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| Surgery begins: Bryon Widner as he began the treatment |
Bryon Widner, 34, went through 16 months of laser surgery on intimidating images including several swastikas and a blood-soaked razor.
Widner’s £20,000 treatment was organised by a black campaigner when he turned away from racism after finding love and starting a family.
The dad has received death threats for exposing racists but said: “It’s a small price to pay for being human again.”
The former neo-Nazi also had the words “Blood & Honour” inked on his neck and “Thug Reich” on his stomach.
Anti-racism lawyer Joseph Roy said of him: “No one was more aggressive, more confrontational, more notorious.”
Widner researched countless ways of remove his tattoos but he had no health insurance and even considered trying to burn them off with acid.
It prompted his wife Julie, also a former white supremacist, to plead with black anti-hate campaigner Daryle Lamont Jenkins, 43, for help.
Mr Jenkins believed Widner, who spent four years in jail for hate crimes in Nashville, Tennessee, was genuinely reformed and helped arrange for an anonymous benefactor to pay for his surgery.
Dr Bruce Shack, of Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, began the treatment in 2009. It is the first time so many facial inkings have been removed.
More followed every few weeks, leaving Widner’s hands and face swollen, burned and covered in blisters.
He said of the surgeon: “He didn’t just see the tattoos. He saw me as a real human being.”
The operations, which often left Widner screaming in agony, were filmed for a US TV documentary.
He said one of the best moments was when a black woman hugged him after the screening of Erasing Hate, crying: “I forgive you.”
Widner still has race hate tattoos and Nazi symbols on his arms and body but is in the process of having them covered with other images. He suffers migraines and has pigment damage.
The family, including his son Tyrson, four, and Julie’s children from a previous relationship, are now in hiding because of death threats they have received from race hate groups he has helped activists and police expose.
