Germany 1990, a world where young men in old SS uniforms regard the Holocaust as a nostalgic myth, play concentration-camp board games, firebomb refugee shelters, and network with old war criminals to plot a new Reich. Most shockingly, their plans and propaganda - Holocaust denial literature and bomb manuals - come primarily from white-power extremists in Boston, California, and Nebraska. This is the world of the neo-Nazis, told through the story of their former leader.

Ingo Hasselbach, the "Fuhrer of the East," grew up as the son of members of the Communist elite in the looking-glass world of the German Democratic Republic. Rebelling against the state, he found himself spending his adolescence in and out of prisons. His avuncular old cellmate, the former Gestapo chief of Dresden, persuaded him that a world Jewish conspiracy was bringing ruin and division to Germany. Upon Hasselbach's release from prison in 1988, he founded the country's first neo-Nazi political party.

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For the next five years, he led a violent extremist group: street fighting, indoctrinating young members, and plotting terrorist attacks. But as Hasselbach confronted the fruits of his labor - the firebombed bodies of refugees, the anguished faces of the survivors - a profound change occurred within him: He began to doubt.

Secretly, Hasselbach began to investigate the Holocaust revisionism he and his Kamerads propagated, and he finally learned the truth about the murder of the Jews - and about the lie he had been living. He no longer wanted to live a life of hate. He decided to get out.

1. In 1993 he publicly renounced the neo-Nazi movement and dedicated his life to dissuading German youths from following his dark path. He began lecturing to student groups and in Jewish community centers and trying to open a dialogue about race relations in Germany. His Kamerads initiated their dialogue by sending Hasselbach a mail bomb. Pursued by death threats, he now lives in hiding.