, including Martin Bormann, Hitler’s private secretary, joined an ill-fated attempt to fight their way out to the west. Others shot themselves. Flegel said she had been convinced there was no way that Bormann, “an older man,” could have survived.

Flegel stayed and witnessed the deaths of the Goebbels family. Helmut Kunz, a dentist, had injected the children, ages 4 to 12, with poison, she said. Later the same evening their parents killed themselves.

Until Hitler’s death Flegel had not even considered survival, she said. “We simply didn’t think about it,” she told the Guardian. “We knew, naturally, who was in charge, and until he was gone, we couldn’t talk about it. The soldiers gradually left. Then they were suddenly gone. Many people tried to reach the U-Bahn in the hope that they could escape the Russians. Everybody was trying as bravely as they could to get out of this bedlam intact.”

On the morning of May 2, 60 years ago, Russians soldiers poked their head round the bunker’s entrance.

“By this stage there were only six or seven of us left in the bunker,” Flegel said. “We knew the Russians were approaching. A [nursing] sister phoned up and said, ‘The Russians are coming.’ Then they turned up in the Reichs Chancellery. It was a huge building complex. The Germans were transported away.”

Flegel said that the Russians she encountered had treated her “very humanely,” despite the mass rape of German women by Russian soldiers elsewhere in the city. They had a “look ’round,” discovered the bunker’s underground supplies and then left, she said, advising her to lock her front door.

The Red Army allowed her to continue working as a nurse for the next few months, treating wounded Russians, until she ended up in the hands of the U.S. Strategic Services Unit, one of the precursors of the CIA. Flegel said her “interrogation” by the Americans in November 1945 was little more than an informal chat over dinner. “They invited us to have dinner with them and treated us to six different courses in order to soften us up. It didn’t work with me, though.”

Flegel’s testimony — including her conviction that Hitler was dead, an important statement for the victorious Allies — was deemed sufficiently important that it remained classified.

The interview went missing until 1981, when a Connecticut doctor and amateur historian stumbled on it in an Army archive and sent it to Richard Helms, the U.S. intelligence chief in 1945 Berlin and later CIA director. He wrote back saying: “It is probably one of the most accurate interviews obtained and has thus far never been quoted, as far as I know, in any of the massive books about Hitler’s Germany.”

Sunday Flegel was evasive about her own attitude to the Nazi era and her role in it. Asked why she had kept quiet for so long about her job as Hitler’s nurse, she replied: “After 1945 people started pointing fingers at each other. A great many people didn’t say anything. Later it was still a source of controversy. I didn’t discuss it.” She had never been tempted to write her memoirs, she said. “I didn’t want to make myself important.”

The film “Downfall,” which she watched in her nursing home, gave an accurate portrayal of the Third Reich and its final hours, she said. “They got a few small details wrong. But generally it was correct,” she said, adding: “I even recognized myself as a nursing sister.”

After the war, Flegel continued her career as a nurse, and also worked as a youth social worker, and traveled to remote regions including Ladakh and Tibet. She never married. At the age of 90 she visited the Crimea, where she had worked as a nurse during the war before her transfer to Berlin.

At 93, she is still mobile and lucid. She has few visitors. The only memento in her tiny room of her time at Hitler’s side is a Reichs Chancellery tablecloth.

Nobody knows exactly what was inside. Some believe the boxes contained gold looted by German troops throughout Europe and carried back to Germany. Others think that they contained documents showing where assets confiscated from Jewish victims were hidden in Swiss bank accounts.

The state company that controls the lake, Bundesforste AG, has signed a contract with Norman Scott, an American treasure hunter, who hopes to solve the mystery.

Later this month Scott will begin a detailed underwater survey of the 350-foot-deep lake, though there is profound official skepticism that there is anything left to find. “I really don’t know if there is anything down there, but we want to resolve the mystery once and for all,” Irwin Klissenbauer, a director of Bundesforste AG, told the Guardian Tuesday. “The aim at first is to measure the lake.” He added: “This is a beautiful area. You have heard of Loch Ness. For Austrians this has been a bit like Loch Ness. Lots of people come here. And whether there is gold down there or not, the mystery has been very good for tourism.”

Klissenbauer said that under the terms of the deal — which allows the U.S. team to dive for the next three years — any treasure found will be divided between the Americans and the Austrian state. “Obviously if they recover anything which has an identifiable owner, under Austrian law we have to give it back.”

