Speaker 1: Col Zone Media. There was still a little bit of
Speaker 1: snow on the ground and Ellsworth, Maine as the sun
Speaker 1: began to set. On March seventeenth, nineteen sixty eight, Claudia
Speaker 1: and Frank Smith had been informed by a neighbor that
Speaker 1: a suspicious looking car with out of state plates had
Speaker 1: been driving back and forth past their house all weekend,
Speaker 1: and by Sunday evening, Frank had had enough. He wanted
Speaker 1: to get a good look at the driver. With Claudia
Speaker 1: at the wheel, the couple began following the mysterious Volkswagen
Speaker 1: that had been shadowing them for two days. Who was
Speaker 1: chasing who? Who loaded his gun first? No one can
Speaker 1: quite agree. By the time the dust had settled, two
Speaker 1: members of the American Nazi Party had spent the better
Speaker 1: part of an hour exchanging gunfire. Somehow no one was injured,
Speaker 1: but both cars were riddled with bullet holes. After Christopher
Speaker 1: Vidniyevitch was taken into custody, an officer overheard Frank Smith
Speaker 1: ask him, what was the reason? I thought we were friends?
Speaker 1: But the reason should have been obvious to Frank. Surely
Speaker 1: he knew why. A loyal lieutenant of the American Nazi
Speaker 1: Party would take a shot at him. They were both
Speaker 1: men on a mission, the same mission. In fact, they
Speaker 1: were both conducting their own investigation into the murder of
Speaker 1: George Lincoln Waqua, I'm Molly Conger, and this is where
Speaker 1: little Gods, that shootout in Maine took place. More than
Speaker 1: six months after George Lincoln Rockwell died. His killer had
Speaker 1: already been convicted of murder. But a closed case file
Speaker 1: never stopped at conspiracy theory. You know that. And before
Speaker 1: we can get into why Frank Smith believes John Patler
Speaker 1: didn't do it, we have to get up to the
Speaker 1: point in our story where he did. When we left
Speaker 1: off last week, it was nineteen sixty three. John Patler
Speaker 1: had been allowed to rejoin the American Nazi Party after
Speaker 1: failing spectacularly at his brief attempt to lead a splinter group.
Speaker 1: Over the protests of most everyone who'd known John Patler,
Speaker 1: Rockwell welcomed him home again. I struggled a bit this
Speaker 1: week with the question of where to focus this episode.
Speaker 1: It would be easy enough to take a straightforward chronological
Speaker 1: journey through the activities of the American Nazi Party in
Speaker 1: the mid nineteen sixties. There are some good stories in
Speaker 1: there some wild anecdotes that I'm sure I'll revisit some
Speaker 1: other time through the lens of some other weird little
Speaker 1: guy who was there for them. After all, this show
Speaker 1: is just one long story told out of order. Listeners
Speaker 1: with long memories might remember I actually talked briefly about
Speaker 1: George Lincoln Rockwall's nineteen sixty five campaign for governor of
Speaker 1: Virginia in an episode last fall. It was a story
Speaker 1: about the history of Virginia's crossburning laws, so I reserve
Speaker 1: the right to come back to nineteen sixty five another day.
Speaker 1: I hate to think I wasted half my week collecting
Speaker 1: old newspaper clippings about events I'm skipping over entirely. But
Speaker 1: what I found most interesting in piezing together this timeline
Speaker 1: is the question of why why did John Patler murder
Speaker 1: George Lincoln Rockwell in August of nineteen sixty seven. Truthfully,
Speaker 1: no one knows, But in the absence of that elusive truth,
Speaker 1: competing and conflicting narratives arose, and the question becomes what
Speaker 1: motivates those Even when you can't sort out what the
Speaker 1: truth actually is, trying to discern the motivations behind those
Speaker 1: half truths can shed some light on things. So instead
Speaker 1: of telling you about every time a member of the
Speaker 1: American Nazi Party got arrested for disorderly conduct at a
Speaker 1: rally that got out of hand, every trip across the
Speaker 1: country to disrupt a civil rights march, every wild stunt
Speaker 1: pulled by a guy in a swastika armband. Instead of
Speaker 1: all that, I want to ask you a question. What
Speaker 1: is a white person? Who is white? That's easy, right,
Speaker 1: You know what a white person is. It's like what
Speaker 1: the Supreme Court said about pornography. You know when you
Speaker 1: see it, But how do you know? Is it the
Speaker 1: color of your skin? Is it the birthplace of your parents?
Speaker 1: Is it your hair, your culture, your religion, your politics?
Speaker 1: Who is white? Are people of Slavic descent white? Are
Speaker 1: fair haired Northern Africans? Can a Jewish person be white?
Speaker 1: Can a Communist be white? Italians are Europeans? Surely that
Speaker 1: makes them white. But what about a dark haired, olive
Speaker 1: skin Sicilian. I'm no sociologist, I'm not an expert on
Speaker 1: the idea of race as a social construct. But for me,
Speaker 1: the clearest evidence that the boundaries of whiteness are constantly shifting,
Speaker 1: that the definition is a highly politicized moving target that
Speaker 1: whiteness is something that can be given and taken away.
Speaker 1: Is the fact that the most racist people on the
Speaker 1: planet are usually the ones writing and rewriting that definition.
Speaker 1: In the American South, we had the one drop rule.
Speaker 1: The faintest trace of black ancestry excluded you from whiteness.
