Government departments have been inundated with spam e-mails containing neo-Nazi messages in German following the infection of a number of computers in the system with a virus.
The "worm" causes infected computers to send messages to all e-mail addresses it finds on an infected machine. The e-mails contain links to neo-Nazi websites.
The e-mails are almost impossible to stop as they contain no malicious code. Some e-mail accounts, including the personal addresses of Ministers, have been inundated with up to 20 e-mails a day.
Most are in German and contain phrases such as "foreigners preferred", "mass tax evasion from foreign workers" or "Germans will be cheated when they go to the doctor".
They also contain links to various right-wing political groups, including the National Democratic Party in Germany.
Civil servants have been advised to delete the messages and that the address of the sender line is also likely to be fake.
The e-mails, which coincided with the 60th anniversary of the end of the second World War, first began to appear in mail boxes over the weekend. It is apparently the first case of such widespread e-mail spam being used for political propaganda.