From the Publisher

More than half a century after the defeat of Nazism and fascism, the far right is again challenging the liberal order of Western democracies. Radical movements are feeding on anxiety about economic globalization, affirmative action, and third-world immigration, flashpoint issues to many traditional groups in multicultural societies. A curious mixture of Aristocratic paganism, anti-Semitic demonology, Eastern philosophies and the occult is influencing populist antigovernment sentiment and helping to exploit the widespread fear that invisible elites are shaping world events.

Black Sun examines the new neofascist ideology, showing how hate groups, militias and conspiracy cults attempt to gain influence. Based on interviews and extensive research into underground groups, Black Sun documents the new Nazi and fascist sects that have sprung up from the 1970s through the 1990s and examines the mentality and motivation of these far-right extremists. The result is a detailed, grounded portrait of the mythical and devotional aspects of Hitler cults among Aryan mystics, racist skinheads and Nazi satanists, Heavy Metal music fans, and in occult literature.

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke offers a unique perspective on far right neo-Nazism viewing it as a new form of Western religious heresy. He paints a frightening picture of a religion with its own relics, rituals, prophecies and an international sectarian following that could, under the proper conditions, gain political power and attempt to realize its dangerous millenarian fantasies.

Library Journal

Presents a troubling picture of the mindset of the modern Far Right.

Publishers Weekly

This comprehensive inquiry examines the disturbing historical and contemporary connections between certain religious cults and Nazi ideology. Goodrick-Clarke (Hitler's Priestess; The Occult Roots of Nazism) begins with a consideration of the origins of American neo-Nazism and ends with a thorough discussion of well-known, current far-right groups: the European skinheads, the Aryan Nations and the World Church of the Creator movement, which inspired the 1999 shooting spree in the Midwest. In between, the author focuses on the intersection between Nazi ideology and religious and cultural oddities, showing, for example, how some Nazi leaders, particularly Heinrich Himmler, were obsessed with esoterica and strange historical justifications for pro-Aryan racial theory. Over the past 75 years, Nazi ideology has been mixed with Hinduism, magic, alchemy and the occult as a rebellion against the status quo. In Nazi Satanism, "the swastika and Third Reich imagery join black candles, skulls and magical pentagrams in a tableau of ritualized transgression." And during the post-WWII era, many fascists saw UFO sightings as an indication that Nazis would come back to rule the world. Throughout, Goodrick-Clarke catalogues the ideologies, histories, personalities and appeals of the groups, most of which have always found young white men to be their most receptive audience. There's little evaluation of the potential that the small, splinter groups now active might have to commit future atrocities, but the author adds to our knowledge of the broad, frightening tentacles of Nazi ideology. Illus. (Feb.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

This comprehensive inquiry examines the disturbing historical and contemporary connections between certain religious cults and Nazi ideology. Goodrick-Clarke (Hitler's Priestess; The Occult Roots of Nazism) begins with a consideration of the origins of American neo-Nazism and ends with a thorough discussion of well-known, current far-right groups: the European skinheads, the Aryan Nations and the World Church of the Creator movement, which inspired the 1999 shooting spree in the Midwest. In between, the author focuses on the intersection between Nazi ideology and religious and cultural oddities, showing, for example, how some Nazi leaders, particularly Heinrich Himmler, were obsessed with esoterica and strange historical justifications for pro-Aryan racial theory. Over the past 75 years, Nazi ideology has been mixed with Hinduism, magic, alchemy and the occult as a rebellion against the status quo. In Nazi Satanism, "the swastika and Third Reich imagery join black candles, skulls and magical pentagrams in a tableau of ritualized transgression." And during the post-WWII era, many fascists saw UFO sightings as an indication that Nazis would come back to rule the world. Throughout, Goodrick-Clarke catalogues the ideologies, histories, personalities and appeals of the groups, most of which have always found young white men to be their most receptive audience. There's little evaluation of the potential that the small, splinter groups now active might have to commit future atrocities, but the author adds to our knowledge of the broad, frightening tentacles of Nazi ideology. Illus. (Feb.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Goodrick-Clarke's The Occult Roots of Nazism examined the influence of late 19th- and early 20th-century German and pagan mysticism on National Socialist thought. This sequel, based on the writings of past and contemporary adherents of these ideas, continues this study among modern American and European racist groups. The new angle is the glorification of Hitler and Nazism. Goodrick-Clarke shows how a strange mix of racism, paganism, Eastern religion, Christianity, Satanism, rock music, and science fiction is being used to support the revival of fascist ideas; adherents see Hitler himself as an avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu who survived World War II at a secret German flying-saucer base located in Antarctica. This disturbing work presents a troubling picture of the mindset of the modern Far Right. For all libraries. Stephen L. Hupp, West Virginia Univ.-Parkersburg Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

