March 27, 2025 • 45 mins
In 1994, a second group of mercenaries arrived at the airport in Johannesburg... but no one was there to pick them up. Their host had been arrested days earlier, after the last group of mercenaries she'd hosted got into a deadly shootout with the South African police. But how did all these Germans end up in South Africa in the first place?
https://www.propublica.org/article/vasilios-pistolis-imprisoned-marine-hate-groups
Sources:
Simonelli, F. J. (1999). American Führer: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party. University of Illinois Press.
Krott, R. (2008). Save the last bullet for yourself: A soldier of fortune in the Balkans and Somalia. Casemate.
Eisenberg, D. (1967). The Reemergence of Fascism. Barnes.
https://balkans.aljazeera.net/news/balkan/2017/11/29/slobodan-praljak-umro-u-bolnici
Bartholomäus Grill: German right-wing radicals shoot in South Africa: License plate D. In: Die Zeit . No. 13 , 25 March 1994
Antifaschistisches Autorenkollektiv: Drahtzieher im braunen Netz : Ein aktueller Überblick über den Neonazi-Untergrund in Deutschland und Österreich. Konkret Literatur Verlag, 1996,
https://etd.library.emory.edu/concern/etds/jm214q33q?locale=it
https://js.emory.edu/news/news-stories-container/Using%20South%20African%20Archives%20to%20Study%20PostWorld%20War%20Two%20Antisemitism%20and%20White%20Supremacist%20Networks.html
https://scholar.ufs.ac.za/server/api/core/bitstreams/c7f1b03d-343d-4abf-bcb3-e508f43dbc90/content
https://antifainfoblatt.de/aib99/dressed-kill
Searchlight Magazine, issues July, August, September 1996
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Col Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
In early March of nineteen ninety four, three men left
the Bosnian city of Siroki brieg. German mercenaries Falk Semang
and Ralph Morakaz were eager for a change of scenery,
not because they had tired of their lives as soldiers
of fortune, but because they were in a bit of
hot water after murdering two of their fellow mercenaries. And
(00:32):
Ronald Douster, a Dutch mercenary they'd worked with on his
last stint with the Croatian forces, was happy to recruit
them to a new mission, one far away from the
mess they'd made in the Balkans. Before they left, they
took a few souvenirs, a couple of AK forty sevens,
one pistol, eight kilos of Semtex, a plastic explosive, and
(00:56):
a crate of hand grenades. They stashed the stolen weapons
under the seats of the old citron that Doyster was driving.
Doyster was no stranger to committing crimes across borders. He'd
been a soldier for hire for over a decade and
had served a bit of time in Ireland for arms smuggling.
He was confident that His expertly forged un press credentials
(01:19):
were all they'd need to ensure a clean getaway without
anyone searching the vehicle, and he was right. After driving
nearly two thousand kilometers, they reached their first destination, the
Belgian city of Russilara. There they met with Roger Spinewen,
the leader of a Belgian Neo Nazi group called the
(01:41):
Order of Flemish Militants. He was a bit of a
legend in certain circles. He was already an old man,
but in the seventies he'd led a small group of
Belgian Nazis in a daring heist of sorts, successfully stealing
the corpse of a long dead Nazi priest from his
grip in Austria to be reinterred on his home soil
(02:02):
in Belgium. And on that day in March of nineteen
ninety four, Spinewin paid Douster eleven thousand Deutsche marks for
the stolen weapons, but he gave him one more thing directions.
It had been Spinewen who had asked Douster to return
to Bosnia this one last time, not as a mercenary
(02:23):
this time, but to fetch hardware and recruits for a
new mission, one in South Africa. The Aeging Neo Nazi
had spent his life fighting for fascism at home in Belgium.
His son John was a member of Parliament as a
leader in the far right party Vlam's Block. But as
the world continued to change around him, he hoped to
(02:46):
retire one day in a beautiful white ethno state in
Southern Africa. Here on the eve of the end of apartheid, though,
that dream was starting to look less and less likely,
unless they could incite enough violence in those final months
to convince the white population of South Africa that they
(03:06):
needed to secede to form a new pure white nation.
And this was the task he'd recruited these mercenaries for.
It wasn't safe to depart directly from Belgium, the authorities
there were already a little suspicious. Instead, the mercenaries took
the ferry across the English Channel to Ramsgate, a seaside
(03:30):
town in Kent. There, with an introduction from Spinowin, they
made their next contacts, members of the British fascist group,
the League of Saint George. They spent a few days
there making final preparations for their journey with the help
of their new English friends. This was becoming something of
a routine for the members of the League of Saint George.
(03:53):
Just two months earlier, they'd hosted another batch of German
mercenaries making the same trip. They didn't know just yet
that one of those men was already dead. On the
evening before Doyster and the Germans were scheduled to fly
out of Heathrow, Roger Spinwen dispatched one of his sons
to Ramsgate with one final message for the mercenaries. Willie
(04:17):
Spinowen handed Ronald Doyster a sealed envelope and passed along
his father's order. Doyster was to personally hand deliver this
envelope to the woman who would meet him at the airport,
a woman named Monica Huggin. I'm Molly Conger and this
(04:39):
is weird, little guys. This is the part of the
story where we finally rejoined them women. We started with
(05:02):
Monica Huggett Stone. It's been a long, strange journey. We
started out a few weeks ago in twenty twelve in Sacramento, California,
American neo Nazis from the Golden State Skinheads were rallying
outside the state Capitol holding the flag of apartheid South Africa,
(05:23):
when counter protesters from a nearby occupy encampment showed up
to heckle them. What an odd site, those skinheads in
their black jackets rallying for the imaginary cause of a
white genocide against South African farmers. That rally was one
of more than a dozen simultaneous rallies across the United
States that day, though they were mostly poorly attended and
(05:46):
some were barely publicized, and all of them were organized
by a short lived Aryan Nations affiliated group called the
South Africa Project, and that group itself was almost certainly
really just two people, a longtime Arian Nations member named
Maurice Goulette and a mysterious woman in Louisiana named Monica Stone.
(06:13):
I'm always surprised by the twists and turns that these
stories take. Once you start turning over a few rocks,
there's always some bizarre new ankle that takes us miles
from where I thought we were going. But this one
has been the strangest ride of any weird little guy
so far. In this chapter of the story, we'll try
(06:35):
to trace the paths of these European mercenaries from Bosnia
to South Africa. It turns out there was an international
network to funnel guns for hire from one conflict to another.
