September 18, 2025 • 48 mins
Sometimes when a weird little guy gets shot, the guy who killed him is just a weirder little guy.
Sources:
Schmaltz, William H. (2000). Hate: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party. Washington, D.C.: Brassey's
Schmaltz, William H. (2013). For Race And Nation: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party. River's Bend Press
Simonelli, Frederick J. (1999). American Fuehrer: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Lee, Martin A. (1997). The Beast Reawakens. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.
Rosenthal, A. M.; Gelb, Arthur (1967). One More Victim: The Life and Death of an American-Jewish Nazi. New York: New American Library
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Col Zone Media. It was just after noon on a
warm day near the end of summer when the demagogue died.
A single bullet fired from a rooftop by his assassin
killed him almost instantly. A man who'd seemed larger than
(00:23):
life bled out in front of horrified onlookers as his
killer fled the scene on foot. He'd devoted his entire
adult life to preaching hate. In the last few years
of his hateful life, he'd spent much of his time
touring colleges and universities, delighting in the controversy. His appearances
provoked and wailing about free speech. When venues refused to
(00:47):
host him. On college campuses across the country, he gave
fiery speeches about the evils of communism, telling his young
audiences that they were being brainwashed by liberalism and force
fed Marxist propaganda. He railed against the Civil Rights Act,
which he called a mistake. He said it was a
(01:07):
weapon wielded against the white race, and he publicly disparaged
Martin Luther King Junior. He likened homosexuality to a disease,
and he dreamed of the day when he would have
the power to strip queer people of their rights entirely
above all else, though he was preoccupied with his belief
that the white race was in danger of being replaced.
(01:32):
Conspiracy theories about his death abounded, and his movement made
him a martyr for their cause. But in the end,
the man who fired the shot that killed George Lincoln
Rockwell wasn't a Jew, or a communist or an agent
of the state. It was a man who'd loved him
(01:52):
like a father. I'm Molly Conger, and this I squere
the little guise. This is a story about history, that's all.
(02:20):
It's the story of an assassination that rocked the right
wing reverberating through the white power movement for decades. Sometimes
I'll open an episode by describing the meandering mental process
through which I have arrived at that week's subject, some
half formed thought that led me down a rabbit hole,
or some tangent from a past episode that I'm following
(02:41):
up on. Something like that. But maybe there's no reason
in particular that I was thinking this week about the sudden,
violent end a man who spent his entire adult life
stoking violence against everyone else. George Lincoln Rockwell died in
the parking lot of a laundromat in a strip mall
(03:01):
in Arlington, Virginia, at twelve oh two p m. On
August twenty fifth, nineteen sixty seven. This isn't really an
episode about George Lincoln Rockwell, except for the fact that
he's dead. Rockwell was the commander of the American Nazi Party,
a group he founded in nineteen fifty nine. There isn't
(03:22):
much to say about Rockwell that hasn't been said before.
He was the founding father of American neo Nazism. He
was a pioneer in the field of Holocaust denial. Barely
a decade after the Holocaust ended, he invented the term
white power. He took a Volkswagen bus full of Nazis
across the country to Montgomery, Alabama, just to antagonize the
(03:45):
Freedom Riders. He followed Martin Luther King Junior all over
the country holding Nazi counter demonstrations, and when one of
his stormtroopers punched King in the face in front of
a crowd in Birmingham, Rockwell promoted the assailant to the
head of the party's Chicago office. Rockwell was a monster,
(04:08):
But this isn't a story about George Lincoln Rockwall it's
about the Nazi who killed him. When that man was
convicted of first degree murder in nineteen sixty seven, his
name was John Patler, but it wasn't always and it
isn't any more. The Nazi best known as John Patler
(04:29):
was born John Pazzalos in New York City in January
of nineteen thirty eight. He was the first of two
sons born to Cristos and Athena Pazzalos. Cristos, so often
referred to by the Anglicized version of his name, christ
emigrated to New York as a teenager in nineteen thirteen,
three years before his future wife was born. He married
(04:53):
Athena manro Gianis, the daughter of Greek immigrants, in the
fall of nineteen thirty seven, just a few months before
for their son, John was born. His younger brother, George,
would follow a year later. In nineteen forty three, when
the Pazzalos boys were just four and five years old,
their father murdered their mother. Newspaper articles from the time
(05:15):
say the couple had been arguing for hours on the
afternoon of August seventh. Cristos Pazzalos then took a taxi
to a nearby police station and announced my wife has
been fighting with me. Now she is shot with my revolver,
for which I have a permit. None of the newspaper
articles from nineteen forty three that I can find mention
(05:37):
the boys. It's almost unbearable to imagine that these two
little boys had been left alone in the home with
their dying mother. But in a later autobiographical essay that
Patler wrote for the American Nazi Party's Stormtrooper magazine, he
said that she'd actually dropped them off at her mother's
house before heading back home to pack her bags. She
(06:00):
was planning to leave her husband. Cristos was initially booked
only on a charge of felonious assault, but when Athena
died the next day, his charges were upgraded to first
degree murder. After unsuccessfully pleading temporary insanity, Cristos was allowed
to plead guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter in
(06:22):
early nineteen forty four, and he was sentenced to just
seven and a half years. While their father was away
at sing Sing, George and John lived with their maternal grandmother,
Bessie mauro Giannis, was only a few years older than
her son in law, and she was recently widowed and
still had a teenager of her own at home. Patler
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would later write that she supported them by selling flowers
at a stand on Park Avenue, and he remembers her
hatred of the Jewish venders that she had to share
space with at the market. It isn't entirely clear if
their father actually wanted them back, but the great my
mother died in nineteen fifty four, just a few years
after Christos was released from prison. John and George were
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placed briefly in a youth home before ultimately being returned
to their father's custody. After a decade of hearing their
grandmother curse his name as the murderer of her daughter.
Suddenly they were living with their father in the very
same home in the Bronx where he'd killed their mother.
Patler started getting into trouble with the police that year.
(07:30):
In September, he and another sixteen year old boy stole
a car, got into a police chase, crashed into a tree,
and then ran off into the woods, evading the police
for hours. That story sounds completely made up, and if
it was just Patler's retelling of it years later, I
wouldn't believe it. But there really is a nineteen fifty
(07:51):
four newspaper headline that reads, twenty five cops seized two
teens after hot car crash. The other boy was sent
off to a reform school, but Patler hadn't been in
serious trouble before, so he just got probation. By his
own account, this was when he quote began to take
a keen political interest in the Jews. Most biographies of
(08:17):
George Lincoln Rockwell have a few pages devoted to Patler's childhood,
and they all seem to agree that Cristos Patsalos and
Bessie Malrogianis were very outspoken in their anti Semitism, so
it's not like he hadn't been exposed to the idea before.
But at sixteen years old, John Patler found a copy
of mindcomp in the school library, and he was really
(08:41):
vocal about his newfound interest in national socialism. His admiration
for Hitler was no secret and it was causing him
problems in school. One afternoon, while he was boxing in
the park, he was chatting with another teenage boy about
the need to do something about how the Jews are
responsible for the malevolent influence of communism. As teenage boys
(09:04):
did in the fifties, I guess and his friend offered
to introduce him to some like minded individuals, a newly
formed group called the Nationalist Youth League. Dust Hooker, a
wealthy businessman, had formed the Nationalist Youth League ostensibly as
the youth arm of his Nationalist party, but it mainly
(09:28):
functioned as a teenage gang run by a middle aged man.
The boys warm matching black uniforms and busted up Communist
meetings and marched around the city handing out anti Semitic pamphlets.
Patler idolized Hooker and quickly grew attached to this man
as a sort of surrogate father. He later wrote that
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Hooker gave him his first political training and taught him
quote everything he knew about the Jews. Part of that training,
I guess, was making his own anti Smith flyers, and
in nineteen fifty six Patler tried his hand at drawing
up his own pamphlets, and he was subsequently arrested on
a charge of criminal libel because the leaflets targeted a
(10:11):
specific Jewish businessman by name. He was still on probation
for that midnight joy ride in a stolen car two
years earlier, so he was sent to a psychiatric hospital
for evaluation. Usually we only have people's recollections after the fact.
You know, years later, with the benefit of hindsight, people
will say, oh, I knew him back then. I remember
(10:34):
he used to say this or that. You have to
take it with a grain of salt. Usually when a
biography says that a man has always been an anti Semite.
But in John Patler's case, there is an incredible trove
of archival evidence. For his nineteen ninety nine biography of
George Lincoln Rockwell, historian Frederick Simonelli was actually able to
(10:57):
access Patler's case file at the Morrisania Hospital Mental Hygiene Clinic.
I don't know how that's possible, come to think of it.