Speaker 1: But without DNA testing or consistent record keeping, how could
Speaker 1: you know who had a black great grandmother. In apartheid
Speaker 1: South Africa, the law required all people to be officially
Speaker 1: registered with the government as black, white, colored, or Indian.
Speaker 1: But how you were classified wasn't up to you. It
Speaker 1: was determined by someone else, not just based on how
Speaker 1: you looked, but how you lived, what language do you
Speaker 1: speak at home, how educated are you, how poor are you?
Speaker 1: And it wasn't uncommon for members of the same family,
Speaker 1: children with the same parents to end up classified differently
Speaker 1: by the government. And famously, Germany adopted the Nuremberg Claws
Speaker 1: in nineteen thirty five, codifying a definition of who is
Speaker 1: German and who is Jewish. In all three of these
Speaker 1: chapters of history, those who fell outside the legal boundaries
Speaker 1: of whiteness were excluded from the benefits of citizenship and
Speaker 1: it isn't just governments who have struggled with classifying who
Speaker 1: exactly should be excluded. You'd think that no one would
Speaker 1: be more firm than the Ku Klux Klan when it
Speaker 1: comes to defining whiteness. But the Klan had to hold
Speaker 1: a vote in the mid nineteen seventies to determine whether
Speaker 1: white immigrants and Catholics were white enough to don white robes.
Speaker 1: For George Lincoln Rockwell and his American Nazi Party, the
Speaker 1: parameters were set by Hitler himself. Rockwell was America's Hitler,
Speaker 1: or at least he hoped to be. He wasn't just
Speaker 1: repeating some of the same ideas Hitler had in Nazi Germany.
Speaker 1: He felt he was Hitler's spiritual successor. His Nazi Party
Speaker 1: headquarters were adorned with gigantic swastika banners, and his storm
Speaker 1: troopers wore Nazi uniforms. He founded the American Nazi Party
Speaker 1: after weeks of intense, vivid dreams that always ended when
Speaker 1: he walked into a room to find Adolf Hitler sitting
Speaker 1: there waiting for him to arrive. He through a birthday
Speaker 1: celebration for Hitler every year on April twentieth, the first
Speaker 1: full issue of the party's newsletter was far from the
Speaker 1: only one to bear a photo of Hitler on the
Speaker 1: front cover. He dedicated his nineteen sixty one memoir to Hitler,
Speaker 1: and in that memoir, Rockwell is pretty clear what he
Speaker 1: means when he talks about the white race. He's talking
Speaker 1: about blonde, blue eyed Aryans, Hitler's Aryan race, people of
Speaker 1: Nordic and Germanic heritage. He lists Slavs, Italians, and Greeks
Speaker 1: in the same sentence as Chinese and Japanese immigrants. These
Speaker 1: are minority groups. These are races outside his definition of whiteness.
Speaker 1: But in nineteen sixty five, the commander of the American
Speaker 1: Nazi Party was starting to wonder if he was using
Speaker 1: the wrong definition of whiteness. Rockwell's political philosophy had always
Speaker 1: relied on the legacy of Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany,
Speaker 1: but the United States in nineteen sixty five didn't exactly
Speaker 1: have the same concentration of Germans as Germany. In nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty five, it was becoming painfully clear that without broadening
Speaker 1: this definition of whiteness, he would never have enough white
Speaker 1: people to do anything with it all, and the movement
Speaker 1: would be doomed. Even in predominantly white areas, American born
Speaker 1: Protestants of pure Nordic or German blood were usually outnumbered
Speaker 1: by Catholics, first generation white immigrants, and people whose ancestors
Speaker 1: came from southern or Eastern Europe. He wasn't abandoning Hitler's
Speaker 1: vision exactly. He was just adapting it for an American movement.
Speaker 1: This idea of a broader coalition of whites was on
Speaker 1: Rockwell's mind as early as nineteen sixty five, but the
Speaker 1: evidence of that is own only in his private letters.
Speaker 1: It's not until nineteen sixty six that the perfect opportunity
Speaker 1: for rebranding the movement landed right in his lap, and
Speaker 1: that's when he invented the phrase white power, or so
Speaker 1: the story goes. In June of nineteen sixty six, Stokely Carmichael,
Speaker 1: who was not yet called Kuame Toure, gave a speech
Speaker 1: in Greenwood, Mississippi. The words black power had been spoken
Speaker 1: before plenty of times. Richard Wright wrote a book in
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty four called Black Power. Grace Lee Boggs founded
Speaker 1: the Organization for Black Power in nineteen sixty five. Adam
Speaker 1: Clayton Powell Junior, a congressman representing Harlem, used the phrase
Speaker 1: in a speech earlier in nineteen sixty six, But for
Speaker 1: some reason, when Stokely Carmichael said those words in Mississippi,
Speaker 1: they stuck, and black power entered the broader American lexicon.
Speaker 1: Paper archives from that week show a sudden explosion of
Speaker 1: articles and op eds about black power, What is it?
Speaker 1: What does it mean? What do they want? Should we
Speaker 1: be afraid? And biographies of George Lincoln Rockwell all credit
Speaker 1: Rockwell with the invention of the phrase white power as
Speaker 1: a direct response to Stokely Carmichael. And that's kind of true.
Speaker 1: I guess it is at least as true as it
Speaker 1: would be to say that Stokely Carmichael invented the phrase
Speaker 1: black power. He didn't, but he popularized it. But William
Speaker 1: Schmaltz's twenty thirteen biography says that Rockwell coined the term
Speaker 1: for the first time while speaking at a rally in Chicago.
