Neo-Nazi Groups: Artifacts of Hate

Though they continue to attract murderous misfits like Fred Cowan, the nation's neo-Nazi organizations have fallen on hard times. The anti-Communist cold war tensions of the '50s and the civil rights clashes of the '60s nourished their sick ideas, but the hate groups have languished since then.

To be sure, there is a profitable U.S. trade in Nazi artifacts--Afrika Korps caps, helmets, Adolf Hitler posters, swastika-emblazoned daggers and flags. Old military uniforms and insignia--including Nazi versions--have been snapped up by various nostalgia collectors who may have no particular ideological axes to grind. Motorcycle gangs, too, have often embraced Hitlerian helmets and swastikas. All such artifacts are readily available through mail-order import houses, as well as some gun and specialty shops, and the catalogues are advertised in various gun and hunting magazines. Porn paperbacks like Gestapo Prison Brothel and Bitch of Buchenwald have their avid readers.

But there is no evidence of a membership boom in fascist political organizations in the U.S. The National States Rights Party, Cowan's outfit, claims some 20,000 members in 100 or more chapters. Experts place its membership at only 1,000, though its hate sheet, Thunderbolt, apparently prints 15,000 copies each month. Based in Marietta, Ga., the party is headed by Lawyer J.B. Stoner, a longtime bigot given to saying things like "There's no point in our going out and shooting Jews and niggers because we couldn't get rid of them that way. It has to be a national program."

The American Nazi Party changed its name after the 1967 assassination of Founder George Lincoln Rockwell, but not its loathsome ideology. Now known as the National Socialist White People's Party, the group has a songbook that includes the following ditty (to the tune of Jingle Bells):

Riding through the Reich,

In a big Mercedes Benz,

Killing lots of kikes,

Making lots of friends.

Rat, tat, tat, tat, tat,

Mow the bastards down,

Oh what fun it is to have

The Nazis back in town.

Headquartered in Arlington, Va., the party has some 400 members. California Reich, a documentary produced last year, showed neighborly-looking people pledging allegiance to "the immortal leader of my race, to the vision for which he stands, the hope and future of Aryan man," and smiling proudly as their children gave Heil Hitler! salutes. Explains Producer Walter Parkes, who won an Oscar nomination for his film: "The Nazi image is a great boost for someone with little selfesteem. The party is full of marginal types, getting together with other marginal types."

If the whole Nazi cult is politically impotent and dwindling in numbers, its potential for stirring hatred and creating violence remains high. "It does not take mass movements to cause trouble in terms of violence," warns Jerome Bakst, research director of the Anti-Defamation League. A handful of Chicago's self-proclaimed Nazis, who number only about 25, proved as much last June when they ignited a rock-throwing, club-wielding melee over the movement of blacks into a white community near Marquette Park. Last week a demented Nazi cultist proved again that even a single such hater can trigger tragedy.

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