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Black Sun

New York University Press

Chapter One

American Neo-Nazism

AN EXOTIC IMPORT from Europe, American neo-Nazism has always transcended American nationalism. American neo-Nazis regard themselves as the brothers of all white men in a global movement of racial nationalism. While they remain fixated on the figure of Adolf Hitler as the lost savior of the Western world, his German nationalist horizons are superseded by their wider vision of a pan-Aryan movement led by the United States as the leading white power of the postwar world. American neo-Nazism traces its roots to the early 1950s, when the anti-communist ideology of the Cold War could find a nostalgic model in Hitler's attempted destruction of the Soviet Union. Neo-Nazism quickly stigmatized liberalism and the American Jews as the aides and abettors of communism in a violent anti-Semitism based on Nazi models. However, it was desegregation and the black civil rights movement of the early 1960s which have provided the enduring political motivation for American racial nationalism. The social enfranchisement of black Americans, forced integration, busing affirmative action and equal opportunities led the Americanneo-Nazis to cast themselves in a white supremacist role. When large-scale Hispanic and other Third World immigration began in the 1980s, American neo-Nazism regarded itself as the front-line defense of America's survival as a white nation. The changing ethnic composition of the United States is a profound issue, as is the political cohesion of an increasingly diverse multicultural society. The progression of American neo-Nazism from George Lincoln Rockwell in the 1960s to William Pierce in the 2000s illustrates how the religious myths of German National Socialism are brought to bear on dramatic cultural changes in American demography and identity.

The self-styled Fuhrer of the 1960s, George Lincoln Rockwell will always be identified as the founder of the overtly pro-Hitler, postwar Nazi movement in the United States. Rockwell's extravagant praise for Hitler, his violent racism against the Jews and blacks, allied with excess and exhibitionist tactics, have ensured him a lasting place in the folklore of American political extremism. Despairing of his earlier political efforts with old-style far-right groups, Rockwell founded his American Nazi Party in 1959, adopting a brazen Nazi image complete with swastika flags, stormtroopers and open declarations of his intentions to gas the Jews. He fantasized that he would become president of the United States by 1973 and that he would enjoy the support of a Senate and House of Representatives made up of members of his party. His political program was firmly grounded in a policy of "white survival" which aimed at the wholesale repatriation of all American Negroes to Africa and at the extermination of the Jews, whom he regarded as the architects of racial desegregation, national decline and cultural degeneracy.

A mixture of clowning and provocation characterized all of Rockwell's public appearances. Soon after founding the party, Rockwell and his men regularly picketed the White House with signs that read "Save Ike from the kikes," "The only communist party in the Middle East is in Israel," "Gas red Jewish spies" and "Communism is Jewish." In 1961 Rockwell drove a "Hate Bus" through the South until his party was apprehended at New Orleans. The sides of the vehicle were hung with notices such as "We do hate race-mixing" and "We hate Jew-Communism." Back in Washington, his stormtroopers used to drive a bus around the city bearing the slogan: "Rockwell is right! Who needs niggers?" In Boston and Philadelphia, the party picketed cinemas showing the popular film Exodus, which told the story of Jewish immigrants to Israel after World War II, with banners demanding "America for Whites and Gas Chamber for Traitors." Throughout the mid-1960s, Rockwell and his American Nazi Party were involved in numerous protests and disruptions. Charges against stormtroopers ranged from fighting, loitering, vagrancy and assault to desertion, criminal defamation and unlawful possession of firearms.

What makes an American Nazi? Examining Rockwell's life, one finds a mixture of religious conviction and idealism driving a noisy program of anti-Semitism and anti-communism, white supremacy and eugenics. His exhibitionist tactics were very likely influenced by his parental background. George Lincoln Rockwell was born on 9 March 1918 in Bloomington, Illinois, the eldest son of theatrical performers. His father, George Lovejoy "Doc" Rockwell, was a vaudeville comedian of English and Scottish ancestry with a top act on Broadway and well known on radio and in the leading theaters of the country. His mother, born Claire Schade, was a young German-French toe dancer, part of a family dance team. Following his parents' divorce, he spent his childhood staying with his mother in rural Illinois and his father on the Maine coast, where regular house guests included Fred Allen, Benny Goodman and Groucho Marx.

After completing prep school at Hebron Academy, Rockwell attended Brown University in 1938 to study philosophy and sociology. He quickly became politicized against the liberal, egalitarian tenor of social science and his teachers. Later, he became convinced that liberalism was the "pimping little sister" of communism. His grades were poor but he was art editor of the campus magazine, Sir Brown. His cartoons ranged from the humorous to comic-book horror with images of violence, destruction and bombings. The prospect of war offered a welcome relief from his studies. Eager for action, high-strung and edgy, Rockwell was swayed by the contemporary buildup of anti-German opinion. By March 1941, he had enlisted in the Naval Air Corps and quickly won his wings. He served as a naval aviator flying anti-submarine missions in the South Atlantic and South Pacific throughout World War II, commanded the naval air support at the battle for Guadalcanal and during the invasion of Guam in August 1944 and was demobbed with the rank of lieutenant commander and several decorations in October 1945.

Meanwhile, he had married a girl he had known as a student at Brown. Rockwell spent the first five years after leaving the navy studying art and then taking a variety of jobs as a commercial photographer, a painter, an advertising executive and a publisher in Maine and New York. He showed some promise as a commercial artist, enrolling at the Pratt Institute in New York. In 1948 he won a $1,000 prize in a national art contest sponsored by the National Society of Illustrators. But war again intervened in his career. In 1950, with the outbreak of the Korean War, Rockwell returned to active duty, training fighter pilots in southern California. His involvement with the Korean conflict bred in him an enduring hatred of communism and a paranoid fear that it would undermine the United States.