Speaker 1: So I figured, if the first popular usage of black
Speaker 1: power spawned a thousand hand ringing op eds, I bet
Speaker 1: the first time someone shouted white power, it probably at
Speaker 1: least an ended up in the newspaper. And it did.
Speaker 1: But it wasn't Rockwell who said it. Chicago newspapers on
Speaker 1: the morning of August first, nineteen sixty six ran headlines
Speaker 1: like white mob battles Negro marchers and sixty injured as
Speaker 1: angry crowd breaks up rights march, and the articles all
Speaker 1: describe a very violent, large white mob attacking a few
Speaker 1: hundred black civil rights marchers near Chicago's Marquette Park, and
Speaker 1: the people throwing rocks at the marchers were all screaming
Speaker 1: white power. So far, this all makes sense with what
Speaker 1: I already know about that summer. There were several famously
Speaker 1: violent assaults on civil rights marches in and around Marquette
Speaker 1: Park that summer, and Rockwell did speak at some of
Speaker 1: those events. But I double checked my timeline. Rockwell didn't
Speaker 1: speak at Marquette Park until August twenty first, So who's
Speaker 1: yelling white power in the park three weeks earlier. A
Speaker 1: definitive answer to that question is probably lost a time,
Speaker 1: But I think I found what could be the earliest
Speaker 1: recording of someone using the phrase white power movement to
Speaker 1: describe the thing we know it as today.
Speaker 2: How mister Carmichael, if I may interrupt, you may see
Speaker 2: right here an indication of where mister Rockwell is aligning
Speaker 2: you as the antithesis of his movement, a white supremacy
Speaker 2: or I think he a white power movement. I think
Speaker 2: here is no question about it.
Speaker 1: That's Chicago area news anchor John J. Madigan on the
Speaker 1: July twenty ninth, nineteen sixty six episode of his political
Speaker 1: discussion show at Random. The guests that evening were Stokely
Speaker 1: Carmichael and George Lincoln Rockwell. It's not until nearly the
Speaker 1: end of that hour long segment that Rockwell seems to
Speaker 1: have grabbed hold of the phrase, and he makes an
Speaker 1: ominous statement about the violence that would visit Chicago in
Speaker 1: the weeks to come.
Speaker 2: But I think we're building up to an inevitable confrontation
Speaker 2: between blackfire and whackfire. Am.
Speaker 1: I let's this omissions you used. Just two days after
Speaker 1: this segment aired, The phrase white power is suddenly on
Speaker 1: the lips of this white mob setting cars on fire
Speaker 1: in south side Chicago. It's what they were screaming as
Speaker 1: they hurled rocks at the nuns who marched with the
Speaker 1: demonstrators from the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations the following
Speaker 1: weekend that screaming white mob faced off again with civil
Speaker 1: rights marchers, This time Martin Luther King Junior himself was
Speaker 1: in town to lead the march, part of a series
Speaker 1: of demonstrations that summer centered around housing discrimination. King wouldn't
Speaker 1: live to see the fruits of the slabor but the
Speaker 1: Chicago Freedom Movement is generally credited as the driving force
Speaker 1: behind the passage of the Fair Housing Act, which was
Speaker 1: signed into law just a week after his death in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty eight. But on this day, August fifth, nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty six, Martin Luther King Junior was struck in the
Speaker 1: face with a rock as he entered Marquette Park, so
Speaker 1: hard that he fell to his knees and the crowd.
Speaker 1: The crowd was all screaming white power as the rocks
Speaker 1: ranged down. King later told reporters quote, I've been in
Speaker 1: many demonstrations all across the South, but I can say
Speaker 1: that I have never seen, even in Mississippi and Alabama,
Speaker 1: mobs as hostile and as hate filled as I'm seeing
Speaker 1: in Chicago. And Rockwell was thrilled this was all the
Speaker 1: proof he needed. Limiting himself to Hitler's ideas of racial
Speaker 1: purity was holding him back. It was an aryan superiority.
Speaker 1: It was white power that had united those racist throngs
Speaker 1: in Chicago. These people throwing rocks at Martin Luther King
Speaker 1: Junior were white, sure, but they weren't Arian. Many of
Speaker 1: them were Polish and Lithuanian, the kinds of white he
Speaker 1: hadn't tried to appeal to before. But white power, white
Speaker 1: power brought them together and it could be the way forward.
Speaker 1: Rockwell couldn't make it out to Chicago right away, but
Speaker 1: he got to work. The party's printing press, housed in
Speaker 1: a converted henhouse in rural Spotsovania County, Virginia, ran all
Speaker 1: night long, churning out signs that said white Power. As
Speaker 1: soon as Rockwell could scrape together the funds for a
Speaker 1: plane ticket, he flew his most loyal lieutenant out to
Speaker 1: Chicago to try to take advantage of this violent momentum.
Speaker 1: John Patler arrived at O'Hare Airport with a suitcase full
Speaker 1: of white power posters on August fourteenth. As I was
Speaker 1: poring over the newspaper archives from August of nineteen sixty six,
Speaker 1: the first time I found a name attached to a
Speaker 1: chant of white power? Was it that march on August fourteenth.
