How a simple act of kindness from a stranger ended my career as a neo-Nazi
When news broke last week that a gunman had
stormed a mosque in New Zealand, unlike most, I didn’t ask myself ‘How could someone do that?’ I have a very good understanding of what motivates a white supremacist – I used to be one.
At 15, my hometown in Norway received a lot of refugees from the civil war in former Yugoslavia. My friends and I did not like outsiders so we would get in fights with them.
Then the anarchists came to town. They took drugs, squatted in a house and sprayed anti-establishment slogans all over it. The neo-Nazis who lived nearby hated these anarchists – so your enemy’s enemy becomes your friend, so to speak.
By the time I was 17 I was a fully-fledged, Holocaust-denying neo-Nazi.
I spent the next six years entrenched in KKK propaganda and rose up to become the leader of one of Norway’s most violent hate groups. We called ourselves the Einzats Gruppen and KKK Norway and we believed Jewish people wanted to mix the world’s races and exterminate the white race, our race.
‘This moment - it completely shattered my worldview.’
I may have continued down this path if it weren’t for a few twists of fate that made me question my beliefs.
I was invited to go to South Africa to join the neo-Nazi movement there called the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB). Mandela was president and the AWB expected an all-out war.
I thought I was meeting up with like-minded people, but this wasn’t the case.
continued
(Wow.. that's some story)
