Vladimir Putin, the KGB and the German Nazi Gangster Who Was a Communist Spy
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Neo-Nazi Rainer Zontag turns to his three dozen skinhead acolytes, huddled beneath the fading neon sign of the Thorn Palace porn cinema. "You guys go get a beer," he tells them. "I'll wait in the car." It's around a quarter to midnight on May 31st, 1991, and the German city of Dresden is on high alert.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification the year before, far-right thugs have rounded on the former communist city's foreigners, beating them up, demanding protection money or claiming organized crime and turning them over to cops. At their helm is Sontag, a stout floppy-haired former pimp and gangster who spent years in the west before heading back to his hometown to lead a neo-nazi crime wave.

He stumbled upon youth lacking purpose and direction, the state's firm communist grip having suddenly left them, many of them living giant grey post-war blocks in a part of town called Gorbitz where swastikas and Hitler salutes are graffitied all over the walls.

The kids of Gorbitz are jobless and bored and Nazism is a way, weirdly, for them to act out anti-authoritarian rebel views against the hard leftism that's kept them under lock and key for decades. For them Sontag is a hero and they meet in a drab Gorbitz pub every Friday night for indoctrination into his growing gang. They have a name for him and he likes it. He's the Sheriff of Dresden.

Now, he set his sights on Dresden's red light district, and in particular, a shabby little spot in the center of town called the Sex Shopping Center. Rumor has it, the brothel's owners, German former builder Ronnie Matz and his Greek business partner, a mulleted boxer named Nikos Simeonidis, have refused Sontag's shakedown. In response, the Nazis promise to flatten their store, and the gang is set to attack at 12 a.m.

Mats and Simeonidis have spent the afternoon preparing. They repair the sex shopping center's metal shutters, usher out Johns and stash baseball bats beside the entrance. Sontag is waiting behind the wheel of his car, his army drinking beer on the sidewalk, when a shiny black Mercedes sedan pulls up in the middle of the street. It's Mats and Simeonidis. Simeonidis steps out of the passenger door and waves a sawn-off shotgun in the youth's direction.

"What do you want here?" he screams, swinging the barrel from side to side. "Get lost and leave us in peace." The youth scatter behind cars, shop fronts and trees. A few yards away, another car door opens with a click. It's Sontag, removing his jacket and walking steadily towards the Mercedes. His troops are watching. There is no way he's backing down. "Go on then," he cries at the simulators. "Shoot, you coward."

The skinheads, well they sense a shift in the balance and they creep out from their hiding spots to join their Nazi-Svengali leader. Sontag keeps advancing. Simeonidis retreats, puts one shoe in the footwell as he does. But Sontag is on him and he's holding the passenger door of the Mercedes open, ready to strike. Mats aims a can of pepper spray at Sontag right across Simeonidis' bow.

There's a puff of gas, confusion and in the cloud the Nazis hear a bang then the sound of their sheriff falling to the asphalt, his head blown half off, a pool of blood thickening on the cold street. They run to him while Mats and Simunita step on the gas and speed away. They'll end up on the run in Bangkok before they're caught and brought back to face trial in Germany.

Reiner Sonntag's death will be a rally cry for Germany's far right and it will unleash a wave of violence against foreigners all over the former east. But what Sonntag's gang doesn't know is that he's a communist spy and the KGB guy who handled him is hundreds of miles away in St. Petersburg climbing the ranks of power in the dying Soviet empire. His name, well you might know it, it's Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

Welcome to the underworld podcast. Hey guys, and welcome to another episode of the show where we try to stay focused on international organized crime and not on our bank balances. I'm your host, Sean Williams in Berlin. I'm joined by Danny gold in New York. We are journalists. We did in fact, and that is why we don't earn the big sub stack bucks. Yeah. I think our new tagline maybe shouldn't mention our slow descent into madness. It's getting less and less subtle every week.

