Speaker 1: Col Zone Media. It was just after noon on a
Speaker 1: warm day near the end of summer when the demagogue died.
Speaker 1: A single bullet fired from a rooftop by his assassin
Speaker 1: killed him almost instantly. A man who'd seemed larger than
Speaker 1: life bled out in front of horrified onlookers as his
Speaker 1: killer fled the scene on foot. He'd devoted his entire
Speaker 1: adult life to preaching hate. In the last few years
Speaker 1: of his hateful life, he'd spent much of his time
Speaker 1: touring colleges and universities, delighting in the controversy. His appearances
Speaker 1: provoked and wailing about free speech. When venues refused to
Speaker 1: host him. On college campuses across the country, he gave
Speaker 1: fiery speeches about the evils of communism, telling his young
Speaker 1: audiences that they were being brainwashed by liberalism and force
Speaker 1: fed Marxist propaganda. He railed against the Civil Rights Act,
Speaker 1: which he called a mistake. He said it was a
Speaker 1: weapon wielded against the white race, and he publicly disparaged
Speaker 1: Martin Luther King Junior. He likened homosexuality to a disease,
Speaker 1: and he dreamed of the day when he would have
Speaker 1: the power to strip queer people of their rights entirely
Speaker 1: above all else, though he was preoccupied with his belief
Speaker 1: that the white race was in danger of being replaced.
Speaker 1: Conspiracy theories about his death abounded, and his movement made
Speaker 1: him a martyr for their cause. But in the end,
Speaker 1: the man who fired the shot that killed George Lincoln
Speaker 1: Rockwell wasn't a Jew, or a communist or an agent
Speaker 1: of the state. It was a man who'd loved him
Speaker 1: like a father. I'm Molly Conger, and this I squere
Speaker 1: the little guise. This is a story about history, that's all.
Speaker 1: It's the story of an assassination that rocked the right
Speaker 1: wing reverberating through the white power movement for decades. Sometimes
Speaker 1: I'll open an episode by describing the meandering mental process
Speaker 1: through which I have arrived at that week's subject, some
Speaker 1: half formed thought that led me down a rabbit hole,
Speaker 1: or some tangent from a past episode that I'm following
Speaker 1: up on. Something like that. But maybe there's no reason
Speaker 1: in particular that I was thinking this week about the sudden,
Speaker 1: violent end a man who spent his entire adult life
Speaker 1: stoking violence against everyone else. George Lincoln Rockwell died in
Speaker 1: the parking lot of a laundromat in a strip mall
Speaker 1: in Arlington, Virginia, at twelve oh two p m. On
Speaker 1: August twenty fifth, nineteen sixty seven. This isn't really an
Speaker 1: episode about George Lincoln Rockwell, except for the fact that
Speaker 1: he's dead. Rockwell was the commander of the American Nazi Party,
Speaker 1: a group he founded in nineteen fifty nine. There isn't
Speaker 1: much to say about Rockwell that hasn't been said before.
Speaker 1: He was the founding father of American neo Nazism. He
Speaker 1: was a pioneer in the field of Holocaust denial. Barely
Speaker 1: a decade after the Holocaust ended, he invented the term
Speaker 1: white power. He took a Volkswagen bus full of Nazis
Speaker 1: across the country to Montgomery, Alabama, just to antagonize the
Speaker 1: Freedom Riders. He followed Martin Luther King Junior all over
Speaker 1: the country holding Nazi counter demonstrations, and when one of
Speaker 1: his stormtroopers punched King in the face in front of
Speaker 1: a crowd in Birmingham, Rockwell promoted the assailant to the
Speaker 1: head of the party's Chicago office. Rockwell was a monster,
Speaker 1: But this isn't a story about George Lincoln Rockwall it's
Speaker 1: about the Nazi who killed him. When that man was
Speaker 1: convicted of first degree murder in nineteen sixty seven, his
Speaker 1: name was John Patler, but it wasn't always and it
Speaker 1: isn't any more. The Nazi best known as John Patler
Speaker 1: was born John Pazzalos in New York City in January
Speaker 1: of nineteen thirty eight. He was the first of two
Speaker 1: sons born to Cristos and Athena Pazzalos. Cristos, so often
Speaker 1: referred to by the Anglicized version of his name, christ
Speaker 1: emigrated to New York as a teenager in nineteen thirteen,
Speaker 1: three years before his future wife was born. He married
Speaker 1: Athena manro Gianis, the daughter of Greek immigrants, in the
Speaker 1: fall of nineteen thirty seven, just a few months before
Speaker 1: for their son, John was born. His younger brother, George,
Speaker 1: would follow a year later. In nineteen forty three, when
Speaker 1: the Pazzalos boys were just four and five years old,
Speaker 1: their father murdered their mother. Newspaper articles from the time
Speaker 1: say the couple had been arguing for hours on the
Speaker 1: afternoon of August seventh. Cristos Pazzalos then took a taxi
Speaker 1: to a nearby police station and announced my wife has
Speaker 1: been fighting with me. Now she is shot with my revolver,
Speaker 1: for which I have a permit. None of the newspaper
Speaker 1: articles from nineteen forty three that I can find mention
Speaker 1: the boys. It's almost unbearable to imagine that these two
Speaker 1: little boys had been left alone in the home with
Speaker 1: their dying mother. But in a later autobiographical essay that
Speaker 1: Patler wrote for the American Nazi Party's Stormtrooper magazine, he
Speaker 1: said that she'd actually dropped them off at her mother's
Speaker 1: house before heading back home to pack her bags. She
Speaker 1: was planning to leave her husband. Cristos was initially booked
Speaker 1: only on a charge of felonious assault, but when Athena
Speaker 1: died the next day, his charges were upgraded to first
Speaker 1: degree murder. After unsuccessfully pleading temporary insanity, Cristos was allowed
Speaker 1: to plead guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter in
Speaker 1: early nineteen forty four, and he was sentenced to just
Speaker 1: seven and a half years. While their father was away
Speaker 1: at sing Sing, George and John lived with their maternal grandmother,
Speaker 1: Bessie mauro Giannis, was only a few years older than
Speaker 1: her son in law, and she was recently widowed and
Speaker 1: still had a teenager of her own at home. Patler
Speaker 1: would later write that she supported them by selling flowers
Speaker 1: at a stand on Park Avenue, and he remembers her
Speaker 1: hatred of the Jewish venders that she had to share
Speaker 1: space with at the market. It isn't entirely clear if
Speaker 1: their father actually wanted them back, but the great my
Speaker 1: mother died in nineteen fifty four, just a few years
Speaker 1: after Christos was released from prison. John and George were
Speaker 1: placed briefly in a youth home before ultimately being returned
Speaker 1: to their father's custody. After a decade of hearing their
Speaker 1: grandmother curse his name as the murderer of her daughter.
