October 9, 2025 • 46 mins
When the commander of the American Nazi Party died, he left instructions with his successor. He wanted the military funeral he was entitled to as an American veteran. It didn't go well.
Sources:
https://snccdigital.org/events/protests-danville-virginia/
https://www.thejc.com/life/lawyer-who-helped-a-loving-couple-nn57y8ct
https://www.newsobserver.com/news/nation-world/national/article120224913.html
https://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/philip_hirschkop_peta_social_justice
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/08/21/the-shadow-of-an-assassinated-american-nazi-commander-hangs-over-charlottesville/
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.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Col Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
In the summer of nineteen sixty four, a recent law
school graduate was sitting down for a meeting with one
of his former professors, Philip Hirshcopp had worked his way
through Georgetown Law as a patent examiner, but even before graduation,
he knew he was never going to be a patent attorney.
While he was still a student, he met civil rights
attorney Dean Rob at a party the summer before his
(00:26):
last year of law school, who traveled with Rob to Danville,
Virginia to help defend the civil rights demonstrators arrested in
the aftermath of Bloody Monday, a particularly brutal state response
to protests for racial equality. By the time he graduated
law school, Hirshkopp was already working on a case that
would protect the right of public school teachers to engage
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in civil rights protests in their personal time. And on
that afternoon in nineteen sixty four, as he was chatting
with his old professor, another of the professor's former students
stopped by. Bernie Cohen had been working on a civil
rights case in Virginia for more than a year already,
but he was looking for some help. It was a
(01:07):
perfect coincidence maybe that Philip Pershkopp was there that day,
and the pair spent the next several years working together
on the case. In April of nineteen sixty seven, just
three years out of law school, Philip Phershkopp stood before
the Supreme Court of the United States and argued on
behalf of his clients, Mildred and Richard Loving, you have
(01:28):
before us.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
Today we consider the most odious of the segregations laws
and the slavery laws.
Speaker 4 (01:33):
And our view of this law, and we hope could
clearly show is that this is slavery.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
A few months after winning the right to interracial marriage
for not only the Lovings but all Americans, Philip Hirshkopp
took on a very different kind of client. He agreed
to represent the American Nazi Party. I'm Molly Conger, this
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is weird little guys. Philip Hushcopp is not our weird
(02:21):
little guy. But the case he took on in the
fall of nineteen sixty seven concerns the corpse of George
Lincoln Rockwell. Hirshcop's career as a civil rights attorney spanned decades.
He won the case that forced the University of Virginia
to admit female students. He won a case that outlawed
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the common practice of placing pregnant teachers on unpaid leave.
He defended the right to teach evolution in schools. He
represented thousands of demonstrators arrested for protesting the Vietnam War,
including novelist Norman Mayler. He was an outspoken advocate for
prison reform. In his his later years, he worked on
cases for animal rights, representing PETA for many years. He
(03:05):
is listed as the council of record for Tillicum the
Whale in a twenty twelve lawsuit against SeaWorld. Taking on
the American Nazi Party as a client seems out of
step with the rest of his career. In a twenty
seventeen article in the American Bar Association Journal, he says
he turned the case down when it was first presented
to him, but his colleagues at the American Civil Liberties
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Union pressured him. It was a matter of free speech,
was it not. It comes up every now and again
on this show that the ACLU has a long standing
habit of representing American fascists. They call it a principled
commitment to constitutional rights. Regardless of how odious the speaker
or how unpleasant the speech. Personally, I would call it
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shortsighted at best, and more often than not, a dangerous, foolish,
and morally bankrupt course of action, And I'm sure they
would defend my right to say it. Real life doesn't
have the same clean rules as a hypothetical scenario in
a bar exam question. In theory, defending the rights of
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everyone equally should result in more equal rights for everyone.
In practice, it would seem that the only reward you
get for honing your enemy's weapon is the blood on
your face the next time he strikes you. Here in Charlottesville,
none of us have forgotten how the acl use eleventh
hour defense of the organizers of the Unite the Right
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rally led to the violence in our streets less than
a day later. They defended the rights of those neo
Nazis to demonstrate in the heart of downtown, and in turn,
those Nazis used that right to violate the rights of
everyone they encountered. But I'm sure I'll have an opportunity
to talk more about the ACLU's history of defending the
(04:52):
indefensible some other time. In that article, in twenty seventeen.
Hirschkob says his own parents refused to speak to him
for two years after he represented the American Nazi Party.
But what exactly did those Nazis need his help with.
The ACLU had gone to bat for the American Nazi
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Party before they represented George Lincoln Rockwell when the New
York City Parks Commissioner denied him a permit to speak
in nineteen sixty and the ACLU came to Rockwell's aid
again when a group of Jewish war veterans sought an
injunction to prevent him from leading another Nazi march in
Chicago after the violent assault his stormtroopers unleashed in Marquette
Park in nineteen sixty six. But in the fall of
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nineteen sixty seven, the ACLU couldn't very well represent George
Lincoln Rockwell IVI. George Lincoln Rockwell was dead. This case
was about his dead body. You see, George Lincoln Rockwell
was a veteran. He was technically entitled to a military
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funeral and burial in a national cemetery. As the leader
of the American Nazi Party. He'd called himself Commander Rockwell,
and that wasn't just an affectation. He had reached the
rank of commander in the United States Navy. The man
who believed that he was America's hitler had technically served
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honorably in World War II. Rockwell joined the Navy after
dropping out of Brown University in nineteen forty, and he
was commissioned as a naval aviator just days after the
attack on Pearl Harbor. He never flew any combat missions,
but he served in both the Battle of the Atlantic
and in the Pacific Theater. By the end of the war,
he was a lieutenant commander, a rank he held as
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a reserve officer until he was recalled to active duty
during the Korean War. He returned to reserve status at
the rank of commander in nineteen fifty four. Before we
get into the battle to bury Rockwell with military honors,
I should answer a question you might be asking. I mean,
I was asking it. Could he possibly have been eligible
(07:02):
for this? He was discharged from the Navy in nineteen
sixty and that discharge was absolutely explicitly because he was
a Nazi. Parading around in a Nazi uniform is the
kind of thing that gets you a dishonorable discharge, surely
right in this case.
Speaker 5 (07:24):
No.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
By the late nineteen fifties, Rockwell was making a name
for himself as an anti semit. In nineteen fifty nine,
he set up shop just outside of Washington, d c.
And he was holding frequent demonstrations in the nation's capital.
There he was declaring himself the head of the American
Nazi Party, wearing a swastika armband, passing out hateful literature
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right outside the White House, and some of his fellow
veterans were understandably disgusted. In nineteen fifty nine, irritated by
a series of unflattering articles digging into his less public affairs,
Rockwell filed a libel lawsuit against columnist Drew Pearson. During
a deposition in that case, Rockwell said, quote, here in
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this country, I have the right to pass out literature.
If anyone tries to stop me, the police protect me.
I was in the Navy once. When people complain to
the Navy about me, the Navy says, that's okay. He
has a right to belong to a political party, and
he wasn't wrong as a reservist. He wasn't really the
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Navy's problem. It's not that they didn't know what he
was up to. They did. Even before those weekly rallies
in DC put him in the public spotlight, the government
had been keeping an eye on him. By the spring
of nineteen fifty nine, the FBI was monitoring his bank accounts,
surveilling his home, receiving photo copies of the exterior of
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every piece of mail he sent or received, and for
several months that year they were intercepting all of his
household garbage. But Jay Edgar Hoover's neuroses didn't necessarily concern
the Navy. Rockwell hadn't been on active duty for years,
and according to a statement from a Navy spokesman, he
wasn't subject to the Uniform Code of Military Conduct while
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on inactive status. But the stunts continued. And remember this
is nineteen sixty. World War II is not some distant past.
It's not a piece of history. If you stop by
your local VFW halt today, you might see a couple
of very old Vietnam veterans. But in nineteen sixty, the
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men hanging out at the veterans of foreign war posts
had very fresh memories of fighting the Nazis in Europe,
and they were starting to make noise. In January of
nineteen sixty, the Fairfax County Virginia VFW adopted a resolution
by unanimous vote to ask the Navy to strip Rockwell
of his rank. The ADL was complaining to the press
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the Jewish Labor Committee was making public demands for an
investigation by the Attorney General. After their initial public statements
that as a reservist, Rockwell's political activities were the free
speech of a private citizen, the Navy changed their minds.
There's no clear public statement pointing to exactly what it
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was that changed their minds, but it seems like all
the public attention had escalated the issue to the point
that it was now a problem in need of a solution.
