Death of a Demagogue, Pt. 2

In the year leading up to George Lincoln Rockwell's assassination, he was trying to take the American Nazi Party in a new direction. Not everyone within the party was on board with the changes.

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.

Griffin, R. S. (2001). The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds. 1st Books Library.

https://time.com/5096937/martin-luther-king-jr-picture-chicago/ 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323670005_An_order_of_crime_the_criminal_law_of_the_Independent_State_of_Croatia_NDH_1941-1945 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Col Zone Media. There was still a little bit of
snow on the ground and Ellsworth, Maine as the sun
began to set. On March seventeenth, nineteen sixty eight, Claudia
and Frank Smith had been informed by a neighbor that
a suspicious looking car with out of state plates had

(00:22):
been driving back and forth past their house all weekend,
and by Sunday evening, Frank had had enough. He wanted
to get a good look at the driver. With Claudia
at the wheel, the couple began following the mysterious Volkswagen
that had been shadowing them for two days. Who was
chasing who? Who loaded his gun first? No one can

(00:45):
quite agree. By the time the dust had settled, two
members of the American Nazi Party had spent the better
part of an hour exchanging gunfire. Somehow no one was injured,
but both cars were riddled with bullet holes. After Christopher
Vidniyevitch was taken into custody, an officer overheard Frank Smith

(01:06):
ask him, what was the reason? I thought we were friends?
But the reason should have been obvious to Frank. Surely
he knew why. A loyal lieutenant of the American Nazi
Party would take a shot at him. They were both
men on a mission, the same mission. In fact, they

(01:27):
were both conducting their own investigation into the murder of
George Lincoln Waqua, I'm Molly Conger, and this is where
little Gods, that shootout in Maine took place. More than

(01:59):
six months after George Lincoln Rockwell died. His killer had
already been convicted of murder. But a closed case file
never stopped at conspiracy theory. You know that. And before
we can get into why Frank Smith believes John Patler
didn't do it, we have to get up to the
point in our story where he did. When we left

(02:23):
off last week, it was nineteen sixty three. John Patler
had been allowed to rejoin the American Nazi Party after
failing spectacularly at his brief attempt to lead a splinter group.
Over the protests of most everyone who'd known John Patler,
Rockwell welcomed him home again. I struggled a bit this

(02:43):
week with the question of where to focus this episode.
It would be easy enough to take a straightforward chronological
journey through the activities of the American Nazi Party in
the mid nineteen sixties. There are some good stories in
there some wild anecdotes that I'm sure I'll revisit some
other time through the lens of some other weird little
guy who was there for them. After all, this show

(03:05):
is just one long story told out of order. Listeners
with long memories might remember I actually talked briefly about
George Lincoln Rockwall's nineteen sixty five campaign for governor of
Virginia in an episode last fall. It was a story
about the history of Virginia's crossburning laws, so I reserve
the right to come back to nineteen sixty five another day.

(03:28):
I hate to think I wasted half my week collecting
old newspaper clippings about events I'm skipping over entirely. But
what I found most interesting in piezing together this timeline
is the question of why why did John Patler murder
George Lincoln Rockwell in August of nineteen sixty seven. Truthfully,

(03:50):
no one knows, But in the absence of that elusive truth,
competing and conflicting narratives arose, and the question becomes what
motivates those Even when you can't sort out what the
truth actually is, trying to discern the motivations behind those
half truths can shed some light on things. So instead

(04:12):
of telling you about every time a member of the
American Nazi Party got arrested for disorderly conduct at a
rally that got out of hand, every trip across the
country to disrupt a civil rights march, every wild stunt
pulled by a guy in a swastika armband. Instead of
all that, I want to ask you a question. What

(04:33):
is a white person? Who is white? That's easy, right,
You know what a white person is. It's like what
the Supreme Court said about pornography. You know when you
see it, But how do you know? Is it the
color of your skin? Is it the birthplace of your parents?

(04:54):
Is it your hair, your culture, your religion, your politics?
Who is white? Are people of Slavic descent white? Are
fair haired Northern Africans? Can a Jewish person be white?
Can a Communist be white? Italians are Europeans? Surely that

(05:15):
makes them white. But what about a dark haired, olive
skin Sicilian. I'm no sociologist, I'm not an expert on
the idea of race as a social construct. But for me,
the clearest evidence that the boundaries of whiteness are constantly shifting,
that the definition is a highly politicized moving target that

(05:39):
whiteness is something that can be given and taken away.
Is the fact that the most racist people on the
planet are usually the ones writing and rewriting that definition.
In the American South, we had the one drop rule.
The faintest trace of black ancestry excluded you from whiteness.

