Speaker 1: Col Zone Media. In nineteen seventy six, James Mason was
Speaker 1: just twenty four years old. He was fresh office sentence
Speaker 1: in Ohio jail for spraying mace ad, a black fourteen
Speaker 1: year old girl in a dairy Queen parking lot. It
Speaker 1: would be a few more years before he started working
Speaker 1: on his most lasting legacy, the Newsletters that would become Siege,
Speaker 1: a beloved text for neo Nazi terrorists, but he was writing.
Speaker 1: He was the editor of the newsletter for the newly
Speaker 1: formed National Socialist Movement, and the August nineteen seventy six
Speaker 1: issue contained a write up about a hated enemy from Charlottesville, Virginia.
Speaker 1: Word reaches us that the sneak murderer of Rockwell, John
Speaker 1: pat Solos, is in trouble again, this time with the
Speaker 1: law for disorderly conduct. In the nude pat Solos aka Patler,
Speaker 1: and two other men were a did in charge with
Speaker 1: trespassing and possession of marijuana while conducting an orgy with
Speaker 1: one woman who is still being sought. Rockwell is dead
Speaker 1: and his murderer carouses reason enough to destroy any system
Speaker 1: that would permit it. Keep turning up this way, buddy boy,
Speaker 1: so that we may keep track of you. Whether or
Speaker 1: not James Mason kept track of John Patler in the
Speaker 1: years that followed, I couldn't tell you. But here's the
Speaker 1: rest of his story. I'm Molly Coner, and this is
Speaker 1: where the little guys. When we left off last time,
Speaker 1: it was nineteen seventy six, and I was apologizing for
Speaker 1: writing without a plan. I could probably be more organized,
Speaker 1: but I think that would mean cutting out the side quests,
Speaker 1: and to be honest, I'd rather die than live a
Speaker 1: life without my rabbit holes. So as my apology to you,
Speaker 1: you're getting this a little bit early, this being the
Speaker 1: second half of the third part of a series that
Speaker 1: I thought was going to be a single episode. Is
Speaker 1: there more? I actually don't know. I'll find out about
Speaker 1: ninety six hours before you do. At the very least,
Speaker 1: I know we aren't quite moving on next week. I
Speaker 1: still need to tell you about the legal battle over
Speaker 1: George Lincoln Rockwell's corpse that ended in an all day
Speaker 1: standoff with the army. But back to the orgy. In
Speaker 1: the summer of nineteen seventy six, John Patler was out
Speaker 1: of prison. He'd been released on parole after serving barely
Speaker 1: five years of his twenty years sentence for the murder
Speaker 1: of America Nazi Party commander George Lincoln Rockwell. He was
Speaker 1: close to finishing a degree at Radford College, having taken
Speaker 1: a year of classes through the Study Release program while
Speaker 1: he was still in prison, but in June of nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy six, he wasn't enrolled in summer classes. He says
Speaker 1: he was in Charlottesville that summer looking for a job. Now,
Speaker 1: for my non Virginians, Radford is about one hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty miles away from Charlottesville. It's hard to say what
Speaker 1: brought him here or what sort of job he was
Speaker 1: looking for. His brother was living about an hour north
Speaker 1: of Charlottesville, and it's hard to say with certainty what
Speaker 1: someone's address was fifty years ago. But it seems like
Speaker 1: both of his ex wives, each of them raising two
Speaker 1: of his sons, were living in the central Virginia area
Speaker 1: at the time as well, although in opposite directions, and
Speaker 1: none of them were actually in the Charlotteville area directly,
Speaker 1: and it doesn't appear he was in contact with them.
Speaker 1: So I guess what I'm saying is, I don't know
Speaker 1: why he was looking for a job here, but that's
Speaker 1: what he told the cops. On a Wednesday evening in
Speaker 1: June of nineteen seventy six, a man got home from work.
Speaker 1: He opened his front door, and he walked inside, and
Speaker 1: he found four naked strangers engaging in some unspecified group
Speaker 1: sex act in his living room. He ordered the naked
Speaker 1: people to leave, obviously, and to their credit, they did.
