THE HATE ON HIS SKIN

He was a neo-Nazi for thirteen years. Then he got out. Now a doctor with Iranian roots is relieving him of his tattoos. Can his past be lasered away?

‘It was in prison: I was standing naked in front of the mirror and I saw my tattoos, the swastika, the Hitler portrait. I looked at myself and thought, shit — you really look like shit. I thought: man, are you ugly. And then I thought: all this has got to go. I considered putting acid on it. Just quickly; wash it off right away. Then I thought: fuck it. When you get out, get tanked up and let someone go to work on you with a belt sander.’

His left forearm is covered in skulls; they run from wrist to elbow, small, white human skulls, scattered, like toys. Each of these skulls, he says, represents a victim of violence.

How many are there?

‘No idea,’ he says.

He starts to count the skulls, lips moving silently. The doctor observes his face from the side. No one speaks. It takes a while. ‘Twenty-nine,’ he says eventually.

He glances at the doctor, whose gaze turns blank.

‘Uff,’ he says. ‘That’s a lot.’ He looks down at his hands. Rubs them together. Straightens his glasses. Says, quietly, ‘I’ve never counted them.’

‘Victims of violence, though,’ the doctor wants to know, ‘what does that mean, exactly? A slap on the face, or …?’

‘It means I had twenty-nine politically motivated violent crimes.’

‘That you’ve beaten up twenty-nine people?’

‘Right,’ he says. Foreigners and political opponents. He doesn’t know what to say after that.

The doctor helps him out. ‘Come on,’ he says, ‘let’s get started.’

The doctor’s name is Afschin Fatemi. 51, dark hair and eyes, bright white teeth. After experiencing racism himself once, as a young man, he wants to understand how racists think. He is the director of this cosmetic clinic in Berlin Mitte. He performs liposuction, tautens droopy eyelids, and removes the Nazi tattoos of people who have quit the neo-Nazi scene. He’s happy to do it, he says, and he does it for free. Later, he explains why.

The patient is Markus Weber*, 35, the man who wanted to pour acid on himself. He was in prison because he killed someone. His body is covered in Nazi tattoos; he is ashamed. When he goes out he tries to hide them, with rings on his fingers, long-sleeved jerseys, long trousers. He hardly ever wears a T-shirt, because he has to be careful, every time he moves, that it doesn’t slip. He has to be careful at work, on the bus, in the gym. He never goes swimming, although he loves to swim. Many of the tattoos are punishable by law. He’s on probation, and if anyone were to bring a charge against him, he might have to go back to jail. Even though he’s left the scene, he’s imprisoned by his tattoos. They won’t release him from his past.

He used to beat people like Fatemi to a pulp. Now he needs his help. He wants to finally start a new life, a ‘perfectly normal’ one, he says, with a house, car, wife, maybe children, barbecues, and occasional trips to the open-air swimming pool, which his nephew has wanted to do with him for years. 

Can you really have your past lasered away?

Weber pulls the jersey and shirt over his head. He has a black swastika on his chest, a portrait of Hitler on his upper arm, Nazi stormtroopers and Wehrmacht soldiers on his stomach. These will be dealt with later. First, they’ll tackle the tattoos that everyone can see, like the word ‘SKIN’ written on his fingers. Weber lies down. Fatemi leans over him with a laser pen. He presses a pedal with his foot. There’s a crackling sound, tick, tick, tick, slow at first, like the ignition on a gas cooker, then faster, louder, tickticktick, like a police taser. The red dot tracks the letters, and they disappear. ‘Ohohohohoho,’ shouts Weber; it’s between a laugh and a cry of pain, like someone walking into icy water.

You can’t tell any more by looking at Weber that he was once a neo-Nazi. He used to shave his head; now he wears his hair long, tied back in a ponytail. One of his restless eyes has a slight squint, and the lenses of his glasses are as thick as the walls of an aquarium. The aura of danger he presumably had in the past is now completely gone. Sometimes, in conversation, he suddenly says ‘Hm?’, as if his thoughts had wandered off. It’s only on second glance that you see the tattoos on his hands: the three-pronged triskelion, reminiscent of a swastika, the ‘SKIN’ on his fingers. 