(06:00):
But without DNA testing or consistent record keeping, how could
you know who had a black great grandmother. In apartheid
South Africa, the law required all people to be officially
registered with the government as black, white, colored, or Indian.
But how you were classified wasn't up to you. It

(06:21):
was determined by someone else, not just based on how
you looked, but how you lived, what language do you
speak at home, how educated are you, how poor are you?
And it wasn't uncommon for members of the same family,
children with the same parents to end up classified differently
by the government. And famously, Germany adopted the Nuremberg Claws

(06:44):
in nineteen thirty five, codifying a definition of who is
German and who is Jewish. In all three of these
chapters of history, those who fell outside the legal boundaries
of whiteness were excluded from the benefits of citizenship and
it isn't just governments who have struggled with classifying who

(07:05):
exactly should be excluded. You'd think that no one would
be more firm than the Ku Klux Klan when it
comes to defining whiteness. But the Klan had to hold
a vote in the mid nineteen seventies to determine whether
white immigrants and Catholics were white enough to don white robes.
For George Lincoln Rockwell and his American Nazi Party, the

(07:28):
parameters were set by Hitler himself. Rockwell was America's Hitler,
or at least he hoped to be. He wasn't just
repeating some of the same ideas Hitler had in Nazi Germany.
He felt he was Hitler's spiritual successor. His Nazi Party
headquarters were adorned with gigantic swastika banners, and his storm

(07:50):
troopers wore Nazi uniforms. He founded the American Nazi Party
after weeks of intense, vivid dreams that always ended when
he walked into a room to find Adolf Hitler sitting
there waiting for him to arrive. He through a birthday
celebration for Hitler every year on April twentieth, the first

(08:10):
full issue of the party's newsletter was far from the
only one to bear a photo of Hitler on the
front cover. He dedicated his nineteen sixty one memoir to Hitler,
and in that memoir, Rockwell is pretty clear what he
means when he talks about the white race. He's talking
about blonde, blue eyed Aryans, Hitler's Aryan race, people of

(08:35):
Nordic and Germanic heritage. He lists Slavs, Italians, and Greeks
in the same sentence as Chinese and Japanese immigrants. These
are minority groups. These are races outside his definition of whiteness.
But in nineteen sixty five, the commander of the American
Nazi Party was starting to wonder if he was using

(08:57):
the wrong definition of whiteness. Rockwell's political philosophy had always
relied on the legacy of Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany,
but the United States in nineteen sixty five didn't exactly
have the same concentration of Germans as Germany. In nineteen
thirty five, it was becoming painfully clear that without broadening

(09:19):
this definition of whiteness, he would never have enough white
people to do anything with it all, and the movement
would be doomed. Even in predominantly white areas, American born
Protestants of pure Nordic or German blood were usually outnumbered
by Catholics, first generation white immigrants, and people whose ancestors

(09:40):
came from southern or Eastern Europe. He wasn't abandoning Hitler's
vision exactly. He was just adapting it for an American movement.
This idea of a broader coalition of whites was on
Rockwell's mind as early as nineteen sixty five, but the
evidence of that is own only in his private letters.

(10:02):
It's not until nineteen sixty six that the perfect opportunity
for rebranding the movement landed right in his lap, and
that's when he invented the phrase white power, or so
the story goes. In June of nineteen sixty six, Stokely Carmichael,
who was not yet called Kuame Toure, gave a speech

(10:24):
in Greenwood, Mississippi. The words black power had been spoken
before plenty of times. Richard Wright wrote a book in
nineteen fifty four called Black Power. Grace Lee Boggs founded
the Organization for Black Power in nineteen sixty five. Adam
Clayton Powell Junior, a congressman representing Harlem, used the phrase

(10:44):
in a speech earlier in nineteen sixty six, But for
some reason, when Stokely Carmichael said those words in Mississippi,
they stuck, and black power entered the broader American lexicon.
Paper archives from that week show a sudden explosion of
articles and op eds about black power, What is it?