It was here that Rockwell first became politically engaged in the campaign to have the military hero General Douglas MacArthur elected president. The anti-communist revelations of Joseph McCarthy also dominated this period, and Rockwell was deeply suspicious of the motives of those who sought to discredit him. An old lady in San Diego involved in the MacArthur campaign showed him some newspapers that she claimed were controlled by Jews and out to smear both men. She introduced him to McCarthy's speeches and Conde McGinley's anti-Semitic newspaper, Common Sense, which contained startling revelations of a secret Jewish-communist plot behind the scenes of twentieth-century history. She also encouraged him to attend a speech of the veteran anti-Semite and rabble-rouser Gerald L. K. Smith in Los Angeles. Rockwell was overwhelmed by Smith's emotive exposure of the Jewish conspiracy and bid for world power. Through further reading in the San Diego public library, he became convinced of the existence of a Jewish-communist world conspiracy. Rockwell was staggered by both the seeming magnitude of the conspiracy as well as the official and media silence concerning its existence. Down in the dark book stacks of the San Diego library one autumn day in 1950, Rockwell experienced illumination and political awakening. He had always felt that the world was out of joint, that mischief was afoot, but now he felt he held the key to the past and the present. But how could he fight against this monstrous and universal plot? Given the apparent enormity of the Jewish world conspiracy, Rockwell now wondered why America had gone to war on the side of the communist Soviet Union and opposed "Christian Germany, which never had a single highly placed spy in [America], and no plans for conquering the world." The example of Adolf Hitler and his crusade against world Jewry and communism quickly came to mind. Rockwell believed Hitler had understood the Jewish menace from the outset of his career and that the Jews had involved Britain and America in the conflict for their own interests. Early in 1951, Rockwell found a copy of Mein Kampf in a local bookshop, read it and saw the world anew:

[Here] I found abundant "mental sunshine," which bathed all the gray world suddenly in the clear light of reason and understanding. Word after word, sentence after sentence stabbed into the darkness like thunderclaps and lightningbolts of revelation, tearing and ripping away the cobwebs of more than thirty years of darkness, brilliantly illuminating the mysteries of the heretofore impenetrable murk in a world gone mad. I was transfixed, hypnotized.... I wondered at the utter, indescribable genius of it.... I realized that National Socialism, the iconoclastic world view of Adolf Hitler, was the doctrine of scientific racial idealism--actually a new religion.

Thus was George Lincoln Rockwell converted to the religion of National Socialism. In later years he would write that "future generations will look upon Adolf Hitler as the White Savior of the twentieth century, and the Fuehrerbunker in Berlin as the Alamo of the White race."

Some eight years were yet to elapse before he became an outspoken Hitlerite at the head of the American Nazi Party. Meanwhile, in November 1952, the navy had assigned him to a base at Keflavik in Iceland, where he spent two years as a F8F Bearcat pilot and achieved the rank of commander. Here he met his second wife, Thora Hallgrimsson, a member of a prominent local family and the niece of Iceland's ambassador to the United States. Rockwell was still engrossed in Mein Kampf and took his bride to Berchtesgaden, Germany, for their honeymoon. They made a pilgrimage to Hitler's Eagle's Nest in a mood of reverence and fascination. On returning to civilian life, he decided to enter magazine publishing, hoping to find both a livelihood and a forum for his political ideas. He was also active among right-wing groups, attempted to launch an American Federation of Conservative Organizations and tried to advance by concealing his Nazi hard-core ideology behind a respectable front. But eventually he despaired of this strategy as it failed to attract dedicated racists and anti-Semites.

Prompted by a series of recurrent dreams in the winter of 1957-58 that always ended with his meeting Hitler, he decided to go public against what he perceived as Jewish power in America, with the financial patronage of Harold N. Arrowsmith, a wealthy anti-Semite. At Arlington, Virginia, they formed the National Committee to Free America from Jewish Domination. After a maverick campaign for the governorship of Georgia, Rockwell's first opportunity for confrontation was provided by the U.S. government's military aid in May 1958 for the Chamoun regime in Lebanon, which was unpopular with Lebanese Arabs but enjoyed the support of the Israelis. On 29 July 1958 Rockwell led a picket of the White House, protesting against Jewish influence on the government, and organized simultaneous demonstrations in Atlanta, Georgia and Louisville, Kentucky. Earlier in the year, Rockwell had been involved in the founding of the National States Rights Party, a new anti-Semitic and racist party in Georgia. When a synagogue was blown up in Atlanta on 12 October, the police seized Rockwell's supporters there, and newspapers around the world carried stories implicating Rockwell. Now he and his family were harassed and his home was attacked; Arrowsmith retreated from the glare of the publicity and withdrew his support.

His wife and children soon found the strain too great and returned to Iceland. Deserted by his family and former supporters, Rockwell faced a bleak and solitary future in the early months of 1959. One cold March morning in his house at Arlington, he found himself alone communing with a huge swastika banner and a plaque of Hitler. Following another "religious experience" involving a brief state of universal awareness, he became convinced he had to fulfill Hitler's mission in a total, global victory over the forces of tyranny and oppression. He would henceforth become an overt National Socialist and self-proclaimed devotee of Hitler, abandoning all thought of liaison with conservative groups and respectability. He proudly displayed his Nazi banner, recruited a handful of stormtroopers to whom he issued grayshirt uniforms and swastika armbands, mounted a large illuminated swastika on the roof of his house and founded the American Party, later called the American Nazi Party. Besides the party headquarters at his house at 2507 North Franklin Road in Arlington, Rockwell also maintained a barracks in a run-down farmhouse nearby for his growing detachment of stormtroopers.