His hand twitches. After only about a minute the letters are no longer black but white, the skin red and swollen. But this will fade. Unlike his victims, he won’t even have scars.

For his protection, the editorial team have decided not to use his real name or say where he lives. People who have left the scene are sometimes threatened. This is also why there are hardly any photos of his tattoos in this report. Someone from his old life might recognise them. Weber himself doesn’t care. He talks openly, says he’s not afraid. ‘Let them come.’

Weber was born in East Germany in 1988, just before the Wall came down. His father was a bricklayer, his mother worked ‘in cardboard packaging’. Weber says his childhood was happy, like all childhoods. His parents were there for him, he says; more than that — the world existed for him and him alone. At some point, though, it occurred to him that there was another child living next door who felt exactly the same: cared for, the centre of the world. He says realising this felt like shit.

There’s no single event that would explain why he became a neo-Nazi. Perhaps there seldom is; life isn’t a movie. Weber says he had everything he needed, fulfilled everyone’s expectations. There was only one person whose expectations he didn’t fulfil, and that was himself. He says he wanted to become a person others looked up to. He was seeking recognition. And there were these guys at school, with shaved heads and combat boots, and they said: you don’t need to become anyone, you already are someone. You’re a German. Weber says that for a person like him, greedy for recognition, it was ‘like a free fuck’.

He was seventeen when his parents separated. His mother cheated on his father and tried to bleed him dry financially. Weber still has hardly any contact with her. He has cut her out of the story of his life, as if mother were just a word. Weber put on armour: combat boots, fourteen- or twenty-hole; white laces, bomber jacket, skinhead, shaved every two days with a razor. ‘Perfumed with Hasseröder,’ he says. A crate of beer, a bottle of hard liquor, every day. If his story is to be believed, his life descended into thick fog. Whenever he left the house he stuck a machete down his back, under his rucksack.

He smiles when he talks about it. Thirteen years — it can’t all have been bad, he says, or he wouldn’t have stayed so long. At the time, he found what he felt he lacked. Blood, honour, loyalty, race, nation: the old lies are still written on his skin today. If you wanted to be worth something, you had to beat people up; if you beat people up, you were worth something. The tattoos were proof; they collected them like trophies. The swastika, for example, was very important for him back then, says Weber. A status symbol within the group, and a signal to outsiders: don’t even think of talking to me. Weber says he’s not trying to minimise his guilt, he’s just telling it like it was. Every morning he made the decision to be ‘this asshole’. 

He’s forgotten when he beat someone up for the first time. He would fight wherever he could, on the street, outside pubs, in the forest. He says he really loved the violence. But it was only in juvenile detention that he became properly radical. He acted tough when actually he was scared of prison. It’s like that for everyone, he says. Weber quickly learned that, in prison, there are only two things that count, strength and violence, and he became a master in both disciplines. After that, he wasn’t scared any more. That was the problem, he says now: alcohol, hate, and the feeling of being untouchable. The act that changed everything was really, he says, just like all the others.

He was pretty tanked up that evening. He was twenty-three. Even now he can only remember bits and pieces. Right up until the trial he didn’t even know whether he had been the ‘executor’ — the one who caused the death. Today he says, ‘Yes, it was me.’

In the treatment room, Dr Fatemi has started to laser the ‘HAIL’ off Weber’s arm. Weber’s white belly starts to wobble. ‘Holy cow!’ Fatemi takes his foot off the pedal and the crackling stops. Weber says it feels as if Fatemi is cutting him with a razor blade. ‘Ah, okay,’ says Fatemi, continuing, ‘not nice.’ Weber says the pain is not unbearable, but it’s weird. It makes you want to laugh. Satisfying, in a way. 

Fatemi grins. He’s wearing a cap like the one surgeons wear in American TV series. His has kittens on it. He loves cats; he has two at home. He also loves his two daughters, whom says he’s brought up to be smart women. He speaks a very polished German; his features are regular, not a wrinkle in sight. He tells us he’s currently reading a biography of the French writer Alexandre Dumas. Did we know he was Black? Hardly anyone knows that!

