Black Metal Blitzkrieg

Searchlight, July 2004

On Saturday, 17 April New Era Productions, a music label, organised a rock music festival with the title Black Metal Blitzkrieg, at the Pazzop youth centre in Bladel, a small village near Eindhoven, close to the Belgian border.

Two of the six bands - Ad Hominem and Seigneur Voland - on the bill were from the fascist National Socialist Black Metal (NSBM) underworld. The bands, both from France, performed, one of them under a false name, despite strong protests from anti-fascists and local councillors.

Worried by a press statement from Anti-Fascist Action (AFA), the first response of the festival organisers was to cancel the two nazi-bands, but later they decided to sneak them in anyway.

Chants of "White Power!" from the 50 or so NSBM fans among the 150-strong attendance greeted the appearance of Kaiser Wodhanasz, the lead singer of Ad Hominem, a salute returned by Wodhanasz.

The nazi's had obviously prepared for the event, many of them kitted out with Nazi Party badges, SS symbols, swastikas and T- shirts emblazoned with the SS "Death's Head".

Behind the stage at the gig was a flag with the so-called Black Sun, the 12-armed swastika symbol, favoured by the SS while two stands touted an assortment of nazi merchandise, including CD's from bands like the German NSBM outfit Absurd.

During the concert, a section of the crowd, a mixture of Belgians, Germans and Dutch, was also bawling for "Auschwitz Rules!" a song from Ad Hominem's Planet ZOG - The End album.

"ZOG" (Zionist Occupation Government) is a term used by fascist and nazi groups to point at alleged Jewish world domination but the band's German record label evidently thought it wiser to shorten the Auschwitz "song" title to "A. rules". Indeed, Wodhanasz admitted in an interview with the title was shortened to "avoid problems with ZOG".

Problems or not, the hosts of the concert were apparently not fazed by the scum under their roof because a member of the youth centre's committee later claimed that the song "had nothing to do with the annihilation of humans, but was about the band itself."

In interviews, Ad Hominem have made it crystal how they think: "Ad Hominem supports the values that became visible during the Nazi regime in Germany. Our message is clear and simple: a total genocide to clean the earth. In our eyes this is the only solution."

They do not want immigrants and Jews to be integrated in French society, declaring that "They are strangers to us and we don't want them here." "But," bleat these specimens of the Master Race, "we are not the state power, because the state is based on Zionism and that's why we can't change it."

The other French band, Seigneur Voland, is more or less the successor of another band called Kristallnacht, a band that was famous among fascists, mainly because of the criminal actions of its members who have notched up convictions for spreading fascist propaganda and desecrating graves. These same people from Kristallnacht feature on an anonymous distributed picture where they are stand at a grave, wearing swastika badges.

Laurent Franchet, a guitarist in the band makes no secret to hide his fascist and anti-Semitic ideas. In various interviews with the NSBM-magazines Warfare, Strength Through War and Hordes Du Chaos he vents his hatred of Jews, foreigners, Arabs and communists, praising Hitler's SS boss Heinrich Himmler because he ordered hideous tortures to be used on Jews and communists. Not surprisingly, Franchet also adores the present-day terrorists of Hamas even if, in his eyes, they are "inferior people".

Together with its music, Seigneur Voland also distributes a leaflet with the following words: "Total genocide to: the armed ZOG and all authorities that will get this record during searches....the nigger from Nice who bought our stuff (don't listen to us anymore, stupid monkey! Burn the t-shirt with you inside)."

One of the band's CDs is called Antisemite and its lyrics are about war, hatred and national socialist ideology. On a compilation CD, its sings about "when the swastika stars light up in heaven."

It is not a coincidence that New Era Productions featured these two bands. This label, based in Maastricht, is run by Remco Mettrop and Jeroen Valkenburg, both of whom are good friends of Jasper Velzel, drummer with the Dutch fascist band Brigade M and former owner of the convicted fascist record label, Berzerker Records (See Searchlight August 2002).

Mettrop was, for a while, a stand-in guitarist for Brigade M and can be seen on the cover of a CD that Brigade M that they made together with the German fascist bands Stromschlag and Schutt & Asche.

He also organised a concert in 1998 in Geleen, in the south of the Netherlands, at which the fascist Dutch band Holocaust performed. Both people from New Era Productions also write for New Era Magazine, to which, among others, the Belgian nazi Daniel Doucet is a contributor. Doucet also used to be distributor of the NSBM magazine Einsatzkommando Zine, a rag full of vitriolic fascist and anti-Semite propaganda.

Despite the fact that all of this information was sent by AFA to both the youth centre and the local press, the bands were still allowed to perform. The people who fixed up this nazi concert still work in the youth centre even though they are responsible for staging one of the most fascist concerts ever at a public venue in the Netherlands, a venue subsidized by the local council.

The last words in this matter have not yet been said - anti- fascists will make sure of that.

By Jeroen Bosch of Alert! and Antifa-Net