And as cloak and dagger as all of that sounds,
it wasn't really a secret, not entirely. Searchlight magazine had
(07:01):
reported on the scheme months before. Those German mercenaries even
bought their plane tickets. Every year for decades now, European
Neo Nazis gather in the Belgian city of Dixmude for
an international fascist get together, and at the event in
nineteen ninety three, there was a lot of talk about
(07:22):
changing their focus, about redirecting mercenaries from the Balkans to
South Africa, and plans were made. At least fifteen mercenaries
were pledged to be dispatched in early nineteen ninety four
with plans to fight alongside Robert vent Honter's Borostock Party.
(07:43):
All of this was published in print in English in
the fall of nineteen ninety three, months before this actually happened.
That same publication. Searchlight Magazine would eventually uncover more of
the d tales about what went on at Dixmuda in
nineteen ninety three. It was at this summit that Roger
(08:06):
Spinewin recruited Ronald Doyster to return to Bosnia to recruit
more mercenaries for South Africa. And according to another source,
it was also sometime in late nineteen ninety three that
Roger Spinwin paid a visit to South Africa himself at
the invitation of Monica Huggett. I mentioned a few weeks
(08:27):
ago that the first step in tracking this Monica Stone,
the one who organized those rallies in twenty twelve, back
to her home country of South Africa, was figuring out
her maiden name, which is Huggitt. And I did that
by digging up old corporate filings for a Christian identity
church called the New Christian Crusade Church. And the New
(08:51):
Christian Crusade Church was run by a man named James K. Warner.
I don't think Warner necessarily qualifies as a big name,
but he shows up in a lot of big stories.
He was an early member of George Lincoln Rockwell's American
Nazi Party. He was a leading member of the short
(09:11):
lived National States Rights Party, and in his clan days,
he was a very close friend of David Duke, I've
left myself a note to come back to James K Warner.
I think there's some real weird little guy stuff going
on here, and I do have a quick correction to make.
As much as it pains me, I just realized I
(09:33):
misspoke in the last episode where I mentioned James K Warner,
I called him Robert K Warner careless. Honestly, I should
have caught that. But to be honest with you, I'm
recording this at one in the morning, and this is
early by my usual standards. I'm always a little down
to the wire. But I think what happened there was
(09:56):
just a slight mix up, because, in my defense, James
Conrad W. Warner did have a brother named Robert L. Warner,
and he did use his brother's name on the deeds
to some of the church property. But it turns out
that Monica's connection to Robert K Warner may be the
answer to a question that's been bothering me for weeks.
(10:19):
How on earth did a woman in South Africa manage
to join the Ku Klux Klan. If you recall the
story in the episode two weeks ago, Monica Hugget was
arrested in nineteen eighty one in connection with a series
of pro apartheid bombings by a group that called itself
the Vid Commando, and after her arrest, she agreed to
(10:42):
testify against the Italian fascists that she'd helped carry out
those bombings. During the trial, she said she was a
member of the American Ku Klux Clan, and she told
the authorities that the books they'd used as a guide
for making those bombs had been sent to her by
her American Clan contacts, So she wasn't just a member
(11:04):
of a Ku Klux Klan style group that operated independently
in South Africa. She's saying that she has active contact
with the Klan in the United States because there is
a big difference there. There have been groups in other
countries that have adopted the esthetic and the ideology of
(11:24):
the clan without necessarily maintaining meaningful contact with the group
they're modeling themselves after. In other examples, what looks like
a foreign iteration of the clan is actually just an
American who happens to be living overseas. In the nineteen eighties,
there was an American serviceman stationed in Germany who claimed
(11:45):
that he was leading an active clan group in Bavaria,
and in the Dennis Mahon story, we saw an American
clansman who traveled internationally trying to spark an interest in
American clan aesthetics and ideology, but with relatively little success.
So what Monica's talking about here is something a little different,
(12:06):
and I was stumped truly. As we'll get to later
on in the story, I can absolutely connect Monica huggets
Stone to the American Ku Klux Klan by the nineteen nineties.
I've got the Federal election commissioned filings to prove that
that's easy. But I still have no answers when it
(12:28):
comes to the question of klansmen in South Africa in
the late nineteen seventies, not in any concrete way. But
I do have a theory. One of the sources I've
relied on heavily throughout this series is a nineteen ninety
nine thesis by Mida Visser on the white fascist movements
(12:50):
in South Africa in the twentieth century, and she sort
of hints at this idea. She writes, quote, the activities
of the clan in South Africa are obscure, although the
police had no concrete evidence that the movement was active
in South Africa. There were claims in the press in
the late seventies that branch has existed in the country,
(13:15):
and so in Visser's thesis she gives a couple of
examples that are definitely evidence of that esthetic copycat behavior
I'm talking about. So, when the VIC Commando took credit
for those bombings in nineteen eighty, the letters they sent
to the press had a symbol in the letterhead that
was almost identical to the logo used by American clan groups.
(13:38):
And in nineteen ninety, when two members of the Order
of Death went on trial for murder, their supporters packed
the courtroom and they were all wearing little clan lapel pens,
and one of them even told a reporter the Order
is long gone. It's the Ku Klux Klan now. In
an unrelated side note, just too to wrap up a
(14:00):
loose end from the last episode, I can tell I've
spent too much time digging around for details I'm not
going to need for this story. When side characters start
to look really familiar. When I was reading that anecdote
about the Order of Death trial in nineteen ninety, I
recognized the names of the murderers. Cornelius Lottering and Fanny
(14:24):
Goosen were two of the ten members of the Africaner
Resistance movement who were arrested in the summer of nineteen ninety.
So when they scooped up Leonard Wienendahl and Horst Cleans,
Lottering and Gusen were in that bunch. And I mentioned
in last week's episode that I couldn't exactly tell what
became of all ten of those men, but two of
(14:45):
them had escaped from custody, and those two were Lottering
in Gusen, So I guess they found them again because
they did get convicted of murder. But back to the
question of the clan, I could have left it there,
but I think you probably know by now that I didn't.
(15:06):
Because he dig just a little bit deeper into the past.
There was a man in South Africa who called himself
the leader of the South African Ku Klux Klan in
the nineteen sixties and into the seventies. He died in
the late seventies. His name was Raymond kirch Rudman, and
(15:28):
by the time he was trying to get a South
African clan going, he was already pretty old, and he
was decades into his career as a professional anti Semite
with impressive international connections. Aside from his clan activities, Rudman
was also the leader of an Afrikaner nationalist group called
the Boronaci, originally founded by Many Merits. Meretz's son, also
(15:52):
called many Merits, was a prominent figure in the Africaner
resistance movement during the same time period as Monica Huggett,
and Rudman also led a group called the Anglo Norman Union.