The Navy sent Rockwell a letter notifying him that his
quote mobilization potential has been reduced to a point where
he is of no further value to the Navy, and
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they called him to appear before a board of officers
in DC. In February of nineteen sixty, a Navy spokesman
told the press that proceedings to discharge reserve officers are
not of a public nature, so I don't have any
primary source documentation from their end As to what charges
Rockwell was defending himself against, But I do have the
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statement he presented to the Navy in his own defense.
According to this bizarre eight page letter, the proceedings concerned
five primary allegations that he had been quote an active
participant and leader of various organizations styled along Nazi lines.
That he had quote publicly and openly espoused race and
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religious hatred. That he had used or permitted to be
used his rank and status in the Naval Reserve in
printed matter distributed to the public fostering rachel and religious hatred.
That he had left the United States without permission from
the Navy, and that as an officer, if he were
to be recalled to duty, he would be commanding members
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of the races and religions at which his propaganda was aimed.
He admitted guilt on just one of the charges. He
had left the United States in late night teen fifty
nine to visit his estranged wife in Iceland. He promised
it would never happen again, which was probably true. That
was the last time he ever saw his second wife.
(12:11):
As for the rest of it, well, he felt like
they were being very unfair to him. Is it even
really hatred if the people you hate deserve it, He wrote, quote,
I have never promoted or advocated hate, except of traitors
or subverters and others deserving of the hate of all
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decent moral people. After a few pages of rambling vitriol
about how Jewish people are responsible for the evils of
communism and really, isn't he actually more loyal to the
United States because he's so committed to rooting out their influence,
he caps things off by saying he's never promoted unfounded
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hatred of any innocent person or group. He brought two
witnesses with him to the hearing, a member of the
American Nazi Party who testified that the group didn't support
hatred or violence, and a weird old Holocaust denier who
gave a forty minute speech accusing the Assistant Secretary of
Defense of being a communist. The board voted unanimously to
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discharge Rockwell, but this was purely administrative. He wasn't court martialed,
wasn't punished or disciplined or demoted. He wasn't on active duty,
so again, technically, when he died in nineteen sixty seven,
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George Lincoln Rockwell was a United States Navy veteran who
had been honorably discharged after nineteen years of service, and
apparently he wanted a full military funeral. George Lincoln Rockwell
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died at noon on Friday, August twenty fifth, nineteen sixty seven.
His family had not shared his politics, and they'd mostly
fallen out of touch. His parents divorced when he was
a child, but at the time of his death they
were both still alive. His father told reporters that he'd
seen less and less of his son in the final
(14:28):
years of his life, saying, quote, He'd always have those
bloody stormtroopers around him, and we could never talk, so
the visit stopped. His brother had cut off contact nearly
a decade earlier, when newspapers reported a possible connection between
Rockwell and the bombing of a synagogue in Atlanta. His
mother and sister kept in touch by letter over the years,
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but they saw each other infrequently. But now he was dead.
In family, his family, he'd been their son, their brother.
After the autopsy was performed, his body waited in the
hospital Morgue. His father got on a train from Maine
and headed south. Matius Cole, having assumed command of the
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American Nazi party claimed to be in possession of a
last will and testament that entrusted him personally with Rockwell's remains.
Rockwell's brother Bobby said the family wished to have a
private service in the small town in Maine where they'd
spent their childhood. And just a quick interjection here in
case anyone was wondering about this, I've been saying, and
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we'll continue to say Cole Matius Cole. His name is German,
and it's spelled k o e h L. In German,
it would be something closer to kerl, but English speakers
tend to read that as coal, so that's what I
settled on. But apparently he pronounced it kale. Here's Frank
(16:00):
Smith talking about it back in the sixties.
Speaker 5 (16:03):
Matthias Kale. Now I don't know where he gets the
name Kale. I think the German pronunciation would be curl
and the little translation in English would be coal, and
I don't think that's acceptable to him. So somehow are
these get kale unless I'm wrong on a German pronunciation.
For any way, it's kale. That's how he goes using
his name.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
Frank's close enough on the German pronunciation but it doesn't
mean coal. It's closest to the German word for cabbage,
but it's not a word at all. It's just a
last name that probably originated as an occupational name for
someone who grows crops. Anyway, Coal, Curl, Kale, whatever you
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want to call him, He's the guy in charge of
the American Nazi Party. After Rockwell's death on Saturday, the
body was moved to the funeral home. Bobby Rockwell told
reporters that the family was probably going to have to
get a lawyer to fight Cole for custody of the remains.
But just a day later, the same newspapers reported that
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the funeral home in Virginia had received a telegram from
the family, and it read only the family no longer
wishes to contest the claim of Matt Cole concerning his
right to make funeral arrangements for g Lincoln Rockwell. Bobby
Rockwell told reporters that the family had made the difficult
decision for personal reasons and offered no further explanation. Years later,
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Rockwell's biographer, Frederick Simonelli, interviewed one of Rockwell's cousins, and
the picture became a little bit clearer. The family gave
up the fight for Rockwall's body because they were afraid
Matias Cole had threatened to stage demonstrations outside Rockwell's mother's home.
She was in her seventies and living alone in an
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apartment in a predominantly Jewish Brooklyn neighborhood. Nothing good could
come from provoking the Nazis, so they relented. The Nazis
could have the body. On Monday, three days after the murder,
as John Patler was being reigned for that murder in
an Arlington courtroom, Matia's coal was busy making funeral arrangements.
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The Pentagon granted the burial permit. They had no valid
reason to deny the application. Rockwell had served in two
wars and received an honorable discharge. He'd never been convicted
of a crime more serious than disorderly conduct, and he'd
never been formally linked to any group on the government's
list of subversive organizations. For some reason, the American Nazi
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Party was never on that list. Decorated veterans who'd been
dragged through the mud of McCarthyism were denied burial and
national cemeteries for being Communists, but the Nazi he was
good to go. They would allow George Lincoln Rockwell to
be interred in a national cemetery, but there would be conditions.
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The letter Rockwell left coal with his final wishes requested
burial at Arlington National Cemetery. The government said they could
have any cemetery but Arlington, so they settled on nearby
Culpeper National Cemetery in central Virginia. The Navy did not
agree to the request that the military honor guard consists
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only of white officers. They said they would get whoever
was available, and in the end no honor guard showed
up at all. And while they would allow Rockwell's corpse
to be dressed in a Nazi uniform inside the coffin,
they would not allow any visible display of Nazi iconography,
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no Nazi flags, no Swastika armbands. The official statement from
the Department of Defense read, unseemly demonstrations such as the
wearing of the un insignia and emblems, or the display
of flags or banners of the American Nazi Party or
its members will not be permitted in ceremonies at a
national cemetery. A national cemetery is a permanent shrine in
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honor of the dead of the armed Forces of this country.
Burial ceremonies must be conducted with dignity and with proper
concern for the sensibilities of those whose loved ones lie there.
The rules were relayed to Coal on Monday afternoon, and
the funeral was scheduled for eleven a m On Tuesday morning.
As long as the Nazis wore normal clothes and behaved
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like normal mourners, they could have a perfectly normal funeral
at Culpeper National Cemetery On Monday evening. Cole told reporters
that they intended to give George Lincoln Rockwell the kind
of funeral he would have wanted, and the army was
ready for them. The funeral procession left Arlington at nine
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am Tuesday morning, accompanied by a police escort from the
Arlington County Police. In a later issue of Stormtrooper magazine,
the Nazis claimed this procession was made up of sixty vehicles,
but most news accounts put the number of total mourners
at around fifty, so that can't be right. The line
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of cars was led by a white Cadillac convertible full
of men in Nazi uniforms. Matius Cole rode in the
front seat of the hearse, which was decorated with a
giant red swastika wreath. I wonder if they assumed they
would be allowed to break the rules. Did they think
that there would be no one on scene to ensure
they were following the guidelines, Or did they think that
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whoever was there to see them breaking the rules wouldn't
be willing or able to stop them, Or were they
hoping for a confrontation. Whatever it was they expected, I
don't think it was bus loads of military police with
helicopters full of even more soldiers landing in nearby fields.
When they arrived in Caper at ten thirty am, the
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entrance to the cemetery was blocked by state and local police.
The poor funeral home employee who got stuck driving the
hearse that day must have been fairly rattled by the
whole experience. He was so surprised at the line of
officers that he stopped the hearse directly over the train
tracks as a freight train was approaching. By all accounts,
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there were mere seconds and inches between this near miss
and an accident that would have rendered the whole thing moot.
When the train passed Cole stepped out of the hearse.