Speaker 1: Suddenly they were living with their father in the very
Speaker 1: same home in the Bronx where he'd killed their mother.
Speaker 1: Patler started getting into trouble with the police that year.
Speaker 1: In September, he and another sixteen year old boy stole
Speaker 1: a car, got into a police chase, crashed into a tree,
Speaker 1: and then ran off into the woods, evading the police
Speaker 1: for hours. That story sounds completely made up, and if
Speaker 1: it was just Patler's retelling of it years later, I
Speaker 1: wouldn't believe it. But there really is a nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: four newspaper headline that reads, twenty five cops seized two
Speaker 1: teens after hot car crash. The other boy was sent
Speaker 1: off to a reform school, but Patler hadn't been in
Speaker 1: serious trouble before, so he just got probation. By his
Speaker 1: own account, this was when he quote began to take
Speaker 1: a keen political interest in the Jews. Most biographies of
Speaker 1: George Lincoln Rockwell have a few pages devoted to Patler's childhood,
Speaker 1: and they all seem to agree that Cristos Patsalos and
Speaker 1: Bessie Malrogianis were very outspoken in their anti Semitism, so
Speaker 1: it's not like he hadn't been exposed to the idea before.
Speaker 1: But at sixteen years old, John Patler found a copy
Speaker 1: of mindcomp in the school library, and he was really
Speaker 1: vocal about his newfound interest in national socialism. His admiration
Speaker 1: for Hitler was no secret and it was causing him
Speaker 1: problems in school. One afternoon, while he was boxing in
Speaker 1: the park, he was chatting with another teenage boy about
Speaker 1: the need to do something about how the Jews are
Speaker 1: responsible for the malevolent influence of communism. As teenage boys
Speaker 1: did in the fifties, I guess and his friend offered
Speaker 1: to introduce him to some like minded individuals, a newly
Speaker 1: formed group called the Nationalist Youth League. Dust Hooker, a
Speaker 1: wealthy businessman, had formed the Nationalist Youth League ostensibly as
Speaker 1: the youth arm of his Nationalist party, but it mainly
Speaker 1: functioned as a teenage gang run by a middle aged man.
Speaker 1: The boys warm matching black uniforms and busted up Communist
Speaker 1: meetings and marched around the city handing out anti Semitic pamphlets.
Speaker 1: Patler idolized Hooker and quickly grew attached to this man
Speaker 1: as a sort of surrogate father. He later wrote that
Speaker 1: Hooker gave him his first political training and taught him
Speaker 1: quote everything he knew about the Jews. Part of that training,
Speaker 1: I guess, was making his own anti Smith flyers, and
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty six Patler tried his hand at drawing
Speaker 1: up his own pamphlets, and he was subsequently arrested on
Speaker 1: a charge of criminal libel because the leaflets targeted a
Speaker 1: specific Jewish businessman by name. He was still on probation
Speaker 1: for that midnight joy ride in a stolen car two
Speaker 1: years earlier, so he was sent to a psychiatric hospital
Speaker 1: for evaluation. Usually we only have people's recollections after the fact.
Speaker 1: You know, years later, with the benefit of hindsight, people
Speaker 1: will say, oh, I knew him back then. I remember
Speaker 1: he used to say this or that. You have to
Speaker 1: take it with a grain of salt. Usually when a
Speaker 1: biography says that a man has always been an anti Semite.
Speaker 1: But in John Patler's case, there is an incredible trove
Speaker 1: of archival evidence. For his nineteen ninety nine biography of
Speaker 1: George Lincoln Rockwell, historian Frederick Simonelli was actually able to
Speaker 1: access Patler's case file at the Morrisania Hospital Mental Hygiene Clinic.
Speaker 1: I don't know how that's possible, come to think of it.
Speaker 1: I mean, those are medical records, but the footnotes are
Speaker 1: very thorough In American fury, simon Eli writes that a
Speaker 1: caseworker at the hospital made a note in Patler's file
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty six about his frequent anti Semitic comments
Speaker 1: to the hospital staff. A psychiatrist wrote that Patler told him, quote,
Speaker 1: I go to church every Sunday morning and fight the Jews.
Speaker 1: The same doctor later wrote in the file quote the
Speaker 1: patient may become dangerous. He appears as a potential murderer.
Speaker 1: After a short stay in the hospital, Patler was released,
Speaker 1: but he had to continue with court bandated outpatient treatment.