Fatemi was born in Mainz in 1972. Iranian parents, father a doctor, mother studied pharmacy. In Germany, people sometimes called them ‘Oil-Eyes’. Fatemi says he was a good student, but at some point he started to act the class clown. He wanted recognition from his classmates with the German names. His German teacher took him aside and asked if he thought this was the way to make his parents — and himself — proud? Fatemi says he’ll always be grateful to this man. He got his school-leaving certificate. His father gave him a conservative upbringing: don’t lie, help each other, work hard. At uni, he carried a tote bag emblazoned with a red star, the symbol of communism. That was how he rebelled. If you’re not a liberal when you’re young, you have no heart, says Fatemi. If you’re still a liberal later on, you have no brain. ‘That’s what they say, isn’t it?’ he asks, and laughs his bright white laugh. 

He established a chain of cosmetic clinics, the S-thetic Clinic group, which is now the biggest in Germany, with practices in Düsseldorf, Munich, Berlin and eleven other cities. He has a TV programme on sixx — ‘The Beauty Docs’ — and almost a dozen vintage sports cars, which he races. On Instagram, Fatemi appears with celebrities. Every day he posts stories that bring him lots of little hearts. He has a charitable foundation that helps people in crisis regions. He says he wants to give something back to society, and you believe him. He knows people here like it if you remain humble when you get rich.

He loves Germany, not least because you can say what you like here and nothing will happen to you. He says that in the last forty years he has ‘not often’ been the target of racist attacks. However, there was one scene that engraved itself on his memory. When he was still at school, he did work experience in a hospital, where an old man said to him: ‘This is how it always starts. First you clean floors, then bottoms, and then you’re sent to the gas chambers.’ He had indeed wiped up this man’s vomit and wiped his bottom. ‘And then he comes out with a comment like that.’ Fatemi shakes his head.

He couldn’t say whether or not the man had been a Nazi. He was the right age for it. But careful, he says: who can judge anyone else by their appearance?

‘I’d like to get rid of this ugly face here,’ says Fatemi, wagging his finger in the direction of Hitler on Weber’s arm. ‘Sure,’ says Weber.

It was another prisoner who pricked out the Hitler portrait for him. The lines are wobbly, the head deformed. The Führer looks simple-minded. It didn’t cost anything, Weber says, and looking at the quality, he’d have to have been stupid to pay for that. Hitler’s moustache is first to disappear. The machine crackles and sparks as Fatemi follows the lines. It’s like those magic boards children can scribble on and erase it all afterwards. Hitler no longer has eyes, no nose, no mouth, soon he won’t have any hair; this takes a little while, a big black area, then the side parting, too, is history.

‘Mm-hm,’ says Fatemi, contemplating his handiwork. ‘How was it on the upper arm?’

‘Hm?’ asks Weber. He wants to remove the protective goggles and take a look as well.

‘On the upper arm, how was it?’

‘So-so,’ says Weber. Later, he says he distracted himself from the pain with the thought: something is being destroyed, and something new is emerging from it. ‘A really great feeling,’ he says.

The victim was an acquaintance. Fifty-three years old, not a neo-Nazi, a drinking pal, a fan of German pop. Weber and a few of his mates were drinking at this man’s house, and they put on far-right rock. The host didn’t like it; he threw a bottle at Weber, which grazed his head. There was a tussle, Weber’s glasses fell off, then a window box crashed to the ground and Weber’s glasses were buried in earth. Right, he said to the others, you’re going to look for those. I’m going outside for a smoke, and if they’re not here when I get back, he told the host, I’ll kill you.

And that was what happened.

Weber, who tells the rest of his story animatedly, almost as if he would like to hear it himself, sounds like a bureaucrat when he talks about the crime. He doesn’t refer to the man whose life he took by name; he says ‘the victim’ or ‘the man who was killed’. He says that someone died because, back then, he couldn’t handle himself. He got away with grievous bodily harm resulting in death. Eleven years imprisonment.

Rage, locked in a cell. For the first three years, he picked fights with everybody, threw plates, knives, punches. Repeated spells in solitary. In the beginning he often thought of Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, who also remained steadfast in prison. But Weber says that after a while it just made him sick. Is this what I want the rest of my life to look like? Is this what we’re here for, in this world? The thought made a deep impression. Until one day, looking at himself after his shower, he thought: ‘Maybe, if I’m looking for the guilty party, I should look in the mirror instead of always reaching for the telescope.’