Speaker 1: As they were leaving. He wrote down the license plate
Speaker 1: number of the car they piled into, and he called
Speaker 1: the police. No reporting that I could find ever identified
Speaker 1: the woman, but all three men were quickly arrested. A
Speaker 1: Charlottesville police officer spotted the car half an hour later
Speaker 1: and arrested John Patler and the other two men. I
Speaker 1: have nothing but questions about this. How did these men meet?
Speaker 1: What was the conversation leading up to this? How do
Speaker 1: you end up having an orgy in someone else's house.
Speaker 1: The other two men's names are in the newspaper, but
Speaker 1: I don't want to get too deep into who they were.
Speaker 1: One of them would later get arrested after an armed
Speaker 1: stand off with police when he barricaded himself inside of
Speaker 1: his psychiatrist's home, which he'd broken into after being released
Speaker 1: from a psychiatric hospital, and the other man had a
Speaker 1: fair number of drug charges that pre date nineteen seventy six,
Speaker 1: but in the two decades after this, he committed such
Speaker 1: a staggering number of horrific sexual crimes that I don't
Speaker 1: really want to talk about it. But back to this
Speaker 1: evening in June of nineteen seventy six, presumably they were
Speaker 1: all clothed by the time the officer pulled them over.
Speaker 1: All three of them were wanted in connection with the
Speaker 1: reported trespassing, and the officer reported finding a pipe with
Speaker 1: marijuana residue, as well as a small quantity of marijuana
Speaker 1: on Patler's person, So he was charged with possession of
Speaker 1: marijuana as well. So now he has three problems. He's
Speaker 1: been charged with two crimes, he's very embarrassed, and he's
Speaker 1: recently been parolled after serving just five years of a
Speaker 1: twenty year sentence for murder. Well, I guess he has
Speaker 1: four problems. It's probably going to be pretty hard to
Speaker 1: find a job in Charlottesville now. Patler told reporters with
Speaker 1: the local newspaper shortly after this arrest that the entire
Speaker 1: incident had been blown out of proportion. He said he
Speaker 1: didn't know anything about any kind of orgy, and he
Speaker 1: claimed that he and the other men had been invited
Speaker 1: guests of the home's other occupant. The man who came
Speaker 1: home to find the orgy in his living room did
Speaker 1: have a roommate, and that man was the brother of
Speaker 1: one of these naked people, so it's not impossible that
Speaker 1: they were his guests. But he wasn't home, and police
Speaker 1: say the group entered the house through a window. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's not something I would do at my brother's house,
Speaker 1: but people are different. The story received a lot more
Speaker 1: press than the average trespassing charge, and Patler was probably
Speaker 1: right when he told the local newspaper that all this
Speaker 1: attention was quote due to the identities of the people involved.
Speaker 1: It was picked up as a wire story and ended
Speaker 1: up published in newspapers all over the country, which is
Speaker 1: probably how word ended up getting back to his old associates.
Speaker 1: All three men were acquitted on the trustpassing charge. The
Speaker 1: judge found that there was insufficient proof they'd been in
Speaker 1: the home because they only had the home occupant's word
Speaker 1: on the matter. Typically, a trustpassing charge involves a police
Speaker 1: officer seeing you do it, but Patler was unable to
Speaker 1: attend his own trial for truspassing because he was already
Speaker 1: back in jail somewhere else. Getting arrested is a parole violation.
Speaker 1: The prosecutor in Charlottesville ultimately dropped the marijuana possession charge
Speaker 1: entirely likely because there was no point prosecuting the case
Speaker 1: if the defendant was already incarcerated somewhere else for something
Speaker 1: more serious. Getting arrested at all, even if you're ultimately
Speaker 1: acquitted or the charges are dropped, is what's called a
Speaker 1: technical violation, which can lead to problems for someone on
Speaker 1: probation or parole. If he had been in perfect compliance
Speaker 1: with his conditions, otherwise, the technical violation may have been resolvable,
Speaker 1: it might not have caused problems for him, But according
Speaker 1: to newspaper reports, his probation conditions required him to remain
Speaker 1: in the Radford area, so it looked like he was
Speaker 1: trying to move to and get a job in Charlottesville,
Speaker 1: which was a violation, and that sent him back to
Speaker 1: prison in the fall of nineteen seventy six. In January
Speaker 1: of nineteen seventy eight, from jail, he filed a petition
Speaker 1: with the court to legally change his name back to Patsalos.
