Once 'a fanatic Nazi', Matthias Adrian began to have doubts, and then found out the hard way that the neo-Nazi movement never lets one of its own go without a fight. Now he helps others escape the extreme-right scene

The man propping up the end of the bar could be an extra from the The Quiet Man, wearing a cloth cap, a sizeable Claddagh ring and supping a pint of Guinness.

He loves The Dubliners and talks enthusiastically about James Connolly as he sits in the Blarney Irish Pub in Berlin. But Matthias Adrian is not Irish. He is a former neo-Nazi. He defaced synagogues with swastikas and recruited young people to the extreme-right movement. He is only 26 but has been arrested 12 times. The German secret service called him "a fanatic Nazi".

Two years ago he left the extreme right scene. A year ago he had to flee his home to escape his former comrades. Today he works for Exit Deutschland, a programme to help neo-Nazis escape Germany's extreme-right scene. Matthias Adrian found out the hard way that the neo-Nazi movement never lets one of its own go without a fight.

He was born in a small town in the state of Hessen in central Germany, an area that's been overwhelmingly Catholic since St Bartholomew and his monks arrived there in the 12th century.

"I break all the stereotypes of neo-Nazis," he says. "I come from a big Catholic family, well-off, nationalistic and very conservative." But it was a thin line between the arch-conservative rhetoric spouted by his grandfather and neo-Nazism.

He began reading the extreme-right Nationalzeitung newspaper when he was 14, and he was fascinated by the political articles criticising the system of denazification and re-education devised by the Allies to return post-war Germany to normality.

It struck a chord with Adrian. He now understood why his grandfather's stories of the good old days in Hitler's Germany were so at odds with the version of history taught by his 1968 generation teachers at school.

"I believed that everyone was trying to re-educate me," he says.

His first attempt to join a neo-Nazi youth group as a teenager was stopped by his outraged father, but Adrian continued to read extreme-right materials. When he turned 21, he joined the Young National Democrats (JN), the youth organisation of the extreme-right National Democratic Party (NPD) the German government is fighting to ban.

"I had so much information in my head. I had been reading about this since I was 14. I was also so naïve, like a child with a new toy," he says.

He never had any time for skinhead street-brawlers within the scene and was always an "ideological head".

The organisation recognised his potential, and Adrian became a JN leader, recruiting new members in school yards with leaflets and tapes of neo-Nazi bands. The forbidden nature of the extreme-right scene combined with youthful curiosity meant he had no trouble finding fresh blood.

Soon the neo-Nazi scene was his life. He met his girlfriend at a neo-Nazi event, and the couple were soon spray-painting swastikas on synagogues in their spare time. He was a firm believer in the Jewish World Conspiracy, the neo-Nazi theory that Jews control the world from Wall Street to the White House. Later he became a frequent public speaker at NPD events, earning the nickname "The Screecher" for imitating Hitler's bombastic public speaking style.

"I didn't accept the laws of Germany or the German government because as far as I was concerned, the Third Reich was the legal government of Germany," he says.

He pulls out an ID card from this period. Staring out from the photo is an unrecognisable figure with a Hitler moustache and hate-filled eyes. His signature is in the old German script favoured by Nazis and ends in a small swastika.

The turning point came in 1999 when his girlfriend started to have doubts about their life in the neo-Nazi movement. Eventually she left the scene, leaving Adrian with a choice between his girlfriend and his beliefs.

Cracks began to appear. In Internet chatroom discussions with neo-Nazis and anti-Nazis his ideology began to unravel further.

In January 2000, he decided to leave the JN and suffered a nervous breakdown.

"I was left sitting in ruins of my life, like the Germans after the war. How could I have believed in Nazism?" he says. At the time, his former comrades left him alone, convinced that Adrian would remain within the scene in some form. But after he was arrested by police and confessed to his neo-Nazi activities in court, the neo-Nazis retaliated.

His name and address appeared on a "traitor" list on the Internet, his girlfriend was attacked by a skinhead gang and, exactly a year ago, the couple fled to Berlin.

Adrian began working with Exit Deutschland, an initiative to support neo-Nazis who make the dangerous decision to leave the scene. He felt lucky to have escaped on his own, now he was determined to help others do the same.

"People who want to leave are put under pressure and threatened because they could put a lot of people in prison," says Sven Poetsch, a counsellor at Exit.

"They have information about people supplying banned materials, such as extreme-right CDs, and often are involved in prostitution." Callers to the Exit hotline are screened and asked about their activities in the scene. This is then cross-checked with the authorities and, if the caller is genuine and appears to want to get out, they are taken into the programme.

In a small number of cases, if a person's life is at risk, Exit counsellors take them into sheltered housing and give them a new identity.

Once in the programme, candidates receive psychological treatment, political re-education and even pay visits to concentration camps.

"We don't expect people to give up the ideology overnight. There are people with a religious attachment to neo-Nazism. One man prayed in front of a picture of Hitler every morning," says Poetsch.

The rise of the extreme-right in Europe is not just a German phenomenon, as politicians like Jean-Marie Le Pen and Jörg Haider have shown, but it is better organised here than anywhere else in Europe. It is also more violent, responsible for at least 100 murders in the last decade.

The counsellors at Exit know their work is dangerous, but the results are encouraging. In its first 18 months, the privately-funded organisation has taken on 68 cases, and so far 22 people have succeeded in starting new lives.

"Every person we get out is one person less. Each neo-Nazi is a potential murderer or would have recruited more people," says Poetsch.

That's the thought that haunts Adrian, that neo-Nazis he trained are still out there recruiting others and killing.

"I have taken part in talks where young neo-Nazis have quoted from arguments I developed and published in neo-Nazi magazines," he says, his voice cracking. "My words are still there, my theories are still being used against me."

Matthias Adrian is a driven man, and not even the recent death of his girlfriend in a train accident has diminished his need to make up for his past.

"I don't say I am a victim, I was a perpetrator," he says. "But I was used, and that's the reason I'm working against neo-Nazis now."