American Nazi Party | |
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Abbreviation | WUFENS (1959) ANP (1959–1966/1967) [1] NSWPP (1966/1967–1983) |
Founder | George Lincoln Rockwell |
Founded | March 1959 |
Succeeded by | American Nazi Party: • Matthias Koehl (1967–1983) • Rocky Suhayda (2014–present) [2] New Order: • Matthias Koehl (1983–2014) • Martin Kerr (2014–present) [3] [4] |
Headquarters | (Rockwell's headquarters) 928 North Randolph Street, Arlington, Virginia, U.S. |
Newspaper | The Stormtrooper [5] |
Youth wing | NSLF (1969–1974) |
Membership | 500 [6] (c. 1967) |
Ideology | Neo-Nazism White supremacy Ultranationalism Antisemitism |
Political position | Far-right |
International affiliation | World Union of National Socialists |
Party flag | |
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Website | |
americannaziparty.com | |
The American Nazi Party (ANP) is an American far-right and neo-Nazi political party founded by George Lincoln Rockwell and headquartered in Arlington, Virginia. The organization was originally named the World Union of Free Enterprise National Socialists (WUFENS), a name to denote opposition to state ownership of property, the same year—it was renamed the American Nazi Party in order to attract 'maximum media attention'. [1] Since the late 1960s, a number of small groups have used the name "American Nazi Party" with most being independent of each other and disbanding before the 21st century. The party is based largely upon the ideals and policies of Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party in Germany during the Nazi era, and embraced its uniforms and iconography. [7] [upper-alpha 1]
Shortly after Rockwell's murder in 1967, the organization appointed Rockwell's second in command, Deputy Commander Matt Koehl as the new leader. The American Nazi Party, now under Koehl's command, was subject to ideological disagreements between members in the 1970s and 1980s. "In 1982, Martin Kerr, a leader at the Franklin Road headquarters, announced that the organization was changing its name to the New Order and moving to the Midwest", effective January 1, 1983. [10] Due to recruitment issues along with financial and legal trouble, Koehl was forced to relocate the group's headquarters from the DC area, eventually finding his way to scattered locations in Wisconsin and Michigan. After Koehl's death in 2014, a long-time member and officer of the New Order, Martin Kerr assumed leadership and maintains the New Order website and organization. [11]
A former member of the original American Nazi Party, Rocky Suhayda, founded his own organization using the American Nazi Party name and has been active since at least 2008. [12] Suhayda claims Rockwell as its founder despite no direct legal or financial link between it and Rockwell's legacy organization. [13] The one connection between the original American Nazi Party and Rocky Suhayda's group besides ideology is that they sell reprints of Rockwell's 1960s-era magazine The Stormtrooper on their website.
The WUFENS headquarters was located in a residence on Williamsburg Boulevard in Arlington, but was moved as the ANP headquarters to a house at 928 North Randolph Street (now a hotel and office building site). Rockwell and some party members also established a "Stormtrooper Barracks" in an old mansion owned by the widow of Willis Kern [14] in the Dominion Hills section of Arlington at what is now the Upton Hill Regional Park. After Rockwell's murder, the headquarters was moved again to one side of a duplex brick and concrete storefront at 2507 North Franklin Road which featured a swastika prominently mounted above the front door. This site was visible from busy Wilson Boulevard. Today, the Franklin Road address is often misidentified as Rockwell's headquarters when in fact it was the successor organization's last physical address in Arlington (now a coffeehouse). [15] [16] [17]
Under Rockwell, the party embraced Nazi uniforms and iconography. [upper-alpha 2]
After several years of living in impoverished conditions, Rockwell began to experience some financial success with paid speaking engagements at universities where he was invited to express his controversial views as exercises in free speech. This prompted him to end the rancorous "Phase One" party tactics and begin "Phase Two", a plan to recast the group as a legitimate political party by toning down the verbal and written attacks against non-whites, replacing the party rallying cry of "Sieg Heil!" with "White Power!", limiting public display of the swastika, and entering candidates in local elections. [18] [19] [6]
The years 1965 and 1967 were possibly the height of Rockwell's profile. [18] He was interviewed by Playboy magazine, an event that stirred controversy within the ranks. [18] [20] At the time Rockwell had about 500 followers. [6] In 1966 or 1967, [upper-alpha 3] Rockwell renamed the ANP the National Socialist White People's Party (NSWPP), a move that alienated some hard-line members. The new name was a "conscious imitation" of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Rockwell wanted a more "ecumenical" approach and felt that the swastika banner was impeding organizational growth. Rockwell was killed on August 25, 1967, before he could implement party reforms. [6] Matt Koehl, a purist Neo-Nazi, succeeded Rockwell as the new leader and this ended the American Nazi Party. Thereafter, the members engaged in internecine disputes, and they were either expelled by Koehl or they resigned. After the murder of Rockwell, the party dissipated and ad hoc organizations usurped the American Nazi Party logo. Those included James Burford in Chicago and John Bishop in Iowa. [18]
