A former neo-Nazi skinhead has had a change of direction - by changing sex, becoming a nurse and joining a left wing party.
Monika Strub, an ex-member of Germany's neo-Nazi NPD party, is running for Baden-Württemberg's state parliament for the Social Democrats.
She said: "I am not trying to hide my past and I never have done, either from the fact that I was a man or the fact that I was a member of the far right scene - but now I am a different person and I have completely broken ties with the NPD. I am a true socialist."
Strub was a member of the right-wing extremist National Democratic Party (NPD) from 2000 to 2002.
There are even pictures that show Horst Strub, as she was known in the years before her sex-reassignment surgery, with cropped hair, a beard and a bomber jacket.
Today, the 35-year old nurse Monika Strub has reinvented itself in more than one way and is campaigning for the socialist Left party.
She said: "I know I made the right move but I have now become a victim of far-right harassment, I have had numerous threats from people who feel I betrayed the NPD. My home has also been vandalised with graffiti."
She decided to go ahead and campaign for the Social Democrats after convincing the party that she really had changed, not just in terms of her gender but also in her political beliefs.
Christoph Kröpel, spokesman for the Left party in the state of Baden-Württemberg, described Strub's history with the NPD as a "youthful transgression" - and said she had "fundamentally changed."
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