(11:08):
What does it mean? What do they want? Should we
be afraid? And biographies of George Lincoln Rockwell all credit
Rockwell with the invention of the phrase white power as
a direct response to Stokely Carmichael. And that's kind of true.
I guess it is at least as true as it
would be to say that Stokely Carmichael invented the phrase

(11:29):
black power. He didn't, but he popularized it. But William
Schmaltz's twenty thirteen biography says that Rockwell coined the term
for the first time while speaking at a rally in Chicago.
So I figured, if the first popular usage of black

(11:50):
power spawned a thousand hand ringing op eds, I bet
the first time someone shouted white power, it probably at
least an ended up in the newspaper. And it did.
But it wasn't Rockwell who said it. Chicago newspapers on
the morning of August first, nineteen sixty six ran headlines

(12:13):
like white mob battles Negro marchers and sixty injured as
angry crowd breaks up rights march, and the articles all
describe a very violent, large white mob attacking a few
hundred black civil rights marchers near Chicago's Marquette Park, and
the people throwing rocks at the marchers were all screaming

(12:34):
white power. So far, this all makes sense with what
I already know about that summer. There were several famously
violent assaults on civil rights marches in and around Marquette
Park that summer, and Rockwell did speak at some of
those events. But I double checked my timeline. Rockwell didn't

(12:55):
speak at Marquette Park until August twenty first, So who's
yelling white power in the park three weeks earlier. A
definitive answer to that question is probably lost a time,
But I think I found what could be the earliest
recording of someone using the phrase white power movement to

(13:19):
describe the thing we know it as today.

Speaker 2 (13:24):
How mister Carmichael, if I may interrupt, you may see
right here an indication of where mister Rockwell is aligning
you as the antithesis of his movement, a white supremacy
or I think he a white power movement. I think
here is no question about it.

Speaker 1 (13:45):
That's Chicago area news anchor John J. Madigan on the
July twenty ninth, nineteen sixty six episode of his political
discussion show at Random. The guests that evening were Stokely
Carmichael and George Lincoln Rockwell. It's not until nearly the
end of that hour long segment that Rockwell seems to

(14:05):
have grabbed hold of the phrase, and he makes an
ominous statement about the violence that would visit Chicago in
the weeks to come.

Speaker 2 (14:14):
But I think we're building up to an inevitable confrontation
between blackfire and whackfire. Am.

Speaker 1 (14:19):
I let's this omissions you used. Just two days after
this segment aired, The phrase white power is suddenly on
the lips of this white mob setting cars on fire
in south side Chicago. It's what they were screaming as
they hurled rocks at the nuns who marched with the
demonstrators from the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations the following

(14:44):
weekend that screaming white mob faced off again with civil
rights marchers, This time Martin Luther King Junior himself was
in town to lead the march, part of a series
of demonstrations that summer centered around housing discrimination. King wouldn't
live to see the fruits of the slabor but the
Chicago Freedom Movement is generally credited as the driving force

(15:06):
behind the passage of the Fair Housing Act, which was
signed into law just a week after his death in
nineteen sixty eight. But on this day, August fifth, nineteen
sixty six, Martin Luther King Junior was struck in the
face with a rock as he entered Marquette Park, so
hard that he fell to his knees and the crowd.

(15:27):
The crowd was all screaming white power as the rocks
ranged down. King later told reporters quote, I've been in
many demonstrations all across the South, but I can say
that I have never seen, even in Mississippi and Alabama,
mobs as hostile and as hate filled as I'm seeing
in Chicago. And Rockwell was thrilled this was all the

(15:52):
proof he needed. Limiting himself to Hitler's ideas of racial
purity was holding him back. It was an aryan superiority.
It was white power that had united those racist throngs
in Chicago. These people throwing rocks at Martin Luther King
Junior were white, sure, but they weren't Arian. Many of

(16:15):
them were Polish and Lithuanian, the kinds of white he
hadn't tried to appeal to before. But white power, white
power brought them together and it could be the way forward.
Rockwell couldn't make it out to Chicago right away, but
he got to work. The party's printing press, housed in

(16:36):
a converted henhouse in rural Spotsovania County, Virginia, ran all
night long, churning out signs that said white Power. As
soon as Rockwell could scrape together the funds for a
plane ticket, he flew his most loyal lieutenant out to
Chicago to try to take advantage of this violent momentum.
John Patler arrived at O'Hare Airport with a suitcase full

(16:59):
of white power posters on August fourteenth. As I was
poring over the newspaper archives from August of nineteen sixty six,
the first time I found a name attached to a
chant of white power? Was it that march on August fourteenth.