I can't find much information about the extent to which
that group actually operated in South Africa, like did it
(16:13):
actually have real members, But in nineteen sixty five Rudman
did use the group to join the World Union of
National Socialists. That was an effort by George Lincoln Rockwell's
American Nazi Party and Colin Jordan, who was then the
head of the National Socialist movement in the United Kingdom,
(16:33):
to form I guess exactly what it sounds a World
Union of Nazi groups. But when it comes to the Clan,
there's not much written, at least not that I was
able to find about the history of the clan in
South Africa. But everything that does exist has Ray Rudman's
(16:54):
name on it. Last year, doctor William Robert Billips completed
his dissertation at Emory University, and I know, I know
that dissertation has the answers I'm looking for, but it
is currently embargoed and not available to read. But a
write up about his research tells me I'm on the
(17:15):
right track. He was researching anti Semitic bombings in the
United States during the Civil Rights era when he came
across one of the same sources I did, an old
mention of Ray Rudman trying to recruit for a clan
group in South Africa in the early nineteen sixties. Phillips
(17:35):
was able to secure grant funding to spend several weeks
in South Africa at the University of the Free State,
where Rudman's personal papers are held in a special collection. Again,
unfortunately for me, I can't read Phillips' research, but I
do have the finding aid for Rudman's papers. I can't
actually see what's written. The documents aren't digitized. A finding
(17:59):
aid is just an inventory listing the contents of various
boxes and folders, and I would love to get my
hands on some of those letters because. Listed in that
inventory are entries for correspondents between Ray Rudman and the
New Christian Crusade Church dated as early as the sixties
(18:20):
and seventies. There's also an entry listing correspondence between Ray
Rudman and the National States Rights Party dated from the
nineteen fifties. The inventory also lists more than forty books
in Rudman's collection that were published by James K. Warner,
either through his Sons of Liberty Press or the New
(18:41):
Christian Crusade Church. A similar finding aid for the personal
papers of James K. Warner, held by the University of
Wyoming also lists correspondents between James Warner and Ray Rudman,
and Warner's Nazi publishing outfit, The Sons of Liberty Press,
also published and sold English language versions of texts by
(19:03):
South African anti semi Johann Schumann, an African internationalist politician.
Yap Maree. So, I can't tell you exactly how Monica
Huggett came to join the Ku Klux Klan, but there
is some really solid connective tissue here. It doesn't feel
as random now. So when she moved to the United States,
(19:27):
she was a close enough associate of James K Warner
that he put her in charge of his new Christian
Crusade church, and that has to have something to do
with the fact that archives show that he was an
active communication with the far right in South Africa from
his earliest days in the movement. It looks like I
(19:47):
have some more digging to do on the subject of
the Fascist International, because the number of connections here is
honestly pretty staggering to me. James K Warner visited England
in the said to speak at a meeting of the
League of Saint George. In nineteen eighty Our Belgian Nazi
Roger Spinewin was deported from the United States while he
(20:10):
was here visiting members of the National States Rights Party,
and our South African clansman Ray Rudman, was listed as
the South African correspondent in issues of a British fascist
magazine in the nineteen seventies. All of these guys are
connected going back decades. But I've been promising to get
(20:34):
to this part of the story for weeks now, the
part where a handful of German mercenaries get into a
shootout with the South African police in March of nineteen
ninety four A few episodes ago. I told you that
one of the first places I found Monica Huggett's name
was in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission's final
(20:55):
Report in Volume two. The portion of the report that
deals with quote the Commission of Gross Violations of Human Rights,
Chapter seven political violence in the Era of Negotiations and Transition.
Under the subheading links with international right wing groups, the
report reads. The first link between ultra right terrorism and
(21:19):
foreign agencies came to light in nineteen eighty two when
mister Fabiomiello, mister Massimo Bolo, and mister Eugenio's Opice, all
white foreign expatriots known as the White Commando, were convicted
of the nineteen seventy nine bombing of the offices of
prominent academic doctor Jan Lombard. Originally mister Kus ver Mullin
and Miss Monica hugget were arrested with them, but Huggitt
(21:40):
turned state's witness and Vermullin was released after a few days.
Huggett's name was subsequently linked to a shootout in March
of nineteen ninety four between the South African police and
three German right wingers in the Donkerhoak area. One German
right winger, mister Stephen Rays, was arrested, mister Thomas Kuns
was shot dead, and a third, mister Horse Cleans, was
later arrested. A fourth, mister Alexander Nydeline, was later charged
(22:04):
in the Cullen And Magistrates Court for illegal possession of
a firearm. And I read that paragraph before you've heard
that bit, and at this point you know some of
the back story that paragraph is talking about. Two weeks ago,
we talked about the vit commando bombings in nineteen eighty
and we spent most of the last episode talking about
(22:26):
one of those men, Horst Cleans. Before that shootout in
nineteen ninety four, Glen's had been involved in a nineteen
eighty nine attack on a United Nations outpost in Namibia,
killing a security guard and later murdering a police constable
when he and his accomplices escaped from custody. And at
some point I teased you a little bit with a
(22:48):
story about Alexander Nydline. He was the German neo Nazi
who swore allegiance to Donald Trump at a fascist rally
in Croatia in twenty seventeen don so we know where
(23:18):
Horst Cleans was in the early nineties. He was in
South Africa, But how did those other three men actually
get there? In nineteen ninety four, Alexander Ndline, Stephen Rays
and Thomas Konst follow the same path as the mercenaries
recruited by Ronald Douster. They deserted from the Convicts Battalion,
(23:42):
a paramilitary unit of the Croatian Defense Council made up
of prisoners and foreign mercenaries, and they left Bosnia with
stolen weapons. Then, with the help of the League of
Saint George in England, they made their way down to
South Africa, and just like Ronald Doyster, they were given
the name of a woman who would pick them up
(24:03):
from the airport, Monica Huggett. And here is another place
(24:24):
in my research for this story where I found a
very unlikely source of information that I just couldn't have
gotten anywhere else. Two weeks ago I had to give
my begrudging thanks to the Central Intelligence Agency after discovering
English translations of South African news stories in archived reports
(24:45):
from the CIA's Foreign Broadcast Information Service. And this week
I have an even more unsavory source to thank, though
he isn't around to hear it.
Speaker 3 (24:59):
This is the prosecution's appeal concerning Praliac in all other
respects affirms the sentence of twenty years of imprisonment, subject
to credit being given on the rule one oh one
sea of the rules for the period he has already
spent in the atention step, Prodiac, you may be seated,
(25:25):
you Fortuna, stop, please please sit down.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
That audio might not sound familiar, but if you're extremely online,
you've seen mimified images of this moment used as a
reaction give a thousand times. I know it. I'm sure
you know the one I'm talking about. It's a white
haired old man in a suit and he's drinking from
a small vial. That man is slowbodown Praliac. He died
(25:58):
by suicide in twenty sis seventeen, and the meme shows
the moment that he produced a small vial of cyanide
from his pocket after a judge at the Hague announced
that his sentence for war crimes would be upheld. I
don't speak Croatian, but news reports translated his last words
in that video as judges slobodon Proliac is not a
(26:22):
war criminal. With disdain, I reject your verdict, and then
he knocks back the vial of cyanide. We don't have
to get into the crimes against humanity that Slobodon Proliac
was convicted of by the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia.
