BERLIN, August 12, 2008 (AFP) - Calls grew on Tuesday for a German youth movement to be banned after police raided what appeared to be a Hitler Youth-style holiday camp involving children as young as eight.

Police sent home 39 children and adolescents from all over the country wearing uniform-like clothing. They were camping in a remote area of north-eastern Germany at the weekend, German news reports said.

Far-right material was seized, as were tea towels and song sheets marked with swastikas and old maps with pre-war boundaries and names.

The camp was operated by a group known as 'Heimattreuen Deutschen Jugend (HDJ)' ('German youth true to the homeland'), believed to be the successor to the 'Wiking-Jugend' ('Viking Youth') that was banned in 1994.

'Interior Minister (Wolfgang Schaeuble) is going to find it hard to find reasons not to ban this group,' Sebastian Edathy, head of a parliamentary commission on domestic affairs, told the Frankfurter Rundschau daily.

Lawmakers from opposition parties have also called for a ban, as has the left-wing SPD party's Jusos youth movement, saying that the HDJ can no longer make out it is an innocent scouting group.

The Frankfurter Rundschau cited experts as saying that such camps are a growing phenomenon and that they take place somewhere in Germany once every two or three weekends.