Yeah, is it that? Yeah, it really is that obvious, isn't it? We had a nice few people join the Patreon this month, so cheers for that, guys. We've been putting tons up there too. Interesting writers, figures in crime and beyond. Plus there's the odd mini show, of course. And updates on Chinguito, which I know is what everyone really wants.

yeah that's where the money is but uh patreon.com slash the underworld podcast you know you guys can join up three dollars a month support five hours a month bonuses and all that sort of stuff but uh yeah maybe we should have toby muse back on to talk about people in columbia who run these animal rescues that are full of drug lords like former tigers and other pets that they shouldn't have owned in the first place i think he did uh he did a video piece on that about one of these animal rescues that's uh that's

That's pretty crazy. Oh, also, I got a bunch of emails telling me I should have gotten the Sturgeon joke you made about Nicholas Sturgeon and all that last week and letting me know that it was actually a great joke. And I want to acknowledge the error of my ways. So the Underworld podcast at gmail.com, corrections on episodes, tips, anything like that you guys want to reach out for. Yeah, we deal in facts, and the fact is that is a great joke. Yeah, apparently. Yeah.

Well, this show's a little different anyway, because you might have read my recent story, The Atavist, about Rainer Zontag, this neo-Nazi gangster, but he was also a communist spy. And we're going to dig into it a little bit more today, because it's a wild story. There's tons that got left on the cutting floor, tons of relevance today, of course, with the war in Ukraine, the rise of Germany's far right.

And it's really not OTT to say you can trace a lot back to this stuff when Putin was at the KGB in Dresden and leading this crack team of cops and agents at East Germany's feared secret police, the Stasi. And there's organized crime all over this episode, guys. So don't worry if you're not into that Cold War spy craft. But I mean, who isn't right?

So, yeah, I mean, you know, you've got you've got neo-Nazis and gangs and Putin and all that. So I kind of feel like who wouldn't be into that? Yeah. Yeah. And at the middle of it all is this kind of crazy character called Rainer Zontag. So, I mean, to begin with, he is born in the city of Dresden, which at the time is in East Germany, which is a communist country.

kind of workers paradise. Uh, but it's really clear that from the early years, he's not really into the whole gig and he gets into a bunch of trouble with his teachers. Uh, I think he sings a ribald song about the Soviet union, a football match, uh, which doesn't go down too well. I mean, like, even if you're about 13 years old, you're already getting a police file at this point. And then he starts a fight with a kid in a, an ice skating rink, um, just punches a kid in the face for no reason. Apparently, uh,

and he signs up to a bunch of these youth organizations there's a parachuting organization there's also a sports one there's the young uh i think it's called free young german youth which sounds pretty nazi but it's communist which is totally a different thing altogether and in no way a whole show theory but uh when he gets a bit older

He gets into some real trouble. So when he's in his early 20s, he tries to escape the country, tries to get into the Czech Republic, pretends that he's going to a parachuting trip. But the police catch him on the border and he's sent to prison for a short while.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What's a parachuting trip? Like he's going like skydiving, like for fun? What does that mean? No, well, it's kind of like a parachuting organization that's kind of associated with the paras in the army. So it's sort of like an army division, but for kids. So it's like just fun, but you know, one day you might have to be sent over the wall and kill a bunch of capitalists.

And they do like a parachuting as like a weekend, like a last activity sort of thing? Yeah, yeah. So you can go for a Saturday meetup and you can fall out of a plane for a little bit. Sounds great fun. That sounds fun. Yeah, yeah, it's kind of fun. But he gets caught. He's a bit of an idiot, actually. He makes up some stupid story about meeting a girl in the Czech Republic and the cops don't buy it. And there's a reason for that, which is that the Stasi, or Stasi,

It's pretty much the most comprehensive police state in the world, definitely at the time, maybe even now, even considering some of the countries around today. And they've basically got on the payroll

Up to 200,000 informants at any one time, which is a country of about 16 million people. So it's an insane kind of apparatus. And they've got his best friends on the payroll and they dub him in and he gets in trouble. Now, it's not really sure where he gets his kind of right wing zeal or politics from to begin with.

But it becomes pretty clear that it might have come from prison. I mean, for one, he said he was designing and making tattoos for all these right wing prisoners. They have this is where it gets pretty weird, actually. So the prisons in East Germany, full of wrong ends and gangsters and whoever you might imagine in any country, but.