(17:19):
It had been chanted by the crowd on July thirty
first and on August fifth. But in all of those
stories it's not coming from anyone's mouth. In particular, it
doesn't say where it started. So if the newspaper is
any official record of history, the first man to stand
in front of a crowd and lead an organized chant

(17:40):
of white power wasn't George Lincoln Rockwell. It was the
man who would shoot Rockwell dead almost exactly a year later.
It was John Patler standing on a bench in Marquette Park.
There is another, albeit slightly less cinematic possibility. As thrilling

(18:01):
as it is to put the first public rallying cry
of Rockwell's most famous slogan into the mouth of his killer,
I can at least speculate about the identity of the
nameless member of that crowd who may have started the
chant the first time. If nothing else, this is an
opportunity to introduce you more fully to the man who

(18:22):
opened fire on that couple in Maine. In nineteen sixty eight,
the American Nazi Party had an office in Chicago. John
Patler was living in Virginia, where the party had its
headquarters and he flew out to Chicago a week after
Martin Luther King Junior was hit with that rock. But
that first week in August, there were members of the

(18:43):
American Nazi Party in the crowd, and they may have
been the ones to get those chants going. The head
of the Chicago chapter of the American Nazi Party in
nineteen sixty six was a twenty two year old named
Christopher Vidnyevitch. Now you know, I love to be thorough.
I love to make a whole timeline of the lives

(19:04):
of even the most ancillary characters in a story. I
guess I just love wasting my own time. And you know,
I don't believe at face value the biographical details that
I read in Nazi newsletters. But those newsletters make some
extraordinary claims about Vidnyevitch. He says that he joined the

(19:27):
Nazi Party as a teenager because of his burning bone
deep hatred of communists. That's pretty standard, But he says
that he hated communists because they murdered his father, and
it's a claim he would later repeat on the stand
under oath when he testified in his own trial for

(19:48):
shooting at Frank Smith in nineteen sixty eight. So I
did a little of my own digging. It might have
been faster in retrospect, who work backwards by assuming that
he was telling the truth and searching for a man
with that last name who was executed in Yugoslavia after
the war. But that isn't what I did. The first

(20:12):
thing I found were naturalization records for a thirteen year
old boy named Kristo Vidnievitch, and on the back of
the card it was written that his name was changed
to Christopher when he gained his citizenship. And from there
I was able to find a new story from nineteen
fifty seven about a thirteen year old boy named Kristo
Vidniyevitch and his seventeen year old sister taking their oath

(20:36):
of citizenship in a courtroom in Chicago. By the time
they were naturalized, they'd been in the United States for
seven years. In nineteen fifty Lydia Vidnyevitch and her two children,
aged ten and six at the time, were listed as
stateless when they arrived at the port of New York
aboard a ship that had sailed from Germany. So I

(20:56):
kept digging, and I found a document produced by the
Internet National Refugee organization. In nineteen forty eight, Lydyavidnyevitch's application
for refugee status was denied, and the stated reason is
quote petitioner is a crow up woman from Zagreb who
is evacuated by the Germans to Austria in December nineteen

(21:18):
forty four, with a number of other women and children
whose husbands were left behind by reason of their official functions.
Despite the very good impression which applicant has made upon
the board, there are reasons to believe that only the
wives of persons who assisted the Germans were taken care
of by the Wehrmacht. She later filed an appeal and

(21:39):
was ultimately deemed eligible for refugee status because the family
could not be safely repatriated to Yugoslavia due to threats
from someone quote moved by a spirit of revenge for
actions of Petitioner's husband. Well, now I'm committed. I need
to know what the story is here. I'm so far

(22:00):
afield of what I was supposed to be working on,
and there's really no excuse for a digression this long.
But I had to know what it was that this
man had done that might move someone's spirit that way,
So I spent an entire day trying to find and
translate documentation about war crimes tribunals in Yugoslavia. In nineteen

(22:22):
forty five, when Lydia Vidnyevitch spoke to a reporter at
her children's naturalization ceremony, she said that she had last
heard from her husband by letter in May of nineteen
forty five, when he was attempting to cross the border
into Austria. She neglected to mention that his letter was
written shortly after the remnants of the fascist government of

(22:44):
Croatia attempted to flee to Austria and before he was
captured by the British Army and sent back to face
a tribunal. He was executed a month later. Christopher Vidnyevitch's
father wasn't just a Nazi collaborator, he was a war criminal.

