The NPD kicked off its national campaign in July at an open-air concert in the otherwise placid and leafy town of Gera, Thüringen, about three hours southwest of Berlin. Local police had gated off the Park der Jugend, or Young People's Park, to let about a thousand people gather on benches, drink beer and eat bratwurst. Udo Voigt was there, too, in his shirtsleeves and tie.

It was a warm summer day, with sunlight streaming between the beeches and elms. Women and a few young families mixed in with jackboots, suspenders and an ocean of inflammatory T-shirts. ("Master Race," "Ku Klux Klan," obscure praise for 9/11.) Germany has hundreds of disorganized gangs, Kameradschaften, and attracting them to this "Rock für Deutschland" concert was vital to the movement. Dr. Richard Stöss, a professor of political science at Berlin's Free University who studies the extreme right, says the NPD under Voigt "is always looking to integrate those smaller groups" as a way to swell the ranks. But the NPD wants to remain legal; so at the park entrance, banned slogans on T-shirts and improper tattoos -- Iron Crosses, swastikas, references to Hitler's S.S. -- had to be censored with packing tape.

Not everyone looked like a skinhead or outlaw, though. What the NPD supporters in Gera had in common wasn't a clothing style but a vigilant, defensive, urgent manner. About the only generalization you can make about neo-Nazis is that they're not relaxed people.

"Some of them are very well-educated," says Richard Herzinger. "You can almost compare the movement to the [radical-left] '68 movement in Germany, which also wasn't a function of material wealth -- some of them just broke with reality in favor of an absolute truth. That has an incomprehensible appeal. Because then you can place yourself over other people. It's not just a question of education."

The first speaker was an aging man in a blazer and glasses named Frank Schwerdt, the party chairman in Thüringen. He talked about merging the factions of the far right to win parliamentary seats. Then he mentioned the shuttered storefronts in Gera, joblessness, and the fact that people were migrating from their hometowns to cities like Berlin or even to other countries, like Austria, for work. Home was an important theme. He said the NPD understood that people needed jobs "da, wo sie zuhause sind" -- there, where they feel at home.

Then a "hatecore" band called Eugenik took the stage, and played masturbatory white noise for about an hour.

The festival mood in Gera is a snapshot of how the party has changed. The last time the NPD had power was in the late '60s, when its members swept briefly into 11 western state legislatures. Back then it ran on a single plank for aging reactionaries who resented foreign soldiers on their soil -- "Germany for Germans" -- but now it's a party for young people, with a platform that both resembles Hitler's old policies and blurs their essential Nazism.

"The NPD is basically devoted to a return of the German Reich," said Dr. Stöss, the political scientist. "Now imagine if you went to a depressed eastern state where immigration from Poland was a problem, and said, 'We think the western parts of Poland should be annexed to Germany.' [Something the NPD espouses.] No one would vote for you. So they couch their position in arguments about globalization ... They say they want to return to a closed, nationalized German state, away from the EU, away from foreign capital, away from the United States."

Hitler himself appropriated left-wing rhetoric about big business and banks. He called the Allies of World War I "gangsters" and "criminals." He railed against America. He inflamed German pride as an antidote to German shame, and in the early days of his party he swelled the rolls with malcontents: "A conglomeration of pimps, murderers, homosexuals, alcoholics, and blackmailers flocked to the party as if to a natural haven," wrote William Shirer in "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich." "Hitler did not care, as long as they were useful to him." The NSDAP wanted to overturn the democracy in Berlin and replace it with a "folkish state," based on land and blood, just like Voigt's NPD.

The NPD's national office is a cramped lemon-yellow row house in Köpenick, called the "Carl-Arthur Bühring Haus," after a wealthy Holocaust denier. Bühring claimed the count of 6 million dead in the German gas chambers was a lie concocted by a former S.S. agent under American pressure during the Nuremberg trials. The NPD's Web site shows enough self-awareness to devote a pair of pages to explaining why the current German National Party is not related to, or even like, Hitler's NSDAP. But its defense is a technical one: It seems Hitler ran his party "dictatorially" from 1921 on, while Udo Voigt is more open-minded. The pages never address racism, the Holocaust, German borders, or Jews.

"We do want a new government in Berlin," Voigt told me. "East Germany was a child of the Russians, and West Germany was a child of America and the Allies. That's unacceptable to us. We want a free Germany, with no more occupation. Remember there are still American troops on German soil. Then we want a government that serves German interests -- German money for German projects, and an immediate halt to aid for Israel."

"Would Germany be democratic under the NPD?"

"Of course," he said.

"Would Jews have a role in the government?" I asked.

"Yes, of course. Jews have contributed a lot to German culture."

But is he telling the truth? Public anti-Semitism would be a kiss of death for the NPD; in fact the party was almost shut down in 2003 for flirting with overt Nazism. Dr. Stöss believes the party's political platform expresses what its leaders can't say out loud. "When they talk about globalism, they're talking about Jewish capital," he said. "They believe Wall Street is run by Jews. They argue that the Palestinians are the true nationalists in Israel -- the Jews in other words are 'internationalists,' with a plot to spread their global network. Whereas the Palestinians and the NPD are 'nationalists.'"

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