Speaker 1: It had been chanted by the crowd on July thirty
Speaker 1: first and on August fifth. But in all of those
Speaker 1: stories it's not coming from anyone's mouth. In particular, it
Speaker 1: doesn't say where it started. So if the newspaper is
Speaker 1: any official record of history, the first man to stand
Speaker 1: in front of a crowd and lead an organized chant
Speaker 1: of white power wasn't George Lincoln Rockwell. It was the
Speaker 1: man who would shoot Rockwell dead almost exactly a year later.
Speaker 1: It was John Patler standing on a bench in Marquette Park.
Speaker 1: There is another, albeit slightly less cinematic possibility. As thrilling
Speaker 1: as it is to put the first public rallying cry
Speaker 1: of Rockwell's most famous slogan into the mouth of his killer,
Speaker 1: I can at least speculate about the identity of the
Speaker 1: nameless member of that crowd who may have started the
Speaker 1: chant the first time. If nothing else, this is an
Speaker 1: opportunity to introduce you more fully to the man who
Speaker 1: opened fire on that couple in Maine. In nineteen sixty eight,
Speaker 1: the American Nazi Party had an office in Chicago. John
Speaker 1: Patler was living in Virginia, where the party had its
Speaker 1: headquarters and he flew out to Chicago a week after
Speaker 1: Martin Luther King Junior was hit with that rock. But
Speaker 1: that first week in August, there were members of the
Speaker 1: American Nazi Party in the crowd, and they may have
Speaker 1: been the ones to get those chants going. The head
Speaker 1: of the Chicago chapter of the American Nazi Party in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty six was a twenty two year old named
Speaker 1: Christopher Vidnyevitch. Now you know, I love to be thorough.
Speaker 1: I love to make a whole timeline of the lives
Speaker 1: of even the most ancillary characters in a story. I
Speaker 1: guess I just love wasting my own time. And you know,
Speaker 1: I don't believe at face value the biographical details that
Speaker 1: I read in Nazi newsletters. But those newsletters make some
Speaker 1: extraordinary claims about Vidnyevitch. He says that he joined the
Speaker 1: Nazi Party as a teenager because of his burning bone
Speaker 1: deep hatred of communists. That's pretty standard, But he says
Speaker 1: that he hated communists because they murdered his father, and
Speaker 1: it's a claim he would later repeat on the stand
Speaker 1: under oath when he testified in his own trial for
Speaker 1: shooting at Frank Smith in nineteen sixty eight. So I
Speaker 1: did a little of my own digging. It might have
Speaker 1: been faster in retrospect, who work backwards by assuming that
Speaker 1: he was telling the truth and searching for a man
Speaker 1: with that last name who was executed in Yugoslavia after
Speaker 1: the war. But that isn't what I did. The first
Speaker 1: thing I found were naturalization records for a thirteen year
Speaker 1: old boy named Kristo Vidnievitch, and on the back of
Speaker 1: the card it was written that his name was changed
Speaker 1: to Christopher when he gained his citizenship. And from there
Speaker 1: I was able to find a new story from nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty seven about a thirteen year old boy named Kristo
Speaker 1: Vidniyevitch and his seventeen year old sister taking their oath
Speaker 1: of citizenship in a courtroom in Chicago. By the time
Speaker 1: they were naturalized, they'd been in the United States for
Speaker 1: seven years. In nineteen fifty Lydia Vidnyevitch and her two children,
Speaker 1: aged ten and six at the time, were listed as
Speaker 1: stateless when they arrived at the port of New York
Speaker 1: aboard a ship that had sailed from Germany. So I
Speaker 1: kept digging, and I found a document produced by the
Speaker 1: Internet National Refugee organization. In nineteen forty eight, Lydyavidnyevitch's application
Speaker 1: for refugee status was denied, and the stated reason is
Speaker 1: quote petitioner is a crow up woman from Zagreb who
Speaker 1: is evacuated by the Germans to Austria in December nineteen
Speaker 1: forty four, with a number of other women and children
Speaker 1: whose husbands were left behind by reason of their official functions.
Speaker 1: Despite the very good impression which applicant has made upon
Speaker 1: the board, there are reasons to believe that only the
Speaker 1: wives of persons who assisted the Germans were taken care
Speaker 1: of by the Wehrmacht. She later filed an appeal and
Speaker 1: was ultimately deemed eligible for refugee status because the family
Speaker 1: could not be safely repatriated to Yugoslavia due to threats
Speaker 1: from someone quote moved by a spirit of revenge for
Speaker 1: actions of Petitioner's husband. Well, now I'm committed. I need
Speaker 1: to know what the story is here. I'm so far
Speaker 1: afield of what I was supposed to be working on,
Speaker 1: and there's really no excuse for a digression this long.
Speaker 1: But I had to know what it was that this
Speaker 1: man had done that might move someone's spirit that way,
Speaker 1: So I spent an entire day trying to find and
Speaker 1: translate documentation about war crimes tribunals in Yugoslavia. In nineteen
Speaker 1: forty five, when Lydia Vidnyevitch spoke to a reporter at
Speaker 1: her children's naturalization ceremony, she said that she had last
Speaker 1: heard from her husband by letter in May of nineteen
Speaker 1: forty five, when he was attempting to cross the border
Speaker 1: into Austria. She neglected to mention that his letter was
Speaker 1: written shortly after the remnants of the fascist government of
Speaker 1: Croatia attempted to flee to Austria and before he was
Speaker 1: captured by the British Army and sent back to face
Speaker 1: a tribunal. He was executed a month later. Christopher Vidnyevitch's
Speaker 1: father wasn't just a Nazi collaborator, he was a war criminal.
