It's `Mein Kampf' To A Rock Beat -- Europe's Skinheads Serenaded By New Wave Of Radical Music That Feeds Hatred And Fear

BERLIN - The songs are loud, simple and filled with raw hatred. This is rock for somebody who likes to throw one at a foreigner, music with a stance you can beat to.

Europe's neo-Nazis are being serenaded - even inspired, some experts fear - by a new wave of rock groups who mix racist rants with thumping punk and frenzied heavy metal.

"It's `Mein Kampf' to a four-four beat," says Tony Robson, a researcher at the London-based Searchlight, a monthly magazine that monitors neo-Nazi activities.

The hit parade of neo-fascist groups includes Hungary's Dwarf Minority and Healthy Head Skin, France's Legion 84, Germany's Storm Troop, Britain's No Remorse - a reference to the Holocaust - and dozens of others.

100,000 RECORDS SOLD

Czechoslovakia's white supremacist Orlik, which split up after it was banned, sold 100,000 records last year, an amazing number in a small nation.

Although the phenomenon is not new, the numbers of such groups - and their appeal - are rising in relation to an increase in xenophobia and rightist violence, particularly in Germany.

Under fire for their plodding response to neo-Nazi attacks on foreigners, German officials only recently began listening to the movement's musical messengers and probing a company in Cologne that records and sells music by Europe's biggest neo-fascist bands, including to U.S. markets.

In Britain, authorities are prosecuting a record distributor with a paraphernalia list that includes Ku Klux Klan T-shirts.

But another blatantly neo-fascist distribution company in France, Rebel European in Brest, has operated worldwide for six years. In Hungary, slick fan magazines openly cater to followers of skinhead music.

Although people who study the skinhead scene differ on the degree such music works as a recruiting tool, they agree it provides a universal bond and common currency to white right-wing rings.

"It gives them an identity. Kids in Poland, Germany, France all wear the same T-shirt," Robson said.

The bands themselves frequently team up for impromptu concerts, usually in white working-class districts.

Last year, Britain's veteran kings of fascist rock, Skrewdriver, organized a concert in the eastern German city of Cottbus with Germany's two hottest hate bands, Stoerkraft ("disturbing force," in German) and Radikahl (a play on the German word for "radical," radikal, with the added `h' referring to the word kahl, which means "bald").

The Oct. 3, 1991, event marked the first anniversary of German unity.

But five Skrewdriver members had to miss the white-power Woodstock after they allegedly stabbed a long-haired young leftist in Cottbus days earlier, police said.

The band members were released on their own recognizance after a stint in investigatory custody, and they were gone by the time officials authorized formal charges.

"If they walk on German soil we'll arrest them," said Christoph Otto, a Brandenburg state prosecutor spokesman.

The concert itself drew 600 people and featured syncopated shouts of "Sieg Heil" from a sea of bobbing bald heads.

SKINHEADS POSE PERVADES

The whole skinhead pose - shaved heads, boots and military clothing - began in working-class Britain in the 1960s. It re-emerged in more xenophobic form in the late 1970s, when it centered on an anthem-like form of punk known as Oi music.

Now it has pervaded eastern Germany and the ruins of the rest of the old Soviet bloc.

The leading band is Skrewdriver, the genre's Beatles-gone-bad. Its 1983 song "White Power" is the movement's theme and the band's records can be found in some alternative U.S. record stores.

Skrewdriver lead singer Gordon Stuart Donaldson was not among those charged in the Cottbus attack and has since returned to Germany.

Skrewdriver and other bands are recorded by a company called Rock-O-Rama, which has its headquarters in Cologne.

Two weeks ago, Berlin began investigating the firm for violating German laws against selling items that are considered dangerous to children, Berlin Sen. Thomas Krueger said.

Some officials say the rightist rockers often couch their lyrics enough to stay within the law. The state of Rheinland-Palatinate tried to prosecute Stoerkraft but couldn't make a solid enough case.

But Stoerkraft two weeks ago became the first neo-Nazi band whose music was banned by the federal government, federal censor Elke Monssen-Engberding said.