Once Rockwell had decided on a flagrant, open avowal of Nazism, his activity was wholly directed toward the provocation of the Jewish enemy and society at large, which he regarded as its passive victim. Besides flaunting their Nazi uniforms and insignia, he and his stormtroopers missed no opportunity to shock and outrage domestic opinion. From 1960 onward, his brash and sensational exploits were designed to achieve maximum press coverage for an otherwise crackpot fringe group that numbered no more than two hundred members at its peak. Surrounded by fluttering Stars and Stripes and swastika flags, Rockwell held speeches before curious crowds and eager reporters advocating a national and then global program of eugenics to purify the Aryan race. He ceaselessly denounced the Jews as representatives of Marxism, unbridled capitalism, racial degeneration and cultural bolshevism and demanded their trial and execution by gassing. Rockwell effectively forced the media to give him publicity by concentrating on the distribution of imflammatory leaflets, creating public incidents and haranguing crowds to provoke violent opposition. The American Nazi Party also pursued a racist policy toward blacks. Rejecting all race mixing and desegregation as Jewish wiles to mongrelize the American racial stock, Rockwell proposed to resettle all American Negroes in a new African state, to be funded by the U.S. government. He even appeared as a guest speaker at a major convention of Black Muslims in Chicago on 25 February 1962, where he told an audience of more than twelve thousand that he considered Elijah Muhammad the Adolf Hitler of the black man. Privately, Rockwell imagined that such a deportation program would be preceded by an imminent race war and the mass slaughter of blacks.

Rockwell's success in achieving notoriety owed much to the growing strength of the contemporary civil rights movement among American blacks, led by Martin Luther King Jr. During the early 1960s, Negroes were becoming more politically aware: protests, marches and the Watts and Harlem riots signaled Negroes' impatience for genuine equality in American society. This was the period of liberal concern for the blacks' predicament, measures for desegregation were undertaken and the busing of white and black children to mixed schools became widespread. All this was anathema to Rockwell, who regarded blacks as a primitive, lethargic race who desired only simple pleasures and a life of irresponsibility. Formerly content as slaves, their problems had begun after their closer involvement with the social and economic life of whites. Rockwell was convinced that Jews had promoted blacks into a hopeless position of alleged equality with whites. Deeply frustrated by their inability to compete in education and for jobs, blacks had become violent and thereby fulfilled Jewish plans for fomenting the breakdown of the traditional order and the advent of communism. By harping on the threat of escalating Negro riots in conjunction with his rabid anti-Semitism and anti-communism, Rockwell attempted to exploit profound American anxieties about the apparent disorderliness of the 1960s.

The American Nazi Party engaged in a constant barrage of protests and disruptions at this time. Jewish youths were beaten up, a synagogue was bombed in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and the word "Jew" was painted on front doors. In early 1962 Rockwell began planning a massive rally to celebrate Hitler's birthday in April. During the summer he attended an international Nazi camp-congress organized by the British neo-Nazi leader Colin Jordan in Gloucestershire in defiance of a Home Office ban on his entry to Britain. Here agreement was reached on the founding of a World Union of National Socialists. Following his deportation back to the States, Rockwell picketed the White House in protest. In September 1962 he awarded one of his captains, Roy James, a medal for punching Martin Luther King Jr. in the face in Birmingham, Alabama. There were also several disruptive incidents in the House of Representatives, including that of Robert A. Lloyd, who ran into the proceedings in blackface and a stovepipe hat, shouting "Long live Rockwell" and asking to be seated as a Missisippi congressman in a parody of Negro speech. Rockwell himself was charged with disorderly conduct and stood trial in New York in June 1966. Defended by a Jewish lawyer, Rockwell was acquitted through the court's upholding of the free speech he would deny to his enemies.

Alongside all this headline-grabbing activity on the American scene, Rockwell was attempting to establish the philosophical credentials of the World Union of National Socialists (WUNS). The leadership of the WUNS, a federation of some seven national Nazi groups and parties in various countries, including Britain, the United States, Chile, Denmark, France, Argentina and Australia, was originally vested in Colin Jordan on its establishment in August 1962. However, after Jordan was sent to prison on public order offenses later that year, this office passed to Rockwell. Through the WUNS, Rockwell was determined to present the racial idealism of National Socialism as a program of global Aryan power above the nationalisms of the past to a younger generation of new supporters. Only with such an ideology, he believed, would it be possible to counter the Jewish world conspiracy and the rising tide of colored peoples all over the planet. In the spring of 1966, Rockwell commenced publishing a new WUNS periodical entitled National Socialist World from his headquarters at Arlington as a new forum for international Nazi ideology.

Rockwell had appointed as its editor Dr. William Luther Pierce (b. 1933), a newcomer to the neo-Nazi movement. Pierce was a physicist by profession who had studied at Rice University and the California Institute of Technology, completed his doctorate at the University of Colorado and then spent three years teaching at Oregon State University. From the outset, National Socialist World cultivated its image and status as the leading international Nazi periodical, with long articles and book reviews ostensibly written for an educated and literate readership and employing high standards of production. The magazine was intended as a quarterly, with each issue having over a hundred pages. The first issue comprised a philosophical appraisal of National Socialism by Colin Jordan and an article by George Lincoln Rockwell on the value of vulgar Nazi propaganda; pride of place was given to a condensed edition of The Lightning and the Sun by Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Nordicist whose Hitler cult and philosophy of history has exercised a deep influence on neo-Nazi intellectuals (see chapter 5). Six numbers of the magazine had been published by the winter of 1968, and these included such subjects as Gottfried Feder's twenty-five points of the German Nazi Party, Matt Koehl on Hitler and National Socialist doctrine, and Robert F. Williams on race war in America.

