Hasselbach, Ingo with Tom Reiss. Führer-Ex: Memoirs of a Former Neo Nazi. New York: Random House, 1996. 384p. $ 24.00

This book offers the reader an insider’s account of Germany’s disturbing neo nazi scene as it evolved from the late 1980s to the mid 1990s. Its author, Ingo Hasselbach, describes growing up in East Berlin during the German Democratic Republic’s last years. From a broken home and without much contact with his communist father, Hasselbach became a rebellious adolescent who was drawn at first to the punk and skinhead street scene. These youth gangs provided the author with the kind of close personal bonds lacking in his family life. They also offered him an opportunity to participate in the kind of street-corner brawling with rival gangs that he came to love. Thus, "...there’s a unique thrill to being in the middle of a violent, dangerous crowd and slugging, slamming, and kicking your way to victory." (p.21)
Time in an East German prison for engaging in too much of the above-mentioned "entertainments" brought Hasselbach into contact with old nazi war criminals. Their laudatory accounts of life in the Third Reich plus the writer’s bitter hatred of the communist state led him down the road to neo-nazism. After his release Hasselbach went through a process of conversion to this movement through contacts in West Germany. He was exposed to Holocaust denial literature and the charismatic appeals of Michael Kuhnen, the AIDS-infected leader of German neo-nazism.

Once he became a neo-nazi, Hasselbach displayed exceptional leadership skills. Blond and tall (6’ 6’’) he came close to epitomizing the nazi ideal. He became something approaching the pied piper of Berlin neo-nazism for alienated and violent youth. Much of the book consists of Hasselbach’s accounts of his movement’s violent adventures--for the most part street fights with such anarchist and anti-fascist youth groups as the Edelweiss Pirates. But there were more serious encounters as well. Hasselbach offers vivid descriptions of the violent Austrian neo-nazi leader Gottfried Küssel, whose apartment in Vienna is filled with nazi memorabilia, and Gary Rex Laux, the American neo-nazi presently awaiting trial in Germany for the illegal dissemination of nazi and Holocaust denial propaganda in the Federal Republic. Also, not to be easily forgotten is Hasselbach’s description of his meetings with some of the widows of nazi functionaries. These women, some in their 80s, still burned with anti-Semitic hatred. So that while graciously sipping tea and consuming little cakes they would urge Hasselbach and his comrades to desecrate Jewish cemeteries and carry out firebomb attacks on defenseless foreigners with more enthusiasm than even the young neo-nazis had for these tasks.

In addition to describing his way into the movement, Hasselbach also describes his way out of it. Here the key role was played by a German filmmaker who struck up a friendship with the author in the course of making a film about the neo-nazi scene. Through this film maker Hasselbach made contact with the world outside the movement, one consisting largely of educated Berliners who led rewarding lives and who regarded nazism as a repulsive disease. Meeting people such as these plus his own feelings of disgust when Turkish women were burned to death by right-wing youth convinced Hasselbach to get out. His disavowal of neo-nazism, on German television, made Hasselbach a marked man however. He received death threats and his erstwhile associates sent his mother a package containing a bomb through the mail.

Both his mother and he survived these attacks--at least to date. Today Hasselbach has become an ardent anti-nazi who tours Germany lecturing young people on the dangers of neo-nazism and using his own story as a case in point.