Guardian Unlimited | Arts features | White off the scale

They're loud, proud and everywhere from East Germany to West Virginia. Neil Mackay spends six months getting to know the white supremacist practitioners of Nazi Hate Rock. Henrik Ostendorf is holed up in an attic room of a dilapidated hotel in a provincial town near Leipzig in the former East Germany. Riot police surround the floodlit building and attack dogs have closed off every exit. The hotel has been taken over by more than a thousand German neo-Nazis - 'musical terrorists' as they are classified by the German police - for the staging of an illegal gig. British white power band Whitelaw will headline the show and are about to take the stage. Lurking in the dark, Ostendorf is watching the scene outside as the police arrest several of his 'comrades' and bundle them into waiting vans. Known to his friends as Ozzie, the crop-haired and bespectacled Ostendorf is one of the leaders of the youth wing of the rising NDP, Germany's main far-right party, and a key figure in Europe's white power scene. He eyes the police outside with an expression of pity and contempt on his face. From the attic, Whitelaw are audible on stage chanting 'Death to ZOG, death to ZOG' over their primitive punk rock. ZOG stands for 'Zionist Occupied Government' - the description the far right give the governments, police forces and media of the western world. It is one of their many totems of hate and conspiracy.(...) Neo-Nazis such as Ostendorf are on the rise across Europe and in the United States. In Britain, the British National Party won more than 800,000 votes at the last European elections. In Germany, they have seats in state parliaments and are doing better, electorally, than at any time since the Second World War. Italy is also seeing a marked upswing in votes for the far right. Increasingly central to the political success of parties such as the German NPD - the political grandchild of Hitler's National Socialist German Workers Party - and the BNP is white power music. Bands include Whitelaw, Strike force 28 and Grinded Nig (whose album Freezer Full of Nigger Heads features songs such as 'Jackhammered Nigger Pussy'). Their records are available from most neo-Nazi record distributors online.