He doesn't really factor in directly to our story at all,
(26:46):
but he did choose to defend himself without an attorney
during his war crimes trial, and as part of that effort,
he had a website dedicated to proving his innocence, and
that website is actually still online today. But the documents
that I found most useful in researching this story don't
(27:09):
appear to be accessible on the current version of the site.
So buried in this poorly organized series of files on
an archived version of this war criminal's website, I found
something terribly interesting. All of the existing reporting that I
could find about Alexander Ninelein, Stephen Rays, and Thomas Koonst
(27:32):
and their whereabouts in late nineteen ninety three seems to
rely on one of those documents, an arrest warrant signed
by their commanding officer, a war criminal named Malad Nalatilic,
which I know I've not pronounced correctly, so we'll just
call him by his nickname Teuta. Everyone else did. When
(27:55):
those three German mercenaries deserted from Teuta's Ragtag Convicts btel
in the middle of December of nineteen ninety three, he
wrote a memo requesting arrest warrants. Translated, it reads, on
December sixteenth, nineteen ninety three, members of the Convicts Battalion
fled from Sierroki Brieg to an unknown destination after spending
(28:19):
three to four days in the unit after stealing weapons
and ammunition. The memo goes on to specify that, aside
from their names and the fact that they'd been briefly
affiliated with the unit, he had no additional information about
these three men. It's possible that a lot is lost
(28:39):
in translation here, but it kind of looks like he's
really going out of his way to distance himself from
these men, because he's very explicit that they were only
there for a few days and he doesn't know anything
about them. These guys are strangers to him, and I
guess there's no reason to doubt that. It's what every
(29:00):
write up about the incident says. And who knows maybe
they got all the way there and they realized war
isn't very fun and they changed their minds. That makes
plenty of sense, right, But I think it would be
terribly naive to take a war criminal at his word
because he was lying in that chaotic document dump. On
(29:25):
Slobodon Prolac's website, I found Tutah's request for the issuance
of those arrest warrants, and I found the arrest warrants themselves,
and they were both signed by Tuta. I clicked through
I don't know, maybe one hundred documents that mostly meant
absolutely nothing to me. I didn't really know what I
(29:46):
was looking for or what might even be there for
me to find. But I did find another document bearing
the signature of the commander of the Convex Battalion, and
this one was dated December second, nineteen ninety three, a
full two weeks before those men deserted, and it's a
(30:07):
list of soldiers under Tuta's command, and it appears to
have been written on a typewriter, and next to the
name of each soldier who had been paid for their
service in the month of November, he had drawn a
check mark in pencil and there twenty four pages into
this list of names are Alexander Nydeline, Stephen Rays, and
(30:30):
Thomas Kunst. Nydeline and Coonst both have a check mark
next to their name, indicating that they'd been paid for
the month of November. Nydline has over the years taken
issue with journalists who characterize him as a mercenary, often
arguing that he never actually got paid, so he can't
(30:51):
be called a mercenary. So this document at least offers
some possible rebuttal to that. Next to Steven and raised name,
though there isn't a check mark. Instead, there's a little
symbol that looks like it might be the letter D.
I think the soldiers who have died are the ones
(31:13):
with a little cross next to their name, and soldiers
who are in the hospital either have a B or
the word bolnikka which means hospital written out. And I
couldn't find any commonly used word for something like dead, deceased, killed, deserted, quit, captured,
(31:33):
any any words like that. I couldn't find any that
would start with D in Croatian. But there are some
words and phrases related to the concept of authorized leave
or a permitted absence that do start with D in Croatian.
(31:56):
I'm just spitballing here. I have no idea what it
could mean. I don't know anything about running a mercenary
unit to do war crimes, and I don't speak Croatian.
I'm just guessing. But regardless of what these mysterious little
symbols mean, here's their commanding officer's signature on a document
listing their names two weeks before. He says they had
(32:20):
only just shown up in the last couple of days.
The obvious next question, then, is why would he lie
(32:41):
about how long they'd been with the unit. The short answer,
obviously is I don't know. I don't think anybody knows,
but if I had to guess, I would say he
was covering his ass. The Convicts Battalion was becoming increasingly
un popular by late nineteen ninety three. It was again
(33:05):
exactly what it sounds like. It was made up of
people who had been in prison for violent crimes, as
well as foreign mercenaries who had volunteered to commit violent crimes,
and they were out of control. A letter sent to
a Croatian general signed by another officer that same month,
December of nineteen ninety three, complained about Tuta's convicts running
(33:28):
a muck. They weren't just committing war crimes, but they
were killing and raping military and police personnel on their
own side, and their commanding officer was protecting them. So
I can only assume that he was trying to distance
himself from another embarrassing act of misconduct by this ragtag
(33:51):
group of foreign murderers when these three Germans deserted the
unit with a bunch of stolen guns and bombs. Other
sources I found writing about the actions of mercenaries in
the Bosnian War single out the German mercenaries in particular
for their brutality. Rob Kratt, a frequent contributor to Soldier
(34:14):
of Fortune magazine, wrote in his book Save the Last
Bullet for Yourself that the Germans he served with during
the Bosnian War had a terrible habit of cutting the
ears off the people they killed and keeping them as trophies.
Austrian journalist Christoph Santner co wrote egayetest rambo Schpielen, which
(34:37):
translates to I'm going to play Rambo now with former mercenary.
Wolfgang Nighter writer and Knight writer recounts seeing a German
mercenary hand a live grenade to a seven year old
Muslim boy in the Bosnian city of Mostar as a
joke of some sort. The mercenary told the boy it
(34:59):
was a toy, and the child was blown to pieces
moments later. There was no shortitch of violence in the
Balkans in the early nineties. There's plenty of blame to
go around, so it seems all the more remarkable that
even in this context, other actual war criminals, people sentenced
(35:21):
to life in prison at the Hague, people who were
guns for hire, they were looking at these German mercenaries
and saying that's a little bit too much.
Speaker 1 (35:35):
Now.
Speaker 2 (35:35):
I hesitate to build a theory on the sand of speculation.