People from the Blue Cross used to come to the prison; they helped Weber to give up alcohol. And people came from the Violence Prevention Network, which helps neo-Nazis and Islamists to leave the extremist scene. One guy spoke to Weber. He said he used to be far-right as well, that he used to drink, beat people up. Later, he got out, and found religion. Weber says the guy said to him: I used to be just like you.

‘That got me straight away, right here,’ he says, patting his heart. They talked for hours. Turned his life around: he joined a residential group for addicts within the prison, got off drugs, and had therapy. Then, he says, he also found God. He heard that God wants everyone, even if they aren’t perfect. It was a bit like in the beginning with the far-right scene, says Weber.

But without alcohol, violence and hate this time. He says he came to understand that his hatred had never been for his opponent, only ever for himself. That was when he stopped seeing people as enemies. For thirteen years he had beaten other people up; now he tried to embrace them. He says it was as if, after all that time, he had found himself. At a ceremony in the residential group leader’s office, Weber symbolically placed his life in God’s hands. From then on, he says, he was calm. Slept better. Didn’t fly into rages. ‘All of a sudden I had real inner peace.’

He was freed in February 2022 after eight years in prison, and moved into shared accommodation for ex-prisoners. He celebrated his first evening of freedom with three cans of Monster Energy and a kilo of frozen chicken legs. Then he watched an action film with Liam Neeson. Weber says there’s really only one thing he’s afraid of: having to go back to prison. He hates everything there, the confinement, the stench. Since being in prison, he can’t stand dirt. He wants everything tidy, everything clean. In prison, he became obsessed with cleaning.

Six years ago, an association that supports people who have quit the far-right scene asked Fatemi whether he would be prepared to remove former neo-Nazis’ tattoos. Another doctor had been doing it prior to that, on the usual basis, for payment. They wanted to pay Fatemi, too. But he says he knows what it’s like: ‘Associations — always short of money.’ One of the people who helped Weber get out says it’s very difficult to find a doctor who’s willing to remove swastikas, let alone do it for free. For these associations, and for ex-Nazis, Fatemi is ‘a treasure’.

Fatemi offered to do it for free on one condition: he wanted to talk to the people beforehand. First, because he wanted to know how they had got involved in the scene, and how they had got out again. And second, because he wanted to make sure no one was taking him for a ride. That’s why there’s an initial interview. First they clarify the medical side of things, then the personal. Fatemi asks questions. Most of the former neo-Nazis were raised with far-right slogans at the dinner table. Others were introduced to the scene by friends. All the stories are different, he says, but one thing is always the same: the person has an emptiness inside. They usually get out when they themselves experience violence, or when they have children. Or when they get to know a ‘foreigner’ and realise that he isn’t stupid at all, and doesn’t stink, either.

Fatemi has lasered away swastikas, portraits of prominent Nazis, flags, slogans, codes — often the ‘88’ that stands for ‘Heil Hitler’. Some people come to him with scenes from concentration camps. The Holocaust as cynical caricature. That blows his mind every time, he says. He has to remind himself: these aren’t Nazis sitting here, they’re ex-Nazis. ‘They’ve already got out, and have come a long way.’ Many of them have satisfied a judge, assessors, associations. Professionals in dealing with former extremists. Fatemi has treated twenty people so far: eighteen men, two women.

In the treatment room, they’re now discussing whether there’s anything special about former neo-Nazis having to go to a ‘foreigner’ to get their swastikas removed. Fatemi believes that, to people who’ve left the scene, it doesn’t make any difference. They’ve long since stopped thinking in racist paradigms. Weber can’t help laughing. He says yes, he thought it was ‘totally awesome… much better than if he was called Müller or Maier!’ Even now, when he sees a black guy, he still thinks, ‘Fuck off, foreigner.’ Then he has to check himself: ‘What did you just think?’ It is getting better, though. Sometimes he doesn’t think it any more. ‘Because when you leave, the most important thing is what goes on up here,’ he says, tapping his forehead.

