Waching daily May 30 2017

Irmela Mensah Schramm is a retired teacher with a mission.

Several times a week, she heads out with what she calls her "activist kit".

The main tool in it is a scraper, which she uses to remove pro-Nazi propaganda stickers.

"'Our country, our values, identity movement.'

I'd classify this as being from an intellectual far-right group, whose views are pervasive

in our universities."

She doesn't have to look far for extremist propaganda, Nazi stickers and xenophobic slurs.

They're on walls, mailboxes, and street-signs.

For more than 30 years, she's been scraping away in Berlin and beyond, at stickers like

this one, bearing an anti-Semitic message.

"I don't want to see that Nazi garbage - I want to get rid of it: this propaganda, this

advertising.

It's unacceptable to me."

Sometimes people on the street praise her for what she's doing.

But there are also times when people tell her to leave the Nazi stickers alone, like

here in the Lichtenberg district of Berlin.

"To say that I'm not achieving anything when I do this is absurd.

I'm sending a message to the Nazis that there IS resistance."

Mensah-Schramm keeps a scrapbook of what she's collected.

She has around seventy-thousand stickers dating from the mid-1980s, all filed away in close

to 90 binders.

It's a huge archive of old and new designs from the far-right.

And she uses them in lectures she gives to raise awareness about extremism.

"I got politically active late.

At first I kept my distance, observing many things.

And then got more and more upset about the injustice and other things happening.

Then little by little I got into the political movement."

When she finds hate-graffiti, she spray paints a heart over the hateful message.

Last year, she was cited by the police, who charged her with property damage.

She was taken to court where she received a suspended sentence, and fined eighteen-hundred

Euros.

The 71-year-old has since appealed.

"They have the crazy idea that what I do is damage to property.

But Nazi propaganda doesn't interest anyone."

She's disappointed that the authorities charged her, despite her dedication.

At one point, it earned her Germany's only federal decoration, the Order of Merit, but

she handed it back in defiance, saying that the government wasn't supporting her enough.

She received a donation of 850 euros for her court case - if it turns out she's forced

to pay the fine.

"That's clean!

Now I feel good."