He wasn't wearing a Nazi uniform, just a plain black suit,
and he was clutching Rockwell's personal copy of Mind Komf
in his hands. The cemetery superintendent explained to him that
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if they would all agree to remove their Nazi armbands
and Swastika lapel pens and put away the giant swastika wreaths,
they would be free to enter the cemetery and conduct
the funeral. As the cemetery superintendent is trying to negotiate
with this crowd to get them to take off their
Nazi armbands, reinforcements were already on their way. The Army
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Provost Marshal Major General Carl Turner arrived by helicopter along
with dozens of military policemen and US marshals. So this
small crowd of maybe fifty Nazis was surrounded by dozens
of reporters, one hundred police officer, hundreds of curious spectators
milling around the edges, and the standoff that followed would
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last six hours. Shortly after General Turner arrived, the first
arrest was made. He noticed that one of the soldiers
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in uniform outside the cemetery. Gates hadn't arrived with him.
This soldier wasn't standing in line with the others. He
was chatting casually with the Nazis standing around the hearse.
Private first Class James de Witt told the general he'd
been granted emergency leave from his post at Fort Gordon
in Georgia to attend the funeral of a friend. General Turner,
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who was also out of Fort Gordon, reactivated the soldier
on the spot, which is apparently a thing a general
can do, and had him taken into custody for violating
uniform regulations for the black armband he was wearing, and
for violating regulations prohibiting soldiers from participating in political demonstrations
in uniform. As military policeman dragged James de Witt away,
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he shouted racial slurs at nearby black onlookers and threw
a Nazi salute for the news cameras. As he passed
a gaggle of reporters. He said, I'd like to take
this uniform off and throw it away. The military stinks
and I'm ashamed to be a part of it. It
turned out that de Witt had not been granted leave.
He was a wall from Fort Gordon. He'd enlisted in
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the Army a yar year earlier, but he'd been a
member of the American Nazi Party for two years. For
another hour or so, everyone just stood there at the
cemetery gates, waiting for someone else to break The funeral
scheduled start time of eleven am came and went around noon.
The Nazis were getting antsy. I wonder if they forgot
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to pack lunches. The exact sequence of events is different
in almost every single account I could find, even the
archival video footage I found this strange fifteen minutes of
TV news b roll looks like it was cut together
out of order. I wish I could have gotten my
hands on a copy of the Army's after action report,
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because I think that would have helped pin down the specifics.
I know the report exists. It's referenced in a footnote
in a book about the use of the military and
domestic disorders in the twentieth century published by the Army's
Center for Military History, But I couldn't find any trace
of the actual report. So, in the absence of certainty,
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here's my best guess at piecing together thirty different reporters recollections.
One thing I found in that compilation of TV news
footage that I didn't actually find written up in any
of the reporting is this odd exchange between General Turner
and a man I recognize in the footage as Douglas Niles.
Speaker 5 (26:29):
Charge will react, I have no idea a federal arrest.
Speaker 3 (26:33):
I'm a federal arrest marshall, And will.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
The charge be threat batter?
Speaker 3 (26:40):
I don't know what it will mean.
Speaker 2 (26:43):
If you can make it out over the helicopter noise.
That's Nazi funeral attendee and American Nazi Party member Douglas Niles,
and he's asking General Turner what someone might be charged
with if they did choose to disobey the orders of
the military police and attempt to enter the cemetery without
removing their swastikas. He didn't get a straight answer, but
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he must have felt reasonably assured that it would be
something minor like trespassing, because he then made the decision
to escalate the situation again. I'm doing my best to
put these pieces in order, and this isn't in the
video I found, But according to a write up in
the Washington Daily News, the crowd gets rowdy. They're screaming
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taunts at the officers and at General Turner in particular,
and Niles jumps up onto the hood of the hearse
and he's shouting, you ain't gonna stop me, you two
star communists, swine, let's go. And as he's standing there
on the hood of the hearse screaming at the General,
the hearse starts to roll slowly forward and it bumps
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gently into the General. I don't know what Douglas Niles
thought would happen, but as he's lunging forward into the
line of military police, they just grab him and drag
him away. Christopher Vignyevitch seemed emboldened by this shift in
the energy of the crowd, and he tried to keep
the momentum going. If you're not keeping careful track of
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all the side characters. Bidnyevitch was the twenty three year
old head of the American Nazi Party's Chicago office. He
immigrated to the United States as a child after his
father was executed for war crimes. He committed as a
Nazi collaborator in Croatia. He joined the American Nazi Party
as a teenager. He testified against John Patler in the
murder trial, and his testimony that Patler had made threatening
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comments about Rockwell in the months before the murder was
seen as particularly convincing evidence by an appeals court. At
Rockwell's funeral, Bidnyevitch was one of just six mourners who
arrived dressed in a full Nazi uniform. He was to
be one of the pallbearers, and so as Doug Niles
is being hauled off by the military policeman, Vidnyevitch now
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jumps up onto the hearse and he's standing on the
roof of the v vehicle shouting, you see what the
Jews are doing. They're keeping us out of here. It's
Jewish power. What we need is white power. And after
he whips the crowd into a frenzy with a couple
of sieguiles and a couple of Hyle Hitler's, vin Yevitch
jumped down from the hearse and charged directly into the
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line of military policemen. I think he thought everyone was
behind him, but they weren't. As he was being taken
into custody, a single Nazi half heartedly broke ranks and
tried to follow him. Mike Stewart is listed in the
newspaper as being sixteen or seventeen years old, and it
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says that he lives with a guardian in Spotslovania County,
although he'd been arrested at a Nazi Party rally in
Chicago a year earlier, and in nineteen sixty six he
told police he was eighteen. An issue of the party's
magazine says Stewart had been living at the party's printing
facility in Spotsylvania for six months, having transferred from the
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Chicago office. How old he actually was at the time
of either arrest isn't clear, but it does seem likely
that he was a miner, and you have to wonder
if his parents knew where he was, if they knew
he was living in a converted hen house under the
supervision of a couple of middle aged Nazis. After that
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flurry of arrests, the crowd quieted down again. Matias Cole,
who'd been sitting inside of the hearse for most of
the morning, got out and had a private meeting with
General Turner in a nearby maintenance shed. The Army's position
had not changed. They could hold the funeral if they
could follow the rules, if they took off the swastikas.
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They would be allowed to enter the cemetery and bury
Rockwell in the open grave that was waiting for him.
If they were dead set on keeping the swastikas on,
they would not be allowed pass the gates. But they
were running out of time to decide if they were
willing to compromise. The grave diggers shift ended at fourth
thirty PM, and cemetery regulations don't allow a coffin to
(31:04):
sit in an open grave overnight. If they were going
to put him in the ground, they had to do
it before three point thirty to ensure there was enough
time to fill the hole. When three point thirty rolled around,
nothing had changed.
Speaker 4 (31:19):
Fifteen managed to comply with the instructions and the regulations
prescribed for burial at this ceremony. It is now fifteen
thirty hours.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
In William Schmaltz's biography of Rockwell, the exchange that followed
is written to be much more dramatic than I think
it really was. General Turner reiterates the requirements for burial,
and Schmaltz includes Cole's reply in the form of a
direct quote, and the quote is verbatim correct, but in
the book he puts exclamation points in it, and he
(31:58):
wrote that Cole was shouting when he replied. The video, though,
does not show a bombastic, defiant Nazi leader. It's a weary,
defeated man.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
The body cannot be brought in under those circumstances. I
will have remained custodian of the body wherever it may
be with or cheered, but I cannot allow it to
be buried against the express wishes of matter Rockland.
Speaker 2 (32:28):
At three thirty, General Turner gave them fifteen minutes, and
that deadline came and went. The Nazis did nothing with
their last fifteen minutes.
Speaker 3 (32:39):
The Department of Army has withdrawn approval for the burial
of George Lincoln Rockwell in this cemetery.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
At three forty five, the General announced that the Army
had withdrawn its approval for the burial. If they wanted
to bury Rockwell in a national cemetery, they couldn't do
it today and they would have to apply for a
new burial permit. For a funeral on another day, a
Culpeper County Justice of the Peace grabbed the bullhorn and
announced to the crowd that there would be no funeral
here today, and he told everyone to go home, and
(33:16):
remarkably they did. The whole day can really only be
described as weird. I'm not just saying that because that's
(33:39):
in the name of the show. It really was the
only word people could think of to describe what they
had seen that day. The Associated Press story about the
whole affair appeared in newspapers across the country, but with
slightly different headlines from paper to paper, headlines like Rockwell
unburied after end of weird day in Culpeper, Nazi unburied
(34:02):
after a weird day. Rockwell would have liked his weird
Nazi funeral weird performance rockwell burial delayed his unfinished funeral
weird scene. I think my favorite one of these headlines
is Rockwell's non funeral weird event. Newspaper editors everywhere agreed
(34:28):
that shit was weird. Defeated, the Nazis drove the hour
and a half back to Arlington with the commander's corpse.