Speaker 1: In nineteen fifty seven, the doctor's notes show Patler's mental
Speaker 1: state was deteriorating. He was paranoid, delusional, and exhibiting violent tendencies,
Speaker 1: and the doctor again wrote that the patient may one
Speaker 1: day commit murder inexplicably. His case file was actually closed
Speaker 1: out soon after that, and there's a note that his
Speaker 1: probation officer felt that he was making satisfactory adjustments. And
Speaker 1: it's around this time that John Patler first met George
Speaker 1: Lincoln Rockwell at a party at Dust Hooker's home. Rockwell
Speaker 1: hadn't yet formed the American Nazi Party, but he was
Speaker 1: an up and coming right wing extremist. It was actually
Speaker 1: dust Hooker who encouraged Rockwell to come out, so to speak,
Speaker 1: to stop speaking in coded language and just put on
Speaker 1: the swastika armband already. In that autobiographical essay Patler later
Speaker 1: wrote in the Nazi magazine, he claims that he chose
Speaker 1: to leave high school and enlist in the Marine Corps
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty eight, but the timeline is a little
Speaker 1: muddy here. In simon Elli's book, he writes that Patler's
Speaker 1: probation violation had actually landed him back in and this
Speaker 1: time he was given two choices. He could face the
Speaker 1: charges as an adult, or he could enlist, and he
Speaker 1: chose to enlist. In nineteen fifty nine, his father, Cristos
Speaker 1: Pazzalos died. Deus Hooker had moved away to Italy, apparently
Speaker 1: to run a seven up bottling factory. John Patler was
Speaker 1: a twenty one year old marine alone in the world
Speaker 1: when he was assigned to a duty station in northern Virginia,
Speaker 1: just a short drive away from the headquarters of the
Speaker 1: newly organized American Nazi Party. Now I've been calling him
Speaker 1: John Patler all this time, just for the sake of simplicity,
Speaker 1: because that's how we know him. But from the time
Speaker 1: he was born in nineteen thirty eight until this point
Speaker 1: in the story in nineteen sixty, his name is John Pazzalos.
Speaker 1: But in nineteen sixty, after he became one of the
Speaker 1: first stormtroopers in the American Nazi Party, he legally changed
Speaker 1: his name to John Patler. Not only did it sound
Speaker 1: less Greek, which was a little too ethnic for the
Speaker 1: Nazi Party. He liked it because it sounded like Hitler.
Speaker 1: There are some sources that claim that he was actually
Speaker 1: born Yanaki Pazzalos, and I can't quite make sense of that. Yannis, Sure,
Speaker 1: that's just Greek for John. I wouldn't be surprised if
Speaker 1: his grandmother probably called him that, But there's never any
Speaker 1: citation for the claim that he was born Yanaki. I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't think that's anyone's name. Sometimes you see a Yanakis,
Speaker 1: but this mysterious fake name is always spelled y A
Speaker 1: n ac k I, and I don't think that's a
Speaker 1: name at all. Mostly I saw this claim repeated in
Speaker 1: old Stormfront posts, so that's not a great source. I
Speaker 1: don't need to track that down. That's just trash. But
Speaker 1: it was on his Wikipedia page without a citation until
Speaker 1: someone removed it in twenty eleven, and it still shows
Speaker 1: up on the German and Finnish language Wikipedia pages, and
Speaker 1: it even appears in a recently published doctoral dissertation about
Speaker 1: the white Power movement. I guess it doesn't matter that much.
Speaker 1: But I did track down a copy of the nineteen
Speaker 1: forty census and his father recorded his two year old
Speaker 1: son's name as John Adam Patsalos when he was arrested
Speaker 1: at sixteen and nineteen fifty four, the newspaper recorded that
Speaker 1: the boy who was arrested was named John Patsalos. When
Speaker 1: he enlisted in the Marines in nineteen fifty eight, Marine
Speaker 1: Corps muster records list him as John C. Patsalos. But
Speaker 1: I do think I found the original source of this
Speaker 1: strange mistake, and I think it's the faded recollection of
Speaker 1: a former rival before William Luther Peers wrote the Turner Diaries,
Speaker 1: before he founded National Alliance. All the way back in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty six, Pierce picked up his family and moved
Speaker 1: them to Virginia to be closer to George Lincoln Rockwell.
Speaker 1: His time at the American Nazi Party headquarters only overlapped
Speaker 1: with Patler for about a year, but in that year,
Speaker 1: Patler and Pierce were pretty open in their hatred of
Speaker 1: one another, and Pierce made no secret of the fact
Speaker 1: that he thought Patler was not white. So maybe that's
Speaker 1: why he gave Patler a much more ethnic sounding, made
Speaker 1: up name. When he was recounting that period of his
Speaker 1: own life to his biographer in two thousand, who knows. So.
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty, the Marine Private John Patsalos became Nazi
Speaker 1: Stormtrooper John Patler. From his duty station in Quantico, he
Speaker 1: was making weekend trips to Arlington to attend American Nazi
Speaker 1: Party meetings and rallies, and he very quickly became quite
Speaker 1: close to Rockwell. At a rally in Washington, d c.
Speaker 1: Over Memorial Day weekend in nineteen sixty, Rockwell proudly told
Speaker 1: the crowd that the man standing right next to him
Speaker 1: was in fact a United States Marine, and that fact
Speaker 1: quickly made it back to the military police. The man
Speaker 1: the Marine Corps knew as Private John Pazzalos was arrested, questioned,
Speaker 1: and given a psychiatric evaluation. In July nineteen sixty, he
Speaker 1: was given a general discharge under honorable conditions, so not
Speaker 1: a dishonorable discharge, but it isn't an honorable discharge either.