I mean, those are medical records, but the footnotes are
very thorough In American fury, simon Eli writes that a
caseworker at the hospital made a note in Patler's file
(11:18):
in nineteen fifty six about his frequent anti Semitic comments
to the hospital staff. A psychiatrist wrote that Patler told him, quote,
I go to church every Sunday morning and fight the Jews.
The same doctor later wrote in the file quote the
patient may become dangerous. He appears as a potential murderer.
(11:40):
After a short stay in the hospital, Patler was released,
but he had to continue with court bandated outpatient treatment.
In nineteen fifty seven, the doctor's notes show Patler's mental
state was deteriorating. He was paranoid, delusional, and exhibiting violent tendencies,
and the doctor again wrote that the patient may one
day commit murder inexplicably. His case file was actually closed
(12:05):
out soon after that, and there's a note that his
probation officer felt that he was making satisfactory adjustments. And
it's around this time that John Patler first met George
Lincoln Rockwell at a party at Dust Hooker's home. Rockwell
hadn't yet formed the American Nazi Party, but he was
(12:26):
an up and coming right wing extremist. It was actually
dust Hooker who encouraged Rockwell to come out, so to speak,
to stop speaking in coded language and just put on
the swastika armband already. In that autobiographical essay Patler later
wrote in the Nazi magazine, he claims that he chose
to leave high school and enlist in the Marine Corps
(12:48):
in nineteen fifty eight, but the timeline is a little
muddy here. In simon Elli's book, he writes that Patler's
probation violation had actually landed him back in and this
time he was given two choices. He could face the
charges as an adult, or he could enlist, and he
chose to enlist. In nineteen fifty nine, his father, Cristos
(13:14):
Pazzalos died. Deus Hooker had moved away to Italy, apparently
to run a seven up bottling factory. John Patler was
a twenty one year old marine alone in the world
when he was assigned to a duty station in northern Virginia,
just a short drive away from the headquarters of the
newly organized American Nazi Party. Now I've been calling him
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John Patler all this time, just for the sake of simplicity,
because that's how we know him. But from the time
he was born in nineteen thirty eight until this point
in the story in nineteen sixty, his name is John Pazzalos.
But in nineteen sixty, after he became one of the
first stormtroopers in the American Nazi Party, he legally changed
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his name to John Patler. Not only did it sound
less Greek, which was a little too ethnic for the
Nazi Party. He liked it because it sounded like Hitler.
There are some sources that claim that he was actually
born Yanaki Pazzalos, and I can't quite make sense of that. Yannis, Sure,
(14:23):
that's just Greek for John. I wouldn't be surprised if
his grandmother probably called him that, But there's never any
citation for the claim that he was born Yanaki. I mean,
I don't think that's anyone's name. Sometimes you see a Yanakis,
but this mysterious fake name is always spelled y A
(14:44):
n ac k I, and I don't think that's a
name at all. Mostly I saw this claim repeated in
old Stormfront posts, so that's not a great source. I
don't need to track that down. That's just trash. But
it was on his Wikipedia page without a citation until
someone removed it in twenty eleven, and it still shows
(15:07):
up on the German and Finnish language Wikipedia pages, and
it even appears in a recently published doctoral dissertation about
the white Power movement. I guess it doesn't matter that much.
But I did track down a copy of the nineteen
forty census and his father recorded his two year old
son's name as John Adam Patsalos when he was arrested
(15:30):
at sixteen and nineteen fifty four, the newspaper recorded that
the boy who was arrested was named John Patsalos. When
he enlisted in the Marines in nineteen fifty eight, Marine
Corps muster records list him as John C. Patsalos. But
I do think I found the original source of this
strange mistake, and I think it's the faded recollection of
(15:53):
a former rival before William Luther Peers wrote the Turner Diaries,
before he founded National Alliance. All the way back in
nineteen sixty six, Pierce picked up his family and moved
them to Virginia to be closer to George Lincoln Rockwell.
His time at the American Nazi Party headquarters only overlapped
(16:15):
with Patler for about a year, but in that year,
Patler and Pierce were pretty open in their hatred of
one another, and Pierce made no secret of the fact
that he thought Patler was not white. So maybe that's
why he gave Patler a much more ethnic sounding, made
up name. When he was recounting that period of his
(16:36):
own life to his biographer in two thousand, who knows. So.
In nineteen sixty, the Marine Private John Patsalos became Nazi
Stormtrooper John Patler. From his duty station in Quantico, he
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was making weekend trips to Arlington to attend American Nazi
Party meetings and rallies, and he very quickly became quite
close to Rockwell. At a rally in Washington, d c.
Over Memorial Day weekend in nineteen sixty, Rockwell proudly told
the crowd that the man standing right next to him
was in fact a United States Marine, and that fact
(17:28):
quickly made it back to the military police. The man
the Marine Corps knew as Private John Pazzalos was arrested, questioned,
and given a psychiatric evaluation. In July nineteen sixty, he
was given a general discharge under honorable conditions, so not
a dishonorable discharge, but it isn't an honorable discharge either.
(17:55):
There's a brief mention in one New York City newspaper
after his discharge that he was going to file a
lawsuit alleging that it had been a conspiracy to violet
his rights, naming the Marine Corps as well as a
group called Jewish War Veterans of the United States as defendants.
He was asking for one five hundred seventy five dollars
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in back pay and five hundred thousand dollars in damages
for the harm to his reputation. Again, this is a
man wearing a Nazi uniform outside of the White House.
I don't know what reputation he thinks is being damaged.
He didn't have an attorney, And aside from that one
news story about the Jewish Veterans Group telling a reporter
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that they had received service of the complaint, I can't
find anything else about it. And it's possible he never
actually filed it. But now in the summer of nineteen sixty,
he's completely untethered. He's an orphan, he's not a marine.
(18:58):
He has no day job, he has no family. There's
only Rockwell Marine Corps Private John Pazzalos is dead and
Stormtrooper John Patler quickly rose through the ranks of Rockwell's party.
He was promoted to editor of the party's official publication,
the National Socialist Bulletin, before the fourth issue was published
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in the fall of that year. He appeared right by
Rockwell's side at countless rallies that year, and in nineteen
sixty alone. He was arrested at so many Nazi Party
rallies that it's hard to sort out which news stories
about his court appearances are connected to which arrests. There
were disorderly conduct charges after a brawl broke out at
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a rally near the White House, and then a week
later another disorderly conduct charge when they came back to
protest the original arrest, and then a week after that
he's arrested again for putting up swastika stickers at the
ADL headquarters. Rockwell gave Patler his blessing to marry Erica,
a blonde women of German descent, and she was already
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heavily pregnant with their first son when she had to
drive to d C in the middle of the night
to bail her husband out of jail for defacing the
offices of the ADL. The January nineteen sixty one issue
of the National Socialist Bulletin lists Lieutenant John Patler as
both the editor and the art director. A few pages
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into the issue, there's an announcement congratulating Lieutenant Patler and
the birth of his firstborn son. Now, Patler's children are
private individuals. They're not part of their father's story voluntarily.
Aside from a handful of notable public comments from his
son Nick, his children aren't your business or mine, But
(20:48):
in the interest of being thorough, I did do my
own background research. This Nazi newsletter proudly announces that Patler
had named his firstborn son Horst Vessel. There's a photo
of Patler wearing his Nazi party uniform cradling his infant
son in his arms, underneath text that reads, in all caps,
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Horst Vessel lives. Horst Vessel was a Nazi. I'm not
talking about this baby boy. I'm talking about the original
Horst Vessel. And he wasn't a Nazi the way John
Patler is a Nazi. He was a real one in
Nazi Germany. He joined the Sturmob Tailoh in nineteen twenty six,
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and he made quite a positive impression on a young
Joseph Goebels. By nineteen twenty nine, Vessel was living in
Berlin and serving as the street cell leader of the
Alexander Plotz unit of the stermop Tilo. As Stormfuurer, Vessel
led a gang of young Nazis that got into violent
altercations with Communists around Berlin. In nineteen thirty, one of
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them shot and killed him. As the leader of this
Nazi street fighting gang, Vessel had received a lot of
encouragement from Gebels, and now that he's dead and Gebels
is the party's chief propagandist, he sees this death as
a golden opportunity. In death, Horst Vessel is more than
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a violent man. He's a symbol. He's a martyr for
the Nazi cause. So by naming his son Horst Vessel
Hatler is invoking the Germany of nineteen thirty, a nation
on the eve of the Third Reich. I get it.
I get what he's going for. The problem is it's
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not true. And this is a big part of why
every episode takes me. I would say three times longer
than is healthy. I can't trust anybody, even mostly reliable sources,
you know, books that are well researched and well regarded.
Sometimes people forget the number one rule of writing about Nazis.
(23:03):
Nazis lie. You can't take a Nazi newsletter at face value,
not for anything. Just because the birth announcement in the
National Socialist Bulletin says that the baby's name is Horst
Vessel Patler doesn't make it true, but the claim does
appear in several books, always without a citation. I'm assuming
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they got it from this Nazi newsletter, and it isn't true.