Speaker 1: Ivan Vitnyevitch was tried alongside several high ranking officials of
Speaker 1: the Nazi puppet government that carried out mass murder in
Speaker 1: Croatia in the nineteen forties. Lydia told that reporter in
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty seven that her husband had been a judge
Speaker 1: in Zagreb, but he was a judge in name only.
Speaker 1: He was the presiding judge of Zagreb's mobile Court Martial,
Speaker 1: an instrument of the Ustasha Rejim's program of mass murder,
Speaker 1: these judges roamed the country carrying out show trials. The
Speaker 1: trials lasted mere minutes, and the accused had no chance
Speaker 1: to speak for himself. The defendant was always guilty and
Speaker 1: the sentence was almost always death. He would try dozens
Speaker 1: of people at once for crimes as minor as reading
Speaker 1: forbidden political pamphlets, or simply for being Serbian or Romani Jewish.
Speaker 1: In one afternoon in nineteen forty one, Ivan Vitnyevitch sentenced
Speaker 1: one hundred people to die at the Yasenovats concentration camp.
Speaker 1: So yes, I guess Christopher Vidnyevitch isn't technically wrong when
Speaker 1: he said Communists killed his father, but it was only
Speaker 1: after he stood trial for handing down death sentences for
Speaker 1: thousands of Jews, Serbs, Roma and political dissidence. A long tangent,
Speaker 1: I know, but I think it's worth knowing that one
Speaker 1: of the most fervent, violent supporters of Rockwell's Nazi Party,
Speaker 1: this young man whipping up crowds that beats civil rights
Speaker 1: marchers every weekend all summer in Chicago in nineteen sixty six.
Speaker 1: He was a true believer. He wasn't misguided, he wasn't confused.
Speaker 1: He knew exactly what it meant to call yourself a Nazi.
Speaker 1: He knew exactly what he was advocating for and who
Speaker 1: would have to die for him to get it. It
Speaker 1: wasn't ironic or edgy or joke when he put on
Speaker 1: that swastika armband. He did it to fulfill his father's legacy.
Speaker 1: But we were talking about white power. It's Rockwell who
Speaker 1: gets credit for the term, even if it was a
Speaker 1: TV news anchor who put the words in his head
Speaker 1: and his lieutenants who got those crowds to chant it.
Speaker 1: In August of nineteen sixty six, Nazis raised hell in Chicago.
Speaker 1: After Patler arrived in town on the fourteenth, he and
Speaker 1: Vitnyevitch whipped up an angry mob in Marquette Park. One
Speaker 1: police officer called the resulting violence the closest thing he'd
Speaker 1: ever seen to an all out war. In his rousing
Speaker 1: speech from the park bench, John Patler announced to the
Speaker 1: crowd that Rockwell himself would be speaking in that very
Speaker 1: spot the next weekend. The August twenty first rally was
Speaker 1: George Lincoln Rockwell's finest hour. He'd never commanded such an audience,
Speaker 1: and he never would again. Sure, he'd spoken to huge
Speaker 1: theaters of people, but this was different. Thousands of people
Speaker 1: were there not to gawk at the Nazi, not to protest,
Speaker 1: not to heckel, but because they wanted to hear him speak.
Speaker 1: A few lone hecklers were quickly handled by the crowd,
Speaker 1: but the people who were there were enthralled by him.
Speaker 1: This was no college auditorium full of curious skeptics and
Speaker 1: silent protesters. This was a roaring crowd. And standing atop
Speaker 1: his camper with a giant swastika banner draped down the side,
Speaker 1: Rockwell capped off his speech by asking the crowd to
Speaker 1: yell white power, loud enough for Martin Luther King Junior
Speaker 1: to hear them on the other side of town. Over
Speaker 1: and over again, he led them in a call in response,
Speaker 1: yelling white and basking in the response as thousands of
Speaker 1: voices responded power. Years later, when James Mason was writing
Speaker 1: the newsletter, they would eventually be collected into the book Siege,
Speaker 1: that bible of the modern neo Nazi terrorist He called
Speaker 1: this the Apex Moment of the nineteen sixties. But the
Speaker 1: magic was short lived. Martin Luther King Junior moved on
Speaker 1: from Chicago to other cities, and it turned out the
Speaker 1: racist white people of Chicago didn't actually like George Lincoln Rockwell.
Speaker 1: They just really hate the civil rights movement. But it
Speaker 1: was proof still for Rockwell that white power was the
Speaker 1: way forward. By the end of nineteen sixty six, Rockwell
Speaker 1: was drafting his final book, White Power, although he had
Speaker 1: no way of knowing he would die just days before
Speaker 1: it was released. On January first, nineteen sixty seven, he
Speaker 1: issued a formal announcement to party members that they were rebranding.
Speaker 1: The American Nazi Party would from that day forward be
Speaker 1: called the National Socialist White People's Party. The mandatory sea
Speaker 1: khuiles would be replaced with shouts of white power. In
Speaker 1: the director of announcing the change, Rockwell wrote quote, we
Speaker 1: must strive among our white family of people to include
Speaker 1: all and alienate no white non Jews. He was commanding
Speaker 1: his Nazis to stand shoulder to shoulder and to accept
Speaker 1: as equals lesser whites. Not everyone shared the commander's vision.
