LONDON -- "What are you doing here in Germany," asked the three drunken youths when they ran into Alberto Adriano in Dessau one Saturday night in June. "I live here," Adriano might have replied, but he didn't get the chance. The three were still rhythmically kicking and stamping on his head with their steel-capped boots and chanting, "Get out of our country, you nigger pig," when the police pulled up and arrested them.

Adriano was born in Mozambique, but he came to what was then East Germany in his early 20s and had lived and worked in Dessau nearly half his life. He spoke fluent German, and was married to a German woman with whom he had three children. He died three days after the attack without regaining consciousness.

Adriano's skinhead killers went on trial on Aug. 22, with Germany's chief federal prosecutor, Kay Nehm, leading the prosecution personally. Germany is considering a legal ban on the neo-Nazi National Party of Germany, whose members are involved in a high proportion of attacks on racial minorities and foreigners, and Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder is spending two weeks touring the areas of eastern Germany where the far right is strongest and the racist violence is worse.