Like I said, Patler's kids aren't our business. They're private
individuals who did not choose to involve themselves in this.
So I'm not going to tell you what his name
actually is. It was actually really hard to find, which
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tells me he's gone to some trouble to prevent people
like me from finding it. And as an adult, he
actually changed his name again, swapping the last name Patler
for something unrelated. But his first name was never hors Vessel.
It's something perfectly ordinary, the kind of boring white American
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name that you probably went to elementary school with a
dozen of Nineteen sixty one was a tumultuous year for
the Patler family. That spring, his young wife, Erica was
home alone with baby horse Vessel because John Patler was
the driver when the Nazis went on tour in the
hate bus. I assume he had a great time with
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his friends on the Nazi road trip in the spring,
but by the end of the year, John Patler quit
the American Nazi Party, for the first time. He and
another member named Dan Burros had decided to strike out
on their own to form a new splinter group. This
is a classic problem in American neo Nazi organizing. Everybody
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wants to be Hitler. In November of nineteen sixty one,
John Patler packed up his pregnant wife and their infant
son and moved to New York City in a converted
garage and queens. A handful of disaffected members of the
American Nazi Party formed a new group that they called
the American National Party. Patler was the group's chairman and
(25:16):
Dan Burros was his second in command. Patler also edited
the party's magazine, a publication called Kill with an exclamation point,
but the whole endeavor never amounted to much at all.
There were never more than about a dozen members. In
the January nineteen sixty two issue of The Rockwell Report,
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a secondary publication of the American Nazi Party, George Lincoln
Rockwall wanted to make sure that everyone knew he wasn't mad.
He actually didn't care at all, and it did not
hurt his feelings that he'd been abandoned by his most
devoted lieutenant. He wrote, quote in the attempt to justify
their failure in the Nazi Party here and overthrow our
(26:00):
leadership of the right wing. This group of selfish malcontents, loafers, fakers, sissies, cowards,
or damn fools is beneath mentioned. They are held together
solely by their hatred and jealousy of my person and
the American Nazi Party, and will disintegrate soon enough from
lack of leadership and idealism. See he doesn't care at all,
(26:25):
He's not mad, but he was exactly right about their
motivation and how they'd end up. In March, the New
York Daily News ran a headline ten youths in Hollis Shack,
poking fun at these young men playing make believe Nazi
(26:45):
living in a shanty in this neighborhood and queens. In April,
another newspaper in New York speculated that the group might
actually be a front group rather than a splinter of
the American Nazi Party, writing, a little band of eccentrics
calling themselves the American Nazis has sent a few gal
lighters into the New York Long Island area, and Rockwell
(27:10):
played KOI with the reporters. I think he may have
been trying to save face. He didn't want to admit
that he'd been abandoned, so he refused to confirm or
deny any connection to this group. But he hinted that
sometimes sometimes I do use a front group, and maybe
I am working on something in New York City, sort
(27:31):
of insinuating that, yes, these men do still answer to me.
The same article, though, quotes John Patler saying Rockwell hates
my guts and I hate his. Patler really wanted to
make it work. He wanted to be the furer. He
wanted a party. He wanted his own newspaper and his
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own followers, and his own headquarters and his own uniforms.
But they couldn't afford uniforms and a dozen guys in
a shanty, and Queens just doesn't have the gravity to
keep the followers in orbit. There is a nineteen sixty
seven biography of Dan Burros called One More Victim, and
(28:13):
the book offers some fascinating insight into this period of
their lives, a lot more detailed than I was able
to piece together from Rockwell's newsletters, FBI memos, and local
news stories published in Queens in nineteen sixty two, I
should tell you, though, why the editor of the New
York Times wrote a book about Dan Burrows in nineteen
(28:36):
sixty seven. He's hardly so important at this point in
our story in nineteen sixty two. So how could there
be a whole book's worth of information about this man
in his twenties just a few years later. It's because
he died, not just that he died, but how and
(28:56):
why he died. In nineteen sixty the New York Times
published a story revealing that Dan Burroughs, who was at
that time a former member of the American Nazi Party
who had by then joined the Klan, was Jewish. His
parents were both the children of Russian Jewish immigrants. They
(29:17):
were married by a rabbi. He attended Hebrew school, and
he had a bar mitzvah Berno Nazis, being Jewish isn't
something you can leave behind. Just because Borrows had blonde
hair and considered himself an Odonist doesn't mean he wasn't
still a Jew in the eyes of the anti Semite.
(29:37):
And honestly, if you ask any of the Nazis he
spent a decade with, they'd tell you he was as
anti Semitic as any of them. But this revelation, this
revelation that he had been hiding this from them, that
was an unforgivable sin. You can't be a Jewish clansman.
(30:11):
It wasn't even noon on the day the story was
published when Burroughs died. His official cause of death is suicide,
with one bullet wound to his head and another in
his chest. I know, I know, but that's what the
official records all say. There were three witnesses and their
(30:34):
stories all matched, and Burrows was the only one with
gunshot residue on his hands. That's what it says. Now,
I've read enough FBI memos about Roy Frankhauser to be
a little skeptical of his account of anything, especially his
account of how a man died in his bedroom. I'm
(30:57):
not saying it wasn't suicide. I'm just saying I understand
what this looks like, and I don't know what to
tell you. There are several books that contain a description
of this event, and they'll say that the FBI speculated
that maybe Burrows did shoot himself the first time, and
(31:18):
maybe Frankauser put him out of his misery with the
second shot, which is still weird, but it makes a
lot more logical sense than the version Frankhauser tells that
appears in this book in nineteen sixty seven. Now without
spending a week tearing my hair out over it and
maybe still not getting the answer to this question. I
(31:39):
don't know if Frankhauser was already working for the FBI
in nineteen sixty five, but I guess either way, whether
he's an informant at this point or not, he probably
wouldn't want to admit to shooting a guy in the head.
But this version, Frankauser's version, the official version of these events.
It's dramatic. I mean it's theatrical. Wagner is playing a
(32:04):
little too loud on the radio in the house, there's
a hysterical woman screaming at Burros to put the gun down,
and Burros cocks the gun and he looks Frankauser in
the eye, his good eye, I assume, since Frankauser famously
lost an eye and a bar fight, and he once
auctioned off his glass eye and a clan fundraiser. Anyway,
(32:25):
so Burros is looking his friend in his good eye,
and he says, long Live the White Race, and then
he non fatally shoots himself in the chest, and he
stands there unmoving, and then he raises the gun to
his head and fires again. I mean, what a scene.
(32:46):
It's horrific. In nineteen ninety seven, Martin Lee wrote in
his book The Beast Reawakens a History of American Fascism,
that Frankauser never cleaned it up. Dan Burross shot himself
two times in Roy Frankhauser's bedroom, and the bullet holes
(33:09):
and the blood stains were still on the wall and
ceiling thirty years later. Now you know, I like to
find my own sources. So in addition to this anecdote
in Lee's book, I found an old post on Stormfront.
It's about a decade old, and the poster says he
saw the holes for himself when he went to frank
(33:31):
Kauser's home sometime in the early two thousands, a few
years before Frankauser died to buy some old Nazi memorabilia.
So it's a fascinating story with a lot of murky
truths and uncomfortable possibilities about state involvement. The New York
Times did their own work confirming the details and writing
(33:55):
the story, but it was the FBI who tipped them off.
The first place that Dan Burross was Jewish, and that
brings me back to the point I was trying to make.
The New York Times journalist who is tipped off by
the FBI to write the story that led to Borros's death,
wrote a book about it two years later, and I
(34:17):
assume in the course of writing this book they got
more tips from the FBI, which maybe why it has
such interesting descriptions of police files. We might come back
to Dan Burros another time. If I do, I'll even
watch the two thousand and one movie loosely based on
his life, starring Ryan Gosling as the Jewish Nazi and
(34:39):
Billy Zane as the leader of the Nazi gang. But
for now, I was getting to a point about the
embarrassing failure of the American National Party in nineteen sixty two.
In that biography of Burros, A. M. Rosenthal and Arthur
Gelb wrote that the American National Party never had more
than a few men, and it never really got a
(35:02):
lot of press. But the detectives at the NYPD's anti
Subversive squad were fascinated by them, and they kept very
close tabs on all of the members and their associates.
One detective said of the group, quote, these young toughs
live and breathe the atmosphere of violence. That's all they
(35:24):
talk about, getting this guy or blowing up this or that.
A lot of them have guns, and it's as if
they're making love to them. They're not for anything, but
they're against an awful lot of things and people. They
all got excited, you might say, aroused by the civil
rights movement. It got them all worked up. Now you
(35:47):
probably know it pains me to say this NYPD detective
is really cooking here, but listen to this quote. Most
of these people are liars and not smart, and most
of them are cowards. But they work on each other,
and we have to watch to make sure they don't
get each other worked up to the point where they
have to prove their manhood by going out and killing people.