Speaker 1: Like those articles from the early seventies. The first time
Speaker 1: he was in jail, he says he's changed his ways,
Speaker 1: and he understands now that his hateful ways were really
Speaker 1: just misdirected hatred of himself. In early nineteen seventy eight,
Speaker 1: those articles say that he wouldn't be released for another
Speaker 1: six years, and I can't find any newspaper stories that
Speaker 1: definitively put him in or out of prison in the
Speaker 1: next few years. But a footnote in Frederick Simonelli's biography
Speaker 1: of Rockwell says that he was paroled again for good
Speaker 1: in October of nineteen seventy eight, and then he sort
Speaker 1: of disappears. I read in a few sources that he
Speaker 1: moved back to New York City immediately after being released,
Speaker 1: but it does look like he stayed in the Richmond,
Speaker 1: Virginia area for a few years. In nineteen eighty eight,
Speaker 1: he legally changed his name back to John Patsalos in
Speaker 1: the Richmond Circuit Court. I found a marriage license for
Speaker 1: him in Manhattan in nineteen ninety, but the woman moved
Speaker 1: across the country just a few years later, and she
Speaker 1: ultimately filed for divorce from the West Coast. So his
Speaker 1: third marriage didn't last long and doesn't seem to have
Speaker 1: produced any children. In twenty seventeen, a reporter from the
Speaker 1: Washington Post went looking for him. He refused to be interviewed,
Speaker 1: but at the time he was living on the Lower
Speaker 1: East Side. At the age of seventy nine, Butler was
Speaker 1: still earning a living as a freelance cartoonist. But the
Speaker 1: article doesn't say who's buying his art. I mean, freelance
Speaker 1: cartooning is probably a pretty tough way to pay the
Speaker 1: rent in Manhattan, so I imagine he's selling those drawings to
Speaker 1: anyone who would buy them. But I was only able
Speaker 1: to pin down the details for one High Times magazine.
Speaker 1: I found a couple of issues from that era and
Speaker 1: flipped through them, but I never found his name in
Speaker 1: the magazine itself. He's not credited as the artist anywhere
Speaker 1: that I can find, so it's not unlikely that his
Speaker 1: art appears elsewhere also without attribution. But I know he
Speaker 1: was working for High Times, that magazine about marijuana, because
Speaker 1: in twenty seventeen it was sold to a private equity firm.
Speaker 1: As a part of that sale, documents were filed with
Speaker 1: the Securities and Exchange Commission they're all very boring, and
Speaker 1: they're not the kinds of documents I usually look at.
Speaker 1: But in one endless pdf of assets and liabilities and
Speaker 1: financed gibberish, there's a list of the magazine's current freelance contracts.
Speaker 1: John Patsalos is listed as a monthly contributor to the magazine,
Speaker 1: earning five hundred dollars a month as an illustrator. In
Speaker 1: his Misspent Nazi Youth, he illustrated the quarterly magazine of
Speaker 1: the American Nazi Party. There's one issue that has a
Speaker 1: multi page comic called white Man, a superhero with a
Speaker 1: swastika on his chest who does battle with what I
Speaker 1: can only assume is a non copyright infringing version of
Speaker 1: Superman because he's referred to only as the Jew from
Speaker 1: outer Space. In the nineteen sixties, in a converted henhouse
Speaker 1: with a giant swastika on the roof, he labored over
Speaker 1: a rinting press, watching us thousands of copies of his
Speaker 1: racist caricatures landed in a pile. And now in his
Speaker 1: old age, he's drawing little cartoons of people smoking weed.
