'I Was an Asshole'; A Look at Neo-Nazi Germany from the Inside

[pampango]

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,800610,00.html



Manuel Bauer was once a neo-Nazi thug, heavily involved in far-right paramilitary organizations and guilty of numerous assaults against foreigners and immigrants in Germany. He has since turned his back on the scene -- but he can still provide a unique inside look. Authorities, he says, have long underestimated its danger.

Bauer's career as a skinhead began when he was 11 years old. He became friends with a group of classmates who glorified Adolf Hitler and would rail against foreigners in the schoolyard. It was shortly after Germany's reunification, and right-wing extremism, which had remained largely underground during communism, could suddenly come out of the shadows. Across former East Germany, the extremists began finding each other -- and assembling neo-Nazi cliques.

During his military service, Bauer learned how to handle weapons -- knowledge which he later passed on to neo-Nazis at a training camp in Ústí nad Labem, a town in the northern Czech Republic. For a year, he taught right-wing militants how to shoot and construct bombs and drilled them in survival techniques. He says that the camp where he worked is far from an anomaly -- there are others in Hungary, Poland, Russia and Romania.

"The state underestimated right-wing extremism and only focused its attention on the leftist, anti-fascist scene," Bauer says. "But the right is much better organized and structured than the left." And it follows a clear strategy, he says.

His circle of friends, he claims, now includes many of those who he once hunted down: Jews, lesbians, immigrants. "All people who I fought against back then," he says. "Today I am happy and lucky to have such friends." They all know his past, he insists, and they know that, for a time, there was a €10,000 ($13,300) ransom on his head in the extremist scene.