The heart of Berlin’s neo-Nazi scene was located in the eastern district of Lichtenberg, where the SED regime had built a number of vast prisonlike housing complexes. In GDR days the area had been a bastion of Communist loyalty, but in the last years of the regime it also harbored about 300 neo-Nazis. Many of the Lichtenberg skinheads had started out as hippies or punks but, when that form of protest seemed too timid, switched to Nazi slogans and symbols. According to Ingo Hasselbach, a veteran (and later critic) of the scene, he and his friends began spraying swastikas next to their circled “A’s” for anarchism. “We didn’t think much about what a swastika meant, but we knew it was the most forbidden of all symbols.” Inspired by West German television documentaries on Nazi military campaigns in World War II, the skins ranged through the city in search of
When the Wall came down East Berlin’s right-wingers began getting financial and organizational support from West German neo-Nazis, who saw the Ossi thugs as potential foot soldiers in their campaign to extend their influence to the east. Michael Kühnen, the leader of the West German Action Front of National Socialists, which was dedicated to “restoring the values of the Third Reich,” helped out with cartons of Nazi literature, imperial war flags, camouflage outfits, switchblade knives, and steel-tipped Doc Marten boots, perfect for “sidewalk cracking,” or stomping on the head of an opponent who had been knocked to the pavement. Kühnen and his lieutenants educated their Ossi charges about the “Auschwitz lie,” the doctrine that the Holocaust had never happened. Kühnen elevated Hasselbach to “Führer” of the East German branch of his movement, and in early 1990 the new chief registered the National Alternative Berlin (NA Berlin) as East Germany’s first radical-right party. The Berlin group could be more openly neo-Nazi than its West German parent because the Modrow government, anxious to show a democratic spirit, imposed few controls on the welter of new parties that sprang up after the fall of the Wall. As Hasselbach noted, “You could found the German Beer Drinkers’ Union, or the National Party of German Assholes, if you wanted to.” Within a matter of months the NA Berlin was one of the strongest radical-right parties in East Germany, with about 800 members. The group soon fractured, however, when it was disclosed that Kühnen was homosexual. One of Hasselbach’s minions, a twenty-two-year-old hairdresser known as “Stinky,” led a dissident antigay faction. If Kühnen was in the vicinity, Stinky would shout, “Always keep your backs to the wall when the Führer comes!”
Kühnen encouraged the Eastern Nazis to think beyond the borders of the GDR and to join him in opposing the “Jew-controlled Bonn Republic.” As the GDR crumbled, the Ossi skins became more aggressive, engaging in constant street battles with anarchists and leftist gangs. This was a new dimension for them, and very exciting. As Hasselbach wrote: “We were cutting loose in a way that was wilder than anything we’d ever imagined. It was an incredible feeling of freedom—roaming the streets, blowing up cars, and guarding our fortress against the anarchists, even if it did distract from the political work at hand.” Of course, what was exhilarating for the skins was horrifying for the municipal authorities. Even Hasselbach admitted that the street battles were “costing Berlin the reputation it sought as a safe city, which it needed to become Europe’s new cultural and business capital.” In spring 1990 the city struck back by raiding the skins’ headquarters in Weitlingstrasse, confiscating weapons and Nazi literature, jailing Hasselbach for five weeks, and throwing the NA Berlin off the electoral ballot for the May municipal elections.