As a weird kind of rebel against the state, they were all really into Nazism, which is not how I would choose to show that I'm kind of a counterculture icon. But weirdly, it makes sense, right? That's how these guys kind of rose up against authoritarianism that they saw it.

the same authoritarianism that they thought had landed them in jail. And they were like, well, what's the opposite of this? And they kind of turned back to Nazism, which is bizarre. Uh, but he gets involved in this a little bit. There's some stuff about him dealing in Nazi memorabilia as well when he gets out of prison. And then when he gets out the first time he applies to leave again, and there's this kind of catch 22 situation where if you apply to leave, then you might get your application, uh,

Granted, but it also puts a black mark because if you want to leave, it implies that you want to leave and therefore... Yeah, you're not a true believer. Exactly. So it's a bit of a tightrope, your walk in there. And he tries to get out again. He gets caught again. He goes to prison for a couple of minor infractions. And by all accounts, he's sort of a small-time crim. He's not really doing anything bad. Sometime in prison, he gets visited by a guy called Georg Schneider.

Now, this is a guy from a division of the police called K1, and they were this kind of crack team of cops that were at the sharp end of the Stasi's information campaigns, kind of cracking down on political opposition, you know, wannabe counterinsurgents, things like this. And sometime around 1986, 1987, he gets an ultimatum.

And this guy Schneider says to Zontag, either you spy in prison for us or we'll really screw you up.

So despite being in prison with a bunch of very violent Nazis, he says, yeah, sure, whatever, I'll do a bit of spy work. And then soon after that, they bust him out of prison and he gets sent across the wall into the West. So he kind of rises the ranks of informant. And it's when he's in the West that he really starts to cause some trouble. And that's when he meets a guy called Michael Kunin, who is the leader of West Germany's Nazi movement at the time.

But so was he was he really like a firm believer in that? You know, it's just hard to parse how much of a believer you are if you're, you know, like I'm a Nazi, I'm all this. And then you go work for the for for the government. That's I don't know. I'm trying to suss that out, whether he was just convenience. Like, what's the way he's getting shunted around a bunch of prisons. Right. And these places are pretty grim. So.

he doesn't have he certainly doesn't have a future there i mean he gets work as a machinist then he gets work as a delivery driver and he kind of gets bumped down the hierarchy in every single job that he's got um when he's not in prison so he hates the system he rallies against the authority he's he's on a fast track to absolutely nothing so he's an opportunist i guess he's been given a chance to do something now whether he was a far right

Whether he was a true believer in Nazism per se at that time is hard to know, but he certainly does get deep into it the second he gets across the wall. And I think this is one of the interesting things, right? Schneider, and we'll get onto his relationship to Putin in a minute, he...

he's kind of taking a massive punt on this guy i mean he's he's pretty much a down and out he's got no significant sort of friends or family tying him down um he could just go across the wall disappear live his life never speak to the east germans again um but what he does next is pretty insane and he's going to pay it back about 50 fold um but yeah it's

It's a hard one to pass when he becomes a sort of quote unquote Nazi. But the second he gets over the Berlin Wall and he rocks up to this town south of Frankfurt called Langen and he meets this guy, Kunin, well, then he really kicks off.

yeah before we get into that side of his story let's take it back a tiny bit let's kind of figure out this the way that all of this stuff works um i would say that the story kind of blew open for me when i found a guy called klaus suchold so he was a former stasi agent

from Dresden who worked with Schneider and also he happened to meet Vladimir Putin at a football match one day and because Putin despite his cover as a translator spoke pretty shit German they spoke Russian to each other they got on really well Zuchold said that Putin was really jealous of Schneider's wife said he wasn't very good at his job um

wasn't sort of overly impressed by this young KGB agent from St. Petersburg or Leningrad as it was at the time. But between the three of them, they formed this kind of triangle of

working off the books it's kind of a black operation so no one the the KGB knows about it but the East Germans don't know about it so the Schneider the policeman there's Klaus Zuckold the the Stasi agent and there's the KGB guy Putin and they're all working to try to get informants contacts to try and disrupt the West really cause chaos um and this is something that

was being done beforehand, but definitely Putin stepped it up a couple of notches. I mean, Dresden wasn't Berlin, right? It wasn't the most important city in East Germany. While everyone else was messing around in Berlin,

Dresden became this really important kind of economic or black market center. So apparently the East Germans and the Russians were sending a lot of diamonds, dealing a lot of diamonds and firearms across those borders. This became a major free point for those illegal markets. They also had this company called Robotron, which is super interesting. It's like an East German IBM company.