James DeWitt, the young soldier arrested while absent without leave,
was taken into military custody. After a hearing the following week,
he was demoted to private and given forty five days
of extra duty. Christopher Vidnyevitch, Douglas Niles, and Michael Stewart
(34:51):
were taken into federal custody after their arrests for disorderly conduct,
but Stuart's charges were dropped because he was a minor.
Niles and Vignevitch were both eventually convicted, but the court
declined to impose any jail sentence because quote, they were
emotionally upset and had not intended to cause any trouble.
(35:12):
After the standoff in Culpemper, Rockwell's brother made another attempt
to gain custody of the remains, but he told reporters, quote,
Unfortunately they beat us to it. The Nazi Party had
already cremated him. George Lincoln Rockwell was cremated the morning
(35:32):
after the failed burial, but the fight didn't end there.
By the end of the day Wednesday, the American Nazi
Party had retained council from the American Civil Liberties Union,
and the ACLU said they planned to seek a court
injunction to force the Army to allow the Nazis to
interur Rockwell's ashes at the National Cemetery, accompanied by a
(35:52):
service that included their Nazi paraphernalia. Their attorney Philippershkopp sent
a letter to the Secretary of the Army in early September.
He offered his personal assurances that the ceremony would be
no more than forty five minutes and any music played
would be at a volume low enough that it would
only be audible to those at the gravesite. But they
(36:13):
wanted to wear their outfits. Secretary Stanley Rezor replied weeks
later the Army's position had not changed. No Nazi uniforms,
no Nazi flags, no Nazi banners, no swastik la pel pins.
If they're willing to follow the rules, they can apply
(36:34):
for a new burial permit and that's it. So the
Nazis filed a lawsuit in federal court. They wouldn't settle
for anything less than a spectacle. It was, I think,
in a way, a genuine attempt to give George Lincoln
Rockwell what he would have wanted, But not in the
way you might think. I don't mean that. I think
(36:56):
he cared really about the specifics of how his body
ended up in the ground, about what his funeral would
look like, Not really, But I think he would have
loved to know that, even in death, he could still
cause a riot. He'd lived for wasting people's time and
subjecting people to spectacle and getting headlines and newspapers for
(37:16):
some silly stunt or another. It's what he lived for.
Why shouldn't he have a little more in death. The
lawsuit argued that not only was the decision to bar
the funeral attendees from displaying certain symbols blatantly unconstitutional prior
restraint of their free speech, it was a clear case
(37:37):
of discrimination against Nazi specifically, as other types of symbols
half been or probably would be allowed. The order dismissing
the suit ruled that it wasn't discriminatory and they had
no constitutional right to espouse a political philosophy as part
of a burial in a national cemetery. Now, obviously, this
(37:58):
case was filed in nineteen sixty and decided in nineteen
sixty nine, so any cases that came after it aren't
really relevant when we're talking about the context of the
original decision. But I did a little poking around anyway,
and the majority of the cases involving free speech and
cemeteries are about people protesting and picketing at or near funerals,
(38:23):
not so much about the speech of the people organizing
the funeral, But either way, generally courts tend to hold
the cemetery is not a public forum. The government can
impose content neutral restrictions on free expression in a non
public forum as compared to a public forum places like
(38:44):
the sidewalk or designated or limited public forums like city
hall or a meeting room at a public university. You
cannot to this day hold a political demonstration of any
kind in places like Arlington National Cemetery. That would be
an outrage and a scandal, and it was for a
(39:05):
few weeks in the news when Donald Trump made a
partisan speech at a ceremony at Arlington. The current version
of the Code of Federal Regulations and the United States
Code contain explicit prohibitions on demonstrations and disruptions at national
military cemeteries. But again, most of these rules are aimed
(39:25):
at people protesting a funeral. It's hard to apply those
guidelines to people using the funeral itself as a political demonstration.
But that same Code of Federal Regulations also explicitly prohibits
the display of banners, placards, and flags other than the
American flag. I spent an inordinate amount of time cracking
(39:50):
down every quarterly issue of the Federal Register from the
late nineteen sixties. And I can tell you it does
appear that they added this section to the Code of
Federal res Regulations in nineteen sixty nine, which means it
was almost certainly specifically because of this incident. Obviously, you
(40:11):
can't apply rules that were written after the fact, But
just because the rules weren't in the Code of Federal
Regulations doesn't mean there weren't rules. There were rules in
nineteen sixty seven. According to the court order dismissing the lawsuit,
the approved rules governing the operation, maintenance and burials in
National cemeteries are found in the Army Technical Manual. A
(40:33):
portion of that manual is included in some of the
court records. And the rules are very specific about flags.
There's a flag in the cemetery, but there aren't any
other flags. There are no flags allowed on graves. There
are no flags at grave sites. With a singular exception.
A small American flag is placed on each grave on
(40:55):
the business day before Memorial Day and removed on the
business day following Memorial Day, unless it is wet, in
which case it is left in place until it is
dry Confederate flags may be placed in the same location
during the same time periods at private expense. That's it.
(41:15):
There's no other flags. And according to that court opinion,
that same Army manual already prohibited political demonstrations at national cemeteries,
and it prohibited the use of any foreign flag except
during specially permitted flag ceremonies. The judge didn't specifically use
(41:36):
the language of a public first non public forum, but
I think it's pretty well implied in the opinion quote.
The record here made conclusively discloses that it was the
intent of the American Nazi Party to dramatize their political
philosophy by wearing their Nazi style uniforms together with combat
boots and displaying their banners and flags during the burial
(41:57):
of their former leader. Cemetery is a public place so
clearly committed to other purposes that their use for the
airing of grievances is anomalous. The Secretary of the Army
was plainly right in refusing to permit the American Nazi
Party to use the Culpeper National Cemetery as a base
for the symbolic dissemination of their political philosophy. No one's
(42:20):
saying they can't wear Nazi armbands. They do it all
the time. They've marched in cities across the country. They've
fought this battle and they've won it. They can march
around this way if they want to, but they can't
do it in an army national cemetery. And it's not
just Nazis. No one can demonstrate in those spaces because
(42:41):
they are not a public forum for the airing of
free expression. The ACLU appealed the decision to the Fourth
Circuit Court of Appeals. The appeals court affirmed the lower
court opinion without writing an opinion of their own, and
in nineteen seventy the Supreme Court declined to hear the
case after losing the legal battle to inter Rockwell's ashes
(43:05):
at the National Cemetery. They never interred them anywhere at all.
They didn't give him back to his family or to
either of his ex wives who were raising his children.
They didn't bury him somewhere meaningful to him or scatter
him to the winds. Mattias Cole packed him up into
a little white urn and put it on display. When
(43:27):
the Nazis left Virginia for the Midwest and the nineteen eighties,
Rockwall's ashes went with them. Mattius Cole died in twenty fourteen.
The New Order, the name he'd picked when he rebranded
the party again in the eighties, was left to the
leadership of Martin Kerr, that old man who held a
memorial for Rockwell next to a trash can in twenty seventeen.
(43:48):
He was asked at the time whatever became of Rockwell's remains,
but he declined to say any more than that they
were in an urn in a secure location. He's trying
to be mysterious, maybe to let you imagine that maybe
the ashes were somewhere in a place of great honor.
But the urn is almost certainly at his house in
(44:11):
New Berlin, a suburb outside of Milwaukee. Earlier this year,
an admirer posted a video he took of the shrine
when he made a pilgrimage to Wisconsin to visit Rockwell's remains.
It's just a little white box sitting in the center
of a slightly rumpled Nazi flag arranged in a semi
circle around the ashes. There are two little tea light
(44:34):
candles and what I can only call the Nazi equivalent
of holy relics. Rockwell's corn cob pipe, the wedding rings
from his failed marriages, his aviator, sunglasses, and his watch.
In the video, this visitor picks up Rockwell's corn cob
(44:56):
pipe and he handles it with a religious rever rents.
He lifts it up towards his face, which you never see,
and inhales deeply trying to smell the Commander. George Lincoln
Rockwell died alone in a parking lot, murdered by his
closest friend. His loyal followers stole his body from his
(45:21):
family and turned his funeral into a side show. Now
decades later, his urn collects dust on a shabby little altar,
mostly forgotten. Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool
Zoe Media and iHeartRadio. It's research, written and recorded by
me while I hunger. Our executive producers are Sophie Lieutterman
(45:43):
and Robert Evans. This show is edited by the wildly
talented Rory Gagan, although I think this week it may
be the equally talented Ian Johnson. The theme 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 show with other
listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just please don't
(46:06):
post anything that's going to make you one of my
Weird Little Guys.
Col Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
In the summer of nineteen sixty four, a recent law
school graduate was sitting down for a meeting with one
of his former professors, Philip Hirshcopp had worked his way
through Georgetown Law as a patent examiner, but even before graduation,
he knew he was never going to be a patent attorney.