In 1962, ANP member Roy James was sentenced to 30 days in jail and fined $25 for punching Martin Luther King Jr., after pleading guilty to charge of assault and battery and disorderly conduct. King had not wanted to press charges, but Birmingham Judge Charles H. Brown insisted on trying James, calling the incident an "uncalled for, unprovoked assault." [21]
An assassination attempt was made on Rockwell on June 28, 1967. As Rockwell returned from shopping, he drove into the long driveway of the "Stormtrooper Barracks" located in Arlington's Dominion Hills subdivision and found it blocked by a fallen tree and brush. Rockwell assumed that it was another prank by local teens. As a party member cleared the obstruction, two shots were fired at Rockwell from behind one of the swastika-embossed brick driveway pillars. One of the shots ricocheted off the car, right next to his head. Leaping from the car, Rockwell pursued the gunman. On June 30, Rockwell petitioned the Arlington County Circuit Court for a gun permit; no action was ever taken on his request.[ citation needed ]
On August 25, 1967, as Rockwell left the Econowash laundromat at the Dominion Hills Shopping Center, a former follower named John Patler shot Rockwell from the roof of the building. Patler fired two bullets into Rockwell's car through the windshield. One missed, the other hit his chest and ruptured his heart. His car rolled backward to a stop and Rockwell staggered out of the front passenger side door of the car, stood briefly while pointing upward at the strip mall's rooftop where the shots had come from and then collapsed on the pavement. He was pronounced dead at the scene. [14] [22] [23]
Rockwell's second in command, Deputy Commander Matt Koehl, a staunch Hitlerist, assumed the leadership role after a council agreed that he should retain command. Koehl continued some of Rockwell's restructuring of the group by dropping the use of negative verbal and written attacks against racial minorities. Koehl also began emphasizing the positive aspects of Nazism and the glories of a future all-white society. Koehl retained the swastika-festooned party literature and the pseudo-Nazi uniforms of the party's "Storm Troopers" which were modeled on those worn by the Nazi Party's Sturmabteilung. In 1968, Koehl moved the party to a new headquarters on 2507 North Franklin Road, clearly visible from Arlington's main thoroughfare, Wilson Boulevard. He also established a printing press, a "Lincoln Rockwell Book Store", and member living quarters on property nearby.[ citation needed ]
The party began to experience ideological divisions among its followers as it entered the 1970s. In 1970, member Frank Collin, who was himself secretly the son of a Jewish father, broke away from the group and founded the National Socialist Party of America in Chicago, which became famous for its attempt to march through Skokie, Illinois, which was home to many Holocaust survivors. This led to the United States Supreme Court case, National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie. Other dissatisfied members of the NSWPP chose to support William Luther Pierce, and formed the National Alliance in 1974.[ citation needed ]
Further membership erosion occurred as Koehl, drawing heavily upon the teachings of Hitlerian mystic Savitri Devi, began to suggest that Nazism was more akin to a religious movement than a political one. He espoused the belief that Adolf Hitler was the gift of an inscrutable divine providence who had been sent to rescue the white race from decadence and gradual extinction which had been caused by a declining birth rate and miscegenation. Hitler's death in 1945 was viewed as a type of martyrdom; a voluntary, Christ-like self-sacrifice, that looked forward to a spiritual resurrection of Nazism at a later date when the Aryan race would need it the most. These esoteric beliefs led to disputes with the World Union of National Socialists, which Rockwell had founded and whose leader, Danish neo-Nazi Povl Riis-Knudsen, had been appointed by Koehl. Undaunted, Koehl continued to recast the party as a new religion in formation. Public rallies were gradually phased out in favor of low-key gatherings which were held in private venues. On Labor Day 1979, in a highly unpopular move for some members, Koehl disbanded the party's paramilitary "Storm Troopers."[ citation needed ]
On November 3, 1979, some members of the NSWPP and a Ku Klux Klan group attacked a Communist Workers' Party protest march in Greensboro, North Carolina. The group of neo-Nazis and Klansmen shot and killed five marchers. Forty Klansmen and neo-Nazis were involved in the shootings with sixteen Klansmen and neo-Nazis being arrested. The six strongest cases were brought to trial first, but the two criminal trials resulted in the acquittal of the defendants by all-white juries. However, in a 1985 civil lawsuit, the survivors won a $350,000 judgment against the city, the Klansmen, and the neo-Nazis after they were all found guilty of violating the civil rights of the demonstrators. The shootings became known as the "Greensboro Massacre." [24]
In 1982 the Internal Revenue Service took action to foreclose on the group's headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. [25] Koehl ceased printing the organization's White Power newspaper, sold its Arlington, Virginia, real estate holdings, and dispersed the group's various operations to scattered locations in Wisconsin and Michigan. A secluded 88-acre (360,000 m2) rural property called "Nordland" was purchased in New Berlin, Wisconsin, to serve as living quarters and to host annual meetings and ceremonial events.