While fostering the historical memory of Hitler and the Third Reich in articles and book reviews, the periodical put much emphasis on the future importance of the United States in the coming global racial struggle. In a long editorial for the summer 1967 number, Pierce drew up the order of battle between "150 million more-or-less Aryan whites, 25 million Negroes and 6 million Jews" in a war of dominance and survival. He claimed that the elemental aspect of the conflict was concealed by the Jewish control of public opinion, finance and education and pessimistically anticipated that disorders would increase for the time being. All Negro arson, murder and insurrection would continue to be attributed to poverty and discrimination, white prejudice and bigotry, police brutality and injustice. Welfare bribes and leniency toward blacks would increase, the need for more tolerance would be preached, while America descended into an inferno. He expected that active National Socialists would soon find themselves outlawed and driven into illegal, underground activities. Nevertheless, Pierce ultimately hoped that "once Aryan America has become racially self-conscious, has organised itself, flexed its muscles, and scented blood, the Jews will follow the Negroes into history's garbage pail in short order."

Recognizing the limitations of a movement entirely devoted to publicity stunts and provocation, Rockwell had begun planning a longer-term strategy for the party involving mass organization and electoral campaigning. On 1 January 1967 the party had been renamed the National Socialist White Peoples' Party (NSWPP), and issues of fund-raising, propaganda writing and membership recruitment were addressed at a party conference in June. But these plans were cut short. On 25 August 1967 Rockwell was shot by a sniper's bullet as he reversed his vehicle out of a parking lot on leaving a laundromat in Arlington. The assassin was John Patler, who had edited the party bulletin, The Stormtrooper. He had been associated with the National Renaissance Party and Rockwell's American Nazi Party before leaving to start his own organization, the American National Party, which lasted from 1962 to early 1963. He returned to join Rockwell but eventually became a source of friction due to his unstable character and Marxist leanings. Rockwell finally expelled him from the party in March 1967 for fomenting dissent between fair and dark-skinned members. Patler was tried for murder, found guilty and sentenced to twenty years in prison.

Continues...

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Read a Sample Chapter

Chapter One

American Neo-Nazism

AN EXOTIC IMPORT from Europe, American neo-Nazism has always transcended American nationalism. American neo-Nazis regard themselves as the brothers of all white men in a global movement of racial nationalism. While they remain fixated on the figure of Adolf Hitler as the lost savior of the Western world, his German nationalist horizons are superseded by their wider vision of a pan-Aryan movement led by the United States as the leading white power of the postwar world. American neo-Nazism traces its roots to the early 1950s, when the anti-communist ideology of the Cold War could find a nostalgic model in Hitler's attempted destruction of the Soviet Union. Neo-Nazism quickly stigmatized liberalism and the American Jews as the aides and abettors of communism in a violent anti-Semitism based on Nazi models. However, it was desegregation and the black civil rights movement of the early 1960s which have provided the enduring political motivation for American racial nationalism. The social enfranchisement of black Americans, forced integration, busing affirmative action and equal opportunities led the American neo-Nazis to cast themselves in a white supremacist role. When large-scale Hispanic and other Third World immigration began in the 1980s, American neo-Nazism regarded itself as the front-line defense of America's survival as a white nation. The changing ethnic composition of the United States is a profound issue, as is the political cohesion of an increasingly diverse multicultural society. The progression of American neo-Nazism from George Lincoln Rockwell in the 1960s to WilliamPierce in the 2000s illustrates how the religious myths of German National Socialism are brought to bear on dramatic cultural changes in American demography and identity.

    The self-styled Führer of the 1960s, George Lincoln Rockwell will always be identified as the founder of the overtly pro-Hitler, postwar Nazi movement in the United States. Rockwell's extravagant praise for Hitler, his violent racism against the Jews and blacks, allied with excess and exhibitionist tactics, have ensured him a lasting place in the folklore of American political extremism. Despairing of his earlier political efforts with old-style far-right groups, Rockwell founded his American Nazi Party in 1959, adopting a brazen Nazi image complete with swastika flags, stormtroopers and open declarations of his intentions to gas the Jews. He fantasized that he would become president of the United States by 1973 and that he would enjoy the support of a Senate and House of Representatives made up of members of his party. His political program was firmly grounded in a policy of "white survival" which aimed at the wholesale repatriation of all American Negroes to Africa and at the extermination of the Jews, whom he regarded as the architects of racial desegregation, national decline and cultural degeneracy.

    A mixture of clowning and provocation characterized all of Rockwell's public appearances. Soon after founding the party, Rockwell and his men regularly picketed the White House with signs that read "Save Ike from the kikes," "The only communist party in the Middle East is in Israel," "Gas red Jewish spies" and "Communism is Jewish." In 1961 Rockwell drove a "Hate Bus" through the South until his party was apprehended at New Orleans. The sides of the vehicle were hung with notices such as "We do hate race-mixing" and "We hate Jew-Communism." Back in Washington, his stormtroopers used to drive a bus around the city bearing the slogan: "Rockwell is right! Who needs niggers?" In Boston and Philadelphia, the party picketed cinemas showing the popular film Exodus, which told the story of Jewish immigrants to Israel after World War II, with banners demanding "America for Whites and Gas Chamber for Traitors." Throughout the mid-1960s, Rockwell and his American Nazi Party were involved in numerous protests and disruptions. Charges against stormtroopers ranged from fighting, loitering, vagrancy and assault to desertion, criminal defamation and unlawful possession of firearms.

