German neo-Nazi politician rescued from car crash by Syrian refugees

A German neo-Nazi politician who crashed his car into a tree was rescued by passing Syrian refugees, German media has reported on Tuesday.

Stefan Jagsch, 29, a member of the National Democratic Party, was badly injured in the crash last week, local newspapers and national news agency DPA said.

The first responders were two Syrian asylum seekers from a passing minibus that stopped at the crash site near the town of Buedingen in the central state of Hesse.

They pulled Jagsch from the wrecked car and gave him first aid, a spokesman for the local fire brigade told DPA, confirming witness reports from last Wednesday.

Buedingen hosts one of many new refugee shelters set up across Germany since more than one million asylum seekers from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere arrived in Europe's top economy last year.

The record influx has sparked a xenophobic backlash from which far-right parties, including the NPD, have benefited. 

The party scored 10 percent of the vote in 6 March municipal elections in Buedingen and in nearby Altenstadt, where Jagsch was the NPD's main candidate.

The NPD's Hesse state chief Jean Christoph Fiedler called the rescue effort "apparently a very good, humane act," adding that Jagsch himself could not clearly remember the accident, the Frankfurter Rundschau daily reported.

Germany's constitutional court is currently considering a parliamentary request to ban Jagsch's party, which Chancellor Angela Merkel's office has labelled an "anti-democratic, xenophobic, anti-Semitic and anti-constitutional party".

"Now the foreigners are even taking away our first aid," quipped one user on Facebook, while another commented that "destiny has a sense of humour".