Speaker 1: There was a growing schism within the party, those who
Speaker 1: accepted this new commitment to a pan white unity, and
Speaker 1: those who could never accept any departure from a strict
Speaker 1: interpretation of Hitler's racial philosophy of Varian superiority. This new
Speaker 1: expanded definition of whiteness was offensive to Nazi hardliners and
Speaker 1: factions formed. For men like Mattias Cole and William Luther Piers.
Speaker 1: It was unthinkable that lesser races like Slavs or Greeks
Speaker 1: could be included in the party's ranks, and John Patler,
Speaker 1: the son of Greek immigrants, with his dark hair and
Speaker 1: his dark eyes, became the living, breathing manifestation of this
Speaker 1: heresy that was threatening to tear the organization apart. William
Speaker 1: Luther Piers hated John Patler. That's important to remember as
Speaker 1: we move into the messy work of trying to sort
Speaker 1: fact from fiction. In everyone's account of what happened in
Speaker 1: the weeks before Rockwell was murdered, Pierce was not shy
Speaker 1: about the fact that he was disgusted by Patler's presence
Speaker 1: in the party. Even decades later, not long before his
Speaker 1: own death in two thousand and two, heerce recalled to
Speaker 1: his own biographer that Patler was a quote dark, greasy
Speaker 1: looking little guy, and he was always scheming. Rockwell was
Speaker 1: fully committed to his new vision. He was contemplating another
Speaker 1: run for office, and this approach had the potential to
Speaker 1: broaden his appeal. America is full of racists, He'd led
Speaker 1: them on marches up and down the streets of Chicago.
Speaker 1: But no matter how racist they are, no matter how
Speaker 1: many beliefs they share with Rockwell, a huge chunk of
Speaker 1: voting age men in America in nineteen sixty six had
Speaker 1: the living memory of fighting the Nazis in World War Two.
Speaker 1: No amount of shared racism could overcome their visceral disgust
Speaker 1: for the swastika on his shoulder, even if they hated
Speaker 1: Jews as much as he did. But replacing the swastika
Speaker 1: with an eagle, swapping the sea kile for white power,
Speaker 1: and preaching a message of white unity, of white power
Speaker 1: in this time of a hysterical white fear of black power,
Speaker 1: that could help him get his message to the masses.
Speaker 1: That could earn him thousands of new followers. But he
Speaker 1: was painfully aware of the need to convince the followers
Speaker 1: he already had. First, he couldn't afford to lose them.
Speaker 1: Rockwell urged John Patler to be patient, to be diplomatic,
Speaker 1: to let the commander handle it, but Patler was still
Speaker 1: the same volatile, paranoid man he'd been a decade earlier,
Speaker 1: when a court ordered psychiatric evaluation ominously predicted that he
Speaker 1: may one day commit murder. So tensions were high at
Speaker 1: the Nazi Party barracks. Perhaps if he'd kept his head down,
Speaker 1: Rockwell would have eventually achieved party discipline on the new messaging,
Speaker 1: but instead Patler stoked conflict. He was reprimanded for calling
Speaker 1: another Stormtrooper a blue eyed devil. He fell behind on
Speaker 1: his duties as publisher of Stormtrooper, the party's quarterly magazine,
Speaker 1: and as the man in charge of the printing press.
Speaker 1: He dragged his feet when Rockwell ordered him to assist
Speaker 1: Willie Luther Pearce in producing Pearce's new publication called National
Speaker 1: Socialist World. Aside from the existing racial animosity between them,
Speaker 1: it seems like Patler saw National Socialist World as a
Speaker 1: competitor to The Stormtrooper, which was his magazine, and with
Speaker 1: Pierce on the scene with his own publication, he was
Speaker 1: worried that he would lose favor that he would lose power.
Speaker 1: When Rockwell assigned another party member to assist Patler at
Speaker 1: the printing press since he was falling so behind in
Speaker 1: his work, Patler turned the man away and wouldn't let
Speaker 1: him in the building because that man's views fell more
Speaker 1: on the pro Nordic side of the schism. So he's
Speaker 1: causing problems on purpose, and he's got a bad attitude,
Speaker 1: and he doesn't have a lot of people on his side.
Speaker 1: The only person really on his side through all of
Speaker 1: this is George Lincoln Rockwell, so that counts for a lot.
Speaker 1: But he's becoming a liability. The breaking point finally came
Speaker 1: in March of nineteen sixty seven. The last straw is
Speaker 1: never really the most significant one, but when Rockwell arrived
Speaker 1: back home in Virginia after a court appearance in Chicago,
Speaker 1: he found Paller had once again left his post without permission.
Speaker 1: He'd been shirking his duties for months, sometimes disappearing for
Speaker 1: a week at a time without telling anyone. During Rockwall's
Speaker 1: Midwest college speaking tour over the winter, the pair had
Speaker 1: argued when Patler demanded money for airfare to fly home
Speaker 1: to take care of his father in law, who he
Speaker 1: said was ill. Rockwell gave in that time, but Patler
Speaker 1: had abused the commander's leniency for the last time. Biographies
Speaker 1: of Rockwell characterized the memo drafted on March thirtieth, nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty seven, as an ordered dismissing Patler from the party.
