American Nazi Party

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This article is about the party formed in 1959 later renamed the National Socialist White People's Party. For the 1990s National Socialist White People's Party, see National Socialist White People's Party (Harold Covington). For Hitler's American Nazi Party, see German-American Bund.
American Nazi Party
Leader George Lincoln Rockwell (1959-1967)
Matt Koehl (1967-2014)
Rocky Suhayda (2014-)
Founder George Lincoln Rockwell
Founded 1959
Headquarters Arlington, Virginia
Ideology White nationalism
National Socialism
Political position Far-left
International affiliation World Union of National Socialists
Party flag
Party flag
Politics of United States
Political parties
Elections

The American Nazi Party (ANP) is a name given to several American National Socialist political parties, the first of which was founded by George Lincoln Rockwell. Headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, Rockwell initially called it the World Union of Free Enterprise National Socialists (WUFENS), but later renamed it the American Nazi Party in 1960 to attract maximum media attention.[1] The party was based largely upon the ideals and policies of Adolf Hitler's NSDAP in Germany during the National Socialist era. It was a supporter of Holocaust revisionism.

Headquarters

The WUFENS headquarters was first located in a residence on Williamsburg Boulevard in Arlington, but was later 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 [2] in the Dominion Hills section of Arlington at what is now the Upton Hill Regional Park, the tallest hill in the county. After Rockwell's death, 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).[3][4]

Name change and party reform

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 inspired 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. On January 1, 1967 Rockwell renamed the ANP to the National Socialist White People's Party (NSWPP), a move that alienated some hard-line members. Before he could fully implement party reforms, Rockwell was assassinated on August 25, 1967 by a disgruntled follower, John Patler.

Assassination of George Lincoln Rockwell

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 felled 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 would-be assassin. On June 30, Rockwell petitioned the Arlington County Circuit Court for a gun permit; no action was ever taken on his request.

On August 25, 1967, while leaving the Econowash laundromat at the Dominion Hills Shopping Center, an assassin, hiding on the roof of the building, fired two bullets into Rockwell's car through the windshield. One missed, the other hit his chest and ruptured his heart. His car slowly rolled backwards 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.[5][2] Rockwell's assailant was John Patler, a former ANP/NSWPP member whom Rockwell had ejected from the party for allegedly trying to introduce Marxist doctrine into the party's platforms.

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Koehl succession and ideological divisions

Rockwell's deputy commander, Matt Koehl, a staunch Hitlerist, assumed the leadership role after a party council agreed that he should retain command. Koehl continued some of Rockwell’s reforms such as emphasizing the prospect of a future all-white society, and toning down public denigration of non-whites. Koehl retained the swastika-festooned party literature and pseudo-Nazi uniforms of the party's "Storm Troopers" who had been modeled on the NSDAP's Sturmabteilung. In 1968 Koehl moved the party to a new headquarters at 2507 North Franklin Road, clearly visible from Arlington's main thoroughfare, Wilson Boulevard. He also established a printing press, a "George Lincoln Rockwell Memorial Book Store", and member living quarters on property nearby.

The party began to experience ideological division 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 due to an attempt to march through Skokie, Illinois, home to many Holocaust survivors. This led to the United States Supreme Court Case. Other dissatisfied members of the NSWPP chose to support William Luther Pierce, eventually forming the National Alliance in 1974.

Further membership erosion occurred as Koehl, drawing heavily upon the teachings of Hitlerian mystic Savitri Devi, began to suggest that National Socialism was more akin to a religious movement than a political one. He espoused the belief that Hitler was the gift of an inscrutable divine providence sent to rescue the white race from decadence and gradual extinction 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 National Socialism 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 in private venues. On Labor Day 1979, in a highly unpopular move for some members, Koehl disbanded the party's paramilitary "Storm Troopers". The Koehl organization is now known as the New Order and operates so far from the public spotlight that few of today's neo-Nazis are aware of its existence or know that it is the linear descendant of Rockwell's original ANP.

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 alliance 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 for violating the civil rights of the demonstrators. The shootings became known as the "Greensboro Massacre".

Namesake organizations

Since the late 1960s there have been a number of small groups that have used the name "American Nazi Party". Perhaps the first was led by James Warner and Allen Vincent and consisted of members of the California branch of the NSWPP.[6] This group announced its existence on January 1, 1968. In 1982 James Burford formed another "American Nazi Party" from dissafected branches of the National Socialist Party of America.[7] This Chicago-based group remained in existence until at least 1994.[8] There was also a small American Nazi Party that operated out of Davenport, Iowa led by a John Robert Bishop.[9][10]

The name "American Nazi Party" has also been adopted by a group run by Rocky J. Suhayda, a former member of Rockwell's original ANP in 1967. Although Suhayda's ANP states that Rockwell was their founder, there is no direct legal or financial link between it and Rockwell's legacy organization, now a low-key Hitlerian religious group called New Order. Headquartered in Westland, Michigan, Suhayda's ANP website sells nostalgic reprints of Rockwell's 1960s-era magazine The Stormtrooper. The group boasts 2008's National Socialist presidential candidate John Taylor Bowles as a member. Holding semi-private yearly meetings at his home, and at the national convention in California, Suhayda's followers do not wear uniforms, except for the SA, or Security Arm and eschew public demonstrations, frequently criticizing rival organization the National Socialist Movement for "outing" its members with excessive media exposure.[citation needed]

Notable former members

See also

References

Notes

  1. ↑ Rockwell, George Lincoln. From Ivory Tower to Privy Wall: On The Art of Propaganda c.1966
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Schmaltz, William H. For Race And Nation: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party River's Bend Press, 2013.
  3. ↑ Weingarten, Gene. "It's Just Nazi Same Place" Washington Post (February 10, 2008)
  4. ↑ Cooper, Rebecca A. "Java Shack glimpses its past as Nazi headquarters" TDB.com (March 8, 2011)
  5. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  6. ↑ Kaplan (2000), pp.558-62
  7. ↑ Kaplan pp.3, 33
  8. ↑ Anti-Defamation League. Danger: Extremism New York; Anti-Defamation League 1996 p.177
  9. ↑ Kaplan (2000), p.3
  10. ↑ Marks, Kathy Faces of Right Wing Extremism Boston; Branden Books, 1996 p.58

Bibliography

External links


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