    What makes an American Nazi? Examining Rockwell's life, one finds a mixture of religious conviction and idealism driving a noisy program of anti-Semitism and anti-communism, white supremacy and eugenics. His exhibitionist tactics were very likely influenced by his parental background. George Lincoln Rockwell was born on 9 March 1918 in Bloomington, Illinois, the eldest son of theatrical performers. His father, George Lovejoy "Doc" Rockwell, was a vaudeville comedian of English and Scottish ancestry with a top act on Broadway and well known on radio and in the leading theaters of the country. His mother, born Claire Schade, was a young German-French toe dancer, part of a family dance team. Following his parents' divorce, he spent his childhood staying with his mother in rural Illinois and his father on the Maine coast, where regular house guests included Fred Allen, Benny Goodman and Groucho Marx.

    After completing prep school at Hebron Academy, Rockwell attended Brown University in 1938 to study philosophy and sociology. He quickly became politicized against the liberal, egalitarian tenor of social science and his teachers. Later, he became convinced that liberalism was the "pimping little sister" of communism. His grades were poor but he was art editor of the campus magazine, Sir Brown. His cartoons ranged from the humorous to comic-book horror with images of violence, destruction and bombings. The prospect of war offered a welcome relief from his studies. Eager for action, high-strung and edgy, Rockwell was swayed by the contemporary buildup of anti-German opinion. By March 1941, he had enlisted in the Naval Air Corps and quickly won his wings. He served as a naval aviator flying anti-submarine missions in the South Atlantic and South Pacific throughout World War II, commanded the naval air support at the battle for Guadalcanal and during the invasion of Guam in August 1944 and was demobbed with the rank of lieutenant commander and several decorations in October 1945.

    Meanwhile, he had married a girl he had known as a student at Brown. Rockwell spent the first five years after leaving the navy studying art and then taking a variety of jobs as a commercial photographer, a painter, an advertising executive and a publisher in Maine and New York. He showed some promise as a commercial artist, enrolling at the Pratt Institute in New York. In 1948 he won a $1,000 prize in a national art contest sponsored by the National Society of Illustrators. But war again intervened in his career. In 1950, with the outbreak of the Korean War, Rockwell returned to active duty, training fighter pilots in southern California. His involvement with the Korean conflict bred in him an enduring hatred of communism and a paranoid fear that it would undermine the United States.

    It was here that Rockwell first became politically engaged in the campaign to have the military hero General Douglas MacArthur elected president. The anti-communist revelations of Joseph McCarthy also dominated this period, and Rockwell was deeply suspicious of the motives of those who sought to discredit him. An old lady in San Diego involved in the MacArthur campaign showed him some newspapers that she claimed were controlled by Jews and out to smear both men. She introduced him to McCarthy's speeches and Conde McGinley's anti-Semitic newspaper, Common Sense, which contained startling revelations of a secret Jewish-communist plot behind the scenes of twentieth-century history. She also encouraged him to attend a speech of the veteran anti-Semite and rabble-rouser Gerald L. K. Smith in Los Angeles. Rockwell was overwhelmed by Smith's emotive exposure of the Jewish conspiracy and bid for world power. Through further reading in the San Diego public library, he became convinced of the existence of a Jewish-communist world conspiracy. Rockwell was staggered by both the seeming magnitude of the conspiracy as well as the official and media silence concerning its existence. Down in the dark book stacks of the San Diego library one autumn day in 1950, Rockwell experienced illumination and political awakening. He had always felt that the world was out of joint, that mischief was afoot, but now he felt he held the key to the past and the present. But how could he fight against this monstrous and universal plot? Given the apparent enormity of the Jewish world conspiracy, Rockwell now wondered why America had gone to war on the side of the communist Soviet Union and opposed "Christian Germany, which never had a single highly placed spy in [America], and no plans for conquering the world." The example of Adolf Hitler and his crusade against world Jewry and communism quickly came to mind. Rockwell believed Hitler had understood the Jewish menace from the outset of his career and that the Jews had involved Britain and America in the conflict for their own interests. Early in 1951, Rockwell found a copy of Mein Kampf in a local bookshop, read it and saw the world anew:

[Here] I found abundant "mental sunshine," which bathed all the gray world suddenly in the clear light of reason and understanding. Word after word, sentence after sentence stabbed into the darkness like thunderclaps and lightningbolts of revelation, tearing and ripping away the cobwebs of more than thirty years of darkness, brilliantly illuminating the mysteries of the heretofore impenetrable murk in a world gone mad. I was transfixed, hypnotized.... I wondered at the utter, indescribable genius of it.... I realized that National Socialism, the iconoclastic world view of Adolf Hitler, was the doctrine of scientific racial idealism—actually a new religion.

Thus was George Lincoln Rockwell converted to the religion of National Socialism. In later years he would write that "future generations will look upon Adolf Hitler as the White Savior of the twentieth century, and the Fuehrerbunker in Berlin as the Alamo of the White race."