Speaker 1: But I've read it and I don't agree. The two
Speaker 1: page document bears the subject modification of duties. Of the
Speaker 1: thirteen numbered paragraphs, the first seven outlines the reason Patler
Speaker 1: is being disciplined. He's been at sent from his post
Speaker 1: without permission. He's only produced two issues of Stormtrooper over
Speaker 1: the past year. He's abusing his editorial control of the
Speaker 1: magazine by printing statements without Rockwell's sign off. Pretty straightforward stuff,
Speaker 1: But the tone shifts when Rockwell gets to the thing
Speaker 1: that's actually bothering him. Quote. You have continuously produced catastrophic
Speaker 1: division and hatred between party members, berated other party officers
Speaker 1: in the presence of troops, allowed your personal life to
Speaker 1: cause the disaffection of workers in the party to the
Speaker 1: point of near explosion, particularly in Chicago. And you have
Speaker 1: done precisely the same thing you did last time before
Speaker 1: you ran out on the party with Dan Burroughs to
Speaker 1: try to set up your own party. You have agitated
Speaker 1: and irritated everybody around you until I have on my
Speaker 1: hands a series of near mutinies and upheavals. He seems bothered.
Speaker 1: Rockwell goes on to say that he will no longer
Speaker 1: tolerate the disruption of Patler's quote damnable, constant emphasis on
Speaker 1: the dark's verse, life's controversy, and his quote irrational inferiority
Speaker 1: complex over being Greek and dark. He says that none
Speaker 1: of that matters to him. He's always been committed to
Speaker 1: white unity. It's Patler who's making this a problem. I
Speaker 1: don't know why everyone's surprised that there's racism at the
Speaker 1: Nazi Party headquarters, but that was the problem. But he
Speaker 1: doesn't dismiss Patler from the party. That's not what this
Speaker 1: letter says. Quote. You have left me no honorable choice
Speaker 1: but to discipline you as severely as it is in
Speaker 1: my power short of ejecting you from the party. I
Speaker 1: could also do that, but I do recognize your value
Speaker 1: to the cause and your dedication there two. The discipline
Speaker 1: he imposed was definitely humiliating, for sure. Rockwell sent Mattia's
Speaker 1: coal to cut the lock off Patler's bedroom door at
Speaker 1: the party's property in Spotsylvania County, which he knew would
Speaker 1: bother Patler because the men hated each other. But Patler
Speaker 1: was only relieved of his duties at the printing press.
Speaker 1: He was reassigned to live at the party's barracks in Arlington,
Speaker 1: where he would continue to edit and publish Stormtrooper Magazine
Speaker 1: under Rockwell's direct personal supervision. Honestly, it's barely a punishment.
Speaker 1: Patler hated being assigned to the Spotsylvania property. It was
Speaker 1: way out in the country and far from his family.
Speaker 1: That's part of why he kept leaving his post. Moving
Speaker 1: back to Arlington would put him closer to his family.
Speaker 1: By this time, he'd married his second wife and they
Speaker 1: had two young sons. But he did not take the
Speaker 1: letter well. Despite what looks to me like a clear
Speaker 1: statement that he's not kicked out of the party, Patler
Speaker 1: walked away. Surviving letters that Patler wrote to another member
Speaker 1: of the party in April and may do show that
Speaker 1: he was angry. He was angry with Rockwell, he was
Speaker 1: angry with the party. It was a lot like when
Speaker 1: he walked away in nineteen sixty one with Dan Burrows.
Speaker 1: You know, he spent a few months cursing Rockwell's name,
Speaker 1: and he got over it. They'd been through this before.
Speaker 1: They'd known each other for nearly a decade. Hatler was
Speaker 1: one of Rockwell's very first followers, and aside from all
Speaker 1: the times that he did quit, he was loyal. They
Speaker 1: were close, and Rockwell had always forgiven him before, and
Speaker 1: it seems Patler was willing to forgive too. In one letter,
Speaker 1: he wrote that summer he not only forgave Rockwell for
Speaker 1: sleeping with his wife, he gave the commander his blessing
Speaker 1: to continue the affair if he wanted to, writing, if
Speaker 1: Alice wants to make it with you, I wouldn't object.
Speaker 1: That's the truth. In his final letter to Rockwell, Patler wrote,
Speaker 1: I feel so much better after talking to you. I
Speaker 1: want so badly to get back into the spirit of
Speaker 1: things and push for you all the way. I don't
Speaker 1: think there are two people on earth who think and
Speaker 1: feel the same as we do. You are a very
Speaker 1: important part of my life. I need you as much
Speaker 1: as you need me. Without you, there is no future.
Speaker 1: There's no evidence that Rockwell ever wrote back, but Christopher
Speaker 1: Vidnyevitch testified at trial that Rockwell directed him to meet
Speaker 1: with Patler several times that summer to discuss reconciliation. Contrary
Speaker 1: to the tone of Patler's own letters, Vidnyevitch paints a
Speaker 1: picture of a spiteful, bitter man plotting revenge, claiming Patler
Speaker 1: told him quote Rockwell is an evil genius and he
Speaker 1: must be stopped.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: I should be clear with you before we go any further.
Speaker 1: John Patler murdered George Lincoln Rockwell. He did. He was
Speaker 1: convicted at trial, which makes it legally true. But is
Speaker 1: it true? I think so based on my own reading
Speaker 1: of the evidence against him, I'm convinced the jury reached
Speaker 1: the correct verdict. Patler himself has never accepted responsibility for
Speaker 1: the crime, and there are a handful of holdouts with
Speaker 1: conspiracy theories to this day. But on the question of
Speaker 1: who pulled the trigger, I have no doubt that it
Speaker 1: was John Patler. So that's not why I spent days
Speaker 1: trying to itemize these small discrepancies in every recorded account
Speaker 1: of the events leading of to Rockwell's death. I'm not
Speaker 1: searching for an alternate suspect I'm just curious about what
Speaker 1: people might be trying to gain by muddying the truth.
