COLUMN ONE : Hate From America’s Heartland : Germany’s right-wing extremists get much of their propaganda from a man in Lincoln, Neb. Protected by free-speech laws here, he churns out Nazi material smuggled there to evade strict bans.

BONN — They are the hate crimes that no one seems to read or hear about in a unified Germany:

A blond teen-ager who can see Poland from his back yard pores over a crude Nazi comic book that shrilly demands a “pure” Germany free of foreign “filth.”

In big cities and small villages alike, right-wing extremists prowl the streets at night, furtively plastering swastika stickers with anti-Semitic slogans on light poles and walls.

Young people at underground rock concerts and neo-Nazi rallies sport SS armbands and wave SS banners recalling the Nazi elite force of World War II; the more literate ones read “Mein Kampf” and listen to tapes of Adolf Hitler’s speeches.

Third Reich and Nazi propaganda is making an opportunistic comeback here in the wake of escalating right-wing violence.

But the worst of the racist literature, videotapes, cassettes, souvenirs and computer games are not even made in the Germany they extol: Forbidden under the postwar German constitution, the materials come, instead, from sympathizers abroad who smuggle them into the country with impunity, protected by their own nations’ guarantees of freedom of expression.

“Most of the hard-core material is coming from America,” said an official at the VFS, the German domestic intelligence agency charged with monitoring extremism. “And there’s not much we can do about it.”

German investigators trace the bulk of the outlawed material to Gary Rex Lauck, a self-proclaimed mail-order Nazi in Lincoln, Neb., who makes his living churning out nationalistic material in 10 languages, including English, German, Russian and Hungarian. A 40-year-old American of German ancestry, Lauck has become the ersatz Joseph Goebbels of the would-be Fourth Reich, chief propagandist to a tiny but increasingly dangerous segment of Europe’s right wing.

“We’re equipping them,” Lauck said in a telephone interview, maintaining that supplying propaganda to German extremists is tantamount to supplying weapons to a righteous but outnumbered army on the front lines of battle.

“I know it’s an effective weapon,” he added.

Lauck refused to specify how much he earns from the export of Nazi memorabilia and his own neo-Nazi party’s newspaper, Nazi Battle Cry. (He also sells the material in the United States.)

One recent Battle Cry article examined the “theoretical possibilities of an armed, underground resistance to the German state,” Lauck said, and another told of neo-Nazi mercenaries fighting in Croatia.

The articles, he said, are unsigned unless they are by a recognizable name in neo-Nazi and revisionist circles.

The bimonthly paper also runs a full-page advertisement for Nazi propaganda being hawked by Lauck’s party, and the German-language edition also carries Lauck’s “security tips” for smuggling the material into Germany (“Don’t keep it in your own apartment, have it sent to a drop address”).

The mail-order items range from swastika necklaces to a 90-minute cassette of “War Songs of the Third Reich” and a Hitler Youth songbook.

Lauck demands payment in cash only. “Two local banks stopped buying German marks (from other sources) because we supply enough for them,” boasted Lauck, who has been dubbed the “Farm-Belt Fuehrer.”

Lauck, who was arrested and briefly jailed in Germany while carrying 20,000 nationalistic stickers in 1976, would face trial if caught on German soil again--a threat he claims to have easily defied several times.

“Of course he’s having a considerable influence here,” said the VFS official, speaking on condition of anonymity. The VFS, the German abbreviation for the Federal Office for Protection of the Constitution, monitors domestic terrorism and extremism. The agency reported a 65% jump in right-wing “propaganda crimes” last year, with 2,717 cases.

Authorities say the volatile material is clearly having an impact on its mostly young, hungry audience, and raids on the apartments of skinheads and neo-Nazis linked to attacks on foreigners routinely turn up piles of the banned propaganda.

“The German-produced propaganda tends to be not as slick or brazen as the foreign material,” said the high-ranking VFS official. “The German neo-Nazis know the limits of just how far they can go before being charged with a federal crime.”

Lauck readily agrees. “They have to water it down,” he said. “They can’t even say, ‘Heil Hitler.’ ” Also verboten is the printing of Nazi symbols such as the swastika or the double lightning bolts of the SS.

In the United States, the Anti-Defamation League said it has been tracking Lauck’s activities for “many, many years.”

“We do consider him a serious problem,” said Irwin Suall, fact-finding director of the New York-based organization. Asked whether Lauck was not in fact merely preaching to the converted, Suall insisted that “the quantity of material he is turning out is having an effect. In certain situations, his material is very dangerous.”