But if that little D next to Stephen Rays's name
does happen to mean that he was on leave in November,
that does line up with some other sort of hazy
details about this time period, because again we know that
(36:00):
there was an international effort to recruit mercenaries to travel
to South Africa. The two men from the beginning of
this episode, Fox Samang and Ralph Morajz, were recruited by
Ronald Doyster personally when he traveled to Bosnia in early
nineteen ninety four, and by all accounts, Nideline Rays and
coonst were recruited by Horsed Clens. But how because remember
(36:27):
Horsed Glens had been in South Africa for years at
this point. He escaped from custody in Namibia nineteen eighty
nine and he fled back to South Africa. He was
arrested again in the summer of nineteen ninety in connection
with the Ordoboro folk bombings, and he didn't end up
getting charged with anything, but he spent a while in
jail while South African courts tried to figure out if
(36:50):
they needed to extradite him to Namibia. He was eventually,
probably in late nineteen ninety two, released on bond depending
a final decision in the extradition matter, and then he disappeared.
It is possible, I guess that Glenn's could have gone
to Bosnia at some point in nineteen ninety three, but
(37:13):
I don't think so because there's a much more likely explanation.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
Fan fass On torsis not nice and sent Nsael that
there's some about er v Moule's striker game at MNEM.
Dolphin said Oskar Wolf and Vaughn.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
That probably didn't mean anything to you. I speak a
little German, but that guy's accent was a little tricky
for me. I had to ask a friend who was
fluent for some help with this one. That's a clip
from a segment that aired on a German TV news program,
and the man speaking is an unnamed hotel guest. Unnamed,
(37:57):
probably because the hotel in question was a cedy establishment
in Hamburg's Red light district, and the man is recalling
for a reporter from Derspiegel an incident that happened in
late October nineteen ninety three. Stephen Rays was thrown out
of the hotel after some kind of loud argument and
(38:19):
just Stephen Rays. According to researchers from Germany's anti fascist Infoblot,
Klen's was also spotted in Hamburg in October of nineteen
ninety three, and we know Stephen Rays did go back
to Bosnia after he got kicked out of that CD
motel because he deserted in December. So what it looks
(38:42):
like to me is that Rays made contact with Klen's
in Hamburg in October, and then he went back to
Bosnia and told his friends about this exciting new opportunity.
All they had to do was steal a bunch of
guns and find a way to get to England. What
we do know for certain is that all three of
(39:04):
those mercenaries left Bosnia on December sixteenth, nineteen ninety three,
and on December thirtieth, they robbed a post office in
the German city of Lubec, making off with around eighty
five hundred Deutsche marks. I don't entirely know how to
sort out how much money that is. In nineteen ninety three,
(39:29):
one US dollar was equal to about one point six
Deutsche marks, so that would make it a little over
five thousand dollars. But those are nineteen ninety three dollars,
so I guess you could best understand the actual value
of this money is around ten thousand US dollars today.
(39:49):
Don't email me about math. And with cash in hand,
they traveled from Germany to Ramsgate, that little seaside town
in England, where members of the League of Saint George
drove them to the airport, and, just like the mercenaries
that would follow them two months later, they were given
a name Monica hug It would pick them up from
(40:11):
the airport when they got to South Africa. They arrived
on tourist visas in January of nineteen ninety four, and
Monica was there as promised to pick them up. She
sorted other paperwork and work permits and their mercenary assignments,
passing them off to Horst Cleans. They were assigned as
(40:36):
armed guards at Radio Pretoria, an illegal radio station that
broadcast African Internationalists propaganda, and they participated in military drills
led by Willem Ratta, a former Rhodesian military officer. Everything
seemed to be going according to plan until March fourteenth,
(40:57):
nineteen ninety four. By the time the next round of
mercenaries arrived a few days later, there was no one
there at the airport to greet them. Thomas Coonst was dead,
and Alexander Nydelein, Horst Clean's, Stephen Ray's, and Monica Huggett
had all been arrested. I really do hate to leave
(41:21):
you hanging again. I promise I'm not dragging this story
out on purpose to torment you. I was a little
preoccupied this past week, and I'll be entirely otherwise occupied
during the week you're hearing this. If you're listening to
this on the day it comes out, I am almost
certainly sitting in court right now. In October of last year,
(41:43):
I did a couple of episodes about Virginia's burning objects law.
There was a pair of episodes on Berry Black, the
Pennsylvania clansman who challenged Virginia's cross burning statute and eventually
won his case at the Supreme Court. And there was
a third episode about a man who broke the law
Virginia wrote to replace that original crossburning ban. In that episode,
(42:07):
I talked a bit about the Nazi torch march that
took place here in my hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia on
August eleventh, twenty seventeen. The episode was about Tyler Diykes,
but he was just one of about a dozen men
who've been charged with burning an object with the intent
to intimidate. That's the law that replaced the old crossburning statute. Well,
(42:31):
this week, another one of those men is taking his
case to trial. So I lost a little bit of
time this week reviewing the facts so I can be
prepared to sit through the trial. And I'm going to
lose the entire next week. Sitting on a wooden bench
taking notes by hand, I would love to promise you
the final chapter of Monica Huggett's story is going to
(42:53):
come next week, but if I'm being realistic, it'll be
something else. I've been planning to do sort of a
Q and A episode, so it might be that you
can submit questions for that on the Weird Little Guy's subreddit.
Just please don't send them to meet anywhere else, Like
on any other social media platform, I'll just lose them.
(43:16):
So if you have a question, please post it to
the subreddit, or if you absolutely for some reason cannot
do that, you can email it to me, but nowhere
else please, And depending on how things go during the trial,
I might have a minisode about the defendant, Basilio's pistols.
If you're curious about pistolis, I'll include a link in
(43:38):
the show notes to the pro publica article about his
discharge from the Marines after he was revealed to be
a member of Adam Woffen. So thank you for bearing
with me as I tell the story of Monica Stone
in these strange little chunks. I've really been enjoying how
much digging this one has demanded of me. I just
(43:58):
need a little more time to read some very weird
racist prophecies before I'm ready to write the last chapter.
(44:25):
Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media
and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by me Ellie Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lettterman and Robert Evans. The
show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The
theme music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email
me at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com.
(44:46):
I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other
listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. If you have
a burning question for me about the show, it's not
too late to get over to the subreddit. Apply to
a thread for an upcoming Q and a episode, but
pass always. Just don't post something that's gonna make you
(45:07):
one of my Weird Little Guys
Col Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
In early March of nineteen ninety four, three men left
the Bosnian city of Siroki brieg. German mercenaries Falk Semang
and Ralph Morakaz were eager for a change of scenery,
not because they had tired of their lives as soldiers
of fortune, but because they were in a bit of
hot water after murdering two of their fellow mercenaries. And
(00:32):
Ronald Douster, a Dutch mercenary they'd worked with on his
last stint with the Croatian forces, was happy to recruit
them to a new mission, one far away from the
mess they'd made in the Balkans. Before they left, they
took a few souvenirs, a couple of AK forty sevens,
one pistol, eight kilos of Semtex, a plastic explosive, and
(00:56):
a crate of hand grenades. They stashed the stolen weapons
under the seats of the old citron that Doyster was driving.
