![]() ![]() ![]() The story that follows is based on dozens of interviews with neo-Nazis, eyewitnesses, and former spies, and hundreds of pages of Stasi files and court records. In fact, right up until the Iron Curtain fell, one of his handlers was a young, ambitious Russian officer stationed in Dresden. ![]() While outwardly he was a neo-Nazi, he was also a spy for East Germany’s feared secret police, the Stasi. They were willing to follow him anywhere.īut Sonntag’s young disciples didn’t know his darkest secret. One by one, they emerged to join their leader. “Go on, then! Shoot, you coward!” Sonntag called out, removing his jacket and advancing steadily on Simeonidis.įrom their hiding places, the neo-Nazis sensed a shift in the balance of the situation. He wasn’t likely to back down just because his target had a gun-especially not with his troops watching. Sonntag had charm to spare and a vicious stubborn streak. He was of average height and stoutly built, with dark, wavy hair and a round, friendly face that even now seemed on the verge of breaking into an infectious smile. Simeonidis waved the shotgun in a wide arc, sending the neo-Nazis scattering for cover behind cars and bushes. ![]() “Get out of here!” he yelled at the forty or so young men gathered in the street. Simeonidis, a compact amateur boxer with a 16-1 record, brandished a sawed-off shotgun. The Sex Shopping Center was run by a Greek pimp named Nicolas Simeonidis and his business partner, Ronny Matz.Īround 11:45 p.m., as Sonntag’s army assembled beneath the Faun Palace’s faded neon sign, Simeonidis and Matz arrived in a black Mercedes to confront them. From behind the wheel of a parked car, Sonntag waited to give the signal to attack. Throughout the evening, far-right youth-some with shaved heads, others with the feathery mullets still fashionable in the Eastern Bloc’s dying days-gathered in nearby bars and outside the boarded-up Faun Palace porn cinema, just down the street from the brothel. Never mind that not so long ago, Sonntag himself had worked in a red-light district in the West he timed an assault on a Dresden brothel called the Sex Shopping Center for midnight on the last day of May. Then the youth hounded the city’s Vietnamese cigarette sellers. They handcuffed the men and handed them over to the local police. Sonntag’s gang of neo-Nazis had started their supposed purification of the city by targeting the hütchenspieler, three-card swindlers who plied their trade on Dresden’s central Prager Strasse. Support The Atavist by becoming a member. The Atavist Magazine, our sister site, publishes one deeply reported, elegantly designed story each month. They flocked to him, calling him the Sheriff. Sonntag had charisma and an uncanny ability to channel the energy and anger of Gorbitz’s youth. The buildings there were filled with young people who had been stripped of stability and purpose by Communism’s implosion. Most of his followers came from the grim maze of housing projects in Gorbitz, on Dresden’s western edge. When he returned home, he recruited a ragtag army of acolytes to rid Dresden of influences he claimed were noxious. By the time the wall fell, Sonntag had become one of the West’s leading neo-Nazis, thanks to a willingness to roll up his sleeves and fight. Sonntag was born and raised in Dresden, but had fled across the Iron Curtain to West Germany five years earlier. His name was Rainer Sonntag, and he was a far-right vigilante-an avowed neo-Nazi. Kiosks that once sold Neues Deutschland, the dour Communist Party propaganda sheet, now carried German editions of Playboy and Hustler. One man had sworn to clean house. Suddenly, it was filled with new imports from the West, including drugs, gambling, and prostitution. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall some 18 months before, the smog-choked, bomb-scarred city in East Germany had changed. All day the city had been abuzz with the rumor that there was going to be a riot in the city’s nascent red-light district. As the sun set on May 31, 1991, the streets of Dresden crackled with energy. ![]()
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