    Some eight years were yet to elapse before he became an outspoken Hitlerite at the head of the American Nazi Party. Meanwhile, in November 1952, the navy had assigned him to a base at Keflavik in Iceland, where he spent two years as a F8F Bearcat pilot and achieved the rank of commander. Here he met his second wife, Thora Hallgrimsson, a member of a prominent local family and the niece of Iceland's ambassador to the United States. Rockwell was still engrossed in Mein Kampf and took his bride to Berchtesgaden, Germany, for their honeymoon. They made a pilgrimage to Hitler's Eagle's Nest in a mood of reverence and fascination. On returning to civilian life, he decided to enter magazine publishing, hoping to find both a livelihood and a forum for his political ideas. He was also active among right-wing groups, attempted to launch an American Federation of Conservative Organizations and tried to advance by concealing his Nazi hard-core ideology behind a respectable front. But eventually he despaired of this strategy as it failed to attract dedicated racists and anti-Semites.

    Prompted by a series of recurrent dreams in the winter of 1957-58 that always ended with his meeting Hitler, he decided to go public against what he perceived as Jewish power in America, with the financial patronage of Harold N. Arrowsmith, a wealthy anti-Semite. At Arlington, Virginia, they formed the National Committee to Free America from Jewish Domination. After a maverick campaign for the governorship of Georgia, Rockwell's first opportunity for confrontation was provided by the U.S. government's military aid in May 1958 for the Chamoun regime in Lebanon, which was unpopular with Lebanese Arabs but enjoyed the support of the Israelis. On 29 July 1958 Rockwell led a picket of the White House, protesting against Jewish influence on the government, and organized simultaneous demonstrations in Atlanta, Georgia and Louisville, Kentucky. Earlier in the year, Rockwell had been involved in the founding of the National States Rights Party, a new anti-Semitic and racist party in Georgia. When a synagogue was blown up in Atlanta on 12 October, the police seized Rockwell's supporters there, and newspapers around the world carried stories implicating Rockwell. Now he and his family were harassed and his home was attacked; Arrowsmith retreated from the glare of the publicity and withdrew his support.

    His wife and children soon found the strain too great and returned to Iceland. Deserted by his family and former supporters, Rockwell faced a bleak and solitary future in the early months of 1959. One cold March morning in his house at Arlington, he found himself alone communing with a huge swastika banner and a plaque of Hitler. Following another "religious experience" involving a brief state of universal awareness, he became convinced he had to fulfill Hitler's mission in a total, global victory over the forces of tyranny and oppression. He would henceforth become an overt National Socialist and self-proclaimed devotee of Hitler, abandoning all thought of liaison with conservative groups and respectability. He proudly displayed his Nazi banner, recruited a handful of stormtroopers to whom he issued grayshirt uniforms and swastika armbands, mounted a large illuminated swastika on the roof of his house and founded the American Party, later called the American Nazi Party. Besides the party headquarters at his house at 2507 North Franklin Road in Arlington, Rockwell also maintained a barracks in a run-down farmhouse nearby for his growing detachment of stormtroopers.

    Once Rockwell had decided on a flagrant, open avowal of Nazism, his activity was wholly directed toward the provocation of the Jewish enemy and society at large, which he regarded as its passive victim. Besides flaunting their Nazi uniforms and insignia, he and his stormtroopers missed no opportunity to shock and outrage domestic opinion. From 1960 onward, his brash and sensational exploits were designed to achieve maximum press coverage for an otherwise crackpot fringe group that numbered no more than two hundred members at its peak. Surrounded by fluttering Stars and Stripes and swastika flags, Rockwell held speeches before curious crowds and eager reporters advocating a national and then global program of eugenics to purify the Aryan race. He ceaselessly denounced the Jews as representatives of Marxism, unbridled capitalism, racial degeneration and cultural bolshevism and demanded their trial and execution by gassing. Rockwell effectively forced the media to give him publicity by concentrating on the distribution of imflammatory leaflets, creating public incidents and haranguing crowds to provoke violent opposition. The American Nazi Party also pursued a racist policy toward blacks. Rejecting all race mixing and desegregation as Jewish wiles to mongrelize the American racial stock, Rockwell proposed to resettle all American Negroes in a new African state, to be funded by the U.S. government. He even appeared as a guest speaker at a major convention of Black Muslims in Chicago on 25 February 1962, where he told an audience of more than twelve thousand that he considered Elijah Muhammad the Adolf Hitler of the black man. Privately, Rockwell imagined that such a deportation program would be preceded by an imminent race war and the mass slaughter of blacks.

    Rockwell's success in achieving notoriety owed much to the growing strength of the contemporary civil rights movement among American blacks, led by Martin Luther King Jr. During the early 1960s, Negroes were becoming more politically aware: protests, marches and the Watts and Harlem riots signaled Negroes' impatience for genuine equality in American society. This was the period of liberal concern for the blacks' predicament, measures for desegregation were undertaken and the busing of white and black children to mixed schools became widespread. All this was anathema to Rockwell, who regarded blacks as a primitive, lethargic race who desired only simple pleasures and a life of irresponsibility. Formerly content as slaves, their problems had begun after their closer involvement with the social and economic life of whites. Rockwell was convinced that Jews had promoted blacks into a hopeless position of alleged equality with whites. Deeply frustrated by their inability to compete in education and for jobs, blacks had become violent and thereby fulfilled Jewish plans for fomenting the breakdown of the traditional order and the advent of communism. By harping on the threat of escalating Negro riots in conjunction with his rabid anti-Semitism and anti-communism, Rockwell attempted to exploit profound American anxieties about the apparent disorderliness of the 1960s.