But they just stole every single thing they had. So they made computers, they made sort of word processors and things, but it was all just completely stolen information from IBM, from HP, other companies like that. So...

I guess industrial espionage and black market gun running and diamond smuggling was Dresden's thing. So you had Putin and a guy that he was friends with, we'll call him Uzaltsev, Vladimir Uzaltsev, because that's what the name that he goes under. I actually found him too, but I think he might even be dead now. Not as a result of my work, but...

They were working out of the KGB's office in Dresden, and Putin at the same time had this kind of side project that he was hiring people of which Sontag is one of them. Does that kind of make sense? Yeah, sure. Yeah. So it's interesting that the whole story came about because my co-writer, he's a British guy. He found an old 2015 article written by a German investigative outlet called Korrektiv,

And it mentions on tag in like a single tiny paragraph buried down the bottom of sort of a story about Putin's early years. Um, and then once he came to Berlin, look through the Stasi archives, cause everyone can look for these millions and millions of documents, uh, this crazy totalitarian state right here. Then he found out, Whoa, shit. Yeah. Putin really was this guy's handler. Um, and he was picked up and jail and sent across, uh,

And yeah, I mean, it's a pretty wild story. We met Zushold in a little Greek restaurant, got him quite drunk. He got himself drunk pretty happily and started telling us all these wild tales about Putin and Zontag and how they used to hire students and professors and scientists and other people like that.

One of Putin's early roles, which is pretty crazy considering the stuff that he's done as leader of Russia, was he was looking for Novichok nerve agents, but specifically ones that could be administered through the penis. So he was... Wait, seriously? Yeah. He was doing research on how you could poison someone while you were shagging them. And that's...

And they did a lot of honey traps with like... Evil fucker. I know, right? I mean, of all the things, Chinguito didn't go like that, unfortunately, but...

When you were getting drinks with this guy, did he come across as someone like was he? First of all, where was it? And then also, was he just like he come across like a crackpot or were you like this guy is giving us the stuff that he's just wanted to get off his chest for like decades? Well, first, yeah, it was weird because first of all, we did think he was a bit of a crackpot. I mean, the guy is I guess he's in his mid 70s now. He's in a wheelchair. He's got a fake leg.

uh, because of something that happened to him that he thinks might have been a deliberate attack. Uh, he had a massive blood clot and lost the leg. Um, he's got kind of wild scarecrow hair. Um, and then the, the way that he tells stories is just like photographic. He'll just,

describe the exact moment. He can describe dates. When I asked him for follow-up on people's dates of birth, he was giving me immediately the date and the place of birth of all the main people in the story, and it all checked out. This guy is pretty precocious. And there was just so much...

He was worried about the German press basically because he survived what he thinks and what is pretty credibly an assassination attempt in 2016. He was on the train going from one part of East Germany to another and some guy stuck him with a needle, he says, and his arm blew up and he nearly died.

Interestingly, we spoke to someone at Bellingcat about this, and it would have figured out that the guys who did, I can't remember the exact killing, but there was a big assassination in maybe Britain at that time in 2016. And the two guys that did it, the two Russian officers, they were not far away from where he was exactly the week that he describes this thing happening. You mean, was that the two terrorists who just wanted to look at churches? Yeah.

That was, was that 2016? That might figure out. Yeah.

I'm not sure. I know that was one of the big ones in England. The guys in Salisbury, the Skripal one. Yeah, it could have been a couple years later. I'm not sure. Yeah, I mean, we saw some stuff that was like the thing that happened to Klaus was consistent with poisoning. And I mean, it certainly fits the bill. And yeah, a couple of the guys at the Bellingcat team said that their movements fit the story that he was saying, which is pretty crazy, right?