“Our view is that hate propaganda is dangerous,” Suall added in a telephone interview. “There are degrees of danger depending on the context. Distributing this type of material in New York City is one thing, but if the same type is distributed in Germany today, where they have a serious neo-Nazi and skinhead problem, that’s different.”

In a special report earlier this year on German neo-Nazis, the ADL--noting that he had ties with Chicago neo-Nazi Frank Collin--singled out Lauck as the movement’s most dangerous propagandist.

“The most popular Nazi propaganda material comes from Gary Rex Lauck,” the report said, noting that his inflammatory material was uncovered by German authorities in at least 72 criminal investigations in 1992. Nazi propaganda is rarely, if ever, the target of such raids, usually conducted in search of crime suspects and weapons.

Experts on both sides of the Atlantic say Lauck has relatively few actual members of his Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ Party and that he is more a propagandist than a political activist.

In a review of far-right propaganda, the VFS noted that “Lauck’s activities are not forbidden or punishable by law in the United States.”

Both Lauck and the VFS said his most popular items are neo-Nazi stickers--all emblazoned with swastikas--bearing slogans such as “Don’t Buy From Jews” and “We’re Back!”

The VFS official pointed to a Lauck design featuring a man with a swastika armband blowing up a radio tower, with the body of a Jew wearing a Star of David in the background. “That’s worth five years in a German prison,” the official declared.

(Under German law, it is illegal to possess, produce or disseminate Nazi materials; statutes also make it a crime to foment violence.)

American authorities, so far, have offered their German counterparts no cooperation in trying to shut down Lauck’s mail-order campaign, officials said.

“We’ve gone to America and met with the FBI and the CIA,” the VFS official said. “He’s uninteresting to them because he only makes propaganda; he’d only be considered relevant if he were violent.

“We don’t know anything about how he’s equipped, and if they could just give us his mailing list, we could crack down on the people disseminating his material illegally in Germany,” the official continued. “It’s schizophrenic when (the United States) issues well-grounded reproaches against right-wing extremism here but then this slew of disgusting propaganda comes out of that same country at the same time.”

Although Lauck declined to discuss his “diabolical means” in detail, he acknowledged that he often uses pigeons to smuggle his material across Germany’s borders with nine countries.

Armin Pfahl-Traughber, a Marburg sociologist who has studied right-wing propaganda, observed, “I know of a well-respected defense attorney in a small town--a very earnest man--and I’m sure 99.9% of his clients have no idea he’s receiving this material from the States and spreading Nazi propaganda.

“It’s an interesting phenomenon,” Pfahl-Traughber said, explaining how propaganda has politicized skinheads and soccer hooligans who in the late 1980s had only “a foggy right-wing world view of their own fashion, defined mainly by things like skinhead bands.”

Neo-Nazis organized regular get-togethers at pubs with the violent youths and began disseminating propaganda, Pfahl-Traughber said. “They offer these kids simple explanations for complex feelings and situations,” he noted. “Instead of examining complicated economic-political situations, they reduce it to a simple answer: It’s the foreigners’ fault.”

Besides ignorant teeny-boppers, the consumers of the hate materials include hardened skinheads and nostalgic old Nazis.

“Certainly some of the kids want the stuff only for provocation,” Pfahl-Traughber said. “Maybe they want to annoy their parents and teachers. But that can lead to acceptance, and deep down, when a house is firebombed like the one in Solingen, and five women and children are killed, it doesn’t matter at all.

“There would still be five victims whether the perpetrator read a verboten copy of ‘Mein Kampf’ or not,” he said.

But, ironically, it is foreigners who enjoy the most credibility when spreading neo-Nazi propaganda.

“Foreign authors and so-called scientists provide an alibi,” Pfahl-Traughber said. “They’ll say an American or a Brit is unveiling the German truth. They carry more credibility than a German saying Auschwitz was a lie.”

Authorities have only a rough idea of the amount of neo-Nazi and far-right propaganda circulating in Germany, since the most provocative material, such as Lauck’s, tends to be passed around among friends. Sympathizers translate and write original articles for Lauck’s non-English publications, though Lauck can speak German and began going by the name “Gerhard” at age 17 in what he calls “an act of cultural consciousness.”

German-produced right-wing propaganda, including newspapers published by organized parties and operating within the framework of the law, totaled about 7.8 million pieces last year, according to the VFS.

“Right-wing extremists are introverted types with inferiority complexes,” the VFS official said. “They’re bigmouths, with a big need for self-confirmation. That’s the role propaganda plays.”