Speaker 1: That's the last place John Patler appears in any record
Speaker 1: I can find. Every August. His name appears in a
Speaker 1: few newspapers running stories about the anniversary of Rockwell's death,
Speaker 1: but it's always the same story, just a reminder of
Speaker 1: that moment in history, just to remember when about that
Speaker 1: day in nineteen sixty seven. There's no obituary that I
Speaker 1: can find, and data broker sites show that he still
Speaker 1: lives in that apartment on the Lower East Side, but
Speaker 1: that doesn't mean much. If he is still alive, he'll
Speaker 1: turn eighty eight in January. If he isn't, then his
Speaker 1: passing didn't make the news and wasn't mourned by anyone,
Speaker 1: at least not pup alive or dead. The last years
Speaker 1: of his life were spent in obscurity. He's just a strange,
Speaker 1: sad footnote in the story of the man he says
Speaker 1: he didn't kill. A listener posted a question a few
Speaker 1: weeks ago on the show's subreddit about Patler's younger brother. Ordinarily,
Speaker 1: I would probably leave him out of a story like this.
Speaker 1: There's no indication I could find that they were particularly close,
Speaker 1: and nothing I found hinted that he was involved in
Speaker 1: similar political activities, at least not the Nazi stuff. There
Speaker 1: is a new story about him getting arrested for cross
Speaker 1: burning in nineteen eighty five, but it looks like the
Speaker 1: case was dropped because the victim was also white. Puzzling.
Speaker 1: But in any case, I think for this story it
Speaker 1: is actually relevant to talk a little bit about George Patsalos.
Speaker 1: Back in the first episode, I talked a little about
Speaker 1: their childhoods. They were born a year and a half apart,
Speaker 1: so George wasn't quite four years old when their father
Speaker 1: murdered their mother in nineteen fifty eight, the year John
Speaker 1: Patler enlisted the Marines to avoid going to jail for
Speaker 1: a probation violation, George was arrested for setting a school
Speaker 1: on fire in the Bronx in nineteen sixty seven. When
Speaker 1: John Patler wrote his own autobiography in his final issue
Speaker 1: of Stormtrooper magazine, he dismissed the idea that his troubled
Speaker 1: home life had played any role in the man he became,
Speaker 1: considering his brother was nothing like him, He wrote, quote,
Speaker 1: the environmentalists and the jew oriented psychiatrists will no doubt
Speaker 1: attribute my political activity and extremist beliefs to my unfortunate
Speaker 1: childhood experiences. But my brother, who experienced the exact environment
Speaker 1: I did, and who underwent the same hardships, lives an
Speaker 1: opposite life than mine. He is today a happily married man,
Speaker 1: a peaceful, non political citizen, and the owner of a
Speaker 1: small business he built up himself, And maybe in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty seven, John Patler believed that that was true. It
Speaker 1: was around this time that his brother George moved down
Speaker 1: to Virginia from New York. I couldn't tell you what
Speaker 1: prompted the move for exactly when it was. Articles about
Speaker 1: George that were written much later say that he moved
Speaker 1: to Virginia in the early seventies, but birth records for
Speaker 1: his children show one born in New York in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty three, followed by one born in Virginia in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty seven. So he was living in Virginia at least
Speaker 1: as early as nineteen sixty seven, and the happy marriage
Speaker 1: Tatler wrote about seems to have been anything. But he
Speaker 1: married his first wife in nineteen sixty three, at eight
Speaker 1: months before their first daughter was born. When his wife
Speaker 1: filed for divorce, she cited both cruelty and wilful abandonment.
Speaker 1: By the time the divorce was finalized in nineteen seventy four. George,
Speaker 1: who was in his mid thirties and a father of four,
Speaker 1: was already living with a girl he met a year earlier,
Speaker 1: when he was married and she was in high school.
Speaker 1: Her name was Ava DeHart. By nineteen eighty two, she
Speaker 1: wasn't a teenager anymore. They'd been together for almost a decade.
