THERE was not a skinhead to be seen in this Baltic town at the heart of Germany’s neoNazi revival. No thugs with steel-tipped paratroop boots, no ranting xenophobes.

Yet the signs are clear: the far Right is on the march in Eastern Germany.

The neo-Nazis, picking up an astonishing level of support on the home turf of Angela Merkel, the Chancellor, look set to win a big chunk of seats in regional elections on Sunday. And to make sure that middleclass voters do not panic ahead of the ballot, they have donned camouflage.

“What did you expect,” asked Michael Andrejewski, the new face of the extreme Right. “That I would beat your brains out with a baseball bat?” Blinking from behind gold-framed glasses, Herr Andrejewski looked as threatening as a maths teacher — unlike the five young men who formed a protective semicircle around their leader. “You’ll be wanting to move along,” said one of them with menacing politeness. One quickly got the point. The slogan on his T-shirt read: “Granddad was right”.

According to the latest opinion polls the NPD, the National Party of Germany, is poised to win between 4.8 per cent and 7 per cent of the vote this weekend in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the lush flatland that borders the Baltic Sea.

Since most Germans are afraid of admitting that they intend to vote for neo-Nazis, the betting is that the party will easily win the 5 per cent needed to capture parliamentary seats. It will be the second region, after Saxony, to have neo-Nazi members of parliament — a slap in the face for Frau Merkel, whose political constituency is in Mecklenburg.

Young Germans are leaving the area in droves in search of work. In East German days there were more than 20,000 people in Anklam, mainly fishermen and factory workers. Now there are barely 15,000. “It was the Leftists that got out,” says Herr Andrejewski, 47, who is likely to become a regional MP. “But our people stayed.”

That is only part of an extraordinary story — the economic transformation of the far Right. In Anklam and neighbouring Baltic villages ultranationalists own internet cafes and drink delivery services. They run music shops that are stacked with far Right rock bands. “There is a whole network of right-wing-run companies, above all in the local building business,” says Günther Hoffmann, who set up an association in Anklam to monitor the rise of the neo-Nazis. Small hotels are being bought up. A giveaway paper called The Island Messenger is edited and published by the extreme Right and is widely read.

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This economic power — in a region where unemployment is more than 20 per cent — has translated into political clout. Firms in right-wing hands hire right-wing sympathisers as apprentices. Slowly but surely, neo-Nazis have become an indispensable part of society in northeast Germany. They sponsor sports competitions and dance evenings. The baker offers loaves with smooth brown crusts called glatze, the German for skinhead. There is no niche of society here that has not been infiltrated.

“It began with Blood & Honour rock concerts in the 1990s,” says Benedikt, a middle-aged computer specialist who did not want to be photographed, “and we thought it would go away when the teenagers grew up. But now they bring their children [to meetings] and marry each other.”

One proud neo-Nazi father gave his daughter a black doll for her third birthday — and a bat to beat it with.

The structural change came when the skinheads from the so-called Kameradschaften — disciplined, potentially violent gangs — decided to go mainstream and join the NPD about five years ago.

The posters that deck out every street corner say things like “Tourists welcome — asylum seekers out,” or depict a fist under the slogan “Enough!”

The NPD, which had been shipping tonnes of pamphlets in from its publishing houses across the country, is squeezing out the other parties. The Christian Democrats of Chancellor Merkel — in power in Berlin but not in Mecklenburg, have become almost invisible.

It is the likes of Herr Andrejewski who understand the mechanics of turning public frustration into a political weapon. He is not a maths teacher but a lawyer, and is using his legal skills to set up an advisory office for those on social welfare — the NPD intends to flood employment offices with official complaints and paralyse their work. The worse it gets for Mecklenburg, the better the far Right can present itself as the answer for those seeking social justice.

As for Hitler and the Nazi era, Herr Andrejewski would rather not comment. “Statements on this subject can drop you in legal hot water,” he said with just the flicker of a smile.

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