(36:11):
So the cops would hang around and watch, but they'd
stop buying chat too. It was never a secret that
they were being surveilled. Borros, much like his former commander
George Lincoln Rockwell, was happy to talk to the police.
It seems like he kind of got a kick out
of it even and both Burros and Rockwell would frequently
(36:34):
take the initiative to contact the police themselves to inform
on other members of the movement, although this biography of
Burroughs notes that he never accepted any money for it,
and nothing he offered was ever of much value. So
for most of nineteen sixty two, Dan Burross, the secretly
Jewish Nazi, and John Patler are holed up in a
(36:58):
shanty in Queen's writing a Nazi newsletter that no one reads,
devoted mostly to bashing the father figure that they have abandoned,
and a squad of detectives is standing outside taking turns
watching them make the occasional bodega run. In August of
nineteen sixty two, Patler was arrested for disturbing the peace
(37:20):
after he refused to stop picketing a school integration rally
in Englewood, New Jersey. He was alone. He attended that
event alone. There was a lot of publicity leading up
to it. He was making these sort of public pronouncements
that the American National Party is going to show up
(37:41):
and counterdemonstrate against these black families. Preparations were being made
and the town was in negotiations with him about where
they could stand and whether they could have amplified sound,
and the police were involved. But by the time the
actual day comes, Patler showed up alone and he's just
standing there in Englewood, New Jersey, yelling at the parents
(38:04):
of black school children. And for all his trouble, Patler
was sentenced to ten days in jail, which he protested
by staging a hunger strike. And he really did do it.
I've seen plenty of guys like Patler say they're gonna
do it, they say they're gonna do something drastic. I've
(38:25):
recently seen a guy a lot like Patler threatened to
go on a hunger strike and he didn't do it.
But according to the doctor who examined Patler on his release,
he'd lost a significant amount of weight over those ten days,
so I guess you can't say he didn't commit. And again,
(38:45):
much like the lead up to the Englewood rally, during
these ten days Patler's in jail. The American National Party,
you know, those two guys in the shanty and Queens,
are threatening to picket the jail to demand his release,
but they didn't. On one of those ten nights, one
(39:07):
member of the American National Party showed up, Ralph Grandinetti,
the group's state chairman stood outside the jail for about
a half hour one evening. On the morning Patler was released,
the Bergen County Record published a photo of him hunched
over a plate of breakfast food at a diner, and
(39:29):
they note that there was no crowd waiting for him
outside the jail when he was released. He was arrested
again in November, this time for disrupting Eleanor Roosevelt's funeral,
and he was sentenced to ninety days in jail this time.
But worse than this jail sentence was the growing realization
(39:49):
that this was a failure. When he left Virginia with
Dan Burrows, they had a plan, they were going to
do something, They were going to make something of themselves.
But Burrows didn't seem all that committed. He hadn't supported
Paller at all when he was on his hunger strike
in August, and on the day of Eleanor Roosevelt's funeral,
(40:10):
he didn't even want to go. He told Paller he'd
rather stay at home and watch sports on TV. I
tried to figure out what game would have been on.
I think this was November tenth, nineteen sixty two. What
sports were on that day. Maybe he was watching a rerun.
Did they have those in nineteen sixty two? I don't know.
(40:31):
When the ACLU finally cut Patler out of jail in
January of nineteen sixty three, he was ready to beg
Rockwell for for gypness, his wife, Erica, put her foot down.
She was done. She didn't want to move again with
her two small children. If he went back to Rockwell,
she wasn't coming with him, and John Patler chose George
(40:52):
Lincoln Rockwell over his wife and sons. It would take
a few years to sort out an actual divorce, I think,
but they separated and she didn't follow him back to Virginia.
A few years later, when Patler's on trial for murder,
he only ever talks about having two children, and he's
(41:13):
talking about the two children he had after this with
his second wife. His first two sons, and his first
wife are completely absent from his own telling of his
life story after this point. In February of nineteen sixty three,
Patler publishes the fourth and final issue of Kill, the
(41:35):
magazine for the American National Party, and in it he
announces that the American National Party is no more. I
didn't actually manage to find a copy of that issue
of Kill, but an FBI memo describing it just notes
that it announced the end of the group. Rockwell, on
(41:57):
the other hand, claimed in his confidential internal party newsletter
that the fourth issue of Kill was devoted entirely to
the theme Rockwell was right in an attempt to quote
patch up some of the damage he'd done in deserting
the party and attacking the commander. He also claims that
Patler sent him a telegram asking to be allowed to
(42:18):
return to the party. Rockwell made a bit of a
show of it, too, humiliating Patler in the party newsletter
on multiple occasions that year, announcing Patler's return by writing
that Patler had been quote too big for his breeches,
but he'd come to his senses and come crawling back,
begging and pleading, and Patler had to start again from
(42:40):
the bottom. He was not Lieutenant Patler. Party materials referred
to him as a probationary storm trooper for the rest
of nineteen sixty three. But I think deep down there
was never any doubt in Rockwell's mind that he would
welcome Patler home again. He'd lost other high ranking party
(43:02):
officers before, and he'd lose more in years to come.
And he always lashes out in the way a man
with a bruised ego does. But Patler's departure seems to
have hurt him somewhere deeper than his thin skin. He
was taking a big risk excepting Patler back into the fold.
(43:22):
He probably shouldn't have done it. He looked weak opening
his arms to a man who'd spent a year publicly
attacking him. And not only that, Patler wasn't popular. People
didn't like him, partly because a lot of them didn't
see him as white. Another high ranking party officer quit
(43:45):
over the mere idea that Rockwell might meet with Patler
to discuss returning. I mean this was a controversial choice.
Rockwell did this because he liked Patler, not because it
was a good choice politically or for the party. By
the summer of nineteen sixty three, Patler was once again
(44:06):
editing the party Stormtrooper magazine, and he'd been assigned to
travel across the state of Pennsylvania to try to get
publicity for the American Nazi Parti's planned counter demonstration for
the upcoming March on Washington. You know the one, the
one where a quarter of a million people heard Martin
Luther King Junior give his I Have a Dream speech.
That one. Rockwell spent most of the summer of sixty
(44:30):
three trying to recruit supporters for his Nazi response to
this event, and they were pulling stunts all over the country,
getting members arrested in multiple states. Rockwell himself was arrested
in Virginia for handing out flyers that officials felt were
inciting racial violence. But the publicity tour in Pennsylvania was
(44:52):
just two men, John Patler and Roy Frankhauser. Now, again,
the story's a little bit out of order because by
nineteen sixty five, obviously Roy Frankhauser is no longer in
the American Nazi Party. He's just a klansman. But here
in the past, in nineteen sixty three, frank Kauser is
still a member of the American Nazi Party. Sorry about that.
(45:16):
And so their journey across the state of Pennsylvania is
called the Hate Hike, and they're traveling across the state
standing outside of bus stations and public pools, holding signs
that say we hate race mixing, trying to go passers
by into hitting them. I guess if the surviving newspaper
(45:36):
archives and FBI memos or anything to go on, it
looks like the only person they managed to get a
rise out of was a policeman in Pittsburgh who allegedly
hit Roy Frankhauser in the face after they were arrested.
But for the most part, the hate hike seems to
have gone largely unremarked on, and so at the end
(45:57):
of the summer, George Lincoln Rockwell shows up in Washington,
d C. With fifty supporters at most, a pathetic showing
for the months of touring and rallies and stunts he'd
been pouring resources into to get the word out. I
don't know how Patler felt about the rally, but overall,
at the end of nineteen sixty three, life was pretty
(46:20):
good for John Patler. He'd already forgotten the wife and
sons he abandoned in New York, the woman who would
later become his second wife, was pregnant with their first son,
and most importantly, he was back in his commander's good graces.
I didn't mean to get so lost in the newspaper archives.
(46:42):
I really thought I was going to have this wrapped
up in one but We'll have to pick back up
next week with John Patler's second rise to the highest
ranks of the American Nazi Party, his second resignation from
the party, his ultimate dismissal, his murder trial, compete Nazi
conspiracy theories leading to a shootout in Maine, and oddly
(47:06):
that time, a guy came home from work one day
to find four nude strangers having an orgy in his
living room, and one of those naked people was the
recently paroled murderer of America's most famous Nazi. Weird Little
(47:37):
Guys as a production of Pool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's research, written and recorded by me, Molly Conger. Our
executive producers are Sophe Lieuchtermann and Robert Evans. The show
is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme
music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me
at Weirdly Guys Podcast at gmail dot com. I will
definitely read it, but I probably won't answer. It's nothing personal.