Speaker 1: She worked at the motorcycle shop he ran in Fredericksburg, Virginia,
Speaker 1: and they lived together in a trailer in a small
Speaker 1: town about halfway between Fredericksburg and Charlottesville. In the summer
Speaker 1: of nineteen eighty two, Ava confided in her sister that
Speaker 1: she was afraid of George, that he'd been hurting her,
Speaker 1: and she was afraid that if she tried to leave,
Speaker 1: he would find her and kill her, or worse, that
Speaker 1: he'd kill her family. She told her sister that he'd
Speaker 1: killed before, but she wouldn't say anymore, and then she disappeared.
Speaker 1: George Patsalos had already moved on to another woman before
Speaker 1: Ava disappeared in nineteen eighty two, and in nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: five he married Barbara Campfield, the woman he'd started seeing
Speaker 1: a year before. Ava de Heart vanished. That marriage was
Speaker 1: over before it even really began. They married in March,
Speaker 1: had a baby in May, and they were separated by July,
Speaker 1: though they didn't officially divorce until nineteen eighty seven. On
Speaker 1: the divorce decree, the legal grounds for the divorce is
Speaker 1: listed simply as cruelty. You can't really know what goes
Speaker 1: on behind closed doors. But shortly before Barbara filed for
Speaker 1: the divorce, her brother shot George in the neck during
Speaker 1: an argument that took place at her mother's house. For
Speaker 1: fourteen years, Ava Dehart's sister, Debbie, investigated the disappearance on
Speaker 1: her own. She hired a private investigator, but she kept
Speaker 1: pursuing the best lead on her own. Barbara Campfield hadn't
Speaker 1: to know something. She was George Patsalos's girlfriend when Ava disappeared,
Speaker 1: and it's a small town people talk, so she took
Speaker 1: advantage of that, and she talked too. Debbie would stop
Speaker 1: by the grocery store where Barbara was working, just a chat.
Speaker 1: Every now and then. She'd ask Barbara her sister. She
Speaker 1: asked her about George. She asked what happened in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty two, and slowly Barbara opened up to her. Barbara
Speaker 1: hired a lawyer shortly after She led on to Debbie
Speaker 1: that she'd helped George clean up a lot of blood
Speaker 1: one night in July of nineteen eighty two, and her
Speaker 1: lawyer negotiated a deal for immunity, and then she took
Speaker 1: the police to the well. Barbara said for all those
Speaker 1: years she'd been too afraid to talk. She was afraid
Speaker 1: that George would do the same thing to her. But
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety six, she finally confessed to helping George
Speaker 1: Potsollos throw a body down a well. She claimed that
Speaker 1: she never knew whose body it was. A forensic examination
Speaker 1: confirmed that the skeletal remains at the bottom of an
Speaker 1: abandoned well were those of Ava DeHart. A forensic anthropologist
Speaker 1: had testified that of the thirty five fractures detected on examination,
Speaker 1: twenty seven of them happened while she was still alive.
Speaker 1: George Potzalos beat her to death. George Pozzalos was convicted
Speaker 1: of the first degree murder of Ava de Hart in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety seven. He was sentenced to life in prison,
Speaker 1: where he died in two thousand and six. So in
Speaker 1: nineteen forty three, Cristos Pazzalos shot his wife Athena in
Speaker 1: the throat, leaving John and George without a mother. John
Speaker 1: Patler was right almost when he wrote in nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: six that it isn't fair to attribute his political leanings
Speaker 1: entirely to his violent childhood. It is possible to grow
Speaker 1: up in a violent home and not become a Nazi.
Speaker 1: It is possible to be the son of a domestic
Speaker 1: abuser and not grow up to beat women to death.
Speaker 1: But it is still true to say that that's what
Speaker 1: happened here, that the sons of a murdered mother grew
Speaker 1: into men who murdered too. One killed a man he
Speaker 1: loved like a father, and the other killed a woman
Speaker 1: who'd once carried his child. I don't know what that means,
Speaker 1: if it means anything, All I know is that's what happened.
Speaker 1: In twenty thirteen, John Patler's youngest son, Nicholas Patler, contributed
Speaker 1: the afterward to William Schmaltz's biography of George Lincoln Rockwell.