Doyster was no stranger to committing crimes across borders. He'd
been a soldier for hire for over a decade and
had served a bit of time in Ireland for arms smuggling.
He was confident that His expertly forged un press credentials
(01:19):
were all they'd need to ensure a clean getaway without
anyone searching the vehicle, and he was right. After driving
nearly two thousand kilometers, they reached their first destination, the
Belgian city of Russilara. There they met with Roger Spinewen,
the leader of a Belgian Neo Nazi group called the
(01:41):
Order of Flemish Militants. He was a bit of a
legend in certain circles. He was already an old man,
but in the seventies he'd led a small group of
Belgian Nazis in a daring heist of sorts, successfully stealing
the corpse of a long dead Nazi priest from his
grip in Austria to be reinterred on his home soil
(02:02):
in Belgium. And on that day in March of nineteen
ninety four, Spinewin paid Douster eleven thousand Deutsche marks for
the stolen weapons, but he gave him one more thing directions.
It had been Spinewen who had asked Douster to return
to Bosnia this one last time, not as a mercenary
(02:23):
this time, but to fetch hardware and recruits for a
new mission, one in South Africa. The Aeging Neo Nazi
had spent his life fighting for fascism at home in Belgium.
His son John was a member of Parliament as a
leader in the far right party Vlam's Block. But as
the world continued to change around him, he hoped to
(02:46):
retire one day in a beautiful white ethno state in
Southern Africa. Here on the eve of the end of apartheid, though,
that dream was starting to look less and less likely,
unless they could incite enough violence in those final months
to convince the white population of South Africa that they
(03:06):
needed to secede to form a new pure white nation.
And this was the task he'd recruited these mercenaries for.
It wasn't safe to depart directly from Belgium, the authorities
there were already a little suspicious. Instead, the mercenaries took
the ferry across the English Channel to Ramsgate, a seaside
(03:30):
town in Kent. There, with an introduction from Spinowin, they
made their next contacts, members of the British fascist group,
the League of Saint George. They spent a few days
there making final preparations for their journey with the help
of their new English friends. This was becoming something of
a routine for the members of the League of Saint George.
(03:53):
Just two months earlier, they'd hosted another batch of German
mercenaries making the same trip. They didn't know just yet
that one of those men was already dead. On the
evening before Doyster and the Germans were scheduled to fly
out of Heathrow, Roger Spinwen dispatched one of his sons
to Ramsgate with one final message for the mercenaries. Willie
(04:17):
Spinowen handed Ronald Doyster a sealed envelope and passed along
his father's order. Doyster was to personally hand deliver this
envelope to the woman who would meet him at the airport,
a woman named Monica Huggin. I'm Molly Conger and this
(04:39):
is weird, little guys. This is the part of the
story where we finally rejoined them women. We started with
(05:02):
Monica Huggett Stone. It's been a long, strange journey. We
started out a few weeks ago in twenty twelve in Sacramento, California,
American neo Nazis from the Golden State Skinheads were rallying
outside the state Capitol holding the flag of apartheid South Africa,
(05:23):
when counter protesters from a nearby occupy encampment showed up
to heckle them. What an odd site, those skinheads in
their black jackets rallying for the imaginary cause of a
white genocide against South African farmers. That rally was one
of more than a dozen simultaneous rallies across the United
States that day, though they were mostly poorly attended and
(05:46):
some were barely publicized, and all of them were organized
by a short lived Aryan Nations affiliated group called the
South Africa Project, and that group itself was almost certainly
really just two people, a longtime Arian Nations member named
Maurice Goulette and a mysterious woman in Louisiana named Monica Stone.
(06:13):
I'm always surprised by the twists and turns that these
stories take. Once you start turning over a few rocks,
there's always some bizarre new ankle that takes us miles
from where I thought we were going. But this one
has been the strangest ride of any weird little guy
so far. In this chapter of the story, we'll try
(06:35):
to trace the paths of these European mercenaries from Bosnia
to South Africa. It turns out there was an international
network to funnel guns for hire from one conflict to another.
And as cloak and dagger as all of that sounds,
it wasn't really a secret, not entirely. Searchlight magazine had
(07:01):
reported on the scheme months before. Those German mercenaries even
bought their plane tickets. Every year for decades now, European
Neo Nazis gather in the Belgian city of Dixmude for
an international fascist get together, and at the event in
nineteen ninety three, there was a lot of talk about
(07:22):
changing their focus, about redirecting mercenaries from the Balkans to
South Africa, and plans were made. At least fifteen mercenaries
were pledged to be dispatched in early nineteen ninety four
with plans to fight alongside Robert vent Honter's Borostock Party.
(07:43):
All of this was published in print in English in
the fall of nineteen ninety three, months before this actually happened.
That same publication. Searchlight Magazine would eventually uncover more of
the d tales about what went on at Dixmuda in
nineteen ninety three. It was at this summit that Roger
(08:06):
Spinewin recruited Ronald Doyster to return to Bosnia to recruit
more mercenaries for South Africa. And according to another source,
it was also sometime in late nineteen ninety three that
Roger Spinwin paid a visit to South Africa himself at
the invitation of Monica Huggett. I mentioned a few weeks
(08:27):
ago that the first step in tracking this Monica Stone,
the one who organized those rallies in twenty twelve, back
to her home country of South Africa, was figuring out
her maiden name, which is Huggitt. And I did that
by digging up old corporate filings for a Christian identity
church called the New Christian Crusade Church. And the New
(08:51):
Christian Crusade Church was run by a man named James K. Warner.
I don't think Warner necessarily qualifies as a big name,
but he shows up in a lot of big stories.
He was an early member of George Lincoln Rockwell's American
Nazi Party. He was a leading member of the short
(09:11):
lived National States Rights Party, and in his clan days,
he was a very close friend of David Duke, I've
left myself a note to come back to James K Warner.
I think there's some real weird little guy stuff going
on here, and I do have a quick correction to make.
As much as it pains me, I just realized I
(09:33):
misspoke in the last episode where I mentioned James K Warner,
I called him Robert K Warner careless. Honestly, I should
have caught that. But to be honest with you, I'm
recording this at one in the morning, and this is
early by my usual standards. I'm always a little down
to the wire. But I think what happened there was
(09:56):
just a slight mix up, because, in my defense, James
Conrad W. Warner did have a brother named Robert L. Warner,
and he did use his brother's name on the deeds
to some of the church property. But it turns out
that Monica's connection to Robert K Warner may be the
answer to a question that's been bothering me for weeks.