While he was still a student, he met civil rights
attorney Dean Rob at a party the summer before his
(00:26):
last year of law school, who traveled with Rob to Danville,
Virginia to help defend the civil rights demonstrators arrested in
the aftermath of Bloody Monday, a particularly brutal state response
to protests for racial equality. By the time he graduated
law school, Hirshkopp was already working on a case that
would protect the right of public school teachers to engage
(00:46):
in civil rights protests in their personal time. And on
that afternoon in nineteen sixty four, as he was chatting
with his old professor, another of the professor's former students
stopped by. Bernie Cohen had been working on a civil
rights case in Virginia for more than a year already,
but he was looking for some help. It was a
(01:07):
perfect coincidence maybe that Philip Pershkopp was there that day,
and the pair spent the next several years working together
on the case. In April of nineteen sixty seven, just
three years out of law school, Philip Phershkopp stood before
the Supreme Court of the United States and argued on
behalf of his clients, Mildred and Richard Loving, you have
(01:28):
before us.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
Today we consider the most odious of the segregations laws
and the slavery laws.
Speaker 4 (01:33):
And our view of this law, and we hope could
clearly show is that this is slavery.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
A few months after winning the right to interracial marriage
for not only the Lovings but all Americans, Philip Hirshkopp
took on a very different kind of client. He agreed
to represent the American Nazi Party. I'm Molly Conger, this
(02:01):
is weird little guys. Philip Hushcopp is not our weird
(02:21):
little guy. But the case he took on in the
fall of nineteen sixty seven concerns the corpse of George
Lincoln Rockwell. Hirshcop's career as a civil rights attorney spanned decades.
He won the case that forced the University of Virginia
to admit female students. He won a case that outlawed
(02:41):
the common practice of placing pregnant teachers on unpaid leave.
He defended the right to teach evolution in schools. He
represented thousands of demonstrators arrested for protesting the Vietnam War,
including novelist Norman Mayler. He was an outspoken advocate for
prison reform. In his his later years, he worked on
cases for animal rights, representing PETA for many years. He
(03:05):
is listed as the council of record for Tillicum the
Whale in a twenty twelve lawsuit against SeaWorld. Taking on
the American Nazi Party as a client seems out of
step with the rest of his career. In a twenty
seventeen article in the American Bar Association Journal, he says
he turned the case down when it was first presented
to him, but his colleagues at the American Civil Liberties
(03:28):
Union pressured him. It was a matter of free speech,
was it not. It comes up every now and again
on this show that the ACLU has a long standing
habit of representing American fascists. They call it a principled
commitment to constitutional rights. Regardless of how odious the speaker
or how unpleasant the speech. Personally, I would call it
(03:51):
shortsighted at best, and more often than not, a dangerous, foolish,
and morally bankrupt course of action, And I'm sure they
would defend my right to say it. Real life doesn't
have the same clean rules as a hypothetical scenario in
a bar exam question. In theory, defending the rights of
(04:11):
everyone equally should result in more equal rights for everyone.
In practice, it would seem that the only reward you
get for honing your enemy's weapon is the blood on
your face the next time he strikes you. Here in Charlottesville,
none of us have forgotten how the acl use eleventh
hour defense of the organizers of the Unite the Right
(04:32):
rally led to the violence in our streets less than
a day later. They defended the rights of those neo
Nazis to demonstrate in the heart of downtown, and in turn,
those Nazis used that right to violate the rights of
everyone they encountered. But I'm sure I'll have an opportunity
to talk more about the ACLU's history of defending the
(04:52):
indefensible some other time. In that article, in twenty seventeen.
Hirschkob says his own parents refused to speak to him
for two years after he represented the American Nazi Party.
But what exactly did those Nazis need his help with.
The ACLU had gone to bat for the American Nazi
(05:13):
Party before they represented George Lincoln Rockwell when the New
York City Parks Commissioner denied him a permit to speak
in nineteen sixty and the ACLU came to Rockwell's aid
again when a group of Jewish war veterans sought an
injunction to prevent him from leading another Nazi march in
Chicago after the violent assault his stormtroopers unleashed in Marquette
Park in nineteen sixty six. But in the fall of
(05:35):
nineteen sixty seven, the ACLU couldn't very well represent George
Lincoln Rockwell IVI. George Lincoln Rockwell was dead. This case
was about his dead body. You see, George Lincoln Rockwell
was a veteran. He was technically entitled to a military
(05:56):
funeral and burial in a national cemetery. As the leader
of the American Nazi Party. He'd called himself Commander Rockwell,
and that wasn't just an affectation. He had reached the
rank of commander in the United States Navy. The man
who believed that he was America's hitler had technically served
(06:19):
honorably in World War II. Rockwell joined the Navy after
dropping out of Brown University in nineteen forty, and he
was commissioned as a naval aviator just days after the
attack on Pearl Harbor. He never flew any combat missions,
but he served in both the Battle of the Atlantic
and in the Pacific Theater. By the end of the war,
he was a lieutenant commander, a rank he held as
(06:41):
a reserve officer until he was recalled to active duty
during the Korean War. He returned to reserve status at
the rank of commander in nineteen fifty four. Before we
get into the battle to bury Rockwell with military honors,
I should answer a question you might be asking. I mean,
I was asking it. Could he possibly have been eligible
(07:02):
for this? He was discharged from the Navy in nineteen
sixty and that discharge was absolutely explicitly because he was
a Nazi. Parading around in a Nazi uniform is the
kind of thing that gets you a dishonorable discharge, surely
right in this case.
Speaker 5 (07:24):
No.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
By the late nineteen fifties, Rockwell was making a name
for himself as an anti semit. In nineteen fifty nine,
he set up shop just outside of Washington, d c.
And he was holding frequent demonstrations in the nation's capital.
There he was declaring himself the head of the American
Nazi Party, wearing a swastika armband, passing out hateful literature
(07:45):
right outside the White House, and some of his fellow
veterans were understandably disgusted. In nineteen fifty nine, irritated by
a series of unflattering articles digging into his less public affairs,
Rockwell filed a libel lawsuit against columnist Drew Pearson. During
a deposition in that case, Rockwell said, quote, here in
(08:08):
this country, I have the right to pass out literature.
If anyone tries to stop me, the police protect me.
I was in the Navy once. When people complain to
the Navy about me, the Navy says, that's okay. He
has a right to belong to a political party, and
he wasn't wrong as a reservist. He wasn't really the
(08:29):
Navy's problem. It's not that they didn't know what he
was up to. They did. Even before those weekly rallies
in DC put him in the public spotlight, the government
had been keeping an eye on him. By the spring
of nineteen fifty nine, the FBI was monitoring his bank accounts,
surveilling his home, receiving photo copies of the exterior of
(08:53):
every piece of mail he sent or received, and for
several months that year they were intercepting all of his
household garbage. But Jay Edgar Hoover's neuroses didn't necessarily concern
the Navy. Rockwell hadn't been on active duty for years,
and according to a statement from a Navy spokesman, he
wasn't subject to the Uniform Code of Military Conduct while
(09:15):
on inactive status. But the stunts continued. And remember this
is nineteen sixty. World War II is not some distant past.
It's not a piece of history. If you stop by
your local VFW halt today, you might see a couple
of very old Vietnam veterans. But in nineteen sixty, the
(09:39):
men hanging out at the veterans of foreign war posts
had very fresh memories of fighting the Nazis in Europe,
and they were starting to make noise. In January of
nineteen sixty, the Fairfax County Virginia VFW adopted a resolution
by unanimous vote to ask the Navy to strip Rockwell
of his rank. The ADL was complaining to the press
(10:03):
the Jewish Labor Committee was making public demands for an
investigation by the Attorney General. After their initial public statements
that as a reservist, Rockwell's political activities were the free
speech of a private citizen, the Navy changed their minds.
There's no clear public statement pointing to exactly what it
(10:23):
was that changed their minds, but it seems like all
the public attention had escalated the issue to the point
that it was now a problem in need of a solution.
The Navy sent Rockwell a letter notifying him that his
quote mobilization potential has been reduced to a point where
he is of no further value to the Navy, and
(10:44):
they called him to appear before a board of officers
in DC. In February of nineteen sixty, a Navy spokesman
told the press that proceedings to discharge reserve officers are
not of a public nature, so I don't have any
primary source documentation from their end As to what charges
Rockwell was defending himself against, But I do have the
(11:06):
statement he presented to the Navy in his own defense.
According to this bizarre eight page letter, the proceedings concerned
five primary allegations that he had been quote an active
participant and leader of various organizations styled along Nazi lines.