(47:58):
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show. The listeners
on the Weird Little Guys separated it just don't post
anything that's going to make you one of my weird
little guys,
Col Zone Media. It was just after noon on a
warm day near the end of summer when the demagogue died.
A single bullet fired from a rooftop by his assassin
killed him almost instantly. A man who'd seemed larger than
(00:23):
life bled out in front of horrified onlookers as his
killer fled the scene on foot. He'd devoted his entire
adult life to preaching hate. In the last few years
of his hateful life, he'd spent much of his time
touring colleges and universities, delighting in the controversy. His appearances
provoked and wailing about free speech. When venues refused to
(00:47):
host him. On college campuses across the country, he gave
fiery speeches about the evils of communism, telling his young
audiences that they were being brainwashed by liberalism and force
fed Marxist propaganda. He railed against the Civil Rights Act,
which he called a mistake. He said it was a
(01:07):
weapon wielded against the white race, and he publicly disparaged
Martin Luther King Junior. He likened homosexuality to a disease,
and he dreamed of the day when he would have
the power to strip queer people of their rights entirely
above all else, though he was preoccupied with his belief
that the white race was in danger of being replaced.
(01:32):
Conspiracy theories about his death abounded, and his movement made
him a martyr for their cause. But in the end,
the man who fired the shot that killed George Lincoln
Rockwell wasn't a Jew, or a communist or an agent
of the state. It was a man who'd loved him
(01:52):
like a father. I'm Molly Conger, and this I squere
the little guise. This is a story about history, that's all.
(02:20):
It's the story of an assassination that rocked the right
wing reverberating through the white power movement for decades. Sometimes
I'll open an episode by describing the meandering mental process
through which I have arrived at that week's subject, some
half formed thought that led me down a rabbit hole,
or some tangent from a past episode that I'm following
(02:41):
up on. Something like that. But maybe there's no reason
in particular that I was thinking this week about the sudden,
violent end a man who spent his entire adult life
stoking violence against everyone else. George Lincoln Rockwell died in
the parking lot of a laundromat in a strip mall
(03:01):
in Arlington, Virginia, at twelve oh two p m. On
August twenty fifth, nineteen sixty seven. This isn't really an
episode about George Lincoln Rockwell, except for the fact that
he's dead. Rockwell was the commander of the American Nazi Party,
a group he founded in nineteen fifty nine. There isn't
(03:22):
much to say about Rockwell that hasn't been said before.
He was the founding father of American neo Nazism. He
was a pioneer in the field of Holocaust denial. Barely
a decade after the Holocaust ended, he invented the term
white power. He took a Volkswagen bus full of Nazis
across the country to Montgomery, Alabama, just to antagonize the
(03:45):
Freedom Riders. He followed Martin Luther King Junior all over
the country holding Nazi counter demonstrations, and when one of
his stormtroopers punched King in the face in front of
a crowd in Birmingham, Rockwell promoted the assailant to the
head of the party's Chicago office. Rockwell was a monster,
(04:08):
But this isn't a story about George Lincoln Rockwall it's
about the Nazi who killed him. When that man was
convicted of first degree murder in nineteen sixty seven, his
name was John Patler, but it wasn't always and it
isn't any more. The Nazi best known as John Patler
(04:29):
was born John Pazzalos in New York City in January
of nineteen thirty eight. He was the first of two
sons born to Cristos and Athena Pazzalos. Cristos, so often
referred to by the Anglicized version of his name, christ
emigrated to New York as a teenager in nineteen thirteen,
three years before his future wife was born. He married
(04:53):
Athena manro Gianis, the daughter of Greek immigrants, in the
fall of nineteen thirty seven, just a few months before
for their son, John was born. His younger brother, George,
would follow a year later. In nineteen forty three, when
the Pazzalos boys were just four and five years old,
their father murdered their mother. Newspaper articles from the time
(05:15):
say the couple had been arguing for hours on the
afternoon of August seventh. Cristos Pazzalos then took a taxi
to a nearby police station and announced my wife has
been fighting with me. Now she is shot with my revolver,
for which I have a permit. None of the newspaper
articles from nineteen forty three that I can find mention
(05:37):
the boys. It's almost unbearable to imagine that these two
little boys had been left alone in the home with
their dying mother. But in a later autobiographical essay that
Patler wrote for the American Nazi Party's Stormtrooper magazine, he
said that she'd actually dropped them off at her mother's
house before heading back home to pack her bags. She
(06:00):
was planning to leave her husband. Cristos was initially booked
only on a charge of felonious assault, but when Athena
died the next day, his charges were upgraded to first
degree murder. After unsuccessfully pleading temporary insanity, Cristos was allowed
to plead guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter in
(06:22):
early nineteen forty four, and he was sentenced to just
seven and a half years. While their father was away
at sing Sing, George and John lived with their maternal grandmother,
Bessie mauro Giannis, was only a few years older than
her son in law, and she was recently widowed and
still had a teenager of her own at home. Patler
(06:44):
would later write that she supported them by selling flowers
at a stand on Park Avenue, and he remembers her
hatred of the Jewish venders that she had to share
space with at the market. It isn't entirely clear if
their father actually wanted them back, but the great my
mother died in nineteen fifty four, just a few years
after Christos was released from prison. John and George were
(07:06):
placed briefly in a youth home before ultimately being returned
to their father's custody. After a decade of hearing their
grandmother curse his name as the murderer of her daughter.
Suddenly they were living with their father in the very
same home in the Bronx where he'd killed their mother.
Patler started getting into trouble with the police that year.
(07:30):
In September, he and another sixteen year old boy stole
a car, got into a police chase, crashed into a tree,
and then ran off into the woods, evading the police
for hours. That story sounds completely made up, and if
it was just Patler's retelling of it years later, I
wouldn't believe it. But there really is a nineteen fifty
(07:51):
four newspaper headline that reads, twenty five cops seized two
teens after hot car crash. The other boy was sent
off to a reform school, but Patler hadn't been in
serious trouble before, so he just got probation. By his
own account, this was when he quote began to take
a keen political interest in the Jews. Most biographies of
(08:17):
George Lincoln Rockwell have a few pages devoted to Patler's childhood,
and they all seem to agree that Cristos Patsalos and
Bessie Malrogianis were very outspoken in their anti Semitism, so
it's not like he hadn't been exposed to the idea before.
But at sixteen years old, John Patler found a copy
of mindcomp in the school library, and he was really
(08:41):
vocal about his newfound interest in national socialism. His admiration
for Hitler was no secret and it was causing him
problems in school. One afternoon, while he was boxing in
the park, he was chatting with another teenage boy about
the need to do something about how the Jews are
responsible for the malevolent influence of communism. As teenage boys
(09:04):
did in the fifties, I guess and his friend offered
to introduce him to some like minded individuals, a newly
formed group called the Nationalist Youth League. Dust Hooker, a
wealthy businessman, had formed the Nationalist Youth League ostensibly as
the youth arm of his Nationalist party, but it mainly
(09:28):
functioned as a teenage gang run by a middle aged man.
The boys warm matching black uniforms and busted up Communist
meetings and marched around the city handing out anti Semitic pamphlets.
Patler idolized Hooker and quickly grew attached to this man
as a sort of surrogate father. He later wrote that
(09:49):
Hooker gave him his first political training and taught him
quote everything he knew about the Jews. Part of that training,
I guess, was making his own anti Smith flyers, and
in nineteen fifty six Patler tried his hand at drawing
up his own pamphlets, and he was subsequently arrested on
a charge of criminal libel because the leaflets targeted a
(10:11):
specific Jewish businessman by name. He was still on probation
for that midnight joy ride in a stolen car two
years earlier, so he was sent to a psychiatric hospital
for evaluation. Usually we only have people's recollections after the fact.
You know, years later, with the benefit of hindsight, people
will say, oh, I knew him back then. I remember
(10:34):
he used to say this or that. You have to
take it with a grain of salt. Usually when a
biography says that a man has always been an anti Semite.
But in John Patler's case, there is an incredible trove
of archival evidence. For his nineteen ninety nine biography of
George Lincoln Rockwell, historian Frederick Simonelli was actually able to
(10:57):
access Patler's case file at the Morrisania Hospital Mental Hygiene Clinic.
I don't know how that's possible, come to think of it.
I mean, those are medical records, but the footnotes are
very thorough In American fury, simon Eli writes that a
caseworker at the hospital made a note in Patler's file
(11:18):
in nineteen fifty six about his frequent anti Semitic comments
to the hospital staff. A psychiatrist wrote that Patler told him, quote,
I go to church every Sunday morning and fight the Jews.
The same doctor later wrote in the file quote the
patient may become dangerous. He appears as a potential murderer.
(11:40):
After a short stay in the hospital, Patler was released,
but he had to continue with court bandated outpatient treatment.