(23:05):
Ivan Vitnyevitch was tried alongside several high ranking officials of
the Nazi puppet government that carried out mass murder in
Croatia in the nineteen forties. Lydia told that reporter in
nineteen fifty seven that her husband had been a judge
in Zagreb, but he was a judge in name only.
He was the presiding judge of Zagreb's mobile Court Martial,

(23:28):
an instrument of the Ustasha Rejim's program of mass murder,
these judges roamed the country carrying out show trials. The
trials lasted mere minutes, and the accused had no chance
to speak for himself. The defendant was always guilty and
the sentence was almost always death. He would try dozens

(23:49):
of people at once for crimes as minor as reading
forbidden political pamphlets, or simply for being Serbian or Romani Jewish.
In one afternoon in nineteen forty one, Ivan Vitnyevitch sentenced
one hundred people to die at the Yasenovats concentration camp.

(24:12):
So yes, I guess Christopher Vidnyevitch isn't technically wrong when
he said Communists killed his father, but it was only
after he stood trial for handing down death sentences for
thousands of Jews, Serbs, Roma and political dissidence. A long tangent,

(24:35):
I know, but I think it's worth knowing that one
of the most fervent, violent supporters of Rockwell's Nazi Party,
this young man whipping up crowds that beats civil rights
marchers every weekend all summer in Chicago in nineteen sixty six.
He was a true believer. He wasn't misguided, he wasn't confused.

(24:57):
He knew exactly what it meant to call yourself a Nazi.
He knew exactly what he was advocating for and who
would have to die for him to get it. It
wasn't ironic or edgy or joke when he put on
that swastika armband. He did it to fulfill his father's legacy.

(25:34):
But we were talking about white power. It's Rockwell who
gets credit for the term, even if it was a
TV news anchor who put the words in his head
and his lieutenants who got those crowds to chant it.
In August of nineteen sixty six, Nazis raised hell in Chicago.
After Patler arrived in town on the fourteenth, he and

(25:55):
Vitnyevitch whipped up an angry mob in Marquette Park. One
police officer called the resulting violence the closest thing he'd
ever seen to an all out war. In his rousing
speech from the park bench, John Patler announced to the
crowd that Rockwell himself would be speaking in that very
spot the next weekend. The August twenty first rally was

(26:19):
George Lincoln Rockwell's finest hour. He'd never commanded such an audience,
and he never would again. Sure, he'd spoken to huge
theaters of people, but this was different. Thousands of people
were there not to gawk at the Nazi, not to protest,
not to heckel, but because they wanted to hear him speak.

(26:45):
A few lone hecklers were quickly handled by the crowd,
but the people who were there were enthralled by him.
This was no college auditorium full of curious skeptics and
silent protesters. This was a roaring crowd. And standing atop
his camper with a giant swastika banner draped down the side,

(27:05):
Rockwell capped off his speech by asking the crowd to
yell white power, loud enough for Martin Luther King Junior
to hear them on the other side of town. Over
and over again, he led them in a call in response,
yelling white and basking in the response as thousands of
voices responded power. Years later, when James Mason was writing

(27:33):
the newsletter, they would eventually be collected into the book Siege,
that bible of the modern neo Nazi terrorist He called
this the Apex Moment of the nineteen sixties. But the
magic was short lived. Martin Luther King Junior moved on
from Chicago to other cities, and it turned out the
racist white people of Chicago didn't actually like George Lincoln Rockwell.

(27:59):
They just really hate the civil rights movement. But it
was proof still for Rockwell that white power was the
way forward. By the end of nineteen sixty six, Rockwell
was drafting his final book, White Power, although he had
no way of knowing he would die just days before
it was released. On January first, nineteen sixty seven, he

(28:21):
issued a formal announcement to party members that they were rebranding.
The American Nazi Party would from that day forward be
called the National Socialist White People's Party. The mandatory sea
khuiles would be replaced with shouts of white power. In
the director of announcing the change, Rockwell wrote quote, we

(28:43):
must strive among our white family of people to include
all and alienate no white non Jews. He was commanding
his Nazis to stand shoulder to shoulder and to accept
as equals lesser whites. Not everyone shared the commander's vision.

