Between 1994 and 1995, Yaron Svoray, an Israeli-born Jew, spent nearly a year infiltrating Germany's neo-Nazi machinery. Last night in the University's McLeod Hall auditorium, Svoray spent an hour recounting his story to an attentive audience of at least 300.
While visiting Germany in 1994, Svoray met a former Nazi officer who took him for a German World War II veteran. The officer introduced Svoray to his nephew, the leader of a neo-Nazi skinhead movement. The nephew, who understood from his uncle that Svoray was a fellow skinhead, led Svoray to a room where several young men in Nazi uniforms were watching a pornographic film that depicted the rape of an eight year-old girl by Nazi soldiers.
Svoray posed as an Australian journalist writing an article for an American right-wing magazine.
He said he entered easily into the inner circle of neo-Nazi leadership. "Every group of neo-Nazis I met was eager to talk to me," he added.
Svoray's breakthrough came when he befriended an important Nazi leader who introduced him to a number of "shady characters," among them a man who had served as Adolf Hitler's valet and the daughter of the man who had masterminded the infamous Nazi death camp machinery.
He came very close to being discovered several times. Svoray's associates once received a phone call from an associate of the leading American neo-Nazi, Willis Carter. Carter's associate demanded to be sent an issue of the journal that Svoray was supposedly reporting for by the next day. In the course of 24 hours, "seven secretaries and a rabbi sat down and created a 12-page right-wing magazine," he said.
In the end, Svoray managed to escape without being discovered.
Svoray said he is cautious about whether the German neo-Nazi movement poses an immediate threat to the world. "I don't think that the Nazis are going to march through the Brandenberg gates tomorrow and re-establish the old glory," he said.
He added that Germans maintain many of their discriminatory feelings, despite calling them by a new name.
"Do the Germans still feel anti-Semitic?" Svoray asked. "Today they [discriminate] against foreigners" such as Turks, he said.
He added that many Germans are embarrassed about their Nazi past. "The one thing you never do if you're a young German is ask Grandpa what he did during the [Second World] War," Svoray said.
He also offered advice on how to avoid another Holocaust.
"If you learn one thing from this, let it be that at some time in your life you'll have to make a choice," he said. "You'll have to forget everything else and do the right thing."
Svoray's audience, composed mainly of University students, appreciated his story. "It was Indiana Jones-ish -- only better, and real," said Hillel Jewish Center secretary Mike Kaplan.
Hillel sponsored Svoray's speech.
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