The Underworld Podcast - Vladimir Putin, the KGB and the German Nazi Gangster Who Was a Communist Spy

Episode Date: July 12, 2022

Rainer Sonntag was just your run-of-the-mill, anti-state East German petty criminal—until a black ops team headed by then-KGB agent Vladimir Putin helped turn him into one of Europe's leading neo-Nazi leaders. When the Berlin Wall fell, Putin fled to Saint Petersburg and Sonntag returned to his hometown of Dresden. There he led a gang of skinhead thugs to shake down and beat up foreigners. But when he targeted a downtown brothel, things got bloody real quick. Then he and Putin's legacies really began. Read more about Putin, Sonntag and their violent rises to power in Sean's story for The Atavist, "Follow the Leader" - https://magazine.atavist.com/follow-the-leader-nazi-putin-sonntag-cold-war/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th, the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th, and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th.

Tickets on sale now at Yamavat Theater.com, only at Yamava Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary. You in? Must be 21 to enter. Ambition comes in all shapes and size. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Neo-Nazi Reynastag turns to his three dozen skinhead acolytes,

huddled beneath the fading neon sign of the Form 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 31, 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 organised crime and turning them over to cops. At their helm is Zontag, 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 Gorbitts, where Swastikers and Hitler salutes are graffeted all over the walls. The kids of Gorbitts 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 Gourbett's 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 centre of town called Desmond. sex shopping center. Rumor has it, the brothels 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 Nazi has promised to flatten their store and the gang is set to attack at 12 a.m. Matt's and Simeonidis have spent the afternoon preparing. They repair the sex shopping center's metal shutters, usher out Johns and stash baseball bats beside 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 Simeonidas. Simeonidas 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, shopfronts, 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 Ciminators. Shoot, you coward. The skinheads, will they sense a shift in the balance, and they creep out from their hiding spots to join their Nazi Sengali leader. Sontag keeps advancing. Simeonidis retreats. He puts one shoe in the footwell as he does. But Sontag is on him, and he's holding the passenger's door with the Mercedes open, ready to strike.

Mats aims a can of pepper spray at Sontag right across Simeonidis's bow. There's a puff of gas, confusion, and in the cloud the Nazis hear a bang, and the sound of their sheriff fall into the asphalt, his head blown half off, a pool of blood thickening on the cold street. They run to him while Mats and Siminidis 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. Rana Zontag'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 Zontag'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 Vladimir 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 facts and that is why we don't earn the big substack bucks. Yeah, I think our new tagline maybe shouldn't mention our slow descent into madness. It's just 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 Cinguito, which I know is what everyone really wants. Yeah, that's where the money is. But Patreon.com slash the Underworld podcast. You know, you guys can join up $3 a month, support, $5 a month bonuses and all that sort of stuff.

But yeah, maybe we should have Toby Mews 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 a video piece on that about one of these animal rescues. That's pretty crazy. Oh, also, I got a bunch of emails telling me I should have gotten the, uh, the, the, Sturgeon joke you made about Nicholas Sturgeon and all that last week and uh letting me know that it was actually a great joke and uh I just I want to acknowledge the error of my ways so um 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 that is a great joke but

yeah apparently yeah well this shows a little different anyway because you might have read my recent story the activist about rana zontag this neo-nazi gangster but he was 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 cracked 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 spycraft, but I mean, who isn't, right? 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 Rana 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 kind of work as paradise. 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 I think he sings a ribald song about

the Soviet Union at a football match 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 to fight with a kid in an ice skating rink just punches a kid in the face for no reason apparently and he signs up

up to a bunch of these youth organizations. There's a parachuting organization. There's also a sports one. There's the young, 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 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, uh, try to. 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 parishooting 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 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 dobb 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-ins 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 turn back to Nazism, which is bizarre. 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 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 you're walking 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. It's not really doing anything bad. But 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 a cracking down on political opposition, you know, wannabe, counterinsurgents, things like this. And sometime around 1986, 97, he gets an ultimatum. And this guy Schneider says to, says to a Zontag, either you spy in prison for us or will really screw you up. So despite being in prison with a bunch of very violent Nazis, he says, 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 Michelle Coonan, who is the leader of West Germany's Nazi movement at the time. But, so was he really like a firm believer in the, 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 the government that's, I don't know, like I'm trying to suss that out whether he, what's just convenience, like what's the, well, 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 and every single job that he's got when he's not in prison. So he hates the system. He rallies against authority. 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 on to his relationship to Putin in a minute.

He's kind of taking a massive punt on this guy. I mean, he's pretty much a down and out. He's got no significant sort of friends of family tying him down. He could just go across the wall, disappear, live his life, never speak to the East Germans again. But what he does next is pretty insane, and he's going to pay it back about 50-fold. But yeah, 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, Coonan, or then he really kicks off. But 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. I would say that the story kind of blew open for me when I found a guy called Klaus Sushold. 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, 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 working off the books. It's kind of a black operation. So no one, the KGB knows about it, but the East Germans don't know about it. So the Schneider, the policeman, There's Klaus Zucold, 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. 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. But while everyone else was messing around in Berlin, Trezden 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 three point for those illegal markets. They also had this company called Robotron, which is super interested.

