Peroxide and black leather. A skinhead bomb-thrower turned best-selling author. From solitary confinement to police protection.
The life of Ingo Hasselbach, 26, has been one of contrasts and extremes.
Hasselbach once was boss of Berlin’s neo-Nazi scene, but he became sickened by the blood, broken teeth and, eventually, the rising toll of burned bodies left by right-wing riots that escalated from fists to firebombs after German reunification in 1990.
Last year, Hasselbach came in from the cold to write a “kick and tell” memoir, part confession and part expose, about the inner workings of Germany’s neo-Nazis.
A first press run of 15,000 copies of “The Reckoning: A Neo-Nazi Drops Out” (Aufbau Verlag) sold out rapidly in Germany. Critical response included a letter-bomb delivered to his mother. Police demolition experts took three hours to defuse the device and said it was powerful enough to blow out the entire apartment block.
The ex-skinhead leader is now in hiding from his ex-comrades.
To arrange a talk with Hasselbach, then, requires a long march through unlisted telephone numbers, anonymous pocket-pagers and blind-alley answering machines that lead eventually to an apartment that meets his criteria for anonymity.
The rendezvous point may be nondescript; Hasselbach is anything but. How can this guy expect to hide anywhere?
He’s tall enough for basketball, and striking enough for film-or at least TV, where he appears routinely to admonish fellow Germans to beware a rising danger from the extremist Right. There is no more shaved head, but spikes of blond, in contrast to every piece of clothing, which is black. Earrings. Heavy boots. Awfully blue eyes.
It’s easy to understand why Hasselbach’s book is the talk of the town, why supporters want it assigned as required reading in high schools, why detractors rush to denounce it as the blowhard conceits of a street punk who finally made a clever career move. In the book, Hasselbach talks about:
– Secret encouragement for anti-foreigner violence from the low-level, racist ranks of eastern Berlin police officers “who prefer just to look on” and not halt the fighting if skinheads are beating up Turks, Vietnamese or Gypsies.
– An almost seamless continuum of shared political outlook running from aimless, violence-prone skinheads to organized neo-Nazis to an elder generation of radical-right politicians-and then on to the conservative wings of mainstream political parties.
– Secret donors subsidizing the neo-Nazi movement, a life he constantly refers to as “the Scene.” Hasselbach says “money is never a problem” thanks to notable conservative attorneys, frustrated middle-class burghers and aged widows of Nazis who require no “neo” in front of their names.
– Weapons buried in secret caches across Germany, saying that “every ultra-rightist or neo-Nazi group has a corresponding paramilitary arm.” Weapons including hand grenades, automatic rifles and bazookas are bought on the black market, often from departing Russian troops eager for deutsch marks or booze.
– Links between German neo-Nazis and American white-supremacist groups, which have become the “single most important suppliers of Nazi propaganda anywhere.”
The first thing he wants readers to know, Hasselbach says, is that “neo-Nazis don’t have any solutions for people’s problems. They simply benefit from the mood created by economic misfortune.”
(Germany today is suffering its worst recession since World War II, with unemployment topping a critical threshold of 4 million jobless in February, before dropping a bit last month.)
“It wasn’t any different in 1933,” Hasselbach warns, referring to the year Adolf Hitler goose-stepped into power, leading the ranks of the National Socialists, or Nazis.
Few serious thinkers give German neo-Nazis any chance of achieving their trio of central goals: allowing banned Nazi parties to openly participate in national politics, restoring Germany’s borders to their expansionist embrace of 1937, and establishing a homogenous ethnic state under a strong, centralized-call it authoritarian-regime.
Without argument, though, a danger remains: that right-wing agitation and general economic malaise will swing national politics hard to the right at just the moment in history when a stable Germany is most needed to anchor Europe-a Europe newly free from communism and newly vulnerable to ethnic and nationalist strife.
Leaving the Scene
“I can no longer remember the breaking point,” Hasselbach says of his escape from the Scene, although his catharsis seems to have begun after a Turkish woman and two young girls were killed in a 1992 firebomb attack in the city of Molln.
“After Molln, I felt so, so-that I had just been repressing what was happening on the street, and what people were doing,” he said. “Molln was a wakeup call for me. I saw not only that there was a problem, but that I was part of it.”
His rescuer, his guide out of the Scene, was French filmmaker Winfried Bonengel, whose controversial documentary, “Profession: Neo-Nazi,” was temporarily banned in Germany after its release early this year.
The film’s critics argue that Bonengel’s cinema verite style gives neo-Nazis a bully pulpit to address an international audience without providing viewers with necessary background or clear moral judgment.
Doubtless, the film boosted the profile of its subject, Bela Ewald Althans, 27, a would-be fuehrer from Munich who comes across-all politics aside-as clever, articulate and well-connected.
Hasselbach is just an unidentified bit player in the documentary, a role that is cited by right-wing activists who argue that he was never the top-level insider he claims.
In separate interviews, Germany’s three senior neo-Nazi leaders-Christian Worch of the National List, Michael Swierczek of the National Offensive and Frank Huebner of the German Alternative-all described Hasselbach as a mid-level functionary with limited access to the movement’s top-level strategy sessions or most secret workings.
Indeed, several claims by Hasselbach do not bear scrutiny of independent research.
He says he commanded 800 rightists in his outfit, the National Alternative, which is an exaggerated claim according to Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
And his claim to have once registered a legal political party, the Eagles, in a scam to receive federal matching election funds could not be confirmed despite a detailed search of records at Berlin City Hall.
From pranks to violence
Plenty remains, though, to provide compelling reading and worthwhile insights into the nature and nurturing of a neo-Nazi.
Cognizant of the flawed logic and false life of his communist parents in the former East Berlin, the teenage Hasselbach drifted in and out of various scenes-hippies, punks, what have you-before embracing in earnest the Scene of the skinhead-neo-Nazi movement.
He was imprisoned in communist East Germany, including six months of solitary confinement, for shouting, “Down with the wall!”
Violent acts slowly escalated over the years, beginning with two-bit pranks like breaking into the East Berlin zoo to feed schnapps to the sloth, to felony muggings of Western tourists in East Berlin.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, neo-Nazis from West Germany established ties with rightist youths in the East.
The easterners, Hasselbach writes, were urged toward “expressions of national-socialism,” such as painting swastikas on Jewish cemeteries, destroying communist monuments and attacking homes of asylum-seekers or guest workers.
“That would guarantee headlines,” Hasselbach writes. “People would see: We are out there.”
By April 1990, foreigner-bashing was earnest sport, with Turks, Vietnamese and Gypsies the favored targets as they passed through the train station in the Lichtenberg section of far East Berlin.
“The East German police held back, and the West German police had no right to interfere then in East Berlin,” he writes. “This unusual treatment just motivated us further.”
Hasselbach claims his National Alternative grew to 800 members by October 1990 and German reunification. Since then, the nation has been tortured by neo-Nazi violence that has left more than 30 dead.
Attacking foreigners, the handicapped and religious or ethnic minorities “is cowardly, disgusting,” Hasselbach writes. “Starting my life over is lonely and difficult. But I am an opponent of violence.”