In nineteen fifty seven, the doctor's notes show Patler's mental
state was deteriorating. He was paranoid, delusional, and exhibiting violent tendencies,
and the doctor again wrote that the patient may one
day commit murder inexplicably. His case file was actually closed
(12:05):
out soon after that, and there's a note that his
probation officer felt that he was making satisfactory adjustments. And
it's around this time that John Patler first met George
Lincoln Rockwell at a party at Dust Hooker's home. Rockwell
hadn't yet formed the American Nazi Party, but he was
(12:26):
an up and coming right wing extremist. It was actually
dust Hooker who encouraged Rockwell to come out, so to speak,
to stop speaking in coded language and just put on
the swastika armband already. In that autobiographical essay Patler later
wrote in the Nazi magazine, he claims that he chose
to leave high school and enlist in the Marine Corps
(12:48):
in nineteen fifty eight, but the timeline is a little
muddy here. In simon Elli's book, he writes that Patler's
probation violation had actually landed him back in and this
time he was given two choices. He could face the
charges as an adult, or he could enlist, and he
chose to enlist. In nineteen fifty nine, his father, Cristos
(13:14):
Pazzalos died. Deus Hooker had moved away to Italy, apparently
to run a seven up bottling factory. John Patler was
a twenty one year old marine alone in the world
when he was assigned to a duty station in northern Virginia,
just a short drive away from the headquarters of the
newly organized American Nazi Party. Now I've been calling him
(13:39):
John Patler all this time, just for the sake of simplicity,
because that's how we know him. But from the time
he was born in nineteen thirty eight until this point
in the story in nineteen sixty, his name is John Pazzalos.
But in nineteen sixty, after he became one of the
first stormtroopers in the American Nazi Party, he legally changed
(14:01):
his name to John Patler. Not only did it sound
less Greek, which was a little too ethnic for the
Nazi Party. He liked it because it sounded like Hitler.
There are some sources that claim that he was actually
born Yanaki Pazzalos, and I can't quite make sense of that. Yannis, Sure,
(14:23):
that's just Greek for John. I wouldn't be surprised if
his grandmother probably called him that, But there's never any
citation for the claim that he was born Yanaki. I mean,
I don't think that's anyone's name. Sometimes you see a Yanakis,
but this mysterious fake name is always spelled y A
(14:44):
n ac k I, and I don't think that's a
name at all. Mostly I saw this claim repeated in
old Stormfront posts, so that's not a great source. I
don't need to track that down. That's just trash. But
it was on his Wikipedia page without a citation until
someone removed it in twenty eleven, and it still shows
(15:07):
up on the German and Finnish language Wikipedia pages, and
it even appears in a recently published doctoral dissertation about
the white Power movement. I guess it doesn't matter that much.
But I did track down a copy of the nineteen
forty census and his father recorded his two year old
son's name as John Adam Patsalos when he was arrested
(15:30):
at sixteen and nineteen fifty four, the newspaper recorded that
the boy who was arrested was named John Patsalos. When
he enlisted in the Marines in nineteen fifty eight, Marine
Corps muster records list him as John C. Patsalos. But
I do think I found the original source of this
strange mistake, and I think it's the faded recollection of
(15:53):
a former rival before William Luther Peers wrote the Turner Diaries,
before he founded National Alliance. All the way back in
nineteen sixty six, Pierce picked up his family and moved
them to Virginia to be closer to George Lincoln Rockwell.
His time at the American Nazi Party headquarters only overlapped
(16:15):
with Patler for about a year, but in that year,
Patler and Pierce were pretty open in their hatred of
one another, and Pierce made no secret of the fact
that he thought Patler was not white. So maybe that's
why he gave Patler a much more ethnic sounding, made
up name. When he was recounting that period of his
(16:36):
own life to his biographer in two thousand, who knows. So.
In nineteen sixty, the Marine Private John Patsalos became Nazi
Stormtrooper John Patler. From his duty station in Quantico, he
(17:06):
was making weekend trips to Arlington to attend American Nazi
Party meetings and rallies, and he very quickly became quite
close to Rockwell. At a rally in Washington, d c.
Over Memorial Day weekend in nineteen sixty, Rockwell proudly told
the crowd that the man standing right next to him
was in fact a United States Marine, and that fact
(17:28):
quickly made it back to the military police. The man
the Marine Corps knew as Private John Pazzalos was arrested, questioned,
and given a psychiatric evaluation. In July nineteen sixty, he
was given a general discharge under honorable conditions, so not
a dishonorable discharge, but it isn't an honorable discharge either.
(17:55):
There's a brief mention in one New York City newspaper
after his discharge that he was going to file a
lawsuit alleging that it had been a conspiracy to violet
his rights, naming the Marine Corps as well as a
group called Jewish War Veterans of the United States as defendants.
He was asking for one five hundred seventy five dollars
(18:15):
in back pay and five hundred thousand dollars in damages
for the harm to his reputation. Again, this is a
man wearing a Nazi uniform outside of the White House.
I don't know what reputation he thinks is being damaged.
He didn't have an attorney, And aside from that one
news story about the Jewish Veterans Group telling a reporter
(18:38):
that they had received service of the complaint, I can't
find anything else about it. And it's possible he never
actually filed it. But now in the summer of nineteen sixty,
he's completely untethered. He's an orphan, he's not a marine.
(18:58):
He has no day job, he has no family. There's
only Rockwell Marine Corps Private John Pazzalos is dead and
Stormtrooper John Patler quickly rose through the ranks of Rockwell's party.
He was promoted to editor of the party's official publication,
the National Socialist Bulletin, before the fourth issue was published
(19:20):
in the fall of that year. He appeared right by
Rockwell's side at countless rallies that year, and in nineteen
sixty alone. He was arrested at so many Nazi Party
rallies that it's hard to sort out which news stories
about his court appearances are connected to which arrests. There
were disorderly conduct charges after a brawl broke out at
(19:41):
a rally near the White House, and then a week
later another disorderly conduct charge when they came back to
protest the original arrest, and then a week after that
he's arrested again for putting up swastika stickers at the
ADL headquarters. Rockwell gave Patler his blessing to marry Erica,
a blonde women of German descent, and she was already
(20:02):
heavily pregnant with their first son when she had to
drive to d C in the middle of the night
to bail her husband out of jail for defacing the
offices of the ADL. The January nineteen sixty one issue
of the National Socialist Bulletin lists Lieutenant John Patler as
both the editor and the art director. A few pages
(20:24):
into the issue, there's an announcement congratulating Lieutenant Patler and
the birth of his firstborn son. Now, Patler's children are
private individuals. They're not part of their father's story voluntarily.
Aside from a handful of notable public comments from his
son Nick, his children aren't your business or mine, But
(20:48):
in the interest of being thorough, I did do my
own background research. This Nazi newsletter proudly announces that Patler
had named his firstborn son Horst Vessel. There's a photo
of Patler wearing his Nazi party uniform cradling his infant
son in his arms, underneath text that reads, in all caps,
(21:11):
Horst Vessel lives. Horst Vessel was a Nazi. I'm not
talking about this baby boy. I'm talking about the original
Horst Vessel. And he wasn't a Nazi the way John
Patler is a Nazi. He was a real one in
Nazi Germany. He joined the Sturmob Tailoh in nineteen twenty six,
(21:32):
and he made quite a positive impression on a young
Joseph Goebels. By nineteen twenty nine, Vessel was living in
Berlin and serving as the street cell leader of the
Alexander Plotz unit of the stermop Tilo. As Stormfuurer, Vessel
led a gang of young Nazis that got into violent
altercations with Communists around Berlin. In nineteen thirty, one of
(21:55):
them shot and killed him. As the leader of this
Nazi street fighting gang, Vessel had received a lot of
encouragement from Gebels, and now that he's dead and Gebels
is the party's chief propagandist, he sees this death as
a golden opportunity. In death, Horst Vessel is more than
(22:17):
a violent man. He's a symbol. He's a martyr for
the Nazi cause. So by naming his son Horst Vessel
Hatler is invoking the Germany of nineteen thirty, a nation
on the eve of the Third Reich. I get it.
I get what he's going for. The problem is it's
(22:40):
not true. And this is a big part of why
every episode takes me. I would say three times longer
than is healthy. I can't trust anybody, even mostly reliable sources,
you know, books that are well researched and well regarded.
Sometimes people forget the number one rule of writing about Nazis.
(23:03):
Nazis lie. You can't take a Nazi newsletter at face value,
not for anything. Just because the birth announcement in the
National Socialist Bulletin says that the baby's name is Horst
Vessel Patler doesn't make it true, but the claim does
appear in several books, always without a citation. I'm assuming
(23:25):
they got it from this Nazi newsletter, and it isn't true.
Like I said, Patler's kids aren't our business. They're private
individuals who did not choose to involve themselves in this.