Fatemi turns off the laser; they’ll take a quick break. Weber goes to get something to drink. With the old lasers, Fatemi says, he could only get the black ink out; they left scars and blotches behind, or a negative image of the tattoo. The new lasers remove the ink completely. Basically, he says, the body wants to get rid of anything that could harm it, whether it’s a grain of sand or ink. It sends in white blood cells, like macrophages. Garbage disposal. But ink is too big to be carried away; the body can’t break it down. The laser does that. At the right strength and wavelength, it leaves hair, skin and blood vessels intact, hits the ink particles and blasts them into tiny fragments. Because Weber has so many tattoos, he’ll need a lot of sessions.

Fatemi says that a democratic society must take firm action and confront its enemies. But it should talk to the ones who can still be reached. Because, unfortunately, there isn’t a laser for societies that could erase national socialism once and for all.

Fatemi says he admires Weber’s courage. He walked away from his old life, his home, his friends. That, he says, is why tattoo removal is not an act of mercy. These people have already completed the majority of the journey. Fatemi is just opening the door for them. He says he believes that people can change. He wouldn’t do all this otherwise. But there’s another reason, too. He says that lasering away a swastika feels ‘simply awesome’. A bit like cleaning. Really scrubbing away the dirt. Very satisfying. And one less swastika in the world is always a good thing, right?

Weber lies back down on the couch. A silver cross on a chain rests over the swastika on his chest. He was baptised a few weeks ago. There’s a video. He stood, a little awkwardly, beside the priest, wearing a hoodie with the logo ‘Team Jesus’, and a ring, so that the letters on his fingers spelled not ‘SKIN’, only ‘SIN’. Weber gave a short speech. The psalm he had chosen read: ‘Yet I am always with you; you hold me by my right hand. You guide me with your counsel, and afterwards you will take me into glory.’

People applauded at the end. They knew about his past. They received the prodigal son again. That’s the practical thing about Christianity: no matter what you’ve done, God forgives you. People outside the congregation aren’t going to make it that easy for him. In the eyes of the law, Weber has served his sentence. No one has to pardon him, least of all his victims. Forgiveness is a private decision.

Fatemi briefly re-examines the tattoos, then says, ‘Come on, we’ll stop there.’ They’ll deal with the swastika and the remaining tattoos in the upcoming sessions. He smears some ointment on the raw areas. Weber gets dressed. A pullover and shirt with ‘Team Jesus’: he ordered them off Amazon. Fatemi says he mustn’t scratch or go in the sun. Then Fatemi has to leave, to go to Düsseldorf. They shake hands. Outside the clinic, Weber hesitates. It smells like rain; Berlin daily life swirls around him. What will he do with the rest of the day? The memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe is just a few minutes’ walk away. He’s never been there. Or maybe he’ll go to that sports shop around the corner, he’s been wanting to go there for ages.

Then something occurs to him. He has to contradict Dr Fatemi on one thing. For Weber, what he did today really was an act of mercy. Maybe not by Fatemi, but by the general public. He considers it a ‘great gift’.

Weber says his departure from the far-right scene is complete. With or without tattoos. On top of his wardrobe at home is a box with his old Nazi outfits and far-right rock CDs. He wants to invite the members of his congregation round, for a barbecue, maybe, and burn everything in a big bonfire. ‘Sort of as a symbol,’ he says. He reckons he can count himself lucky, because he’s found a ‘dream job’, one in which he can give his obsession free rein: he works as a cleaner. He doesn’t drink any more. His father is proud of him.

Weber still doesn’t have a driving licence — he’s having lessons at the moment — or an apartment of his own. The last three landlords suddenly stopped replying after the viewing. He assumes it’s because they got wind of his past. People talk. Yet he has a steady income and his credit rating is clean. Apart from his prison record, he says, he’s a desirable tenant. Weber can imagine volunteering to go into schools and tell his story. As a warning, a positive example. And as a kind of atonement.

He says his life sometimes reminds him of the American film American History X, in which a young man with a black swastika on his chest quits the neo-Nazi scene. For a long time, things seem to be going well. But his past catches up with him in the end.

Recently, Weber met a young woman at a barbecue who cried when she saw him. Later, she said that he had beaten up her then-boyfriend very badly, and had threatened her. He told her that, sadly, he didn’t remember. Then they talked, for a long time. In the end she hugged him and said: please, stay as you are.

Weber says this was actually the most beautiful moment of his life so far. 

 

* Name has been changed