In 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the Bombing of Dresden in World War II, a radical left group, the Anti-Germans (political current) started an annual rally praising the bombing on the grounds that so many of the city's civilians had supported Nazism. Beginning in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Neo-Nazis started holding demonstrations on the same date. In 2009, the Junge Landsmannschaft Ostdeutschland youth group of the NPD organised a march but surrounded by policemen, the 6,000 neo-Nazis were not allowed to leave their meeting point. At the same time, some 15,000 people with white roses assembled in the streets holding hands to demonstrate against Nazism, and to create an alternative “memorial day” of war victims.