A German court has sentenced a far-right politician to eight months in prison for displaying a Nazi tattoo.

Marcel Zech was found guilty of "public incitement to hatred" and given a harsher sentence on appeal than the six-month suspended sentence he originally received last December.

The 28-year-old was photographed at a swimming pool displaying the tattoo, which appeared to combine a depiction of Auschwitz concentration camp with a slogan from the Buchenwald concentration camp's gate, “Jedem das Seine”, which means “to each his own”.

Zech, a local council member of the far-right National Democratic Party, admitted to displaying the tattoo.

Prosecutors appealed after a district court in Oranienburg in the eastern state of Brandenburg, which surrounds Berlin, gave him a six-month suspended sentence in December, saying the punishment was too lenient. Zech also appealed the verdict, seeking to be acquitted.

On Monday, a state court in Neuruppin, north of Berlin, upheld the defendant's conviction for incitement, but imposed a new harsher sentence, the DPA news agency reported.

Explaining his decision, judge Jörn Kalbow said a lesser sentence could have been interpreted as “the state backing down in the face of right-wing radicalism”.

Mr Kalbow noted that Germany had seen an increase in xenophobic hate crime.

Zech's lawyer, Wolfram Nahrath, said he would appeal again to a higher court.

The councillor's back tattoo was originally photographed when he took his shirt off at a public swimming pool last November in Oranienburg.

During the hearing, Mr Nahrath told judges that Zech had since altered the tattoo as a result of the “exceptional denunciation” of him resulting from the case, and because he wanted to be able to keep going to the swimming pool with his children.

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Prosecutor Torsten Lowitsch said the image of Auschwitz has been replaced by Max and Moritz, figures from a well-known German children's tale.