The Koehl organization changed its name to New Order on January 1, 1983, on the grounds that the people in the area "are not people looking to join revolutionary organizations", saying that it was moving to an area in the Midwest which it would not reveal for security reasons. [26] The name change reflected the group's Nazi mysticism and it was still known by that name in 2010. [27]
The organization briefly attracted the media's attention in October 1983, when it held a private meeting at Yorktown High School in Arlington, Virginia. [28] A non-uniformed gathering of members was held indoors while the police kept a crowd of counter-protesters at bay outside. This event marked the last publicized appearance of Koehl and the New Order in Arlington. From that point forward the only outward sign that the group was still operational was the annual appearance of the swastika and Betsy Ross American Revolutionary War flags flying from the party's nondescript headquarters building on North Franklin Road every April 20 (Hitler's birthday).
Today the New Order operates quietly far from the public spotlight, eschewing the confrontational public rallies that were once a hallmark of its previous incarnations. It maintains a web page and a Milwaukee, Wisconsin, post office box providing information and template material promoting Nazism. It has no members but rather "registered supporters" who pledge to mail in donations on a monthly basis. Financing is also obtained through sales of books and other merchandise under an affiliate business, NS Publications of Wyandotte, Michigan. The NS Bulletin, a newsletter, is sent to supporters on a quarterly basis. The group holds occasional ceremonial gatherings at undisclosed private locations such as an annual observance of Hitler's birthday each April 20.
New Order's Chief of Staff, Martin Kerr, claims that the group is no longer a white supremacist group and focuses on advocating "in favor of [white] people, not against other races or ethnicities...we consider the white people of the world to be a gigantic family of racial brothers and sisters, united by ties of common ancestry and common heritage. Being for our own family does not mean that we hate other families." The SPLC still classifies them as neo-Nazis and as a "hate group." [29] [30] [31]
Since the late 1960s, there have been a number of small groups that have used the name "American Nazi Party."
Neo-Nazism comprises the post-World War II militant, social, and political movements that seek to revive and reinstate Nazi ideology. Neo-Nazis employ their ideology to promote hatred and racial supremacy, to attack racial and ethnic minorities, and in some cases to create a fascist state.
George Lincoln Rockwell was an American Neo-Nazi/fascist activist and exhibitionist. Rockwell founded the American Nazi Party in 1959 and became the self-styled Führer of Neo-Nazism in the United States.
Savitri Devi Mukherji was a Greek fascist, Nazi sympathizer, and spy who served the Axis powers by committing acts of espionage against the Allied forces in India. She was later a leading member of the Neo-Nazi underground during the 1960s.
Francis Joseph Collin is an American former political activist and Midwest coordinator with the American Nazi Party, later known as the National Socialist White People's Party. After being ousted for being partly Jewish, in 1970, Collin founded the National Socialist Party of America. (N.S.P.A.) In the late 1970s, his planned march in the predominantly Jewish suburb of Skokie, Illinois was challenged; however, the American Civil Liberties Union defended Collin's group's freedom of speech and assembly in a case that reached the United States Supreme Court to correct procedural deficiencies. Specifically, the necessity of immediate appellate review of orders restraining the exercise of First Amendment rights was strongly emphasized in National Socialist Party v. Village of Skokie, 432 U.S. 43 (1977). Afterward, the Illinois Supreme Court held that the party had a right to march and to display swastikas, despite local opposition, based on the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Collin then offered a compromise, offering to march in Chicago's Marquette Park instead of Skokie. After Collin was convicted and sentenced in 1979 for child molestation, he lost his position in the party.