Speaker 1: There's a brief mention in one New York City newspaper
Speaker 1: after his discharge that he was going to file a
Speaker 1: lawsuit alleging that it had been a conspiracy to violet
Speaker 1: his rights, naming the Marine Corps as well as a
Speaker 1: group called Jewish War Veterans of the United States as defendants.
Speaker 1: He was asking for one five hundred seventy five dollars
Speaker 1: in back pay and five hundred thousand dollars in damages
Speaker 1: for the harm to his reputation. Again, this is a
Speaker 1: man wearing a Nazi uniform outside of the White House.
Speaker 1: I don't know what reputation he thinks is being damaged.
Speaker 1: He didn't have an attorney, And aside from that one
Speaker 1: news story about the Jewish Veterans Group telling a reporter
Speaker 1: that they had received service of the complaint, I can't
Speaker 1: find anything else about it. And it's possible he never
Speaker 1: actually filed it. But now in the summer of nineteen sixty,
Speaker 1: he's completely untethered. He's an orphan, he's not a marine.
Speaker 1: He has no day job, he has no family. There's
Speaker 1: only Rockwell Marine Corps Private John Pazzalos is dead and
Speaker 1: Stormtrooper John Patler quickly rose through the ranks of Rockwell's party.
Speaker 1: He was promoted to editor of the party's official publication,
Speaker 1: the National Socialist Bulletin, before the fourth issue was published
Speaker 1: in the fall of that year. He appeared right by
Speaker 1: Rockwell's side at countless rallies that year, and in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty alone. He was arrested at so many Nazi Party
Speaker 1: rallies that it's hard to sort out which news stories
Speaker 1: about his court appearances are connected to which arrests. There
Speaker 1: were disorderly conduct charges after a brawl broke out at
Speaker 1: a rally near the White House, and then a week
Speaker 1: later another disorderly conduct charge when they came back to
Speaker 1: protest the original arrest, and then a week after that
Speaker 1: he's arrested again for putting up swastika stickers at the
Speaker 1: ADL headquarters. Rockwell gave Patler his blessing to marry Erica,
Speaker 1: a blonde women of German descent, and she was already
Speaker 1: heavily pregnant with their first son when she had to
Speaker 1: drive to d C in the middle of the night
Speaker 1: to bail her husband out of jail for defacing the
Speaker 1: offices of the ADL. The January nineteen sixty one issue
Speaker 1: of the National Socialist Bulletin lists Lieutenant John Patler as
Speaker 1: both the editor and the art director. A few pages
Speaker 1: into the issue, there's an announcement congratulating Lieutenant Patler and
Speaker 1: the birth of his firstborn son. Now, Patler's children are
Speaker 1: private individuals. They're not part of their father's story voluntarily.
Speaker 1: Aside from a handful of notable public comments from his
Speaker 1: son Nick, his children aren't your business or mine, But
Speaker 1: in the interest of being thorough, I did do my
Speaker 1: own background research. This Nazi newsletter proudly announces that Patler
Speaker 1: had named his firstborn son Horst Vessel. There's a photo
Speaker 1: of Patler wearing his Nazi party uniform cradling his infant
Speaker 1: son in his arms, underneath text that reads, in all caps,
Speaker 1: Horst Vessel lives. Horst Vessel was a Nazi. I'm not
Speaker 1: talking about this baby boy. I'm talking about the original
Speaker 1: Horst Vessel. And he wasn't a Nazi the way John
Speaker 1: Patler is a Nazi. He was a real one in
Speaker 1: Nazi Germany. He joined the Sturmob Tailoh in nineteen twenty six,
Speaker 1: and he made quite a positive impression on a young
Speaker 1: Joseph Goebels. By nineteen twenty nine, Vessel was living in
Speaker 1: Berlin and serving as the street cell leader of the
Speaker 1: Alexander Plotz unit of the stermop Tilo. As Stormfuurer, Vessel
Speaker 1: led a gang of young Nazis that got into violent
Speaker 1: altercations with Communists around Berlin. In nineteen thirty, one of
Speaker 1: them shot and killed him. As the leader of this
Speaker 1: Nazi street fighting gang, Vessel had received a lot of
Speaker 1: encouragement from Gebels, and now that he's dead and Gebels
Speaker 1: is the party's chief propagandist, he sees this death as
Speaker 1: a golden opportunity. In death, Horst Vessel is more than
Speaker 1: a violent man. He's a symbol. He's a martyr for
Speaker 1: the Nazi cause. So by naming his son Horst Vessel
Speaker 1: Hatler is invoking the Germany of nineteen thirty, a nation
Speaker 1: on the eve of the Third Reich. I get it.
Speaker 1: I get what he's going for. The problem is it's
Speaker 1: not true. And this is a big part of why
Speaker 1: every episode takes me. I would say three times longer
Speaker 1: than is healthy. I can't trust anybody, even mostly reliable sources,
Speaker 1: you know, books that are well researched and well regarded.
Speaker 1: Sometimes people forget the number one rule of writing about Nazis.
Speaker 1: Nazis lie. You can't take a Nazi newsletter at face value,
Speaker 1: not for anything. Just because the birth announcement in the
Speaker 1: National Socialist Bulletin says that the baby's name is Horst
Speaker 1: Vessel Patler doesn't make it true, but the claim does
Speaker 1: appear in several books, always without a citation. I'm assuming
Speaker 1: they got it from this Nazi newsletter, and it isn't true.
Speaker 1: Like I said, Patler's kids aren't our business. They're private
Speaker 1: individuals who did not choose to involve themselves in this.
Speaker 1: So I'm not going to tell you what his name
Speaker 1: actually is. It was actually really hard to find, which
Speaker 1: tells me he's gone to some trouble to prevent people
Speaker 1: like me from finding it. And as an adult, he
Speaker 1: actually changed his name again, swapping the last name Patler
Speaker 1: for something unrelated. But his first name was never hors Vessel.