But for that reason, he didn't really want to speak to German media. But he spoke to us, which is pretty nuts. And I'm going to meet him this week, actually. I'm going to hear some more of his stories because he's got some more stuff to talk about. Oh, nice. Yeah. Yeah. So maybe there's more to come. But the idea that these the idea that these Germans and the KGB and the Soviet Union were in some way.

upholding the safety of ethnic minorities and Jewish people all over the world is kind of bunk. I mean, they funded... Kind of. Kind of.

I mean, they funded militant wings of the PLO. They funded the Baader-Meinhof gang. They funded all kinds of terrorist acts. They also defaced Jewish graves in West Germany in a deliberate attempt to kind of undermine the West German government. And interestingly, there's a moment where Adolf Eichmann, the famous Nazi war criminal, was on trial in Jerusalem, and the East Germans...

penned a fake letter from West Germans praising him and saying that he should be let off to try and sort of stir up chaos and cause a load of discord in the West, which, you know, if you've not been living under a rock for the last 15 years or so, you can see all of this stuff coming out today in what Putin does in the Kremlin.

Yeah, I mean, they've been doing that recent years, you know, propping up far-right groups and things like that. And then also, you know, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, like they, I mean, the Holocaust of World War II as well, like they, you know, they had their own sort of, you know, everyone knows about the U.S. and Nazi scientists, but

Russia did the same. I mean, God damn it. All over the place. The Soviet Union did the same thing, right? They were also hiring and taking, I forget the name of their, I mean, what the US one was, was Operation Paperclip, right? Paperclip, right. Yeah. Yeah. The Soviet Union had their own Operation Paperclip where they did the exact same thing. Yeah. Yeah. So there's this attempt to use the far right to sort of mobilize Russia.

either stir up chaos in the West or undermine their governments and say that they're anti-Semitic or racist or whatever. So this is not something that Putin invented, like far from it. The story of Zontag is really, really important because it shows how Putin as an individual was kind of really, really,

Obviously, I did a ton of research and spoke to a lot of people, including some people that worked with Putin at the time. And the theme running through it is that he wasn't really an idealist at all. He wasn't a true communist. The guy who worked with him in Dresden, this Vladimir Izaltov, he even says so in a really...

obscure book that he wrote years and years and years ago called the colleagues um now he goes by a different name does not live in russia and understandably um

Yeah, he was for like first and foremost, he was a statist, right? He was he believed in the absolute power of the state and in kind of almost a monarchical hierarchy of society. So that all checks out with today. And he he went nuts hiring as many people as he could. There's this 2000 published article.

biography of Putin called First Person, which is also really odd. I mean, this is when he's just getting into power as the leader. And he says himself that he was under tremendous pressure from Moscow to hire informants. And I spoke to a guy, this didn't make it into the story, actually, but there's huge, huge rumors about the way that Putin left the KGB and

when the Berlin Wall fell and it wasn't necessarily because he was under pressure or under any danger in East Germany but it was actually because he was hiring people who'd already been on the books from East Germans or the police just like hiring, hiring, hiring he was getting loads of trouble because he was getting bad information so yeah

Probably couldn't stand that up in the piece as much as I would like but it came from at least three sources So it's pretty it's pretty good information, but you can stand up in the podcast though, you know Fucking stuff in the podcast. No, this is this is a factual podcast guys So some tech goes across the wall, right? He's been sent there by this trio including Vladimir Putin and

And he hooks up with a guy called Mishael Coonan. And Coonan is not like Sontag, right? Sontag is this sort of rough and ready street thug. Loves to fight. Loves getting involved. He's kind of a working class. He's not intellectual at all. But this guy Coonan, he definitely is. He's...

founds all of these crazily named right-wing Nazi front organizations just outside Frankfurt. And his plan in the mid-80s is to make this town, Langen, Ausländerfrei, or foreigner-free. So they try and hound out the foreigners that are coming into the city. It just so happens to be that Langen is where there's this big refugee center for either East Europeans fleeing communism or

People from the Middle East fleeing various wars and then problems there. And it's also where East Germans land when they turn up. And so that is where Sontag first rocks up in Germany.