That he had quote publicly and openly espoused race and
(11:28):
religious hatred. That he had used or permitted to be
used his rank and status in the Naval Reserve in
printed matter distributed to the public fostering rachel and religious hatred.
That he had left the United States without permission from
the Navy, and that as an officer, if he were
to be recalled to duty, he would be commanding members
(11:50):
of the races and religions at which his propaganda was aimed.
He admitted guilt on just one of the charges. He
had left the United States in late night teen fifty
nine to visit his estranged wife in Iceland. He promised
it would never happen again, which was probably true. That
was the last time he ever saw his second wife.
(12:11):
As for the rest of it, well, he felt like
they were being very unfair to him. Is it even
really hatred if the people you hate deserve it, He wrote, quote,
I have never promoted or advocated hate, except of traitors
or subverters and others deserving of the hate of all
(12:32):
decent moral people. After a few pages of rambling vitriol
about how Jewish people are responsible for the evils of
communism and really, isn't he actually more loyal to the
United States because he's so committed to rooting out their influence,
he caps things off by saying he's never promoted unfounded
(12:52):
hatred of any innocent person or group. He brought two
witnesses with him to the hearing, a member of the
American Nazi Party who testified that the group didn't support
hatred or violence, and a weird old Holocaust denier who
gave a forty minute speech accusing the Assistant Secretary of
Defense of being a communist. The board voted unanimously to
(13:16):
discharge Rockwell, but this was purely administrative. He wasn't court martialed,
wasn't punished or disciplined or demoted. He wasn't on active duty,
so again, technically, when he died in nineteen sixty seven,
(13:39):
George Lincoln Rockwell was a United States Navy veteran who
had been honorably discharged after nineteen years of service, and
apparently he wanted a full military funeral. George Lincoln Rockwell
(14:07):
died at noon on Friday, August twenty fifth, nineteen sixty seven.
His family had not shared his politics, and they'd mostly
fallen out of touch. His parents divorced when he was
a child, but at the time of his death they
were both still alive. His father told reporters that he'd
seen less and less of his son in the final
(14:28):
years of his life, saying, quote, He'd always have those
bloody stormtroopers around him, and we could never talk, so
the visit stopped. His brother had cut off contact nearly
a decade earlier, when newspapers reported a possible connection between
Rockwell and the bombing of a synagogue in Atlanta. His
mother and sister kept in touch by letter over the years,
(14:50):
but they saw each other infrequently. But now he was dead.
In family, his family, he'd been their son, their brother.
After the autopsy was performed, his body waited in the
hospital Morgue. His father got on a train from Maine
and headed south. Matius Cole, having assumed command of the
(15:12):
American Nazi party claimed to be in possession of a
last will and testament that entrusted him personally with Rockwell's remains.
Rockwell's brother Bobby said the family wished to have a
private service in the small town in Maine where they'd
spent their childhood. And just a quick interjection here in
case anyone was wondering about this, I've been saying, and
(15:35):
we'll continue to say Cole Matius Cole. His name is German,
and it's spelled k o e h L. In German,
it would be something closer to kerl, but English speakers
tend to read that as coal, so that's what I
settled on. But apparently he pronounced it kale. Here's Frank
(16:00):
Smith talking about it back in the sixties.
Speaker 5 (16:03):
Matthias Kale. Now I don't know where he gets the
name Kale. I think the German pronunciation would be curl
and the little translation in English would be coal, and
I don't think that's acceptable to him. So somehow are
these get kale unless I'm wrong on a German pronunciation.
For any way, it's kale. That's how he goes using
his name.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
Frank's close enough on the German pronunciation but it doesn't
mean coal. It's closest to the German word for cabbage,
but it's not a word at all. It's just a
last name that probably originated as an occupational name for
someone who grows crops. Anyway, Coal, Curl, Kale, whatever you
(16:45):
want to call him, He's the guy in charge of
the American Nazi Party. After Rockwell's death on Saturday, the
body was moved to the funeral home. Bobby Rockwell told
reporters that the family was probably going to have to
get a lawyer to fight Cole for custody of the remains.
But just a day later, the same newspapers reported that
(17:06):
the funeral home in Virginia had received a telegram from
the family, and it read only the family no longer
wishes to contest the claim of Matt Cole concerning his
right to make funeral arrangements for g Lincoln Rockwell. Bobby
Rockwell told reporters that the family had made the difficult
decision for personal reasons and offered no further explanation. Years later,
(17:30):
Rockwell's biographer, Frederick Simonelli, interviewed one of Rockwell's cousins, and
the picture became a little bit clearer. The family gave
up the fight for Rockwall's body because they were afraid
Matias Cole had threatened to stage demonstrations outside Rockwell's mother's home.
She was in her seventies and living alone in an
(17:52):
apartment in a predominantly Jewish Brooklyn neighborhood. Nothing good could
come from provoking the Nazis, so they relented. The Nazis
could have the body. On Monday, three days after the murder,
as John Patler was being reigned for that murder in
an Arlington courtroom, Matia's coal was busy making funeral arrangements.
(18:16):
The Pentagon granted the burial permit. They had no valid
reason to deny the application. Rockwell had served in two
wars and received an honorable discharge. He'd never been convicted
of a crime more serious than disorderly conduct, and he'd
never been formally linked to any group on the government's
list of subversive organizations. For some reason, the American Nazi
(18:41):
Party was never on that list. Decorated veterans who'd been
dragged through the mud of McCarthyism were denied burial and
national cemeteries for being Communists, but the Nazi he was
good to go. They would allow George Lincoln Rockwell to
be interred in a national cemetery, but there would be conditions.
(19:06):
The letter Rockwell left coal with his final wishes requested
burial at Arlington National Cemetery. The government said they could
have any cemetery but Arlington, so they settled on nearby
Culpeper National Cemetery in central Virginia. The Navy did not
agree to the request that the military honor guard consists
(19:26):
only of white officers. They said they would get whoever
was available, and in the end no honor guard showed
up at all. And while they would allow Rockwell's corpse
to be dressed in a Nazi uniform inside the coffin,
they would not allow any visible display of Nazi iconography,
(19:49):
no Nazi flags, no Swastika armbands. The official statement from
the Department of Defense read, unseemly demonstrations such as the
wearing of the un insignia and emblems, or the display
of flags or banners of the American Nazi Party or
its members will not be permitted in ceremonies at a
national cemetery. A national cemetery is a permanent shrine in
(20:13):
honor of the dead of the armed Forces of this country.
Burial ceremonies must be conducted with dignity and with proper
concern for the sensibilities of those whose loved ones lie there.
The rules were relayed to Coal on Monday afternoon, and
the funeral was scheduled for eleven a m On Tuesday morning.
As long as the Nazis wore normal clothes and behaved
(20:35):
like normal mourners, they could have a perfectly normal funeral
at Culpeper National Cemetery On Monday evening. Cole told reporters
that they intended to give George Lincoln Rockwell the kind
of funeral he would have wanted, and the army was
ready for them. The funeral procession left Arlington at nine
(20:56):
am Tuesday morning, accompanied by a police escort from the
Arlington County Police. In a later issue of Stormtrooper magazine,
the Nazis claimed this procession was made up of sixty vehicles,
but most news accounts put the number of total mourners
at around fifty, so that can't be right. The line
(21:16):
of cars was led by a white Cadillac convertible full
of men in Nazi uniforms. Matius Cole rode in the
front seat of the hearse, which was decorated with a
giant red swastika wreath. I wonder if they assumed they
would be allowed to break the rules. Did they think
that there would be no one on scene to ensure
they were following the guidelines, Or did they think that
(21:39):
whoever was there to see them breaking the rules wouldn't
be willing or able to stop them, Or were they
hoping for a confrontation. Whatever it was they expected, I
don't think it was bus loads of military police with
helicopters full of even more soldiers landing in nearby fields.
When they arrived in Caper at ten thirty am, the
(22:02):
entrance to the cemetery was blocked by state and local police.
The poor funeral home employee who got stuck driving the
hearse that day must have been fairly rattled by the
whole experience. He was so surprised at the line of
officers that he stopped the hearse directly over the train
tracks as a freight train was approaching. By all accounts,
(22:22):
there were mere seconds and inches between this near miss
and an accident that would have rendered the whole thing moot.
When the train passed Cole stepped out of the hearse.