(29:05):
There was a growing schism within the party, those who
accepted this new commitment to a pan white unity, and
those who could never accept any departure from a strict
interpretation of Hitler's racial philosophy of Varian superiority. This new
expanded definition of whiteness was offensive to Nazi hardliners and

(29:28):
factions formed. For men like Mattias Cole and William Luther Piers.
It was unthinkable that lesser races like Slavs or Greeks
could be included in the party's ranks, and John Patler,
the son of Greek immigrants, with his dark hair and
his dark eyes, became the living, breathing manifestation of this

(29:50):
heresy that was threatening to tear the organization apart. William
Luther Piers hated John Patler. That's important to remember as
we move into the messy work of trying to sort
fact from fiction. In everyone's account of what happened in
the weeks before Rockwell was murdered, Pierce was not shy

(30:11):
about the fact that he was disgusted by Patler's presence
in the party. Even decades later, not long before his
own death in two thousand and two, heerce recalled to
his own biographer that Patler was a quote dark, greasy
looking little guy, and he was always scheming. Rockwell was

(30:33):
fully committed to his new vision. He was contemplating another
run for office, and this approach had the potential to
broaden his appeal. America is full of racists, He'd led
them on marches up and down the streets of Chicago.
But no matter how racist they are, no matter how

(30:53):
many beliefs they share with Rockwell, a huge chunk of
voting age men in America in nineteen sixty six had
the living memory of fighting the Nazis in World War Two.
No amount of shared racism could overcome their visceral disgust
for the swastika on his shoulder, even if they hated

(31:16):
Jews as much as he did. But replacing the swastika
with an eagle, swapping the sea kile for white power,
and preaching a message of white unity, of white power
in this time of a hysterical white fear of black power,
that could help him get his message to the masses.

(31:38):
That could earn him thousands of new followers. But he
was painfully aware of the need to convince the followers
he already had. First, he couldn't afford to lose them.
Rockwell urged John Patler to be patient, to be diplomatic,
to let the commander handle it, but Patler was still

(32:03):
the same volatile, paranoid man he'd been a decade earlier,
when a court ordered psychiatric evaluation ominously predicted that he
may one day commit murder. So tensions were high at
the Nazi Party barracks. Perhaps if he'd kept his head down,
Rockwell would have eventually achieved party discipline on the new messaging,

(32:25):
but instead Patler stoked conflict. He was reprimanded for calling
another Stormtrooper a blue eyed devil. He fell behind on
his duties as publisher of Stormtrooper, the party's quarterly magazine,
and as the man in charge of the printing press.
He dragged his feet when Rockwell ordered him to assist

(32:45):
Willie Luther Pearce in producing Pearce's new publication called National
Socialist World. Aside from the existing racial animosity between them,
it seems like Patler saw National Socialist World as a
competitor to The Stormtrooper, which was his magazine, and with
Pierce on the scene with his own publication, he was

(33:06):
worried that he would lose favor that he would lose power.
When Rockwell assigned another party member to assist Patler at
the printing press since he was falling so behind in
his work, Patler turned the man away and wouldn't let
him in the building because that man's views fell more
on the pro Nordic side of the schism. So he's

(33:28):
causing problems on purpose, and he's got a bad attitude,
and he doesn't have a lot of people on his side.
The only person really on his side through all of
this is George Lincoln Rockwell, so that counts for a lot.
But he's becoming a liability. The breaking point finally came

(33:50):
in March of nineteen sixty seven. The last straw is
never really the most significant one, but when Rockwell arrived
back home in Virginia after a court appearance in Chicago,
he found Paller had once again left his post without permission.
He'd been shirking his duties for months, sometimes disappearing for
a week at a time without telling anyone. During Rockwall's

(34:13):
Midwest college speaking tour over the winter, the pair had
argued when Patler demanded money for airfare to fly home
to take care of his father in law, who he
said was ill. Rockwell gave in that time, but Patler
had abused the commander's leniency for the last time. Biographies
of Rockwell characterized the memo drafted on March thirtieth, nineteen