So I'm not going to tell you what his name
actually is. It was actually really hard to find, which
(23:47):
tells me he's gone to some trouble to prevent people
like me from finding it. And as an adult, he
actually changed his name again, swapping the last name Patler
for something unrelated. But his first name was never hors Vessel.
It's something perfectly ordinary, the kind of boring white American
(24:07):
name that you probably went to elementary school with a
dozen of Nineteen sixty one was a tumultuous year for
the Patler family. That spring, his young wife, Erica was
home alone with baby horse Vessel because John Patler was
the driver when the Nazis went on tour in the
hate bus. I assume he had a great time with
(24:30):
his friends on the Nazi road trip in the spring,
but by the end of the year, John Patler quit
the American Nazi Party, for the first time. He and
another member named Dan Burros had decided to strike out
on their own to form a new splinter group. This
is a classic problem in American neo Nazi organizing. Everybody
(24:51):
wants to be Hitler. In November of nineteen sixty one,
John Patler packed up his pregnant wife and their infant
son and moved to New York City in a converted
garage and queens. A handful of disaffected members of the
American Nazi Party formed a new group that they called
the American National Party. Patler was the group's chairman and
(25:16):
Dan Burros was his second in command. Patler also edited
the party's magazine, a publication called Kill with an exclamation point,
but the whole endeavor never amounted to much at all.
There were never more than about a dozen members. In
the January nineteen sixty two issue of The Rockwell Report,
(25:37):
a secondary publication of the American Nazi Party, George Lincoln
Rockwall wanted to make sure that everyone knew he wasn't mad.
He actually didn't care at all, and it did not
hurt his feelings that he'd been abandoned by his most
devoted lieutenant. He wrote, quote in the attempt to justify
their failure in the Nazi Party here and overthrow our
(26:00):
leadership of the right wing. This group of selfish malcontents, loafers, fakers, sissies, cowards,
or damn fools is beneath mentioned. They are held together
solely by their hatred and jealousy of my person and
the American Nazi Party, and will disintegrate soon enough from
lack of leadership and idealism. See he doesn't care at all,
(26:25):
He's not mad, but he was exactly right about their
motivation and how they'd end up. In March, the New
York Daily News ran a headline ten youths in Hollis Shack,
poking fun at these young men playing make believe Nazi
(26:45):
living in a shanty in this neighborhood and queens. In April,
another newspaper in New York speculated that the group might
actually be a front group rather than a splinter of
the American Nazi Party, writing, a little band of eccentrics
calling themselves the American Nazis has sent a few gal
lighters into the New York Long Island area, and Rockwell
(27:10):
played KOI with the reporters. I think he may have
been trying to save face. He didn't want to admit
that he'd been abandoned, so he refused to confirm or
deny any connection to this group. But he hinted that
sometimes sometimes I do use a front group, and maybe
I am working on something in New York City, sort
(27:31):
of insinuating that, yes, these men do still answer to me.
The same article, though, quotes John Patler saying Rockwell hates
my guts and I hate his. Patler really wanted to
make it work. He wanted to be the furer. He
wanted a party. He wanted his own newspaper and his
(27:53):
own followers, and his own headquarters and his own uniforms.
But they couldn't afford uniforms and a dozen guys in
a shanty, and Queens just doesn't have the gravity to
keep the followers in orbit. There is a nineteen sixty
seven biography of Dan Burros called One More Victim, and
(28:13):
the book offers some fascinating insight into this period of
their lives, a lot more detailed than I was able
to piece together from Rockwell's newsletters, FBI memos, and local
news stories published in Queens in nineteen sixty two, I
should tell you, though, why the editor of the New
York Times wrote a book about Dan Burrows in nineteen
(28:36):
sixty seven. He's hardly so important at this point in
our story in nineteen sixty two. So how could there
be a whole book's worth of information about this man
in his twenties just a few years later. It's because
he died, not just that he died, but how and
(28:56):
why he died. In nineteen sixty the New York Times
published a story revealing that Dan Burroughs, who was at
that time a former member of the American Nazi Party
who had by then joined the Klan, was Jewish. His
parents were both the children of Russian Jewish immigrants. They
(29:17):
were married by a rabbi. He attended Hebrew school, and
he had a bar mitzvah Berno Nazis, being Jewish isn't
something you can leave behind. Just because Borrows had blonde
hair and considered himself an Odonist doesn't mean he wasn't
still a Jew in the eyes of the anti Semite.
(29:37):
And honestly, if you ask any of the Nazis he
spent a decade with, they'd tell you he was as
anti Semitic as any of them. But this revelation, this
revelation that he had been hiding this from them, that
was an unforgivable sin. You can't be a Jewish clansman.
(30:11):
It wasn't even noon on the day the story was
published when Burroughs died. His official cause of death is suicide,
with one bullet wound to his head and another in
his chest. I know, I know, but that's what the
official records all say. There were three witnesses and their
(30:34):
stories all matched, and Burrows was the only one with
gunshot residue on his hands. That's what it says. Now,
I've read enough FBI memos about Roy Frankhauser to be
a little skeptical of his account of anything, especially his
account of how a man died in his bedroom. I'm
(30:57):
not saying it wasn't suicide. I'm just saying I understand
what this looks like, and I don't know what to
tell you. There are several books that contain a description
of this event, and they'll say that the FBI speculated
that maybe Burrows did shoot himself the first time, and
(31:18):
maybe Frankauser put him out of his misery with the
second shot, which is still weird, but it makes a
lot more logical sense than the version Frankhauser tells that
appears in this book in nineteen sixty seven. Now without
spending a week tearing my hair out over it and
maybe still not getting the answer to this question. I
(31:39):
don't know if Frankhauser was already working for the FBI
in nineteen sixty five, but I guess either way, whether
he's an informant at this point or not, he probably
wouldn't want to admit to shooting a guy in the head.
But this version, Frankauser's version, the official version of these events.
It's dramatic. I mean it's theatrical. Wagner is playing a
(32:04):
little too loud on the radio in the house, there's
a hysterical woman screaming at Burros to put the gun down,
and Burros cocks the gun and he looks Frankauser in
the eye, his good eye, I assume, since Frankauser famously
lost an eye and a bar fight, and he once
auctioned off his glass eye and a clan fundraiser. Anyway,
(32:25):
so Burros is looking his friend in his good eye,
and he says, long Live the White Race, and then
he non fatally shoots himself in the chest, and he
stands there unmoving, and then he raises the gun to
his head and fires again. I mean, what a scene.
(32:46):
It's horrific. In nineteen ninety seven, Martin Lee wrote in
his book The Beast Reawakens a History of American Fascism,
that Frankauser never cleaned it up. Dan Burross shot himself
two times in Roy Frankhauser's bedroom, and the bullet holes
(33:09):
and the blood stains were still on the wall and
ceiling thirty years later. Now you know, I like to
find my own sources. So in addition to this anecdote
in Lee's book, I found an old post on Stormfront.
It's about a decade old, and the poster says he
saw the holes for himself when he went to frank
(33:31):
Kauser's home sometime in the early two thousands, a few
years before Frankauser died to buy some old Nazi memorabilia.
So it's a fascinating story with a lot of murky
truths and uncomfortable possibilities about state involvement. The New York
Times did their own work confirming the details and writing
(33:55):
the story, but it was the FBI who tipped them off.
The first place that Dan Burross was Jewish, and that
brings me back to the point I was trying to make.
The New York Times journalist who is tipped off by
the FBI to write the story that led to Borros's death,
wrote a book about it two years later, and I
(34:17):
assume in the course of writing this book they got
more tips from the FBI, which maybe why it has
such interesting descriptions of police files. We might come back
to Dan Burros another time. If I do, I'll even
watch the two thousand and one movie loosely based on
his life, starring Ryan Gosling as the Jewish Nazi and
(34:39):
Billy Zane as the leader of the Nazi gang. But
for now, I was getting to a point about the
embarrassing failure of the American National Party in nineteen sixty two.
In that biography of Burros, A. M. Rosenthal and Arthur
Gelb wrote that the American National Party never had more
than a few men, and it never really got a
(35:02):
lot of press. But the detectives at the NYPD's anti
Subversive squad were fascinated by them, and they kept very
close tabs on all of the members and their associates.
One detective said of the group, quote, these young toughs
live and breathe the atmosphere of violence. That's all they
(35:24):
talk about, getting this guy or blowing up this or that.
A lot of them have guns, and it's as if
they're making love to them. They're not for anything, but
they're against an awful lot of things and people. They
all got excited, you might say, aroused by the civil
rights movement. It got them all worked up. Now you
(35:47):
probably know it pains me to say this NYPD detective
is really cooking here, but listen to this quote. Most
of these people are liars and not smart, and most
of them are cowards. But they work on each other,
and we have to watch to make sure they don't
get each other worked up to the point where they
have to prove their manhood by going out and killing people.