Speaker 1: It's something perfectly ordinary, the kind of boring white American
Speaker 1: name that you probably went to elementary school with a
Speaker 1: dozen of Nineteen sixty one was a tumultuous year for
Speaker 1: the Patler family. That spring, his young wife, Erica was
Speaker 1: home alone with baby horse Vessel because John Patler was
Speaker 1: the driver when the Nazis went on tour in the
Speaker 1: hate bus. I assume he had a great time with
Speaker 1: his friends on the Nazi road trip in the spring,
Speaker 1: but by the end of the year, John Patler quit
Speaker 1: the American Nazi Party, for the first time. He and
Speaker 1: another member named Dan Burros had decided to strike out
Speaker 1: on their own to form a new splinter group. This
Speaker 1: is a classic problem in American neo Nazi organizing. Everybody
Speaker 1: wants to be Hitler. In November of nineteen sixty one,
Speaker 1: John Patler packed up his pregnant wife and their infant
Speaker 1: son and moved to New York City in a converted
Speaker 1: garage and queens. A handful of disaffected members of the
Speaker 1: American Nazi Party formed a new group that they called
Speaker 1: the American National Party. Patler was the group's chairman and
Speaker 1: Dan Burros was his second in command. Patler also edited
Speaker 1: the party's magazine, a publication called Kill with an exclamation point,
Speaker 1: but the whole endeavor never amounted to much at all.
Speaker 1: There were never more than about a dozen members. In
Speaker 1: the January nineteen sixty two issue of The Rockwell Report,
Speaker 1: a secondary publication of the American Nazi Party, George Lincoln
Speaker 1: Rockwall wanted to make sure that everyone knew he wasn't mad.
Speaker 1: He actually didn't care at all, and it did not
Speaker 1: hurt his feelings that he'd been abandoned by his most
Speaker 1: devoted lieutenant. He wrote, quote in the attempt to justify
Speaker 1: their failure in the Nazi Party here and overthrow our
Speaker 1: leadership of the right wing. This group of selfish malcontents, loafers, fakers, sissies, cowards,
Speaker 1: or damn fools is beneath mentioned. They are held together
Speaker 1: solely by their hatred and jealousy of my person and
Speaker 1: the American Nazi Party, and will disintegrate soon enough from
Speaker 1: lack of leadership and idealism. See he doesn't care at all,
Speaker 1: He's not mad, but he was exactly right about their
Speaker 1: motivation and how they'd end up. In March, the New
Speaker 1: York Daily News ran a headline ten youths in Hollis Shack,
Speaker 1: poking fun at these young men playing make believe Nazi
Speaker 1: living in a shanty in this neighborhood and queens. In April,
Speaker 1: another newspaper in New York speculated that the group might
Speaker 1: actually be a front group rather than a splinter of
Speaker 1: the American Nazi Party, writing, a little band of eccentrics
Speaker 1: calling themselves the American Nazis has sent a few gal
Speaker 1: lighters into the New York Long Island area, and Rockwell
Speaker 1: played KOI with the reporters. I think he may have
Speaker 1: been trying to save face. He didn't want to admit
Speaker 1: that he'd been abandoned, so he refused to confirm or
Speaker 1: deny any connection to this group. But he hinted that
Speaker 1: sometimes sometimes I do use a front group, and maybe
Speaker 1: I am working on something in New York City, sort
Speaker 1: of insinuating that, yes, these men do still answer to me.
Speaker 1: The same article, though, quotes John Patler saying Rockwell hates
Speaker 1: my guts and I hate his. Patler really wanted to
Speaker 1: make it work. He wanted to be the furer. He
Speaker 1: wanted a party. He wanted his own newspaper and his
Speaker 1: own followers, and his own headquarters and his own uniforms.
Speaker 1: But they couldn't afford uniforms and a dozen guys in
Speaker 1: a shanty, and Queens just doesn't have the gravity to
Speaker 1: keep the followers in orbit. There is a nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: seven biography of Dan Burros called One More Victim, and
Speaker 1: the book offers some fascinating insight into this period of
Speaker 1: their lives, a lot more detailed than I was able
Speaker 1: to piece together from Rockwell's newsletters, FBI memos, and local
Speaker 1: news stories published in Queens in nineteen sixty two, I
Speaker 1: should tell you, though, why the editor of the New
Speaker 1: York Times wrote a book about Dan Burrows in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty seven. He's hardly so important at this point in
Speaker 1: our story in nineteen sixty two. So how could there
Speaker 1: be a whole book's worth of information about this man
Speaker 1: in his twenties just a few years later. It's because
Speaker 1: he died, not just that he died, but how and
Speaker 1: why he died. In nineteen sixty the New York Times
Speaker 1: published a story revealing that Dan Burroughs, who was at
Speaker 1: that time a former member of the American Nazi Party
Speaker 1: who had by then joined the Klan, was Jewish. His
Speaker 1: parents were both the children of Russian Jewish immigrants. They
Speaker 1: were married by a rabbi. He attended Hebrew school, and
Speaker 1: he had a bar mitzvah Berno Nazis, being Jewish isn't
Speaker 1: something you can leave behind. Just because Borrows had blonde
Speaker 1: hair and considered himself an Odonist doesn't mean he wasn't
Speaker 1: still a Jew in the eyes of the anti Semite.
Speaker 1: And honestly, if you ask any of the Nazis he
Speaker 1: spent a decade with, they'd tell you he was as
Speaker 1: anti Semitic as any of them. But this revelation, this
Speaker 1: revelation that he had been hiding this from them, that
Speaker 1: was an unforgivable sin. You can't be a Jewish clansman.