(34:36):
sixty seven, as an ordered dismissing Patler from the party.
But I've read it and I don't agree. The two
page document bears the subject modification of duties. Of the
thirteen numbered paragraphs, the first seven outlines the reason Patler

(34:57):
is being disciplined. He's been at sent from his post
without permission. He's only produced two issues of Stormtrooper over
the past year. He's abusing his editorial control of the
magazine by printing statements without Rockwell's sign off. Pretty straightforward stuff,
But the tone shifts when Rockwell gets to the thing
that's actually bothering him. Quote. You have continuously produced catastrophic

(35:23):
division and hatred between party members, berated other party officers
in the presence of troops, allowed your personal life to
cause the disaffection of workers in the party to the
point of near explosion, particularly in Chicago. And you have
done precisely the same thing you did last time before
you ran out on the party with Dan Burroughs to
try to set up your own party. You have agitated
and irritated everybody around you until I have on my

(35:45):
hands a series of near mutinies and upheavals. He seems bothered.
Rockwell goes on to say that he will no longer
tolerate the disruption of Patler's quote damnable, constant emphasis on
the dark's verse, life's controversy, and his quote irrational inferiority
complex over being Greek and dark. He says that none

(36:09):
of that matters to him. He's always been committed to
white unity. It's Patler who's making this a problem. I
don't know why everyone's surprised that there's racism at the
Nazi Party headquarters, but that was the problem. But he

(36:38):
doesn't dismiss Patler from the party. That's not what this
letter says. Quote. You have left me no honorable choice
but to discipline you as severely as it is in
my power short of ejecting you from the party. I
could also do that, but I do recognize your value
to the cause and your dedication there two. The discipline

(37:04):
he imposed was definitely humiliating, for sure. Rockwell sent Mattia's
coal to cut the lock off Patler's bedroom door at
the party's property in Spotsylvania County, which he knew would
bother Patler because the men hated each other. But Patler
was only relieved of his duties at the printing press.

(37:25):
He was reassigned to live at the party's barracks in Arlington,
where he would continue to edit and publish Stormtrooper Magazine
under Rockwell's direct personal supervision. Honestly, it's barely a punishment.
Patler hated being assigned to the Spotsylvania property. It was
way out in the country and far from his family.

(37:47):
That's part of why he kept leaving his post. Moving
back to Arlington would put him closer to his family.
By this time, he'd married his second wife and they
had two young sons. But he did not take the
letter well. Despite what looks to me like a clear

(38:07):
statement that he's not kicked out of the party, Patler
walked away. Surviving letters that Patler wrote to another member
of the party in April and may do show that
he was angry. He was angry with Rockwell, he was
angry with the party. It was a lot like when
he walked away in nineteen sixty one with Dan Burrows.

(38:29):
You know, he spent a few months cursing Rockwell's name,
and he got over it. They'd been through this before.
They'd known each other for nearly a decade. Hatler was
one of Rockwell's very first followers, and aside from all
the times that he did quit, he was loyal. They

(38:49):
were close, and Rockwell had always forgiven him before, and
it seems Patler was willing to forgive too. In one letter,
he wrote that summer he not only forgave Rockwell for
sleeping with his wife, he gave the commander his blessing
to continue the affair if he wanted to, writing, if

(39:10):
Alice wants to make it with you, I wouldn't object.
That's the truth. In his final letter to Rockwell, Patler wrote,
I feel so much better after talking to you. I
want so badly to get back into the spirit of
things and push for you all the way. I don't
think there are two people on earth who think and

(39:32):
feel the same as we do. You are a very
important part of my life. I need you as much
as you need me. Without you, there is no future.
There's no evidence that Rockwell ever wrote back, but Christopher
Vidnyevitch testified at trial that Rockwell directed him to meet

(39:52):
with Patler several times that summer to discuss reconciliation. Contrary
to the tone of Patler's own letters, Vidnyevitch paints a
picture of a spiteful, bitter man plotting revenge, claiming Patler
told him quote Rockwell is an evil genius and he
must be stopped.

Speaker 2 (40:13):
Now.