And they managed to go around beating people up, forming this sort of right-wing political movement. One of the names of the parties, he kind of creates this whack-a-mole of different names. I think one of them is called the Werewolves. Another one, interestingly, is called the German Alternative, which is in no way similar to the Alternative for Germany, which is the current right-wing party in Germany. But...

He basically is this tall, slim, black shirted, very he looks like a sort of Nazi from a Lee Riefenstahl movie. He looks crazily like a 40s character, but he's also gay. And when it comes out that he's gay in 1988, 1986, I think it is, it kind of splits the movement in two. So there are some people in this movement, this Nazi movement outside Frankfurt that

who think, well, that's fine. I mean, half the major Nazis back in the 1940s were actually gay, so we're kind of on board with this. And there's another half. The progressive wing of the Nazi party. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, and then... The neo-Nazi party, yeah. And then there's another group who are like, you know, they're thinking, well, we're Nazis, so we can't be gay. Yeah, the traditionalists. The traditionalists, yeah. So you've got the woke mob against the traditionalists, I guess you could say.

And then, but Sontag kind of cleaves to Kunin. He kind of pushes away a load of the competition. There is a guy that shot in the chest with a shotgun that is allegedly a suicide. And Sontag is kind of fingered for the crime. But no one really, no one can ever convict him for it. And so he rises up the ranks. Kunin at the time is suffering from HIV.

He dies in the late 80s, and then Sante becomes the big man. So this guy who was a sort of low-level street thug gangster, he's also working as a pimp, by the way, in a brothel in Frankfurt when he rocks up there. So he's kind of got the roll call of good, nice underworld jobs. He's suddenly one of the biggest Nazis in Europe. And...

So Schneider and Putin and Zuchel can't believe their luck, really, because they've just sent this random dude over the wall and suddenly he's just become this huge figure. But then the wall falls down.

And Sontag goes back over to his home in Dresden where the plan is this thing called Arbeitsplan Ost or Working Plan East. And their plan is that they're going to use the disaffected youth and the young people that have been left behind by the sudden collapse of the East German state. And they're going to use them as their guinea pigs and try and form an army that's going to sort of cause this Nazi renaissance. So really lovely stuff.

Uh, so he goes back. When you say the plan, is that his plan or is that through, um, you know, through the GRU or whoever Putin was working for after the wall fell? No, by this time. So by this time when the wall falls, Putin runs off in a hurry, like I said, so whether he was hiring too many people or whether he was just sort of under fire, no one really knows, but, um, there's some interesting stuff about him, um,

fleeing Dresden. There's a sort of angry mob coming from the KGB coming for the KGB in Dresden. Uh, there's all sorts of hairy moments for him there and he flees. And then he kind of starts on his path towards power first in St. Petersburg and then in, in, in Moscow. But, uh,

Yeah, Sontag himself just comes back off his own volition to try to cause this Nazi wave in the East. And he kind of does. And Schneider, who's his handler with, well, not with Zuckold at this point, it's just Schneider. Zuckold has his own story. We won't get into that, but he kind of switches sides, works for the capitalists, works for the communists. He's sort of this crazy turncoat towards the end of the Cold War.

so schneider uses zontag to go around beating up punks and left-wingers because he thinks it's a great way of cleaning up the streets so he likes to have hard left and hard right running around causing trouble with each other so that it sort of leaves this city in a state of equilibrium obviously that doesn't make any sense whatsoever the guy's a fucking idiot but

We get to a point where Sontag starts this campaign and he gets all of these kids. And we're back up to the story at the start of the episode where,

And he starts to rally to sort of so-called clean up the streets, right? So first off, he targets these guys called the Hützenspieler, the three-card tricksters that sort of line this main street in downtown Dresden going up to the train station. They're just like small-time scamsters, but a lot of them are foreigners. And so he starts with them, starts beating them up.

starts cuffing them, handing them over to cops. Obviously the cops are, you know, on the right wingers side most of the time. They don't like the foreigners either. Then he starts on Vietnamese cigarette sellers. And you've got to bear in mind that this is a city that's been flooded with people from the former communist world, right? So you've got Angolans, Mozambicans, Vietnamese, Koreans. So it's quite, it's quite, there are lots of foreigners in Dresden at the time.