Speaker 1: It wasn't even noon on the day the story was
Speaker 1: published when Burroughs died. His official cause of death is suicide,
Speaker 1: with one bullet wound to his head and another in
Speaker 1: his chest. I know, I know, but that's what the
Speaker 1: official records all say. There were three witnesses and their
Speaker 1: stories all matched, and Burrows was the only one with
Speaker 1: gunshot residue on his hands. That's what it says. Now,
Speaker 1: I've read enough FBI memos about Roy Frankhauser to be
Speaker 1: a little skeptical of his account of anything, especially his
Speaker 1: account of how a man died in his bedroom. I'm
Speaker 1: not saying it wasn't suicide. I'm just saying I understand
Speaker 1: what this looks like, and I don't know what to
Speaker 1: tell you. There are several books that contain a description
Speaker 1: of this event, and they'll say that the FBI speculated
Speaker 1: that maybe Burrows did shoot himself the first time, and
Speaker 1: maybe Frankauser put him out of his misery with the
Speaker 1: second shot, which is still weird, but it makes a
Speaker 1: lot more logical sense than the version Frankhauser tells that
Speaker 1: appears in this book in nineteen sixty seven. Now without
Speaker 1: spending a week tearing my hair out over it and
Speaker 1: maybe still not getting the answer to this question. I
Speaker 1: don't know if Frankhauser was already working for the FBI
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty five, but I guess either way, whether
Speaker 1: he's an informant at this point or not, he probably
Speaker 1: wouldn't want to admit to shooting a guy in the head.
Speaker 1: But this version, Frankauser's version, the official version of these events.
Speaker 1: It's dramatic. I mean it's theatrical. Wagner is playing a
Speaker 1: little too loud on the radio in the house, there's
Speaker 1: a hysterical woman screaming at Burros to put the gun down,
Speaker 1: and Burros cocks the gun and he looks Frankauser in
Speaker 1: the eye, his good eye, I assume, since Frankauser famously
Speaker 1: lost an eye and a bar fight, and he once
Speaker 1: auctioned off his glass eye and a clan fundraiser. Anyway,
Speaker 1: so Burros is looking his friend in his good eye,
Speaker 1: and he says, long Live the White Race, and then
Speaker 1: he non fatally shoots himself in the chest, and he
Speaker 1: stands there unmoving, and then he raises the gun to
Speaker 1: his head and fires again. I mean, what a scene.
Speaker 1: It's horrific. In nineteen ninety seven, Martin Lee wrote in
Speaker 1: his book The Beast Reawakens a History of American Fascism,
Speaker 1: that Frankauser never cleaned it up. Dan Burross shot himself
Speaker 1: two times in Roy Frankhauser's bedroom, and the bullet holes
Speaker 1: and the blood stains were still on the wall and
Speaker 1: ceiling thirty years later. Now you know, I like to
Speaker 1: find my own sources. So in addition to this anecdote
Speaker 1: in Lee's book, I found an old post on Stormfront.
Speaker 1: It's about a decade old, and the poster says he
Speaker 1: saw the holes for himself when he went to frank
Speaker 1: Kauser's home sometime in the early two thousands, a few
Speaker 1: years before Frankauser died to buy some old Nazi memorabilia.
Speaker 1: So it's a fascinating story with a lot of murky
Speaker 1: truths and uncomfortable possibilities about state involvement. The New York
Speaker 1: Times did their own work confirming the details and writing
Speaker 1: the story, but it was the FBI who tipped them off.
Speaker 1: The first place that Dan Burross was Jewish, and that
Speaker 1: brings me back to the point I was trying to make.
Speaker 1: The New York Times journalist who is tipped off by
Speaker 1: the FBI to write the story that led to Borros's death,
Speaker 1: wrote a book about it two years later, and I
Speaker 1: assume in the course of writing this book they got
Speaker 1: more tips from the FBI, which maybe why it has
Speaker 1: such interesting descriptions of police files. We might come back
Speaker 1: to Dan Burros another time. If I do, I'll even
Speaker 1: watch the two thousand and one movie loosely based on
Speaker 1: his life, starring Ryan Gosling as the Jewish Nazi and
Speaker 1: Billy Zane as the leader of the Nazi gang. But
Speaker 1: for now, I was getting to a point about the
Speaker 1: embarrassing failure of the American National Party in nineteen sixty two.
Speaker 1: In that biography of Burros, A. M. Rosenthal and Arthur
Speaker 1: Gelb wrote that the American National Party never had more
Speaker 1: than a few men, and it never really got a
Speaker 1: lot of press. But the detectives at the NYPD's anti
Speaker 1: Subversive squad were fascinated by them, and they kept very
Speaker 1: close tabs on all of the members and their associates.
Speaker 1: One detective said of the group, quote, these young toughs
Speaker 1: live and breathe the atmosphere of violence. That's all they
Speaker 1: talk about, getting this guy or blowing up this or that.
Speaker 1: A lot of them have guns, and it's as if
Speaker 1: they're making love to them. They're not for anything, but
Speaker 1: they're against an awful lot of things and people. They
Speaker 1: all got excited, you might say, aroused by the civil
Speaker 1: rights movement. It got them all worked up. Now you
Speaker 1: probably know it pains me to say this NYPD detective
Speaker 1: is really cooking here, but listen to this quote. Most
Speaker 1: of these people are liars and not smart, and most
Speaker 1: of them are cowards. But they work on each other,
Speaker 1: and we have to watch to make sure they don't
Speaker 1: get each other worked up to the point where they
Speaker 1: have to prove their manhood by going out and killing people.
