The Lost Young: Portrait of a Gang of Neo-Nazi Teen-Agers in Germany : Youth: They hang out in train stations, staring at people with places to go and spewing their racial hatred. Theirs is a world without hope, they say.

His name is Maik Jacob, but his friends call him Leiche, the German word for corpse. With his sunken eyes, bony frame and shaved skull, he looks very much like his nickname.

Last year, Jacob and his friends cornered a Vietnamese man on a dark Dresden street and pounded him senseless with clubs. Jacob tells this story with some embarrassment, because he got caught.

“Severe bodily injury,” he says, almost whispering the juvenile court charge brought against him. “Six months in jail.”

Jacob is 16 years old. After he wakes up at noon and until he goes to bed at 4 a.m., he spends most of his day in the drafty Dresden train station, drinking beer with his friends and harassing people with swarthy skin.

He is part of a social circle of about 25 young men and women who sit on train station benches and stare at people with places to go. They are part of eastern Germany’s neo-Nazi scene, a subculture of rightist radical hate and teen-age rootlessness.

They get drunk, try to scrape up money for a movie, exchange secret handshakes and spout fascist slogans from wrinkled pamphlets. They are mostly penniless offspring of jobless parents living in tiny apartments in suffocating socialist-era housing complexes.

They are also the shock troops of a growing yet extremely disorganized, emotion-driven rightist movement that has rattled the united Germany and confronted the government with a problem it cannot seem to solve.

Since Aug. 22, mobs of young people have staged daily attacks on homes for foreigners seeking asylum in Germany. Most have occurred in former East Germany, where communism’s demise brought economic collapse and left a population consumed by pessimism and bereft of democratic values.

Experts say the real threats are not the tiny, veteran neo-Nazi groups that have existed for years in Germany, but rather the young people who find foreigners a convenient target for teen Angst .

These youngsters are as diverse as Simone Kisza, a winsome dreamer who likes black denim and the rock group Depeche Mode; Markus Lieske, a depressed dropout obsessed with his nascent alcoholism; and vacant, thrill-seeking hoods like Club, a car thief and mixer of Molotov cocktails.

And, of course, Maik Jacob, alias Leiche, alias Corpse, a bald-headed boy in combat boots and camouflage jacket who thinks life is a riot.

Simone Kisza--Sims to her pals --is among a surprisingly large number of young women drawn to the macabre social swirl of the neo-Nazi scene.

Her mother died of cancer when she was 7, and her father recently lost his job as an engineer at Robotron, the former East German computer maker that went belly up in the free market.

Sims, 16, has moved into a girlfriend’s one-room apartment. Tall and striking with a jet-black Cleopatra haircut, she wears a black denim jacket and jeans and imitation Converse All-Star high tops.

She is obsessed with New York City and eagerly quizzes a reporter who once lived there. “Can you send pictures? I want to see how young people live,” she says.

While many neo-Nazis favor hard-core punk and speed metal rock spewed out by nationalistic underground bands like the Boese Onkels (Evil Uncles), Sims digs the moody art rock of Depeche Mode.

But she is not that different.

“I think the foreigners here should die,” she says flatly, without emotion. “They take our jobs and apartments, and the government doesn’t care. I have no optimism. There is nothing.”

Markus Lieske quit high school before turning 18, which is illegal. He lives with his grandmother, but his address is not registered with police, which is also illegal.

When he was 14, he says, he took part in neo-Nazi rallies during the Communist regime, which was really illegal. He was jailed and has a scar on his head from a policeman’s nightstick.

“Do you know why I’m drinking? Do you?” he shouts, waving a beer can. “I don’t do anything. I’m 19. I have no job, no hope. The foreigners are cheap labor.”

No address, no education, no prospects, no cash. No future.

“These are the only pants I have!” he says, pointing to his faded brown overalls.

Lieske is drunk. The next morning, when he meets a reporter for breakfast, he will order beer.

“The hate grows stronger and stronger. Unemployment. Suicide. Alcoholism,” he says frantically, then mumbles, “I myself am almost an alcoholic.”

He speaks admiringly about the Los Angeles riots and wishes that he could have joined them. He responds with a blank look when he is told that a neo-Nazi would not have been welcome.

“I think our goals are the same,” he says. He wears a patch on his black vinyl bomber jacket that says, “Blessed Be Our Fatherland.”

Michael Petermann hasn’t found a job since he left trade school last year, and he knows whom to blame: the foreigners he sees arriving at the train station.

“I hate niggers and Turks and Vietnamese,” says Petermann, tall and wiry and hyper with rage. His nickname is Skorpy, as in scorpion.

“The niggers are swine. I hate when a German woman is with a nigger. They have mixed children. Aaggh!! They sell drugs. The attacks on foreigners are justified because they are niggers and Asians.”

He takes a breather and a gulp of beer.

“I hate blacks working when I’m not. I hate all colors other than white. White power!”

Petermann, 18, likes to run through the train station when a lot of Asians are passing through. “You run up and do this--boosh!” he said, faking a punch to Lieske’s startled face.

The recipe for a good firebomb starts with a Trabant, the old East German car with the two-cycle engine, says Udo Ahrend, 19.

“The gasoline caps do not have locks,” he explains.

Ahrend rushed to the Baltic port city of Rostock, 200 miles away, to take part in the refugee attacks that began Aug. 22. Those riots spread nationwide.

Ahrend, short and stocky with a cold, penetrating stare, says his nickname is Kreute, which means club. “Like baseball,” he says, swinging an imaginary Louisville Slugger.

Ahrend was imprisoned three years ago for car theft. He moved to Dresden in April after he was kicked out of his family’s house in the village of Hinterhermsdorf. He said he is a laid-off painter and makes ends meet by stealing cars and tape decks and selling them in Czechoslovakia and Poland.

It is close to midnight, and 20 rightists have slowly coalesced into a discussion group. A tense policeman posts himself on the perimeter. Travelers glance over and hurry along.

The youngsters take awkward stabs at describing what they believe in.

“National socialism,” says Jacob. Lieske adds that national socialism is not the same as Nazism.

“It is!” Sims tells him. “That’s what Nazi means.”

Dresden is a living graveyard of World War II, a shrine of bombed buildings surrounded by huge, beehive-like tenements built by the Communists. West German interests are quickly reshaping it. Fancy hotels, shops and restaurants are springing up. Prices have soared.

Beneath the fury over foreigners and twisted logic of hate, the kids in the train station sense that they are being left behind. Four young toughs who had breakfast with a reporter had to be coaxed inside one of the new restaurants, where they nervously fidgeted through a meal they needed help ordering.

Jacob, timid and small, takes a reporter aside and says his father threw him out. He lives with his girlfriend’s family for now. This violent boy seems pathetically tentative, easily influenced. He seems to be slipping away.

“This is my family,” he says with a smile, tipping his beer can toward his friends.