    The American Nazi Party engaged in a constant barrage of protests and disruptions at this time. Jewish youths were beaten up, a synagogue was bombed in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and the word "Jew" was painted on front doors. In early 1962 Rockwell began planning a massive rally to celebrate Hitler's birthday in April. During the summer he attended an international Nazi camp-congress organized by the British neo-Nazi leader Colin Jordan in Gloucestershire in defiance of a Home Office ban on his entry to Britain. Here agreement was reached on the founding of a World Union of National Socialists. Following his deportation back to the States, Rockwell picketed the White House in protest. In September 1962 he awarded one of his captains, Roy James, a medal for punching Martin Luther King Jr. in the face in Birmingham, Alabama. There were also several disruptive incidents in the House of Representatives, including that of Robert A. Lloyd, who ran into the proceedings in blackface and a stovepipe hat, shouting "Long live Rockwell" and asking to be seated as a Missisippi congressman in a parody of Negro speech. Rockwell himself was charged with disorderly conduct and stood trial in New York in June 1966. Defended by a Jewish lawyer, Rockwell was acquitted through the court's upholding of the free speech he would deny to his enemies.

    Alongside all this headline-grabbing activity on the American scene, Rockwell was attempting to establish the philosophical credentials of the World Union of National Socialists (WUNS). The leadership of the WUNS, a federation of some seven national Nazi groups and parties in various countries, including Britain, the United States, Chile, Denmark, France, Argentina and Australia, was originally vested in Colin Jordan on its establishment in August 1962. However, after Jordan was sent to prison on public order offenses later that year, this office passed to Rockwell. Through the WUNS, Rockwell was determined to present the racial idealism of National Socialism as a program of global Aryan power above the nationalisms of the past to a younger generation of new supporters. Only with such an ideology, he believed, would it be possible to counter the Jewish world conspiracy and the rising tide of colored peoples all over the planet. In the spring of 1966, Rockwell commenced publishing a new WUNS periodical entitled National Socialist World from his headquarters at Arlington as a new forum for international Nazi ideology.

    Rockwell had appointed as its editor Dr. William Luther Pierce (b. 1933), a newcomer to the neo-Nazi movement. Pierce was a physicist by profession who had studied at Rice University and the California Institute of Technology, completed his doctorate at the University of Colorado and then spent three years teaching at Oregon State University. From the outset, National Socialist World cultivated its image and status as the leading international Nazi periodical, with long articles and book reviews ostensibly written for an educated and literate readership and employing high standards of production. The magazine was intended as a quarterly, with each issue having over a hundred pages. The first issue comprised a philosophical appraisal of National Socialism by Colin Jordan and an article by George Lincoln Rockwell on the value of vulgar Nazi propaganda; pride of place was given to a condensed edition of The Lightning and the Sun by Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Nordicist whose Hitler cult and philosophy of history has exercised a deep influence on neo-Nazi intellectuals (see chapter 5). Six numbers of the magazine had been published by the winter of 1968, and these included such subjects as Gottfried Feder's twenty-five points of the German Nazi Party, Matt Koehl on Hitler and National Socialist doctrine, and Robert F. Williams on race war in America.

    While fostering the historical memory of Hitler and the Third Reich in articles and book reviews, the periodical put much emphasis on the future importance of the United States in the coming global racial struggle. In a long editorial for the summer 1967 number, Pierce drew up the order of battle between "150 million more-or-less Aryan whites, 25 million Negroes and 6 million Jews" in a war of dominance and survival. He claimed that the elemental aspect of the conflict was concealed by the Jewish control of public opinion, finance and education and pessimistically anticipated that disorders would increase for the time being. All Negro arson, murder and insurrection would continue to be attributed to poverty and discrimination, white prejudice and bigotry, police brutality and injustice. Welfare bribes and leniency toward blacks would increase, the need for more tolerance would be preached, while America descended into an inferno. He expected that active National Socialists would soon find themselves outlawed and driven into illegal, underground activities. Nevertheless, Pierce ultimately hoped that "once Aryan America has become racially self-conscious, has organised itself, flexed its muscles, and scented blood, the Jews will follow the Negroes into history's garbage pail in short order."

    Recognizing the limitations of a movement entirely devoted to publicity stunts and provocation, Rockwell had begun planning a longer-term strategy for the party involving mass organization and electoral campaigning. On 1 January 1967 the party had been renamed the National Socialist White Peoples' Party (NSWPP), and issues of fund-raising, propaganda writing and membership recruitment were addressed at a party conference in June. But these plans were cut short. On 25 August 1967 Rockwell was shot by a sniper's bullet as he reversed his vehicle out of a parking lot on leaving a laundromat in Arlington. The assassin was John Patler, who had edited the party bulletin, The Stormtrooper. He had been associated with the National Renaissance Party and Rockwell's American Nazi Party before leaving to start his own organization, the American National Party, which lasted from 1962 to early 1963. He returned to join Rockwell but eventually became a source of friction due to his unstable character and Marxist leanings. Rockwell finally expelled him from the party in March 1967 for fomenting dissent between fair and dark-skinned members. Patler was tried for murder, found guilty and sentenced to twenty years in prison.

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Excerpted from BLACK SUN by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke. Copyright © 2002 by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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