Speaker 1: So the cops would hang around and watch, but they'd
Speaker 1: stop buying chat too. It was never a secret that
Speaker 1: they were being surveilled. Borros, much like his former commander
Speaker 1: George Lincoln Rockwell, was happy to talk to the police.
Speaker 1: It seems like he kind of got a kick out
Speaker 1: of it even and both Burros and Rockwell would frequently
Speaker 1: take the initiative to contact the police themselves to inform
Speaker 1: on other members of the movement, although this biography of
Speaker 1: Burroughs notes that he never accepted any money for it,
Speaker 1: and nothing he offered was ever of much value. So
Speaker 1: for most of nineteen sixty two, Dan Burross, the secretly
Speaker 1: Jewish Nazi, and John Patler are holed up in a
Speaker 1: shanty in Queen's writing a Nazi newsletter that no one reads,
Speaker 1: devoted mostly to bashing the father figure that they have abandoned,
Speaker 1: and a squad of detectives is standing outside taking turns
Speaker 1: watching them make the occasional bodega run. In August of
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty two, Patler was arrested for disturbing the peace
Speaker 1: after he refused to stop picketing a school integration rally
Speaker 1: in Englewood, New Jersey. He was alone. He attended that
Speaker 1: event alone. There was a lot of publicity leading up
Speaker 1: to it. He was making these sort of public pronouncements
Speaker 1: that the American National Party is going to show up
Speaker 1: and counterdemonstrate against these black families. Preparations were being made
Speaker 1: and the town was in negotiations with him about where
Speaker 1: they could stand and whether they could have amplified sound,
Speaker 1: and the police were involved. But by the time the
Speaker 1: actual day comes, Patler showed up alone and he's just
Speaker 1: standing there in Englewood, New Jersey, yelling at the parents
Speaker 1: of black school children. And for all his trouble, Patler
Speaker 1: was sentenced to ten days in jail, which he protested
Speaker 1: by staging a hunger strike. And he really did do it.
Speaker 1: I've seen plenty of guys like Patler say they're gonna
Speaker 1: do it, they say they're gonna do something drastic. I've
Speaker 1: recently seen a guy a lot like Patler threatened to
Speaker 1: go on a hunger strike and he didn't do it.
Speaker 1: But according to the doctor who examined Patler on his release,
Speaker 1: he'd lost a significant amount of weight over those ten days,
Speaker 1: so I guess you can't say he didn't commit. And again,
Speaker 1: much like the lead up to the Englewood rally, during
Speaker 1: these ten days Patler's in jail. The American National Party,
Speaker 1: you know, those two guys in the shanty and Queens,
Speaker 1: are threatening to picket the jail to demand his release,
Speaker 1: but they didn't. On one of those ten nights, one
Speaker 1: member of the American National Party showed up, Ralph Grandinetti,
Speaker 1: the group's state chairman stood outside the jail for about
Speaker 1: a half hour one evening. On the morning Patler was released,
Speaker 1: the Bergen County Record published a photo of him hunched
Speaker 1: over a plate of breakfast food at a diner, and
Speaker 1: they note that there was no crowd waiting for him
Speaker 1: outside the jail when he was released. He was arrested
Speaker 1: again in November, this time for disrupting Eleanor Roosevelt's funeral,
Speaker 1: and he was sentenced to ninety days in jail this time.
Speaker 1: But worse than this jail sentence was the growing realization
Speaker 1: that this was a failure. When he left Virginia with
Speaker 1: Dan Burrows, they had a plan, they were going to
Speaker 1: do something, They were going to make something of themselves.
Speaker 1: But Burrows didn't seem all that committed. He hadn't supported
Speaker 1: Paller at all when he was on his hunger strike
Speaker 1: in August, and on the day of Eleanor Roosevelt's funeral,
Speaker 1: he didn't even want to go. He told Paller he'd
Speaker 1: rather stay at home and watch sports on TV. I
Speaker 1: tried to figure out what game would have been on.
Speaker 1: I think this was November tenth, nineteen sixty two. What
Speaker 1: sports were on that day. Maybe he was watching a rerun.
Speaker 1: Did they have those in nineteen sixty two? I don't know.
Speaker 1: When the ACLU finally cut Patler out of jail in
Speaker 1: January of nineteen sixty three, he was ready to beg
Speaker 1: Rockwell for for gypness, his wife, Erica, put her foot down.
Speaker 1: She was done. She didn't want to move again with
Speaker 1: her two small children. If he went back to Rockwell,
Speaker 1: she wasn't coming with him, and John Patler chose George
Speaker 1: Lincoln Rockwell over his wife and sons. It would take
Speaker 1: a few years to sort out an actual divorce, I think,
Speaker 1: but they separated and she didn't follow him back to Virginia.
Speaker 1: A few years later, when Patler's on trial for murder,
Speaker 1: he only ever talks about having two children, and he's
Speaker 1: talking about the two children he had after this with
Speaker 1: his second wife. His first two sons, and his first
Speaker 1: wife are completely absent from his own telling of his
Speaker 1: life story after this point. In February of nineteen sixty three,
Speaker 1: Patler publishes the fourth and final issue of Kill, the
Speaker 1: magazine for the American National Party, and in it he
Speaker 1: announces that the American National Party is no more. I
Speaker 1: didn't actually manage to find a copy of that issue
Speaker 1: of Kill, but an FBI memo describing it just notes
Speaker 1: that it announced the end of the group. Rockwell, on
Speaker 1: the other hand, claimed in his confidential internal party newsletter
Speaker 1: that the fourth issue of Kill was devoted entirely to
Speaker 1: the theme Rockwell was right in an attempt to quote
Speaker 1: patch up some of the damage he'd done in deserting
Speaker 1: the party and attacking the commander. He also claims that
Speaker 1: Patler sent him a telegram asking to be allowed to
Speaker 1: return to the party. Rockwell made a bit of a
Speaker 1: show of it, too, humiliating Patler in the party newsletter
Speaker 1: on multiple occasions that year, announcing Patler's return by writing
Speaker 1: that Patler had been quote too big for his breeches,
Speaker 1: but he'd come to his senses and come crawling back,
Speaker 1: begging and pleading, and Patler had to start again from
Speaker 1: the bottom. He was not Lieutenant Patler. Party materials referred
Speaker 1: to him as a probationary storm trooper for the rest
Speaker 1: of nineteen sixty three. But I think deep down there
Speaker 1: was never any doubt in Rockwell's mind that he would
Speaker 1: welcome Patler home again. He'd lost other high ranking party
Speaker 1: officers before, and he'd lose more in years to come.