This is not the first time explorers have tried to retrieve the lake’s legendary lost gold. In 1947 a U.S. Navy diver became entangled in Lake Toplitz’s many submerged logs and drowned. Then in 1959 a team financed by the German magazine Stern had more luck, retrieving 72 million pounds in forged sterling currency hidden in boxes and a printing press. The currency, it turned out, was part of a secret counterfeiting operation, Operation Bernhard, personally authorized by Adolf Hitler to weaken the British economy. Nazis and Nazi sympathizers who had retreated to the Austrian Alps intending to fight a last-ditch guerrilla battle apparently dumped the currency to prevent its discovery.

In 1963 the Austrian government imposed a ban on explorations after another diver, led to the lake by an S.S. officer, drowned during an illegal dive. More recent expeditions have had mixed fortunes. In 1983 a German biologist accidentally discovered more forged British pounds, numerous Nazi-era rockets and missiles that had crashed into the lake, and a previously unknown worm. The last diving team to explore the lake, in 2000, had less luck. After a three-week search in an underwater diving capsule, they came away with nothing more than a box full of beer lids, apparently dumped in the lake as a practical joke.

Scott, whose previous expeditions have included a search for a steamer carrying gold coin that sank on the way to Panama, said he was confident he would find “something damn big. Until now nobody has explored the lake using high-tech equipment. We will be the first people to go to the right spot,” he told Swiss newsmagazine Facts.

Scott, 72, claims to have discovered fresh clues in archives in Berlin and Washington pointing him toward the gold, though he refuses to give details.

Some experts believe he may be right. They point out that the bottom of the lake is encrusted with a thick carpet of logs. Any treasure could be stuck in the mud underneath, they suggest. “There is a lot of wood down there. We don’t know yet whether it is possible to get through it,” Klissenbauer said. “You have to remember that the last lot who went down there with a mini-U-boat didn’t find anything.”

It has staged a remarkable comeback here, among the pretty timbered villages close to the Czech border, and along the banks of the Elbe. In federal elections in Saxony last September, the neo-Nazi National Party of Germany (NPD) won a stunning 9.2 percent of the vote, giving it 12 M.P.’s in the new Saxon parliament in Dresden. Since then, the NPD has staged a series of parliamentary stunts — for example, walking out last month during a one-minute silence for Holocaust victims. This Sunday, the party and its supporters intend to carry out their most flamboyant protest yet: a “funeral march” to mourn the 35,000 Germans killed during the raid on Dresden 60 years ago by Allied bombers. According to Holger Apfel, the NPD’s 33-year-old leader, the allied attack on Dresden during Feb. 13-14, 1945, was a war crime. It was a “Holocaust” of Germans, he said last month, and an “act of gangster politics.”

The NPD’s rise has caught most German politicians unaware. But it comes against a background of mass unemployment, with more than 5 million Germans now on the dole and disillusionment with the mainstream parties increasing. This week, Edmund Stoiber, the conservative leader of Bavaria’s ruling Christian Social Union Party, suggested that present-day Germany bore an increasing resemblance to 1932, when mass unemployment helped Hitler seize power the following year. Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was to blame, Stoiber said. He had failed to reduce unemployment, thus driving voters into the arms of the far right.

German columnists and historians have this week been pondering the same dark question: Is this the Weimar Republic all over again? Thursday, Frieder Haase, the mayor of Loenigstein, a town 30 kilometers south of Dresden, said he was confident that German history wasn’t repeating itself. “I’m here to try to stop 1933 from happening again. That is why I’m standing here,” he said. “If it happened, I would be the first person to leave.”

Koenigstein, with a population of 3,200, is a small town in the heart of Saxon Switzerland, in what was once a part of Bohemia. Its main attraction is a 16th century fortress that was visited by Napoleon, and later used to incarcerate French, British and American prisoners of war in the Second World War. The town also boasts a Baroque church and a riverside hotel. In summer, tourists cruise past Koenigstein on paddle steamers, sometimes stopping for lunch on its duck-filled banks. In common with most of the neighboring towns along the Elbe, during last September’s elections almost 20 percent of its population voted for the NPD. Who, then, are the NPD’s supporters? “They look like you and me. They are completely normal,” Haase, who sits as an independent, says. “They work on building sites. They are women shop assistants. They don’t look like skinheads.”

An alarmed German media has given differing explanations for the NPD’s rise. They include the fact that the Communists ran the area until 1989, the unemployment rate of 18 percent and disillusionment with Germany’s red-green government in Berlin. But the phrase most frequently mentioned in Koenigstein is “bürgernah,” which, loosely translated, means “close to the people.” While German politicians have argued endlessly, and often abstrusely, about economic reforms, the NPD has quietly built up its local base. Since the late ’90s it has fielded well-known candidates for key elections. And it has assiduously gathered support among its core constituency — the young — with barbecues, discos and canoeing trips.