Matthias Koehl Jr. was an American marine, neo-Nazi politician and writer. He succeeded George Lincoln Rockwell as the longest serving leader of the American Nazi Party, from 1967 to 2014.
The National Socialist Party of America (NSPA) was a Chicago-based organization founded in 1970 by Frank Collin shortly after he left the National Socialist White People's Party. The NSWPP had been the American Nazi Party until shortly after the assassination of its leader George Lincoln Rockwell in 1967. Collin, a follower of Rockwell, developed differences with his successor Matt Koehl.
James Nolan Mason is an American neo-Nazi. Mason is an ideologue for the Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi terrorist organization. After growing disillusioned with the mass movement approach of neo-Nazi movements, he began advocating for a white supremacist revolution through terrorism. He was referred to as the "Godfather of Fascist Terrorism" in the Fair Observer. He has been convicted of assault and weapons charges, as well as charged with sexual exploitation and possession of pornographic images of a minor. In 2021, Mason is one of only two individuals sanctioned by the Canadian Government on its list of terror-related entities.
Joseph Charles Tommasi was an American Neo-Nazi who founded the National Socialist Liberation Front. He advocated extremism and armed guerrilla warfare against the U.S. government and what he called its "Jewish power structure." Tommasi wanted anarchy and lawlessness so that the "system" could be attacked without protection. Tommasi was derisively nicknamed "Tomato Joe" by rival neo-Nazis because of his Italian heritage and "less than Nordic complexion." He was later expelled from the group for using drugs and misusing group funds.
Daniel Burros was a Jewish American who joined the American Nazi Party (ANP) and the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). While initially an ANP member, Burros became a Kleagle for the KKK's United Klans of America (UKA) in the aftermath of a falling-out between him and ANP founder George L. Rockwell. The UKA was the most violent white supremacist group within the KKK at the time.
The National Renaissance Party (NRP) was an American neo-Nazi group founded in 1949 by James Madole. It was frequently in the headlines during the 1960s and 1970s for its involvement in violent protests and riots in New York City. It published a journal, The National Renaissance. After Madole's death from cancer in 1979, which was preceded by the commander of its paramilitary, Andrej Lisanik, being killed by a mugger, the party faded after its records were lost in a car crash that killed another member on his way home from Madole's funeral.
The National Youth Alliance (NYA) was an American right-wing political group founded by Willis Carto, head of the right-wing Liberty Lobby.
The World Union of National Socialists (WUNS) is an organisation founded in 1962 as an umbrella group for neo-Nazi organisations across the globe.
John Patsalos, formerly known as John Patler, is an American former Nazi who was convicted of the August 25, 1967, murder of American Nazi Party (ANP) leader George Lincoln Rockwell.
Harold Armstead Covington was an American neo-Nazi activist and writer. He advocated the creation of an "Aryan homeland" in the Pacific Northwest and was the founder of the Northwest Front (NF), a white separatist political movement that sought to create a white ethnostate.
The National Socialist Vanguard is a Neo-Nazi group founded in 1983 and led by Rick Cooper, based in The Dalles, Oregon, US, from about 1998. It has focused its efforts on recruiting high school students.
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Upton Hill Regional Park is a regional park located in Arlington, Northern Virginia. The park contains a waterpark, batting cages and a miniature golf course. The batting cages include nine baseball and softball cages. It is owned and operated by the NOVA Parks agency of Northern Virginia.
The National Socialist Liberation Front (NSLF) was an American neo-Nazi organization. Originally established in 1969 as a youth wing of the National Socialist White People's Party, in 1974 it reconstituted itself as the NSLF after its leader Joseph Tommasi was expelled from the NSWPP.
James K. Warner was an early recruit to George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party (ANP) as part of the core of the party and national secretary. He later became involved with the National States' Rights Party (NSRP). After moving to Los Angeles, he was converted to Christian Identity by Wesley Swift and started the New Christian Crusade Church. Warner succeeded Richard Girndt Butler as leader of the Christian Defense League. He eventually moved both the New Christian Crusade Church and the Christian Defense League to Louisiana. Warner later became the Louisiana Grand Dragon of David Duke's Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
Informational notes
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Further reading