Speaker 1: And he always lashes out in the way a man
Speaker 1: with a bruised ego does. But Patler's departure seems to
Speaker 1: have hurt him somewhere deeper than his thin skin. He
Speaker 1: was taking a big risk excepting Patler back into the fold.
Speaker 1: He probably shouldn't have done it. He looked weak opening
Speaker 1: his arms to a man who'd spent a year publicly
Speaker 1: attacking him. And not only that, Patler wasn't popular. People
Speaker 1: didn't like him, partly because a lot of them didn't
Speaker 1: see him as white. Another high ranking party officer quit
Speaker 1: over the mere idea that Rockwell might meet with Patler
Speaker 1: to discuss returning. I mean this was a controversial choice.
Speaker 1: Rockwell did this because he liked Patler, not because it
Speaker 1: was a good choice politically or for the party. By
Speaker 1: the summer of nineteen sixty three, Patler was once again
Speaker 1: editing the party Stormtrooper magazine, and he'd been assigned to
Speaker 1: travel across the state of Pennsylvania to try to get
Speaker 1: publicity for the American Nazi Parti's planned counter demonstration for
Speaker 1: the upcoming March on Washington. You know the one, the
Speaker 1: one where a quarter of a million people heard Martin
Speaker 1: Luther King Junior give his I Have a Dream speech.
Speaker 1: That one. Rockwell spent most of the summer of sixty
Speaker 1: three trying to recruit supporters for his Nazi response to
Speaker 1: this event, and they were pulling stunts all over the country,
Speaker 1: getting members arrested in multiple states. Rockwell himself was arrested
Speaker 1: in Virginia for handing out flyers that officials felt were
Speaker 1: inciting racial violence. But the publicity tour in Pennsylvania was
Speaker 1: just two men, John Patler and Roy Frankhauser. Now, again,
Speaker 1: the story's a little bit out of order because by
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty five, obviously Roy Frankhauser is no longer in
Speaker 1: the American Nazi Party. He's just a klansman. But here
Speaker 1: in the past, in nineteen sixty three, frank Kauser is
Speaker 1: still a member of the American Nazi Party. Sorry about that.
Speaker 1: And so their journey across the state of Pennsylvania is
Speaker 1: called the Hate Hike, and they're traveling across the state
Speaker 1: standing outside of bus stations and public pools, holding signs
Speaker 1: that say we hate race mixing, trying to go passers
Speaker 1: by into hitting them. I guess if the surviving newspaper
Speaker 1: archives and FBI memos or anything to go on, it
Speaker 1: looks like the only person they managed to get a
Speaker 1: rise out of was a policeman in Pittsburgh who allegedly
Speaker 1: hit Roy Frankhauser in the face after they were arrested.
Speaker 1: But for the most part, the hate hike seems to
Speaker 1: have gone largely unremarked on, and so at the end
Speaker 1: of the summer, George Lincoln Rockwell shows up in Washington,
Speaker 1: d C. With fifty supporters at most, a pathetic showing
Speaker 1: for the months of touring and rallies and stunts he'd
Speaker 1: been pouring resources into to get the word out. I
Speaker 1: don't know how Patler felt about the rally, but overall,
Speaker 1: at the end of nineteen sixty three, life was pretty
Speaker 1: good for John Patler. He'd already forgotten the wife and
Speaker 1: sons he abandoned in New York, the woman who would
Speaker 1: later become his second wife, was pregnant with their first son,
Speaker 1: and most importantly, he was back in his commander's good graces.
Speaker 1: I didn't mean to get so lost in the newspaper archives.
Speaker 1: I really thought I was going to have this wrapped
Speaker 1: up in one but We'll have to pick back up
Speaker 1: next week with John Patler's second rise to the highest
Speaker 1: ranks of the American Nazi Party, his second resignation from
Speaker 1: the party, his ultimate dismissal, his murder trial, compete Nazi
Speaker 1: conspiracy theories leading to a shootout in Maine, and oddly
Speaker 1: that time, a guy came home from work one day
Speaker 1: to find four nude strangers having an orgy in his
Speaker 1: living room, and one of those naked people was the
Speaker 1: recently paroled murderer of America's most famous Nazi. Weird Little
Speaker 1: Guys as a production of Pool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: It's research, written and recorded by me, Molly Conger. Our
Speaker 1: executive producers are Sophe Lieuchtermann and Robert Evans. The show
Speaker 1: is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme
Speaker 1: music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me
Speaker 1: at Weirdly Guys Podcast at gmail dot com. I will
Speaker 1: definitely read it, but I probably won't answer. It's nothing personal.
Speaker 1: You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show. The listeners
Speaker 1: on the Weird Little Guys separated it just don't post
Speaker 1: anything that's going to make you one of my weird
Speaker 1: little guys,