It's like an East German IBM, but they just stole every single thing they had. So they made computers. They made sort of word processes and things, but it was all just completely stole and 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 Usalzv, Vladimir Azulzv, 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. Cool. 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 Corrective. And it mentions Zontag in like a single tiny paragraph buried down the bottom of sort of a story about Putin's early years.

And then once he came to Berlin, looked through the Stasi archives because everyone can look through these millions and millions. of documents of this crazy totalitarian state right here. Then he found out, whoa, shit. Yeah, Putin really was this guy's handler. And he was picked up and jail and sent across. And yeah, I mean, it's a pretty wild story. We met Zuchold 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 making, he was doing research on how you could poison someone. one while you were shagging them. And that's, like, and they, they did a lot of honey traps with,

evil fucker. I know, right? I mean, of all, of all the things, um, chingrito didn't go like that, unfortunately. But, uh, when you, 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, did he come across like a crackpot? Or were you like, this guy's, you know, giving us the stuff that he 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 because of something that happened to him that he thinks might have been a deliberate attack. He had a massive blood clot and lost a leg. He's got kind of wild scarecrow hair. And then the way that he tells stories is just like photographic.

He'll just... get you more of what you value. Comfort in. It's calling your name. Save on the stain. Oh, and free waffles are yours to claim. Book direct at storeshiltails.com. The jurors sat in a dark room,

hands resting on a Ouija board. They weren't guessing. They were asking the victim who killed them. Sounds unbelievable, right? But it happened. And that's just one of thousands of stories waiting for you on Morning Cup of Murder. Hi, I'm Karina B. B. Meesterfer, and every single day on Morning Cup of Murder, I bring you a real, chilling true crime story connected to that exact day in history.

From Killer Cannibal Brothers to the Boy Scout who was obsessed with the occult and the strange story of the bloody hammer in the frozen cabin. These aren't the cases you've heard a hundred times. They're the ones that make you stop and think, how have I never heard this before? With over 2,500 episodes and a brand new story each and every single day, Morning Cup of Murder becomes part of your routine fast. If you like your coffee hot but your bones chilled, then sit back and start your day with a Morning Cup of Murder. Go listen to Morning Cup of Murder wherever you get your podcasts. And remember, stay safe.

Describe the exact moment. He can describe dates. When I asked him to like for follow up on people's dates of birth, he was giving me like immediately the like the date and the place of birth of all the main people in the in the story and it all checked out like this guy is pretty precocious um and there was just so much he was worried about the german press basically because he survived uh what he thinks

and was pretty credibly an assassination attempt in 2016 uh 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 Bellingat 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 in Britain at that time in 2016

and the two guys that did it, the two like Russian officers, they were not far away from where he was exactly the week that he describes this thing happening. You mean the, was that the two tourists who just wanted to look at churches? That was, was that 2016? That might figure out, yeah. I'm not sure.

I know that was one of the big ones in, in England. The guys in Salisbury, the script-al 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 Bellingat team said that their movements

fit the story that he was saying which is pretty crazy 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 the the idea that the East 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 I mean they funded militant wings of the PLO they funded the Bardem-Meynhoff gang they funded all kinds of terrorist acts They also defaced Jewish graves in West Germany and deliberate attempt to kind of undermine the West German government. And interestingly, there's a moment where Adolf Eichmann was on 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, probably have 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, Russia, 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 Operation 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,

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. But the story of Zontag is really, really important because it shows how Putin as an individual was kind of really, I mean, 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's not really, he wasn't really an idealist at all.

He wasn't a true communist. the guy who worked with him in Dresden, this Vladimir result, so he even says so in a really obscure book that he wrote years and years and years ago called the colleagues. Now he goes by a different name, does not live in Russia, understandably. But, yeah, he was, like first and foremost, he was a statist, right? 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 went nuts hiring as many people as he could. There's this 2000 published 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. make it into the story actually but there's huge huge rumors about the way that Putin left the KGB in the in the night 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's getting loads of trouble because he was getting bad information um 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 good information. You can stand up in the podcast, though. You can stand up any old fucking stuff in the podcast. No, this is a factual podcast, guys.

So, Sontag goes across the wall, right? He's been sent there by this trio, including Vladimir Putin. And he hooks up with a guy called Michelle Koonen, and Koonen is not like Sontag, right? Sontag is this sort of rough and ready street. thug loves a fight loves getting involved uh 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 uh just outside frankfort and his plan in the mid-80s is to make this town langen uh elselander fjel foreigner free uh so they try and hound out the foreigners that are coming

into the city that 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 Zontag 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 Lenny Riefen-style movie. He looks crazily like a 40s character. But he's also gay. And when it comes out that he's gay in 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, 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 The progressive wing of the Nazi party.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and then, Neo-Nazi party. Yeah. And then there's another, 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 traditionalist, yeah.

