[PART 51] Führer-Ex

The making and unmaking of a Neo-Nazi

Fuhrer-Ex: Memoirs of a former Neo-Nazi
By Ingo Hasselbach with Tom Reiss
Random House, 388 pages, $24


Some would relegate neo-Nazis to a loathsome, but relatively small and ineffectualfar-right fringe group. They might urge: worry about the real terrorist groups such as the Irish Republican Army (IRA) [Irish ROMAN Army? - Wol.] or the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas who continue to wreak deadly havoc around the world.
Overlooked is the fact that German neo-Nazis have menaced and killed refugeeson their soil, and the intriguing possibility of a neo-Nazi link in the devastating 1995 Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing. Defendant Timothy McVeigh's lawyer has traveled to London to investigate whether British neo-Nazis contributed bomb components. [The Jewish Review. March 15, 1996]
Even if no such international conspiracy is uncovered in this case, it is known that much German neo-Nazi support-in the form of hate and Holo- caust denial propaganda and explosives manuals (some of U.S. military issue) -- is forthcoming from U.S. white power groups. The author cites NEBRASKA as the WORLD HEADQUARTERS of the successor of the original German Socialist German Workers (aka: NAZI) Party (Could there be any connection between this fact and the reported encounters with "German speaking" aerial disk pilots in NEBRASKA, which have been documented by at least two witnesses? - Wol). Ironically, the German post-Reich ban on such materials in conjunction with American First Amendment free speech provisions foster this situation. A more subtle reason for concern over the ascendancy of such extremist groups is the current highest postwar unemployment rate in Germany. [The Oregonian. March 10, 1996]
The famous Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal is more cognizant than most of this genuine ongoing threat, and has praised this courageous first-ever insider account of the international neo-Nazi network. Known as the " Führerof the East," Ingo Hasselbach came of age as a rebel against the East German Communist state (represented by his Communist journalist father who he did not know as his real father until adolescence). While being watched since age 14 by the Stasi (GDR secret police) as a "potential disturber of the socialist peace...," he courted every protest group regardless of politics: hippies, punks, skinheads. Getting a prison education from a former Gestapo officer about the alleged Jewish conspiracy against the Fatherland, he "graduated" to form the German Democratic Republic's first neo-Nazi party in 1988 and served for five years as the leader of the movement's recruiting and violent activities.
While not excusing Hasselbach's behavior, his fractured family background in a totalitarian state surely served as fertile ground for a career as a sub- versive. Early memories humanize what might have been a mere diatribe against his former peers: e.g., his grandmother telling him, ironically,of being taken to a concentration camp for looking Jewish and then being released (one of many ironies in the book); and being impressed by the rebelliousness, rather than the ideology, of a school classmate who gave the Nazi salute to an authoritarian teacher.
Hasselbach now lives in fear of his life from former Kamrades, for his public dialog devoted to dissuading German youth from his fanatical path. How then did his re-education and renunciation in 1993 evolve? His conscience was finally penetrated by the fatal 1992 firebombing of a Turkish family, though he claims that his group was not responsible for that incident; the final severing resulted from the attempted bombing of his mother's Berlin apartment in response to the earliest inkling of his turncoat leanings. Coinci- dentally in the U.S. for the first time just two days prior to the Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing, he described in non-excusing words his reaction to such horrific events: "Morally, I was a bomb-thrower and just as responsible as anyone who planted a fuse or drove a truck with explosives. ""The first step for me in rejoining the civilized world was in realizing that." "And the first step in fighting them was to tell the story of what made me one of them, of how I pulled others in, and of how a sewer of the Third Reich waste water flows beneath the clean streets of modern Germany."
Hasselbach provides chilling insight into the psychology of hatred and alien- ation:"...I had walked as if sealed inside an ideological space suit, treat- ing my enemies as if they were deadly viruses. The suit kept the virus from infecting me and killing the hate. To take the suit off and approach my enemy, without my ideology on, was to risk discovering him as a person."
Perhaps even more important than insights into the neo-Nazi psyche and organization, this book confronts us with the dilemma of how to inoculate against such inhumane ideas and actions in a democratic society.
Reviewed by Sala Horowitz, Ph.D.
Sala Horowitz, Ph.D., is a Portland, Oregon writer/researcher with extensive experience in health, education and the social sciences.