Speaker 1: Nicholas was not quite a year old when his father
Speaker 1: shot Rockwell, and he wrote that he had no contact
Speaker 1: with his father from the time he was six until
Speaker 1: he was thirty four. He's the only one of Patler's
Speaker 1: four children who seems to have made any public statement
Speaker 1: about their father, So he's the only one I'll talk about.
Speaker 1: He has a master's degree in history. His first book
Speaker 1: was a history of the massive protest movement that emerged
Speaker 1: in opposition to the forced segregation of the federal workforce
Speaker 1: during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. For several years he
Speaker 1: was an adjunct professor teaching African American history. His second
Speaker 1: book actually just came out a few weeks ago, a
Speaker 1: biography of Pinkney Bent and Stewart Pinchback. Pinchback was the
Speaker 1: son of an enslaved woman and was briefly the governor
Speaker 1: of Louisiana in eighteen seventy two. Nicholas Butler has clearly
Speaker 1: worked hard to put something into the world that his
Speaker 1: father was trying to take away from it. Look at
Speaker 1: his life, his work, interviews he's given over the years.
Speaker 1: He is the opposite of the man his father was
Speaker 1: in the nineteen sixties. In that afterward, he writes compassionately
Speaker 1: about the father he got to know as an adult.
Speaker 1: He describes his father's traumatic childhood, and he understands how
Speaker 1: a damaged young man came to be drawn in by
Speaker 1: the fatherly attention he got from Rockwell. He's trying to understand,
Speaker 1: and he's careful to emphasize that his goal is not
Speaker 1: to excuse. When he wrote this in twenty thirteen, he'd
Speaker 1: spent a little over a decade getting to know his father,
Speaker 1: and at the time he had also recently enrolled in
Speaker 1: a master's program at Bethany Theological Seminary. And I think
Speaker 1: that does help me understand the tenor of the essay
Speaker 1: in a way. He's writing earnestly about finding peace and
Speaker 1: being opened to the possibility of transformation. He wrote that
Speaker 1: his father really was a changed man. His father had
Speaker 1: told him once that he regretted his time in the
Speaker 1: Nazi movement, and even expressed that he now realized he'd
Speaker 1: been marching with the wrong side during the Civil Rights movement.
Speaker 1: Nicholas Butler ends that afterward on a hopeful note, writing quote,
Speaker 1: I want to encourage the reader not to give up
Speaker 1: on those trapped in cycles and situations of violence and distortion,
Speaker 1: whether in her own back yard or across the globe.
Speaker 1: The one thing that I have seen personally and witnessed
Speaker 1: over and over in many contexts that can transform hatred
Speaker 1: and the hater is love, courageous, visionary, and uncompromising love.
Speaker 1: In twenty thirteen, when he wrote that his father was
Speaker 1: proof of this message, that he'd been transformed. Four years later,
Speaker 1: in twenty seventeen, after the Unite the Right rally in Charlesville, Virginia,
Speaker 1: every news outlet in the country was running front page
Speaker 1: stories with pictures of Nazis. Hundreds and hundreds of neo Nazis,
Speaker 1: men flying Swastika flags, men with Swastika tattoos, men in
Speaker 1: Nazi uniforms, men with torches, men with weapons, Videos of
Speaker 1: men chanting you will not replace us blood and soil,
Speaker 1: videos of men shouting Rockwell's most famous slogan, white power.