And then he, despite Zontag's own history as a pimp, he goes after the brothels. Now this is a crazy time in the East.

Formerly, you wouldn't have even seen sex workers, you wouldn't have seen any kind of pornography, brothels, nothing like that. But suddenly, you've got kiosks selling Playboy and Hustler, you've got this little red light district setting up in downtown Dresden, you've got this crummy, shitty little brothel called the Sex Shopping Center, but it's run by two guys. One of them's a Greek, so that's a kind of red flag for these Nazis.

And they decide that they can, that's going to be their, their talisman for cleaning up streets. They're like, we're going to flatten this place. In reality, they're just a gang. They're just trying to shake these dudes down and they tell them to piss off. But that night it all goes wrong. They try to attack Zontag dies and,

And in the immediate aftermath, he becomes this huge rallying figure for the far right. There's gangs of street kids running around Dresden for like over a year in the early 90s. I mean, this is just a crazy time for Germany now.

Society is broken down in many ways. I spoke to a couple of guys in Dresden. There was a Pakistani born social worker and he said he got beaten up twice. He couldn't go out after 6 p.m. People were getting beaten up. There's a pregnant woman shaken down for cash and then beaten up on a doorstep. I mean, it's just like complete lawlessness.

And there's a guy called George Gomondai. He's a Mozambican. He's working at a local slaughterhouse. He gets chucked out of a streetcar, I think in 1993, killed. And his death really becomes the sort of low point of this entire movement. So thousands of people march through the center of Dresden,

uh, to, to try and highlight his death and how things have fallen apart in the former East. And then shortly after that, or shortly just at the round, the same time as that, there's this huge rally of skinheads and neo-Nazis in Sontag's memory. And it's the biggest neo-Nazi rally since 1945. And what's interesting about this is that,

And there's this grainy footage, right, that someone has shot of this huge march, there's thousands of people going through Dresden. And in this footage, you can see members of the current far right in Germany. That might be the AFD, which is sort of becoming something of a mainstream party these days. There is Pegida, it's basically Islamophobic movement straight out of Dresden. And there's plenty more people that just...

are current members of the German far right. So Sontag isn't just, he's not just a kind of like time capsule for this crazy time in the Cold War. He's really this genesis of a far right movement all over Germany that kind of rings true today. One of them, I went to his house, which is just, I mean, it's like three or four miles north of my own house here in central Berlin.

He's got SS signs all over the walls. When you ring his doorbell, it says, attention, SS area. And there's all these pictures of like werewolves and shit all over the walls. He didn't answer the doorbell. And then he rang me later on. I slipped a bit of paper under the door and he said, hey, I'd love to talk.

By the way, it's my birthday today. And I said, oh, great. Happy birthday. And he's like, no, no, no. It's Hitler's birthday. We're going to have a massive party. Do you want to come by? And I was like, I think I'm going to let that one go, mate. Wait, this was in your own free time or this was for a story? I was trying to get hold of him for this story. I know. I'm kidding. But isn't that illegal in Germany? Yeah, it is.

But there's some of these people that are just sort of abided. It's weird. There's a bunch of them. There's about half a dozen people that were in Sontag's crew back in the day that are still around now. I went down to that town, Langen, to try and find one of them. I think I found his doorbell under a slightly different name. His wife told me to piss off. I spoke to another guy who was going on about Sontag like he was a gripper.

and Kunin was nearer or whatever the Roman emperor is. And these guys are pretty open. They talk to the media all the time. I mean, it's really weird how there's this huge neo-Nazi movement, especially around here in Berlin. It's pretty nuts for all the talk of Berlin being a really liberal place.

Yeah, it's pretty nuts. But then obviously Putin's story as well. He gets to the top in St. Petersburg, becomes mayor, and loads of people say that that is with the help of the Ismailovskaya mafia, right? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, there's like Semyon Mogilevich. There's a bunch of stuff about their rise to power together, right?