He wasn't wearing a Nazi uniform, just a plain black suit,
and he was clutching Rockwell's personal copy of Mind Komf
in his hands. The cemetery superintendent explained to him that
(22:46):
if they would all agree to remove their Nazi armbands
and Swastika lapel pens and put away the giant swastika wreaths,
they would be free to enter the cemetery and conduct
the funeral. As the cemetery superintendent is trying to negotiate
with this crowd to get them to take off their
Nazi armbands, reinforcements were already on their way. The Army
(23:07):
Provost Marshal Major General Carl Turner arrived by helicopter along
with dozens of military policemen and US marshals. So this
small crowd of maybe fifty Nazis was surrounded by dozens
of reporters, one hundred police officer, hundreds of curious spectators
milling around the edges, and the standoff that followed would
(23:31):
last six hours. Shortly after General Turner arrived, the first
arrest was made. He noticed that one of the soldiers
(23:51):
in uniform outside the cemetery. Gates hadn't arrived with him.
This soldier wasn't standing in line with the others. He
was chatting casually with the Nazis standing around the hearse.
Private first Class James de Witt told the general he'd
been granted emergency leave from his post at Fort Gordon
in Georgia to attend the funeral of a friend. General Turner,
(24:14):
who was also out of Fort Gordon, reactivated the soldier
on the spot, which is apparently a thing a general
can do, and had him taken into custody for violating
uniform regulations for the black armband he was wearing, and
for violating regulations prohibiting soldiers from participating in political demonstrations
in uniform. As military policeman dragged James de Witt away,
(24:36):
he shouted racial slurs at nearby black onlookers and threw
a Nazi salute for the news cameras. As he passed
a gaggle of reporters. He said, I'd like to take
this uniform off and throw it away. The military stinks
and I'm ashamed to be a part of it. It
turned out that de Witt had not been granted leave.
He was a wall from Fort Gordon. He'd enlisted in
(24:59):
the Army a yar year earlier, but he'd been a
member of the American Nazi Party for two years. For
another hour or so, everyone just stood there at the
cemetery gates, waiting for someone else to break The funeral
scheduled start time of eleven am came and went around noon.
The Nazis were getting antsy. I wonder if they forgot
(25:23):
to pack lunches. The exact sequence of events is different
in almost every single account I could find, even the
archival video footage I found this strange fifteen minutes of
TV news b roll looks like it was cut together
out of order. I wish I could have gotten my
hands on a copy of the Army's after action report,
(25:45):
because I think that would have helped pin down the specifics.
I know the report exists. It's referenced in a footnote
in a book about the use of the military and
domestic disorders in the twentieth century published by the Army's
Center for Military History, But I couldn't find any trace
of the actual report. So, in the absence of certainty,
(26:07):
here's my best guess at piecing together thirty different reporters recollections.
One thing I found in that compilation of TV news
footage that I didn't actually find written up in any
of the reporting is this odd exchange between General Turner
and a man I recognize in the footage as Douglas Niles.
Speaker 5 (26:29):
Charge will react, I have no idea a federal arrest.
Speaker 3 (26:33):
I'm a federal arrest marshall, And will.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
The charge be threat batter?
Speaker 3 (26:40):
I don't know what it will mean.
Speaker 2 (26:43):
If you can make it out over the helicopter noise.
That's Nazi funeral attendee and American Nazi Party member Douglas Niles,
and he's asking General Turner what someone might be charged
with if they did choose to disobey the orders of
the military police and attempt to enter the cemetery without
removing their swastikas. He didn't get a straight answer, but
(27:05):
he must have felt reasonably assured that it would be
something minor like trespassing, because he then made the decision
to escalate the situation again. I'm doing my best to
put these pieces in order, and this isn't in the
video I found, But according to a write up in
the Washington Daily News, the crowd gets rowdy. They're screaming
(27:27):
taunts at the officers and at General Turner in particular,
and Niles jumps up onto the hood of the hearse
and he's shouting, you ain't gonna stop me, you two
star communists, swine, let's go. And as he's standing there
on the hood of the hearse screaming at the General,
the hearse starts to roll slowly forward and it bumps
(27:48):
gently into the General. I don't know what Douglas Niles
thought would happen, but as he's lunging forward into the
line of military police, they just grab him and drag
him away. Christopher Vignyevitch seemed emboldened by this shift in
the energy of the crowd, and he tried to keep
the momentum going. If you're not keeping careful track of
(28:11):
all the side characters. Bidnyevitch was the twenty three year
old head of the American Nazi Party's Chicago office. He
immigrated to the United States as a child after his
father was executed for war crimes. He committed as a
Nazi collaborator in Croatia. He joined the American Nazi Party
as a teenager. He testified against John Patler in the
murder trial, and his testimony that Patler had made threatening
(28:35):
comments about Rockwell in the months before the murder was
seen as particularly convincing evidence by an appeals court. At
Rockwell's funeral, Bidnyevitch was one of just six mourners who
arrived dressed in a full Nazi uniform. He was to
be one of the pallbearers, and so as Doug Niles
is being hauled off by the military policeman, Vidnyevitch now
(28:57):
jumps up onto the hearse and he's standing on the
roof of the v vehicle shouting, you see what the
Jews are doing. They're keeping us out of here. It's
Jewish power. What we need is white power. And after
he whips the crowd into a frenzy with a couple
of sieguiles and a couple of Hyle Hitler's, vin Yevitch
jumped down from the hearse and charged directly into the
(29:17):
line of military policemen. I think he thought everyone was
behind him, but they weren't. As he was being taken
into custody, a single Nazi half heartedly broke ranks and
tried to follow him. Mike Stewart is listed in the
newspaper as being sixteen or seventeen years old, and it
(29:37):
says that he lives with a guardian in Spotslovania County,
although he'd been arrested at a Nazi Party rally in
Chicago a year earlier, and in nineteen sixty six he
told police he was eighteen. An issue of the party's
magazine says Stewart had been living at the party's printing
facility in Spotsylvania for six months, having transferred from the
(29:58):
Chicago office. How old he actually was at the time
of either arrest isn't clear, but it does seem likely
that he was a miner, and you have to wonder
if his parents knew where he was, if they knew
he was living in a converted hen house under the
supervision of a couple of middle aged Nazis. After that
(30:19):
flurry of arrests, the crowd quieted down again. Matias Cole,
who'd been sitting inside of the hearse for most of
the morning, got out and had a private meeting with
General Turner in a nearby maintenance shed. The Army's position
had not changed. They could hold the funeral if they
could follow the rules, if they took off the swastikas.
(30:41):
They would be allowed to enter the cemetery and bury
Rockwell in the open grave that was waiting for him.
If they were dead set on keeping the swastikas on,
they would not be allowed pass the gates. But they
were running out of time to decide if they were
willing to compromise. The grave diggers shift ended at fourth
thirty PM, and cemetery regulations don't allow a coffin to
(31:04):
sit in an open grave overnight. If they were going
to put him in the ground, they had to do
it before three point thirty to ensure there was enough
time to fill the hole. When three point thirty rolled around,
nothing had changed.
Speaker 4 (31:19):
Fifteen managed to comply with the instructions and the regulations
prescribed for burial at this ceremony. It is now fifteen
thirty hours.
Speaker 2 (31:35):
In William Schmaltz's biography of Rockwell, the exchange that followed
is written to be much more dramatic than I think
it really was. General Turner reiterates the requirements for burial,
and Schmaltz includes Cole's reply in the form of a
direct quote, and the quote is verbatim correct, but in
the book he puts exclamation points in it, and he
(31:58):
wrote that Cole was shouting when he replied. The video, though,
does not show a bombastic, defiant Nazi leader. It's a weary,
defeated man.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
The body cannot be brought in under those circumstances. I
will have remained custodian of the body wherever it may
be with or cheered, but I cannot allow it to
be buried against the express wishes of matter Rockland.
Speaker 2 (32:28):
At three thirty, General Turner gave them fifteen minutes, and
that deadline came and went. The Nazis did nothing with
their last fifteen minutes.
Speaker 3 (32:39):
The Department of Army has withdrawn approval for the burial
of George Lincoln Rockwell in this cemetery.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
At three forty five, the General announced that the Army
had withdrawn its approval for the burial. If they wanted
to bury Rockwell in a national cemetery, they couldn't do
it today and they would have to apply for a
new burial permit. For a funeral on another day, a
Culpeper County Justice of the Peace grabbed the bullhorn and
announced to the crowd that there would be no funeral
here today, and he told everyone to go home, and
(33:16):
remarkably they did. The whole day can really only be
described as weird. I'm not just saying that because that's
(33:39):
in the name of the show. It really was the
only word people could think of to describe what they
had seen that day. The Associated Press story about the
whole affair appeared in newspapers across the country, but with
slightly different headlines from paper to paper, headlines like Rockwell
unburied after end of weird day in Culpeper, Nazi unburied
(34:02):
after a weird day. Rockwell would have liked his weird
Nazi funeral weird performance rockwell burial delayed his unfinished funeral
weird scene. I think my favorite one of these headlines
is Rockwell's non funeral weird event. Newspaper editors everywhere agreed
(34:28):
that shit was weird. Defeated, the Nazis drove the hour
and a half back to Arlington with the commander's corpse.
