Ingo Hasselbach was born in East Germany in 1968, the only child of actively Communist parents. He grew up despising the rules they lived by, and hating the state. He fell in with a group of skinheads and became involved in casual violence as an expression of loneliness and contempt. In 1987 he was sent to prison for shouting The wall must fall in a public place. On release, he began working for a secret militant group opposed to the government, and when the government fell he opened up contact with an international network or neo-Nazis and racist movements, and began building up caches of weapons and starting paramilitary camps.