The Saxon town of Hoyerswerda has gone online to tell the world about its history, its economic development and the preoccupations of its 46,000 citizens. But although the website traces the town's origins back to 1003, it makes no mention of the incident that, less than a decade ago, brought Hoyerswerda to the attention of the world.
On the night of September 17th, 1991, skinheads armed with baseball bats, bricks, bottles, rocks and Molotov cocktails attacked a building housing about 150 foreigners, mostly from Vietnam and Mozambique. Hundreds of local residents cheered the skinheads and prevented police from intervening. The siege ended only when the foreigners were evacuated from the building and taken in buses to a nearby army base.
As images of the mob violence flickered around the world, Mr Rudolf Krause, Saxony's interior minister, had no doubt where the blame belonged.
"We must all admit there are asylum-seekers who do not behave according to local customs or in a manner befitting our cultural heritage," he said.
Most of the victims at Hoyerswerda were not, in fact, asylum-seekers but guest workers invited to East Germany by the communist regime before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
But when skinheads attacked a hostel in the eastern port of Rostock a few months later there were more than 200 asylum-seekers inside, most of them Gypsies. To the enthusiastic cheers of more than 500 local residents, the skinheads set fire to the hostel, but the authorities succeeded in evacuating the men, women and children inside before they were burned to death.
The response to such incidents by the government at the time, led by the now disgraced Dr Helmut Kohl, was to toughen Germany's asylum laws to make it more difficult for asylum-seekers to enter the country and make life more unpleasant for those who did get past the border.
At the heart of the new law was a list of "safe countries" including all EU member-states, most central and eastern European countries (including Romania) and a number of African states. Anyone arriving in Germany from one of these "safe countries" - even if their country of origin is elsewhere - can be refused asylum at the border and returned to where they came from.
Applicants have seven days to argue that their country's "persecution-free" label does not apply to them and an administrative court must decide the appeal within two weeks. Such applicants have no recourse to the normal German legal system.
Asylum-seekers whose applications are not deemed "manifestly unfounded" are photographed and fingerprinted before being dispersed to hostels around the country. Each of Germany's 16 federal states accepts a proportionate number of asylum-seekers.
Asylum-seekers receive vouchers for food and other goods and u £32 in cash per month. They are only entitled to medical and dental treatment in cases of acute illness or pain and, in most cases, they are not allowed to work.
The amended law has been spectacularly successful in reducing the number of asylum-seekers coming to Germany from 438,000 in 1992 to just 95,000 last year. The proportion of successful applications has dropped too - from 9 per cent in 1995 to 3 per cent last year.
Groups that support asylum-seekers complain that living conditions for refugees are often poor and that police and border guards use strong-arm tactics during deportations. Critics argue the system still has too many loopholes and that asylum-seekers without passports or other travel documents often succeed in remaining in Germany for years while the authorities argue over where to send them.
While right-wing politicians call for even tighter measures to keep foreigners out of Germany, migration statistics show that more foreigners have been leaving Germany than arriving in recent years. Moreover, the German birth rate is so low that, if the present trend continues, today's population of 80 million will shrink to 50 million by 2050.
According to a recent report by the United Nations, Germany will need 500,000 immigrants a year just to maintain its present population.
Chancellor Gerhard Schroder has acknowledged the need to take a fresh look at immigration by announcing that tens of thousands of computer experts from non-EU countries will be given "Green Card" visas to live and work in Germany for five years. Applicants - who may be accompanied by their families - must have a university degree or the promise of a job paying more than u £40,000 a year.
After years of resistance, the conservative opposition has embraced proposals for a new immigration law that would put Germany's national interest first.
The Bavarian Christian Social Union wants to couple a new immigration law with the abolition of the right to asylum for individuals enshrined in Germany's Basic Law.
This constitutional change could open the way to removing all asylum applications from the normal legal system, speeding up the process by extinguishing the possibility of appeal.