(10:19):
How on earth did a woman in South Africa manage
to join the Ku Klux Klan. If you recall the
story in the episode two weeks ago, Monica Hugget was
arrested in nineteen eighty one in connection with a series
of pro apartheid bombings by a group that called itself
the Vid Commando, and after her arrest, she agreed to
(10:42):
testify against the Italian fascists that she'd helped carry out
those bombings. During the trial, she said she was a
member of the American Ku Klux Clan, and she told
the authorities that the books they'd used as a guide
for making those bombs had been sent to her by
her American Clan contacts, So she wasn't just a member
(11:04):
of a Ku Klux Klan style group that operated independently
in South Africa. She's saying that she has active contact
with the Klan in the United States because there is
a big difference there. There have been groups in other
countries that have adopted the esthetic and the ideology of
(11:24):
the clan without necessarily maintaining meaningful contact with the group
they're modeling themselves after. In other examples, what looks like
a foreign iteration of the clan is actually just an
American who happens to be living overseas. In the nineteen eighties,
there was an American serviceman stationed in Germany who claimed
(11:45):
that he was leading an active clan group in Bavaria,
and in the Dennis Mahon story, we saw an American
clansman who traveled internationally trying to spark an interest in
American clan aesthetics and ideology, but with relatively little success.
So what Monica's talking about here is something a little different,
(12:06):
and I was stumped truly. As we'll get to later
on in the story, I can absolutely connect Monica huggets
Stone to the American Ku Klux Klan by the nineteen nineties.
I've got the Federal election commissioned filings to prove that
that's easy. But I still have no answers when it
(12:28):
comes to the question of klansmen in South Africa in
the late nineteen seventies, not in any concrete way. But
I do have a theory. One of the sources I've
relied on heavily throughout this series is a nineteen ninety
nine thesis by Mida Visser on the white fascist movements
(12:50):
in South Africa in the twentieth century, and she sort
of hints at this idea. She writes, quote, the activities
of the clan in South Africa are obscure, although the
police had no concrete evidence that the movement was active
in South Africa. There were claims in the press in
the late seventies that branch has existed in the country,
(13:15):
and so in Visser's thesis she gives a couple of
examples that are definitely evidence of that esthetic copycat behavior
I'm talking about. So, when the VIC Commando took credit
for those bombings in nineteen eighty, the letters they sent
to the press had a symbol in the letterhead that
was almost identical to the logo used by American clan groups.
(13:38):
And in nineteen ninety, when two members of the Order
of Death went on trial for murder, their supporters packed
the courtroom and they were all wearing little clan lapel pens,
and one of them even told a reporter the Order
is long gone. It's the Ku Klux Klan now. In
an unrelated side note, just too to wrap up a
(14:00):
loose end from the last episode, I can tell I've
spent too much time digging around for details I'm not
going to need for this story. When side characters start
to look really familiar. When I was reading that anecdote
about the Order of Death trial in nineteen ninety, I
recognized the names of the murderers. Cornelius Lottering and Fanny
(14:24):
Goosen were two of the ten members of the Africaner
Resistance movement who were arrested in the summer of nineteen ninety.
So when they scooped up Leonard Wienendahl and Horst Cleans,
Lottering and Gusen were in that bunch. And I mentioned
in last week's episode that I couldn't exactly tell what
became of all ten of those men, but two of
(14:45):
them had escaped from custody, and those two were Lottering
in Gusen, So I guess they found them again because
they did get convicted of murder. But back to the
question of the clan, I could have left it there,
but I think you probably know by now that I didn't.
(15:06):
Because he dig just a little bit deeper into the past.
There was a man in South Africa who called himself
the leader of the South African Ku Klux Klan in
the nineteen sixties and into the seventies. He died in
the late seventies. His name was Raymond kirch Rudman, and
(15:28):
by the time he was trying to get a South
African clan going, he was already pretty old, and he
was decades into his career as a professional anti Semite
with impressive international connections. Aside from his clan activities, Rudman
was also the leader of an Afrikaner nationalist group called
the Boronaci, originally founded by Many Merits. Meretz's son, also
(15:52):
called many Merits, was a prominent figure in the Africaner
resistance movement during the same time period as Monica Huggett,
and Rudman also led a group called the Anglo Norman Union.
I can't find much information about the extent to which
that group actually operated in South Africa, like did it
(16:13):
actually have real members, But in nineteen sixty five Rudman
did use the group to join the World Union of
National Socialists. That was an effort by George Lincoln Rockwell's
American Nazi Party and Colin Jordan, who was then the
head of the National Socialist movement in the United Kingdom,
(16:33):
to form I guess exactly what it sounds a World
Union of Nazi groups. But when it comes to the Clan,
there's not much written, at least not that I was
able to find about the history of the clan in
South Africa. But everything that does exist has Ray Rudman's
(16:54):
name on it. Last year, doctor William Robert Billips completed
his dissertation at Emory University, and I know, I know
that dissertation has the answers I'm looking for, but it
is currently embargoed and not available to read. But a
write up about his research tells me I'm on the
(17:15):
right track. He was researching anti Semitic bombings in the
United States during the Civil Rights era when he came
across one of the same sources I did, an old
mention of Ray Rudman trying to recruit for a clan
group in South Africa in the early nineteen sixties. Phillips
(17:35):
was able to secure grant funding to spend several weeks
in South Africa at the University of the Free State,
where Rudman's personal papers are held in a special collection. Again,
unfortunately for me, I can't read Phillips' research, but I
do have the finding aid for Rudman's papers. I can't
actually see what's written. The documents aren't digitized. A finding
(17:59):
aid is just an inventory listing the contents of various
boxes and folders, and I would love to get my
hands on some of those letters because. Listed in that
inventory are entries for correspondents between Ray Rudman and the
New Christian Crusade Church dated as early as the sixties
(18:20):
and seventies. There's also an entry listing correspondence between Ray
Rudman and the National States Rights Party dated from the
nineteen fifties. The inventory also lists more than forty books
in Rudman's collection that were published by James K. Warner,
either through his Sons of Liberty Press or the New
(18:41):
Christian Crusade Church. A similar finding aid for the personal
papers of James K. Warner, held by the University of
Wyoming also lists correspondents between James Warner and Ray Rudman,
and Warner's Nazi publishing outfit, The Sons of Liberty Press,
also published and sold English language versions of texts by
(19:03):
South African anti semi Johann Schumann, an African internationalist politician.
