A German politician who filed charges against Wikipedia accusing it of promoting the use of banned Nazi symbols has bowed to pressure and withdrawn her claims against the online encyclopaedia.

Katrina Schubert, deputy leader of the Left Party, had encouraged police in Berlin to press charges against the German-language version of Wikipedia, saying that the site's operators allowed too much Nazi-related imagery and content to appear on the site.

“The extent and frequency of the symbols on it goes beyond what is needed for documentation and political education, in my view,” Mr Schubert told Reuters.“This isn’t about restricting freedom of opinion, it’s about examining what the limits are.”

But following criticism from both the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, and party colleagues, who said that the site had its own procedures for filtering out unsavoury content, Mr Schubert withdrew her claims.

“We don’t really know what Ms Schubert’s problem is,” Arne Klempert, managing director of Wikimedia Deutschland, said.“What’s important is the context the symbols are used in, and here it’s quite clearly education and documentation.”

"Proper documentation of the Nazi period is the best weapon there is (to prevent) something like it happening again."

Displaying Nazi symbols in public is banned in Germany, but they can be used for educational purposes.

Heiko Hilker, an MP in Saxony's State Parliament, said that the self-regulating mechanisms on Wikipedia, which allows any user to edit the work of another, were the best means of ensuring that extreme content did not find its way onto the site.

"Right-wing extremism on the world wide web cannot be tackled via national criminal proceedings," he said.

Ms Schubert, who had hoped to encourage debate about whether internet platforms should be allowed to aid the proponents of extremist ideologies, said later: "Clearly I chose the wrong way to conduct this argument."

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