American Nazi Party

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 National Socialism
White nationalism
Anti-communism
Antisemitism
Political position Far-right
International affiliation World Union of National Socialists
Seats in the Senate
0 / 100
Seats in the House
0 / 435
Governorships
0 / 50
State Upper Chamber Seats
0 / 1,972
State Lower Chamber Seats
0 / 5,411
Party flag
Website

The American Nazi Party (ANP) is an American political party founded by George Lincoln Rockwell. Its headquarters are in Arlington, Virginia. Rockwell founded organization as the World Union of Free Enterprise National Socialists (WUFENS), but renamed it the American Nazi Party in 1960.[1] The party was based largely upon the ideals and policies of Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party in Germany during the Nazi era.[2]

Headquarters

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 [3] 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).[4][5]

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.[3][6] 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.

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 Nazi Party'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 for its attempt to march through Skokie, Illinois, 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.

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 Adolf 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".

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. ↑ Potok, Mark. "The Nazi International" on the Southern Poverty Law Center website
  3. 1 2 Schmaltz, William H. For Race And Nation: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party River's Bend Press, 2013.
  4. ↑ Weingarten, Gene. "It's Just Nazi Same Place" Washington Post (February 10, 2008)
  5. ↑ Cooper, Rebecca A. "Java Shack glimpses its past as Nazi headquarters" TDB.com (March 8, 2011)
  6. ↑ "American "Nazi" Shot Dead". BBC News. August 25, 1967. Retrieved 2009-08-07.
  7. ↑ Kaplan 2000, pp. 558-62.
  8. ↑ Kaplan 2000, pp. 3, 33.
  9. ↑ Anti-Defamation League. Danger: Extremism New York; Anti-Defamation League 1996 p.177
  10. ↑ Kaplan 2000, p. 3.
  11. ↑ Marks, Kathy Faces of Right Wing Extremism Boston; Branden Books, 1996 p.58

Bibliography

External links


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