Speaker 1: Because everyone is every account of what happened after that
Speaker 1: memo in March has to be weighed against the motivations
Speaker 1: of the man telling the story. Take Vidnyevitch, for example.
Speaker 1: His trial testimony is the only source for the claim
Speaker 1: that Rockwell asked him to meet with Patler in June.
Speaker 1: But why would Rockwell assign that task to Vidnyevitch. The
Speaker 1: pair had worked closely together in Chicago the summer before,
Speaker 1: but Vidnievitch was firmly in the Aryan superiority camp in
Speaker 1: this schism. He was with Matias Kohle. He was a
Speaker 1: fanatical racist. He joined the American Nazi Party to follow
Speaker 1: in the footsteps of his father, a Nazi collaborator and
Speaker 1: a Croatian nationalist who was executed for his role in
Speaker 1: the ethnic cleansing of Serbs. He would have been a
Speaker 1: poor choice to extend the olive branch to Patler that summer,
Speaker 1: but his testimony at trial was convincing enough that when
Speaker 1: the Supreme Court of Virginia upheld Patler's conviction, Vignievitch's testimony
Speaker 1: that Patler had made those threats in June was the
Speaker 1: only evidence they cited as a motive. And then we
Speaker 1: have Matias Cole, who said that when he was watching
Speaker 1: Patler pack his things after being relieved of his duties
Speaker 1: at the Spotsylvanian property, he just kept muttering over and
Speaker 1: over again, He's making a mistake. He'll be sorry. An
Speaker 1: ominous statement, to be sure, if he said it. But
Speaker 1: Cole is also the source of claims made just hours
Speaker 1: after Rockwell's death that Patler had been expelled from the
Speaker 1: party because of his Bolshevik leanings because Communist thought kept
Speaker 1: creeping into his work. Matias Cole had been the loudest
Speaker 1: voice within the party against Rockwell's shift away from Hitler's
Speaker 1: ideas about Germanic racial purity, a matter he rectified when
Speaker 1: he seized control of the party immediately after Rockwell's death.
Speaker 1: I know that sounds like I'm trying to present alternate
Speaker 1: suspects and conspiracy theories. I'm not Hatler did it, but
Speaker 1: in their attempts to keep their own secrets and to
Speaker 1: write politically advantageous versions of history, they created the perfect
Speaker 1: conditions for conspiracy theories that will never die. I never
Speaker 1: get as far as I think I'm going to when
Speaker 1: I start writing an episode. I skimmed over the entirety
Speaker 1: of nineteen sixty four nineteen sixty five so I could
Speaker 1: get to the end of this murder trial. And I
Speaker 1: haven't even gotten to the murder itself yet. And I
Speaker 1: guess I'll never have a chance to tell you about
Speaker 1: all those weird FBI memos I found from various members
Speaker 1: of the American Nazi contacting the FBI to accuse each
Speaker 1: other of killing JFK. Some other day, maybe, But there
Speaker 1: was just something so intriguing to me about this internal
Speaker 1: struggle over the optics of white power. Rockwell wasn't getting
Speaker 1: soft on racism in nineteen sixty six. He was trying
Speaker 1: to find a practical way to inflict that racism on
Speaker 1: a wider audience. He still believed in killing every Jewish, homosexual,
Speaker 1: and black person in the country when he finally got power.
Speaker 1: He was just refining the sales pitch to increase the
Speaker 1: odds that he'd get that power. And John Patler wasn't
Speaker 1: kicked out of the party for being a communist. If anything,
Speaker 1: he was the member of the party most closely aligned
Speaker 1: with Rockwell. Plenty of people hated George Lincoln rock Well.
Speaker 1: People hated him for being a Nazi. Nazis hated him
Speaker 1: for failing to live up to Hitler's legacy. But the
Speaker 1: man who shot him, he didn't hate him at all.
Speaker 1: Next week, George Lincoln Rockwell will die. There's no way
Speaker 1: that episode doesn't get to the big moment I've been
Speaker 1: working up to all this time. Rockwell gets shot, Patler
Speaker 1: goes to trial, and the Nazis left in their wake
Speaker 1: get to work trying to rewrite history and claim Rockwell's legacy.
Speaker 1: And I promise I haven't forgotten that strange little incident.
Speaker 1: It's last week, but maybe it's for the best that
Speaker 1: I didn't make it up to nineteen seventy six. I
Speaker 1: meant to drive across town this week to double check
Speaker 1: my recollection. When John Patler was arrested for trespassing. The
Speaker 1: news story listed the address, and I swear to God,
Speaker 1: I think I went to a couple of parties in
Speaker 1: college at the house where John Patler once got caught
Speaker 1: having an orgy. There really is something cursed about Charlottesville.
Speaker 1: Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media
Speaker 1: and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
Speaker 1: Our executive producers are Sophie Lieuchdmann and Robert Evans. The
Speaker 1: show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan that
Speaker 1: the music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email
Speaker 1: me at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com.
Speaker 1: I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer.
Speaker 1: It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the
Speaker 1: show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.
Speaker 1: Just don't post anything that's going to make you one
Speaker 1: of my Weird Little Guys