Speaker 1 (40:13):
I should be clear with you before we go any further.
John Patler murdered George Lincoln Rockwell. He did. He was
convicted at trial, which makes it legally true. But is
it true? I think so based on my own reading
of the evidence against him, I'm convinced the jury reached
the correct verdict. Patler himself has never accepted responsibility for

(40:38):
the crime, and there are a handful of holdouts with
conspiracy theories to this day. But on the question of
who pulled the trigger, I have no doubt that it
was John Patler. So that's not why I spent days
trying to itemize these small discrepancies in every recorded account
of the events leading of to Rockwell's death. I'm not

(41:00):
searching for an alternate suspect I'm just curious about what
people might be trying to gain by muddying the truth.
Because everyone is every account of what happened after that
memo in March has to be weighed against the motivations
of the man telling the story. Take Vidnyevitch, for example.

(41:23):
His trial testimony is the only source for the claim
that Rockwell asked him to meet with Patler in June.
But why would Rockwell assign that task to Vidnyevitch. The
pair had worked closely together in Chicago the summer before,
but Vidnievitch was firmly in the Aryan superiority camp in
this schism. He was with Matias Kohle. He was a

(41:46):
fanatical racist. He joined the American Nazi Party to follow
in the footsteps of his father, a Nazi collaborator and
a Croatian nationalist who was executed for his role in
the ethnic cleansing of Serbs. He would have been a
poor choice to extend the olive branch to Patler that summer,

(42:07):
but his testimony at trial was convincing enough that when
the Supreme Court of Virginia upheld Patler's conviction, Vignievitch's testimony
that Patler had made those threats in June was the
only evidence they cited as a motive. And then we
have Matias Cole, who said that when he was watching
Patler pack his things after being relieved of his duties

(42:28):
at the Spotsylvanian property, he just kept muttering over and
over again, He's making a mistake. He'll be sorry. An
ominous statement, to be sure, if he said it. But
Cole is also the source of claims made just hours
after Rockwell's death that Patler had been expelled from the

(42:50):
party because of his Bolshevik leanings because Communist thought kept
creeping into his work. Matias Cole had been the loudest
voice within the party against Rockwell's shift away from Hitler's
ideas about Germanic racial purity, a matter he rectified when
he seized control of the party immediately after Rockwell's death.

(43:14):
I know that sounds like I'm trying to present alternate
suspects and conspiracy theories. I'm not Hatler did it, but
in their attempts to keep their own secrets and to
write politically advantageous versions of history, they created the perfect
conditions for conspiracy theories that will never die. I never

(43:38):
get as far as I think I'm going to when
I start writing an episode. I skimmed over the entirety
of nineteen sixty four nineteen sixty five so I could
get to the end of this murder trial. And I
haven't even gotten to the murder itself yet. And I
guess I'll never have a chance to tell you about
all those weird FBI memos I found from various members

(43:59):
of the American Nazi contacting the FBI to accuse each
other of killing JFK. Some other day, maybe, But there
was just something so intriguing to me about this internal
struggle over the optics of white power. Rockwell wasn't getting

(44:20):
soft on racism in nineteen sixty six. He was trying
to find a practical way to inflict that racism on
a wider audience. He still believed in killing every Jewish, homosexual,
and black person in the country when he finally got power.
He was just refining the sales pitch to increase the

(44:42):
odds that he'd get that power. And John Patler wasn't
kicked out of the party for being a communist. If anything,
he was the member of the party most closely aligned
with Rockwell. Plenty of people hated George Lincoln rock Well.
People hated him for being a Nazi. Nazis hated him

(45:04):
for failing to live up to Hitler's legacy. But the
man who shot him, he didn't hate him at all.
Next week, George Lincoln Rockwell will die. There's no way
that episode doesn't get to the big moment I've been
working up to all this time. Rockwell gets shot, Patler

(45:25):
goes to trial, and the Nazis left in their wake
get to work trying to rewrite history and claim Rockwell's legacy.
And I promise I haven't forgotten that strange little incident.
It's last week, but maybe it's for the best that
I didn't make it up to nineteen seventy six. I

(45:46):
meant to drive across town this week to double check
my recollection. When John Patler was arrested for trespassing. The
news story listed the address, and I swear to God,
I think I went to a couple of parties in
college at the house where John Patler once got caught
having an orgy. There really is something cursed about Charlottesville.

(46:27):
Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media
and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lieuchdmann and Robert Evans. The
show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan that
the music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email
me at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com.
I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer.
It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the

(46:49):
show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one
of my Weird Little Guys