Speaker 1: A changed man, a man who regretted inciting violent racist
Speaker 1: mobs all those years ago, What would he say when
Speaker 1: he saw it happening again. Two days after that rally,
Speaker 1: after a young neo Nazi murdered a peaceful demonstrator in
Speaker 1: the streets, John Patler posted on Facebook that there's nothing
Speaker 1: wrong with white pride. He wrote, it was a peaceful parade,
Speaker 1: a couple of hundred white men, neatly attired, expressing their
Speaker 1: right to free speech and objection to the removal of
Speaker 1: the statue of General Lee. A reporter from The Washington
Speaker 1: Post made several attempts to contact him, even visiting his
Speaker 1: apartment in Manhattan, but he refused to be interviewed. His son,
Speaker 1: the same son who wrote so proudly, so lovingly in
Speaker 1: twenty thirteen about his father's transformation, told The Washington Post
Speaker 1: in twenty seventeen that his father had started to change
Speaker 1: again around twenty fifteen. Quote, I don't know what the
Speaker 1: climate is doing to him now. It seems like little
Speaker 1: by little he's becoming poisoned again. You can't know what's
Speaker 1: in a man's heart. You can judge his actions, you
Speaker 1: can interpret his words, but there isn't any one who
Speaker 1: can tell you for sure whether John Patler's heart changed
Speaker 1: twice or not at all? Was he a changed man
Speaker 1: from nineteen seventy until twenty fifteen and then he changed back?
Speaker 1: Did the love and understanding of a once estranged sun
Speaker 1: help him come to terms with the hurt in his
Speaker 1: own soul and the ways that pushed him to inflict
Speaker 1: pain on the world, only then to hear the siren
Speaker 1: song of a new fure during the twenty sixteen election.
Speaker 1: Was that hate, just lying dormant, waiting for the right
Speaker 1: moment to march again. There are a few times in
Speaker 1: the last few weeks as I've been writing this story
Speaker 1: that something reminded me of what I think is one
Speaker 1: of the greatest episodes of television ever produced. The fourth
Speaker 1: episode of the fourth season of The Twilight Zone aired
Speaker 1: in January of nineteen sixty three. It starred a young
Speaker 1: Dennis Hopper as Peter Fulmer, the leader of a small
Speaker 1: group of neo Nazis. I don't know that Rod Serling
Speaker 1: ever stated outright that he was thinking of George Lincoln
Speaker 1: Rockwell when he wrote the character of Peter Fulmer, a small,
Speaker 1: angry man desperate to command the respect of his followers,
Speaker 1: but struggling to pay the rent on his Nazi headquarters.
Speaker 1: When it is so precisely Rockwell that I can't believe
Speaker 1: there's any other explanation. As Peter Fulmer is struggling to
Speaker 1: put on his little Nazi rallies and grow the ranks
Speaker 1: of his Nazi party, a mysterious figure appears to him
Speaker 1: and offers him money and advice. And when the man
Speaker 1: finally steps out of the shadows, it's Adolf Hitler. Himself.
Speaker 1: The episode aired four years before Rockwell died in real life,
Speaker 1: but at the end of the episode, his on screen
Speaker 1: stand in is leading out in an alley. As Rod
Speaker 1: Serling narrates the closing monologue, you see Hitler's ghost walk
Speaker 1: off into the night in search of a new apprentice,
Speaker 1: and we're left with a warning. He's alive. He's alive
Speaker 1: because we keep him alive.
Speaker 2: He's alive so long as these evils exist. Remember that
Speaker 2: when he comes to Ururtan. Remember it when you hear
Speaker 2: his voice speaking on through others. Remember it when you
Speaker 2: hear a name called a minority, attack, any blind, unreasoning
Speaker 2: assault out a people, or any human being. He's alive
Speaker 2: because through these things we keep them alive.
Speaker 1: George Lincoln Rockwell is dead. Almost all of the men
Speaker 1: who marched behind him sixty years ago are dead. But
Speaker 1: only the men died. The thing that drove them, the
Speaker 1: thing that's still drives men like them today. It's alive,
Speaker 1: and too many people are keeping it alive. Weird Little
Speaker 1: Guys is a production of Pool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: It's researched, written and recorded by me Molly Conger. Our
Speaker 1: executive producers are Sophy Lettterman, and Robert Evans. The show
Speaker 1: is edited by the wildly talented Ry Gagan that the
Speaker 1: music was composed by Brad Dickard. You can email me
Speaker 1: at Wardly Guy's podcast at gmail dot com. I will
Speaker 1: definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it. As
Speaker 1: nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show
Speaker 1: with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subred it.
Speaker 1: Just don't post anything that's going to make you one
Speaker 1: of my Weird Little Guys