Berlin Calling by Paul Hockenos

Author:Paul Hockenos
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620971963
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2017-06-10T04:00:00+00:00

Nazis on the East Side

Other subcultures flourished in the course of the 1980s but, with the exception of the punks, none of them dumbfounded the East German authorities like the Hitler-glorifying skinheads. The kids with shaven skulls and flight jackets seemed to multiply like yeast bubbles in the postwar high-rise blocks across the country. But East Berlin was the stronghold. The young men mouthed the basics of Nazi ideology: racial supremacy, Jewish networks, a greater German state—comprised only of Germans. Prone to violence, they jumped and badly beat up not just rivals from the underground but foreign nationals, too, including guest workers from the GDR’s sister socialist countries Vietnam, Mozambique, and Poland. In train stations and buildings, hand-painted slogans worthy of Kristallnacht appeared—and were promptly erased the next day by the authorities. At night, they’d venture into old Jewish cemeteries and knock over gravestones. The young Nazis were on full display at soccer games mixing with street-fighting hooligans, provoking fistfights with the other team’s fans, the security guards, and the police. In their own minds, they constituted the most radical, principled opposition to the communist state they hated so intensely. After all, it was in school that they learned that fascism was the opposite of communism.

Interestingly, average East Germans, those who found the punks so abhorrent, didn’t mind the clean-shaven, hardworking, serious, and masculine young men with bald craniums. There was nothing on their person that announced they were Nazis, despite the rumors to this effect. When the police investigated the young men for crimes, co-workers spoke highly of them. On the night of October 17, 1987, at the Zion church, it was evident that the police, who refused to intervene, were willing to let the skinheads do some of their dirty work. The police reacted only when the melee provoked a public outcry—because they had to.

In the end, the authorities’ enabling of the raid on the Church of Zion backfired badly, embarrassing the state with the awkward publicity. Some factions high in the GDR hierarchy took the issue of right-wing radicalism to heart and ordered a small, covert research group composed of Humboldt University sociologists to conduct a top-secret study for them. The sociologist who led the study, Loni Niederländer, told me that you could have heard a pin drop when she presented her findings to the Stasi a year later. These young men who called themselves Nazis, mostly between seventeen and twenty-two years of age, were overwhelmingly workers employed in blue-collar jobs (in other words, the proletariat). They hailed from secure families, a disproportionate number of whom were party loyal or military personnel. Many of the young men had served or intended to serve extended stints of military service. The right-wingers, she underscored, were products of the GDR; the phenomenon hadn’t been transplanted from the West to the East, even though there was considerable traffic across the Wall. But rather, a neo-Nazi current had reproduced itself in the East by its own devices, for reasons unique to the GDR.

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