Which I think we should do for another episode because I think it's a really interesting subject. People ask about, I think, Mogilevich, right? How do you say his name? Mogilevich? I don't know. People ask about him a lot in terms of doing an episode. But I know there's been a lot of documentaries about him and all that sort of stuff. And I feel like the information out there on him is very hazy. There's stuff that people out there would tell you he's the most powerful mafioso in the world.

um yeah yeah and I had someone of a friend who's not you know not in the journalism world like a year or two ago who was like think I can get you to him like he knew somebody who knew somebody it was a long story but uh I think it was 99% not possible but he did he did give an interview I think there's well there's like a shot of him playing chess on the roof with a with a journalist so he did give an interview and

Years ago, I think. But yeah, everything about him is so murky. But he is, I mean, there are a lot of people who will tell you he's the most powerful mafioso in the world. And these are people who really know their stuff. Yeah, and I mean, he's rumored to be so close to Putin at the time that he's coming through St. Petersburg and then sort of rising through the ranks of power in Moscow. I mean, you've got Nashi, this like weird...

Kind of movement. I think it means our thing in Russian and it's sort of like a youth movement of Putin and his party And then you've got the night wolves, right? There's this biker gang essentially, I think that they've been implied in all kinds of drug dealing and violence and stuff like this and I mean, it's just this constant attempt to cause chaos and so Discord and confusion over stuff. It's why you get people saying, you know, I

You still get this huge conversation about Ukraine, whether there's a conversation at all about Ukraine, whether it's been invaded or whether Russia has legitimate concerns or whatever. It all comes out of this attempt to just stir the pot and keep people kind of fighting each other in the information war. And it's something that Putin was doing all the way back in the 80s when he was this fresh face KGB agent.

It's really really interesting how like all of the offshoots of this one former gangster Sontag you can take it in all kinds of different directions And yeah, it's had a huge huge effect on today's society and and and the Ukraine war I mean the whole point of this war is allegedly the Kremlin saying they're gonna denazify Ukraine, but I mean this story is proof that Putin was actually not sifying Germany Yeah, 40 years ago

Right, it's not just that, right? It's right-wing parties and groups all across the world, essentially, that his government is propping up and supporting. Like you said, with this goal of fomenting chaos and just internal divisions and all that, you know?

Yeah, yeah. And it's amazing how much of that kind of manifests in gangs. I mean, it's the same thing going back to the Cold War, really, right? I mean, it was just a different ideology, but it was still totalitarianist. They were funding sort of quote-unquote left-wing groups just as much as right-wing groups. It just takes on this...

I don't know, like an unhinged level when you're invading countries and you're trying to sort of pull the wool over the world's eyes and say that that is because of these bogus reasons. But yeah, that is the story of Zontag. I don't know. I mean, I feel like I want people to ask questions about this as well because there's so much that...

There's so much like deep information that was so hard to put in the story. I mean, there's thousands and thousands of files that we went through. People that we met who were dead ends that didn't want to speak. There's this former colleague results of who's living in. Well, he's he's if he is living, he's living in an East European country right now. I think he knows a lot more than he was willing to tell me.

But yeah, there's just such an interesting subject. And hopefully I'll have a little bit more when I meet Klaus this week as well, because he's a pretty fun drinking partner as far as anything else goes.

Yeah, I mean, we can also, if you guys email us at theotherworldpodcast at gmail.com. If you're interested, we can do a little bonus episode on it for the Patreon, answering any questions or having Sean go into details more about this story where he was just really talking to his friends, who he agrees with a lot of. Yeah.

It's what I'm doing every day. I love it. Yeah. But, uh, yeah, hope you guys enjoyed as always bonus stuff. I think it's interesting next week. I think I have a story that's, that's us focused on, uh, on similar issues and the, um, the gangsters. I mean, this is pre, I think it's pre Nazi party existing. So it's in the twenties, but it's about some gangsters who, uh, in the U S who had enough of these, uh,

far right wing efforts to sort of stamp out their businesses and took matters into their own hands and won.

So that's a pretty good story. And we'll have that for you next week. So hope you guys enjoy this. As always, Instagram, YouTube, all that stuff, bonus episodes, patreon.com slash normalpodcast. Please give us ratings, but only give us good ratings. If you're going to give us a bad rating, don't rate us. But if you're going to give us a good rating, then please do rate us. I think that's it. Yeah, cool.

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