James DeWitt, the young soldier arrested while absent without leave,
was taken into military custody. After a hearing the following week,
he was demoted to private and given forty five days
of extra duty. Christopher Vidnyevitch, Douglas Niles, and Michael Stewart
(34:51):
were taken into federal custody after their arrests for disorderly conduct,
but Stuart's charges were dropped because he was a minor.
Niles and Vignevitch were both eventually convicted, but the court
declined to impose any jail sentence because quote, they were
emotionally upset and had not intended to cause any trouble.
(35:12):
After the standoff in Culpemper, Rockwell's brother made another attempt
to gain custody of the remains, but he told reporters, quote,
Unfortunately they beat us to it. The Nazi Party had
already cremated him. George Lincoln Rockwell was cremated the morning
(35:32):
after the failed burial, but the fight didn't end there.
By the end of the day Wednesday, the American Nazi
Party had retained council from the American Civil Liberties Union,
and the ACLU said they planned to seek a court
injunction to force the Army to allow the Nazis to
interur Rockwell's ashes at the National Cemetery, accompanied by a
(35:52):
service that included their Nazi paraphernalia. Their attorney Philippershkopp sent
a letter to the Secretary of the Army in early September.
He offered his personal assurances that the ceremony would be
no more than forty five minutes and any music played
would be at a volume low enough that it would
only be audible to those at the gravesite. But they
(36:13):
wanted to wear their outfits. Secretary Stanley Rezor replied weeks
later the Army's position had not changed. No Nazi uniforms,
no Nazi flags, no Nazi banners, no swastik la pel pins.
If they're willing to follow the rules, they can apply
(36:34):
for a new burial permit and that's it. So the
Nazis filed a lawsuit in federal court. They wouldn't settle
for anything less than a spectacle. It was, I think,
in a way, a genuine attempt to give George Lincoln
Rockwell what he would have wanted, But not in the
way you might think. I don't mean that. I think
(36:56):
he cared really about the specifics of how his body
ended up in the ground, about what his funeral would
look like, Not really, But I think he would have
loved to know that, even in death, he could still
cause a riot. He'd lived for wasting people's time and
subjecting people to spectacle and getting headlines and newspapers for
(37:16):
some silly stunt or another. It's what he lived for.
Why shouldn't he have a little more in death. The
lawsuit argued that not only was the decision to bar
the funeral attendees from displaying certain symbols blatantly unconstitutional prior
restraint of their free speech, it was a clear case
(37:37):
of discrimination against Nazi specifically, as other types of symbols
half been or probably would be allowed. The order dismissing
the suit ruled that it wasn't discriminatory and they had
no constitutional right to espouse a political philosophy as part
of a burial in a national cemetery. Now, obviously, this
(37:58):
case was filed in nineteen sixty and decided in nineteen
sixty nine, so any cases that came after it aren't
really relevant when we're talking about the context of the
original decision. But I did a little poking around anyway,
and the majority of the cases involving free speech and
cemeteries are about people protesting and picketing at or near funerals,
(38:23):
not so much about the speech of the people organizing
the funeral, But either way, generally courts tend to hold
the cemetery is not a public forum. The government can
impose content neutral restrictions on free expression in a non
public forum as compared to a public forum places like
(38:44):
the sidewalk or designated or limited public forums like city
hall or a meeting room at a public university. You
cannot to this day hold a political demonstration of any
kind in places like Arlington National Cemetery. That would be
an outrage and a scandal, and it was for a
(39:05):
few weeks in the news when Donald Trump made a
partisan speech at a ceremony at Arlington. The current version
of the Code of Federal Regulations and the United States
Code contain explicit prohibitions on demonstrations and disruptions at national
military cemeteries. But again, most of these rules are aimed
(39:25):
at people protesting a funeral. It's hard to apply those
guidelines to people using the funeral itself as a political demonstration.
But that same Code of Federal Regulations also explicitly prohibits
the display of banners, placards, and flags other than the
American flag. I spent an inordinate amount of time cracking
(39:50):
down every quarterly issue of the Federal Register from the
late nineteen sixties. And I can tell you it does
appear that they added this section to the Code of
Federal res Regulations in nineteen sixty nine, which means it
was almost certainly specifically because of this incident. Obviously, you
(40:11):
can't apply rules that were written after the fact, But
just because the rules weren't in the Code of Federal
Regulations doesn't mean there weren't rules. There were rules in
nineteen sixty seven. According to the court order dismissing the lawsuit,
the approved rules governing the operation, maintenance and burials in
National cemeteries are found in the Army Technical Manual. A
(40:33):
portion of that manual is included in some of the
court records. And the rules are very specific about flags.
There's a flag in the cemetery, but there aren't any
other flags. There are no flags allowed on graves. There
are no flags at grave sites. With a singular exception.
A small American flag is placed on each grave on
(40:55):
the business day before Memorial Day and removed on the
business day following Memorial Day, unless it is wet, in
which case it is left in place until it is
dry Confederate flags may be placed in the same location
during the same time periods at private expense. That's it.
(41:15):
There's no other flags. And according to that court opinion,
that same Army manual already prohibited political demonstrations at national cemeteries,
and it prohibited the use of any foreign flag except
during specially permitted flag ceremonies. The judge didn't specifically use
(41:36):
the language of a public first non public forum, but
I think it's pretty well implied in the opinion quote.
The record here made conclusively discloses that it was the
intent of the American Nazi Party to dramatize their political
philosophy by wearing their Nazi style uniforms together with combat
boots and displaying their banners and flags during the burial
(41:57):
of their former leader. Cemetery is a public place so
clearly committed to other purposes that their use for the
airing of grievances is anomalous. The Secretary of the Army
was plainly right in refusing to permit the American Nazi
Party to use the Culpeper National Cemetery as a base
for the symbolic dissemination of their political philosophy. No one's
(42:20):
saying they can't wear Nazi armbands. They do it all
the time. They've marched in cities across the country. They've
fought this battle and they've won it. They can march
around this way if they want to, but they can't
do it in an army national cemetery. And it's not
just Nazis. No one can demonstrate in those spaces because
(42:41):
they are not a public forum for the airing of
free expression. The ACLU appealed the decision to the Fourth
Circuit Court of Appeals. The appeals court affirmed the lower
court opinion without writing an opinion of their own, and
in nineteen seventy the Supreme Court declined to hear the
case after losing the legal battle to inter Rockwell's ashes
(43:05):
at the National Cemetery. They never interred them anywhere at all.
They didn't give him back to his family or to
either of his ex wives who were raising his children.
They didn't bury him somewhere meaningful to him or scatter
him to the winds. Mattias Cole packed him up into
a little white urn and put it on display. When
(43:27):
the Nazis left Virginia for the Midwest and the nineteen eighties,
Rockwall's ashes went with them. Mattius Cole died in twenty fourteen.
The New Order, the name he'd picked when he rebranded
the party again in the eighties, was left to the
leadership of Martin Kerr, that old man who held a
memorial for Rockwell next to a trash can in twenty seventeen.
(43:48):
He was asked at the time whatever became of Rockwell's remains,
but he declined to say any more than that they
were in an urn in a secure location. He's trying
to be mysterious, maybe to let you imagine that maybe
the ashes were somewhere in a place of great honor.
But the urn is almost certainly at his house in
(44:11):
New Berlin, a suburb outside of Milwaukee. Earlier this year,
an admirer posted a video he took of the shrine
when he made a pilgrimage to Wisconsin to visit Rockwell's remains.
It's just a little white box sitting in the center
of a slightly rumpled Nazi flag arranged in a semi
circle around the ashes. There are two little tea light
(44:34):
candles and what I can only call the Nazi equivalent
of holy relics. Rockwell's corn cob pipe, the wedding rings
from his failed marriages, his aviator, sunglasses, and his watch.
In the video, this visitor picks up Rockwell's corn cob
(44:56):
pipe and he handles it with a religious rever rents.
He lifts it up towards his face, which you never see,
and inhales deeply trying to smell the Commander. George Lincoln
Rockwell died alone in a parking lot, murdered by his
closest friend. His loyal followers stole his body from his
(45:21):
family and turned his funeral into a side show. Now
decades later, his urn collects dust on a shabby little altar,
mostly forgotten. Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool
Zoe Media and iHeartRadio. It's research, written and recorded by
me while I hunger. Our executive producers are Sophie Lieutterman
(45:43):
and Robert Evans. This show is edited by the wildly
talented Rory Gagan, although I think this week it may
be the equally talented Ian Johnson. The theme 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 show with other
listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just please don't
(46:06):
post anything that's going to make you one of my
Weird Little Guys.
Host
Molly Conger
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