(36:11):
So the cops would hang around and watch, but they'd
stop buying chat too. It was never a secret that
they were being surveilled. Borros, much like his former commander
George Lincoln Rockwell, was happy to talk to the police.
It seems like he kind of got a kick out
of it even and both Burros and Rockwell would frequently
(36:34):
take the initiative to contact the police themselves to inform
on other members of the movement, although this biography of
Burroughs notes that he never accepted any money for it,
and nothing he offered was ever of much value. So
for most of nineteen sixty two, Dan Burross, the secretly
Jewish Nazi, and John Patler are holed up in a
(36:58):
shanty in Queen's writing a Nazi newsletter that no one reads,
devoted mostly to bashing the father figure that they have abandoned,
and a squad of detectives is standing outside taking turns
watching them make the occasional bodega run. In August of
nineteen sixty two, Patler was arrested for disturbing the peace
(37:20):
after he refused to stop picketing a school integration rally
in Englewood, New Jersey. He was alone. He attended that
event alone. There was a lot of publicity leading up
to it. He was making these sort of public pronouncements
that the American National Party is going to show up
(37:41):
and counterdemonstrate against these black families. Preparations were being made
and the town was in negotiations with him about where
they could stand and whether they could have amplified sound,
and the police were involved. But by the time the
actual day comes, Patler showed up alone and he's just
standing there in Englewood, New Jersey, yelling at the parents
(38:04):
of black school children. And for all his trouble, Patler
was sentenced to ten days in jail, which he protested
by staging a hunger strike. And he really did do it.
I've seen plenty of guys like Patler say they're gonna
do it, they say they're gonna do something drastic. I've
(38:25):
recently seen a guy a lot like Patler threatened to
go on a hunger strike and he didn't do it.
But according to the doctor who examined Patler on his release,
he'd lost a significant amount of weight over those ten days,
so I guess you can't say he didn't commit. And again,
(38:45):
much like the lead up to the Englewood rally, during
these ten days Patler's in jail. The American National Party,
you know, those two guys in the shanty and Queens,
are threatening to picket the jail to demand his release,
but they didn't. On one of those ten nights, one
(39:07):
member of the American National Party showed up, Ralph Grandinetti,
the group's state chairman stood outside the jail for about
a half hour one evening. On the morning Patler was released,
the Bergen County Record published a photo of him hunched
over a plate of breakfast food at a diner, and
(39:29):
they note that there was no crowd waiting for him
outside the jail when he was released. He was arrested
again in November, this time for disrupting Eleanor Roosevelt's funeral,
and he was sentenced to ninety days in jail this time.
But worse than this jail sentence was the growing realization
(39:49):
that this was a failure. When he left Virginia with
Dan Burrows, they had a plan, they were going to
do something, They were going to make something of themselves.
But Burrows didn't seem all that committed. He hadn't supported
Paller at all when he was on his hunger strike
in August, and on the day of Eleanor Roosevelt's funeral,
(40:10):
he didn't even want to go. He told Paller he'd
rather stay at home and watch sports on TV. I
tried to figure out what game would have been on.
I think this was November tenth, nineteen sixty two. What
sports were on that day. Maybe he was watching a rerun.
Did they have those in nineteen sixty two? I don't know.
(40:31):
When the ACLU finally cut Patler out of jail in
January of nineteen sixty three, he was ready to beg
Rockwell for for gypness, his wife, Erica, put her foot down.
She was done. She didn't want to move again with
her two small children. If he went back to Rockwell,
she wasn't coming with him, and John Patler chose George
(40:52):
Lincoln Rockwell over his wife and sons. It would take
a few years to sort out an actual divorce, I think,
but they separated and she didn't follow him back to Virginia.
A few years later, when Patler's on trial for murder,
he only ever talks about having two children, and he's
(41:13):
talking about the two children he had after this with
his second wife. His first two sons, and his first
wife are completely absent from his own telling of his
life story after this point. In February of nineteen sixty three,
Patler publishes the fourth and final issue of Kill, the
(41:35):
magazine for the American National Party, and in it he
announces that the American National Party is no more. I
didn't actually manage to find a copy of that issue
of Kill, but an FBI memo describing it just notes
that it announced the end of the group. Rockwell, on
(41:57):
the other hand, claimed in his confidential internal party newsletter
that the fourth issue of Kill was devoted entirely to
the theme Rockwell was right in an attempt to quote
patch up some of the damage he'd done in deserting
the party and attacking the commander. He also claims that
Patler sent him a telegram asking to be allowed to
(42:18):
return to the party. Rockwell made a bit of a
show of it, too, humiliating Patler in the party newsletter
on multiple occasions that year, announcing Patler's return by writing
that Patler had been quote too big for his breeches,
but he'd come to his senses and come crawling back,
begging and pleading, and Patler had to start again from
(42:40):
the bottom. He was not Lieutenant Patler. Party materials referred
to him as a probationary storm trooper for the rest
of nineteen sixty three. But I think deep down there
was never any doubt in Rockwell's mind that he would
welcome Patler home again. He'd lost other high ranking party
(43:02):
officers before, and he'd lose more in years to come.
And he always lashes out in the way a man
with a bruised ego does. But Patler's departure seems to
have hurt him somewhere deeper than his thin skin. He
was taking a big risk excepting Patler back into the fold.
(43:22):
He probably shouldn't have done it. He looked weak opening
his arms to a man who'd spent a year publicly
attacking him. And not only that, Patler wasn't popular. People
didn't like him, partly because a lot of them didn't
see him as white. Another high ranking party officer quit
(43:45):
over the mere idea that Rockwell might meet with Patler
to discuss returning. I mean this was a controversial choice.
Rockwell did this because he liked Patler, not because it
was a good choice politically or for the party. By
the summer of nineteen sixty three, Patler was once again
(44:06):
editing the party Stormtrooper magazine, and he'd been assigned to
travel across the state of Pennsylvania to try to get
publicity for the American Nazi Parti's planned counter demonstration for
the upcoming March on Washington. You know the one, the
one where a quarter of a million people heard Martin
Luther King Junior give his I Have a Dream speech.
That one. Rockwell spent most of the summer of sixty
(44:30):
three trying to recruit supporters for his Nazi response to
this event, and they were pulling stunts all over the country,
getting members arrested in multiple states. Rockwell himself was arrested
in Virginia for handing out flyers that officials felt were
inciting racial violence. But the publicity tour in Pennsylvania was
(44:52):
just two men, John Patler and Roy Frankhauser. Now, again,
the story's a little bit out of order because by
nineteen sixty five, obviously Roy Frankhauser is no longer in
the American Nazi Party. He's just a klansman. But here
in the past, in nineteen sixty three, frank Kauser is
still a member of the American Nazi Party. Sorry about that.
(45:16):
And so their journey across the state of Pennsylvania is
called the Hate Hike, and they're traveling across the state
standing outside of bus stations and public pools, holding signs
that say we hate race mixing, trying to go passers
by into hitting them. I guess if the surviving newspaper
(45:36):
archives and FBI memos or anything to go on, it
looks like the only person they managed to get a
rise out of was a policeman in Pittsburgh who allegedly
hit Roy Frankhauser in the face after they were arrested.
But for the most part, the hate hike seems to
have gone largely unremarked on, and so at the end
(45:57):
of the summer, George Lincoln Rockwell shows up in Washington,
d C. With fifty supporters at most, a pathetic showing
for the months of touring and rallies and stunts he'd
been pouring resources into to get the word out. I
don't know how Patler felt about the rally, but overall,
at the end of nineteen sixty three, life was pretty
(46:20):
good for John Patler. He'd already forgotten the wife and
sons he abandoned in New York, the woman who would
later become his second wife, was pregnant with their first son,
and most importantly, he was back in his commander's good graces.
I didn't mean to get so lost in the newspaper archives.
(46:42):
I really thought I was going to have this wrapped
up in one but We'll have to pick back up
next week with John Patler's second rise to the highest
ranks of the American Nazi Party, his second resignation from
the party, his ultimate dismissal, his murder trial, compete Nazi
conspiracy theories leading to a shootout in Maine, and oddly
(47:06):
that time, a guy came home from work one day
to find four nude strangers having an orgy in his
living room, and one of those naked people was the
recently paroled murderer of America's most famous Nazi. Weird Little
(47:37):
Guys as a production of Pool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's research, written and recorded by me, Molly Conger. Our
executive producers are Sophe Lieuchtermann and Robert Evans. The show
is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme
music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me
at Weirdly Guys Podcast at gmail dot com. I will
definitely read it, but I probably won't answer. It's nothing personal.
(47:58):
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show. The listeners
on the Weird Little Guys separated it just don't post
anything that's going to make you one of my weird
little guys,
Host
Molly Conger
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