“If you have politicians sitting in big cities, you can’t reach them. But if you have politicians living in your street, you can,” Kristin Katzchner, a youth worker in Koenigstein, explains. Instead of wearing bomber jackets and Doc Martens, NPD supporters these days prefer a more insidious sporting chic, especially the British brand Lonsdale. (Worn with a leather jacket, the letters “Lo-” and “-le” are hidden. That leaves “nsda,” the first four letters of Hitler’s Nazi Party, the NSDAP — a subtle code for those in the know.)

The NPD’s new M.P.’s don’t look like skinheads, either. They wear suits; they are in their 30s; and they are impeccably polite. Speaking at his new, second-floor offices in Dresden’s glass-filled parliament building, Holger Apfel says that other parties made a classic mistake: They underestimated him. “We have very good local structures. We have people representing us in local areas who don’t talk in clichés. If you know the person who represents you, you don’t believe what you read in the newspapers,” he says.

But why is Germany’s far right enjoying a renaissance? Apfel, a 33-year-old former publisher, admits high unemployment has a lot to do with it. Life for most east Germans has not improved since reunification, he says. Germany’s then chancellor, Helmut Kohl, famously promised east Germans “blooming landscapes.” “Many people believed Kohl’s promises. But the blooming landscapes didn’t happen. In fact, things got worse,” Apfel says. The party now has representatives in 22 of 27 local councils, in Saxon Switzerland and in the Erzgebirge Mountains, another NPD stronghold. Getting rid of the NPD would be hard, he adds.

Other parliamentarians in Dresden have responded to the NPD by trying to ignore it. The Greens turn their backs in the chamber whenever an NPD member gets up to speak. They also avoid the second-floor lavatories, in case they bump into an NPD member. The NPD caucus eats alone in the canteen. German television stations refuse to interview Apfel. Still, the NPD’s views find a subterranean resonance among some German voters — not least its argument that it is time Germans stopped feeling guilty about being, well, German. “For us, Dresden was a war crime,” Peter Marx, the NPD’s chief whip, says. “It was a senseless act. The city was full of refugees from the east. There was no military need. We think it’s wrong to treat it selectively and talk about the war crimes of the Germans without talking about the war crimes done to the Germans. Young people are fed up with being told: ‘Guilt, guilt, guilt.’ Why should I feel any less proud of being German than you do about being British?”

Marx, a lawyer, makes no secret about his party’s ambitions. The NPD is fielding candidates in next week’s federal elections in Schleswig-Holstein and in the key state of North Rhine-Westphalia in May. But it is Germany’s 2006 general election that is the ultimate prize. There is the tantalizing possibility that the NPD will, for the first time, get more than 5 percent of the popular vote, and thus win seats in Germany’s national parliament.

The prospect of neo-Nazis sitting in the Bundestag fills German leaders with horror. Germany’s Social Democrat-Green government is considering a ban on the NPD and its far-right sister party, the DVU. The chances of success, however, are slim. A similar attempt three years ago was bungled after it emerged that police agents had penetrated both groups.

I ask another of the NPD’s young M.P.’s, Johannes Müller, whether he was, in fact, a Nazi. “I see myself as a national conservative,” he says. “The party was founded in 1946. Most people in it are between 30 and 35. We have no relationship with that time.”

In the meantime, Haase and other Koenigstein citizens are doing their best to shed the town’s reputation as a neo-Nazi stronghold. Last November, someone broke the windows of the shop belonging to Koenigstein’s Vietnamese grocer, Herr Minh. Minh moved to the town in 1988, just before Communist East Germany disappeared, at a time when there were few tourists and when most of the houses were falling apart. Although the NPD blames many of Germany’s problems on “foreigners,” especially those from eastern Europe, Minh is one of only two non-Germans in Koenigstein. The other one runs the local Imbiss, or snack bar. “They smashed the window on a Saturday night,” Minh recalls. “Most people ’round here are very nice, though,” he adds. Afterward, locals collected cash worth 690 pounds to buy Minh a new window.

A short walk away is the Crime Store, a clothing shop that sells labels popular with the far-right scene. Outside, someone has sprayed an anti-Nazi slogan which echoes that used by Nazis against the Jews: “Kauf nicht bei Nazis” (“Don’t buy from Nazis”) and “Raus Nazis!” (“Nazis out”). The shop was shut. “The Nazi phenomenon is not going to happen again,” Haase predicts. “In 1933, Germany was broken, the war had been lost, and along came a big, powerful man — Adolf Hitler. Things are different now.”