So you've got the woke, the woke mob against the traditionalist, I guess. And then, but Sontag kind of cleaves to Koonan. 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 finger for the crime but no one really no one can ever convict him for it and so he rises up the ranks Cooner at the time is suffering from HIV he dies in the late 80s and then Sontag 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 Schneider and Putin and Zuchold 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 Arbites Plan 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. So he goes back. But is this, when you say the plan, is that his plan or is that through, 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 there's some interesting stuff about him fleeing Dresden.

There's a sort of angry mob coming from the KGB, coming for the KGB in Dresden. 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 Moscow. But 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 Zichold 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 with the capitalist, works with the communist.

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. 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.

And he starts to rally to sort of so-called clean up the streets, right? So first off, first off, he targets these guys called the Huchenspieler, the three-card tricksters, that sort of lying this main street in downtown Dresden going up to the train. 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 being flooded with people from the former communist world, right? So you've got Angolans, Mozambicans,

Vietnamese, Koreans. So it's quite, there are lots of foreigners in Dresden at the time. And then he, despite Sontag'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, 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 that's going to be their talisman for cleanup 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 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. Society has broken down in many ways. I spoke to a couple of guys in Dresden. there was a Pakistani born social work and he said he got beaten up twice you 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 Gomondy. He's a Mozambican. He's working at a local slaughterhouse. He gets chucked out of a street car, 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 centre of Dresden to try and highlight his death and how things have fallen apart in the former East.

And then shortly just around 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 1940. And what's interesting about this is that 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,

Achtung, SS-Kibit, which is like 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 know. I'm kidding. But isn't that, like, isn't that illegal in Germany? How? 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, there's like half a dozen people that were in Sontag's crew back in the day that's 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 Koonen was near 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 Islamovska mafia, right? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, there's like Semyon Mogilevich, there's a bunch of stuff about their rise to power together, which I think we should do for another episode because I think it's really interesting subject. People ask about, I think Mogilevich, right? How do you say, Mogileav? I don't know. Yeah. 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. You know, there's stuff that people out there who would tell you he's like the most powerful mafioso in the world. 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, I think I can get you to him. Like he knew somebody who knew somebody. It was a long story. But I think it was 99% not possible. But he did give an interview, I think. There's like a shot of him playing chess on the roof with a journalist. So he did give an interview.

Wishing you could be there live for the big game, soaking up the atmosphere in the crowd. But too often, life gets busy. Or the price holds you back. Price line is here to help you make it happen. With millions of deals on flights, hotels, and rental cars, you can go see the game live. Don't just dream about the trip. Book it with price. Download the Priceline app or visit Priceline.com.

Actual prices may vary, limited time offer. It's baseball, but so much more. Go bananas for Banana Ball with ESPN on Disney Plus. The greatest show in sports? Are you kidding me? It's the phenomenon everyone's talking about. Catch the Savannah bananas and other fan favorite teams all season long. With select games streaming with ESPN on Disney Plus.

Let's go! U.S. residents, 18 plus only. Select Banana Ball games available to all Disney Plus subscribers. Terms apply. Years ago, I think. Okay. But yeah, everything about him is so, 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 Nashy, 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 walls, 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, 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-faced KGB agent. It's really, really interesting how 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 the Ukraine war, I mean, the whole point of this war is allegedly the Kremlin saying they're going to denazify Ukraine. But, I mean, this story is proof that Putin was actually nazifying Germany about 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 manifest in gangs. I mean, it was 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 world over the world's eyes and say that that is because of these bogus reasons but yeah that is that is the story of zontag

um I don't know I mean I feel like I want to 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, Zoltsev, who's living in, well, 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 the Underworld podcast 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, you know, this story where he was just really talking to his friends who he agrees with a lot of. Yeah. That's what I'm doing every day. Yeah, I love it.

Yeah. But, yeah, I hope you guys enjoyed, as always, bonus stuff. I think it's interesting. Next week, I think I have a story that's U.S. focused on similar issues and the gangsters. I mean, this is pre-I think it's pre-Nazi party existing, so it's in the 20s. but it's about some gangsters in the U.S. who had enough of these 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, you know, Instagram, YouTube, all that stuff, bonus episodes, patreon.com slash a novel podcast. Please, you know, give us ratings,

but only give us good ratings. So we're going to give us a bad rating, don't rate us. Yeah, absolutely. If you're going to give us a good rating, then please do rate us, you know? I think that's it. Yeah, sorry. Yeah. Yeah.

Cool. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile, the message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop. With Mint, you can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying, no judgments, but that's weird. Okay, one judgment. Anyway, give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Up front payment of $45 for three-month plan, equivalent to $15 per month required.

Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at mintmobile.com. Security program on spreadsheets, new regulations piling up, and audit dread? It's time for Vanta. Vanta automates security and compliance, brings evidence into one place and cuts audit prep by 82%. Less manual work, clear visibility, faster deals, zero chaos. Call it compliance or call it compliance. Get it? Join the 15,000 companies using Vanta to prove trust. Go to VANTA.com slash com.