From Tammy Wild in Berlin

According to police investigators, he was planning a bomb attack at a ceremony to lay the foundation stone of a new synagogue in Munich. His targets included Jewish dignitaries and Germany's president Johannes Rau. During raids in Munich, northern Brandenburg and the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, police seized around 1.7kg of TNT which formed part of a haul totalling 14kg of explosives.

The 30-strong group around Wiese, which included four women aged between 17 and 21, was preparing for its terror attacks by spying systematically on Social Democratic politicians and left-wing groups in the Munich area. One of the women, it has been revealed,

was employed in the Post Bank and had extracted information about the bank accounts of anti-fascists and left-wingers. A month into the investigation led by the federal state prosecutor in Karlsruhe into the terror plot, a further 12 arrest warrants have been issued.

In the past, fascist activity in Anklam amounted to groups of nazi louts swaggering through the streets but those days are over. Now they have establish themselves right in the centre of town of 15,000 people. Just five minutes away from Anklam's historic Hanseatic town hall stands their shop with the illuminated sign: "New Dawn - Streetwear, Music and More".

In the window are two black hooded tops of the type worn by every other youngster in the town. Hanging from tightly packed clothes stands is a variety of T-shirts promoting nazi hate rock bands. In the shop itself, next to a collecting tin for "comrades in need", are copies of the latest edition of the 48-page nazi rag, Der Fahnentrdger (The Flag Carrier), with its glossy cover in the black, white and red of the Nazi party. The magazine, printed at the main printshop in nearby Wolgast, does not bother to hide its politics, which its cover proclaims as "offensive national socialism".

Business in the shop seems perfectly normal until one examines the clientele: two skinheads drinking coffee and chatting with the two blonde women behind the counter. Their conversation ends abruptly. "Talking to journalists is out of the question," says the older skinhead, who is aged about 30 and has only one eye. "The press does nothing but lie," he adds.

The fact that Wiese's arrest has put them in the media spotlight visibly irritates these nazis. "We don't know Martin Wiese and just because he was born here doesn't mean we have to know him," sulks one of the women. The word "Kameradschaft" is met by a shaking of heads and stony silence.

Every T-shirt and every jacket in "New Dawn", however, spells out the clear message: "Right-wing extremist and proud of it". It puts its bearers on the very rim of legality. To those unfamiliar with the nazi scene, the numbered codes on the T-shirts are almost impenetrable but to those in the know the message is all too obvious. For example, one can buy a sweat shirt for £30 with the legend "28 - we are not going to let them ban us". This is a reference to the outlawed nazi skinhead organisation Blood and Honour, the numbers "2" and "8" standing for "B" and "H".

Many goods are only available to a well initiated circle of customers but the turnover of nazi material is not small. In summer 2001, one nazi ordered 350 copies of a new CD, Republik der Strolche, by the Berlin nazi band Landser. The fact that it is illegal to buy Landser's CDs adds to the excitement for the retailers and customers alike. The lyrics on this infamous CD are currendy the subject of court proceedings in Berlin where three of the band's alleged members are charged with belonging to a criminal gang and incitement to racial hatred.

The nazi who bought the 350 CDs two years ago need not have worried about diem gathering dust in Anklam because there is a well established market for this trash in the 20-strong Kameradschaftsbund Anklam (KBA), the outfit to which Wiese belonged before he decamped to Munich.

Support for the nazis took a big leap forward after regular concerts were held in the nearby village of Biinzow in the mid 1990s. These concerts proved popular with nazis from Germany, Britain and Scandinavia and have attained near legendary status thanks to videos of them being circulated across Europe. These videos are real X-certificate material, showing black-clad, muscle-bound, nazi skinhead "security staff" posing with Hitler salutes while another 600 bawling and half-naked boneheads go crazy to the sound of the British nazi band No Remorse playing their infamous "hit", "Barbecue in Rostock" - all in front of a swastika flag on stage.

The local nazis had good reason to celebrate the notorious August 1992 arson attack on a Vietnamese workers' hostel in Rostock because diey used it to prevent the opening of a hostel for refugees in Anklam, with die result that only a few non-Germans live in the town.

There is little doubt that the Bünzow concerts were the catalyst for the formation of the KBA and the opening of "New Dawn". Some of the skinheads have become businessmen who tout the whole panoply of nazi wares and fancy dress to their eager customers.

One of these business men is Markus Thielke, the nazi who bought the 350 CDs and who, until recently, was living in a kind of nazi rural commune in the village of Salchow. The building housing this commune is a farmhouse built in 1907. In front of its closed blinds graze a half dozen horses while a pitbull terrier runs up and down the garden. In the entrance hall, one is greeted with a nazi mural bearing the words, in gothic script, "Lest den Stahlhelm" (read the Steel Helmet), a paper of Hitler's Wehrmacht. On a mirror are the so-called "14 words" of the US nazi terrorist David Lane, "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children".

An extended barn near the house has been turned into a regular weekend venue, the authorities believe, for strategy meetings attended by as many as 100 nazis from across Germany. However, the fat young man dressed in a blue boiler suit and tennis socks who opens the door of the building does not want to talk about that. Nor does he want to talk about Wiese, reciting the same mantra, "just because he is born here ..." as the people in the shop.

Granddad was right, says a Nazi poster of the "Pomeranian Action Front" openly on display in Anklam

Both Thielke and Gudath come from the same generation of right-wing extremists as Wiese but have followed different lanes along the fascist highway. While Wiese went to Munich to build bombs, opting to remain on the edge of society, the other two have renewed their acquaintance with it by creating jobs for their fellow nazis and trying to create a "national rural idyll". So rooted are they that they stage events such as a "national" volleyball tournament to promote the nazi National Democratic Party of Germany.

Anklam (Vorpommern): Bilder aus der deutschen Provinz Dieses Transparent hing am 9-11-2003 stundenlang und unbeanstandet an einem öffentlichen Platz der Hafenstadt Anklam...

Local trade union officials are very worried about the way in which young right-wing extremists are being elected as union representatives in workplaces, especially when they insist on using the words "national" and "social" in the same breath. Likewise in the schools, teachers are increasingly concerned about pupils who have clearly learned their history from the "training manuals" of the Kameradschaften (Comradeship groups) and openly honour Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess, as a martyr.

Anybody who hoped that many of these young right-wing extremists would eventually drop out to look after their "woman, child and pitbull" can, it seems, forget it. The high number of young women in the Kameradschaften has only served to consolidate their presence.

Despite the tangible evidence of the poisonous effect on society of the KBA - and the 15 other Kameradschaften groups in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern - it is incredible that nobody in the state Interior Ministry in Schwerin appears even to be thinking about outlawing these organisations. The same applies in Anklam, where, it is true, there is little right-wing violence, a fact that itself attests to the wide extent of fascist domination.

No wonder, then, that the town's mayor, Michael Galander, can claim that the extremists "stick out relatively little" and can protest diat any move against "New Dawn" would simply be seen as "a provocation". Galander, 34, has made his money from the business he started when he arrived in Anklam from western Germany ten years ago. His aim as mayor, he says, is to create 500 jobs in a region with 25% unemployment.

He hopes to do this, it appears, by turning a blind eye to the problems of right-wing extremism that are staring him in the face. How else can one interpret his bland comment that, "I cannot for the life of me imagine that we have a serious problem with right-wing extremism"?