Yap Maree. So, I can't tell you exactly how Monica
Huggett came to join the Ku Klux Klan, but there
is some really solid connective tissue here. It doesn't feel
as random now. So when she moved to the United States,
(19:27):
she was a close enough associate of James K Warner
that he put her in charge of his new Christian
Crusade church, and that has to have something to do
with the fact that archives show that he was an
active communication with the far right in South Africa from
his earliest days in the movement. It looks like I
(19:47):
have some more digging to do on the subject of
the Fascist International, because the number of connections here is
honestly pretty staggering to me. James K Warner visited England
in the said to speak at a meeting of the
League of Saint George. In nineteen eighty Our Belgian Nazi
Roger Spinewin was deported from the United States while he
(20:10):
was here visiting members of the National States Rights Party,
and our South African clansman Ray Rudman, was listed as
the South African correspondent in issues of a British fascist
magazine in the nineteen seventies. All of these guys are
connected going back decades. But I've been promising to get
(20:34):
to this part of the story for weeks now, the
part where a handful of German mercenaries get into a
shootout with the South African police in March of nineteen
ninety four A few episodes ago. I told you that
one of the first places I found Monica Huggett's name
was in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission's final
(20:55):
Report in Volume two. The portion of the report that
deals with quote the Commission of Gross Violations of Human Rights,
Chapter seven political violence in the Era of Negotiations and Transition.
Under the subheading links with international right wing groups, the
report reads. The first link between ultra right terrorism and
(21:19):
foreign agencies came to light in nineteen eighty two when
mister Fabiomiello, mister Massimo Bolo, and mister Eugenio's Opice, all
white foreign expatriots known as the White Commando, were convicted
of the nineteen seventy nine bombing of the offices of
prominent academic doctor Jan Lombard. Originally mister Kus ver Mullin
and Miss Monica hugget were arrested with them, but Huggitt
(21:40):
turned state's witness and Vermullin was released after a few days.
Huggett's name was subsequently linked to a shootout in March
of nineteen ninety four between the South African police and
three German right wingers in the Donkerhoak area. One German
right winger, mister Stephen Rays, was arrested, mister Thomas Kuns
was shot dead, and a third, mister Horse Cleans, was
later arrested. A fourth, mister Alexander Nydeline, was later charged
(22:04):
in the Cullen And Magistrates Court for illegal possession of
a firearm. And I read that paragraph before you've heard
that bit, and at this point you know some of
the back story that paragraph is talking about. Two weeks ago,
we talked about the vit commando bombings in nineteen eighty
and we spent most of the last episode talking about
(22:26):
one of those men, Horst Cleans. Before that shootout in
nineteen ninety four, Glen's had been involved in a nineteen
eighty nine attack on a United Nations outpost in Namibia,
killing a security guard and later murdering a police constable
when he and his accomplices escaped from custody. And at
some point I teased you a little bit with a
(22:48):
story about Alexander Nydline. He was the German neo Nazi
who swore allegiance to Donald Trump at a fascist rally
in Croatia in twenty seventeen don so we know where
(23:18):
Horst Cleans was in the early nineties. He was in
South Africa, But how did those other three men actually
get there? In nineteen ninety four, Alexander Ndline, Stephen Rays
and Thomas Konst follow the same path as the mercenaries
recruited by Ronald Douster. They deserted from the Convicts Battalion,
(23:42):
a paramilitary unit of the Croatian Defense Council made up
of prisoners and foreign mercenaries, and they left Bosnia with
stolen weapons. Then, with the help of the League of
Saint George in England, they made their way down to
South Africa, and just like Ronald Doyster, they were given
the name of a woman who would pick them up
(24:03):
from the airport, Monica Huggett. And here is another place
(24:24):
in my research for this story where I found a
very unlikely source of information that I just couldn't have
gotten anywhere else. Two weeks ago I had to give
my begrudging thanks to the Central Intelligence Agency after discovering
English translations of South African news stories in archived reports
(24:45):
from the CIA's Foreign Broadcast Information Service. And this week
I have an even more unsavory source to thank, though
he isn't around to hear it.
Speaker 3 (24:59):
This is the prosecution's appeal concerning Praliac in all other
respects affirms the sentence of twenty years of imprisonment, subject
to credit being given on the rule one oh one
sea of the rules for the period he has already
spent in the atention step, Prodiac, you may be seated,
(25:25):
you Fortuna, stop, please please sit down.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
That audio might not sound familiar, but if you're extremely online,
you've seen mimified images of this moment used as a
reaction give a thousand times. I know it. I'm sure
you know the one I'm talking about. It's a white
haired old man in a suit and he's drinking from
a small vial. That man is slowbodown Praliac. He died
(25:58):
by suicide in twenty sis seventeen, and the meme shows
the moment that he produced a small vial of cyanide
from his pocket after a judge at the Hague announced
that his sentence for war crimes would be upheld. I
don't speak Croatian, but news reports translated his last words
in that video as judges slobodon Proliac is not a
(26:22):
war criminal. With disdain, I reject your verdict, and then
he knocks back the vial of cyanide. We don't have
to get into the crimes against humanity that Slobodon Proliac
was convicted of by the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia.
He doesn't really factor in directly to our story at all,
(26:46):
but he did choose to defend himself without an attorney
during his war crimes trial, and as part of that effort,
he had a website dedicated to proving his innocence, and
that website is actually still online today. But the documents
that I found most useful in researching this story don't
(27:09):
appear to be accessible on the current version of the site.
So buried in this poorly organized series of files on
an archived version of this war criminal's website, I found
something terribly interesting. All of the existing reporting that I
could find about Alexander Ninelein, Stephen Rays, and Thomas Koonst
(27:32):
and their whereabouts in late nineteen ninety three seems to
rely on one of those documents, an arrest warrant signed
by their commanding officer, a war criminal named Malad Nalatilic,
which I know I've not pronounced correctly, so we'll just
call him by his nickname Teuta. Everyone else did. When
(27:55):
those three German mercenaries deserted from Teuta's Ragtag Convicts btel
in the middle of December of nineteen ninety three, he
wrote a memo requesting arrest warrants. Translated, it reads, on
December sixteenth, nineteen ninety three, members of the Convicts Battalion
fled from Sierroki Brieg to an unknown destination after spending
(28:19):
three to four days in the unit after stealing weapons
and ammunition. The memo goes on to specify that, aside
from their names and the fact that they'd been briefly
affiliated with the unit, he had no additional information about
these three men. It's possible that a lot is lost
(28:39):
in translation here, but it kind of looks like he's
really going out of his way to distance himself from
these men, because he's very explicit that they were only
there for a few days and he doesn't know anything
about them. These guys are strangers to him, and I
guess there's no reason to doubt that. It's what every
(29:00):
write up about the incident says. And who knows maybe
they got all the way there and they realized war
isn't very fun and they changed their minds. That makes
plenty of sense, right, But I think it would be
terribly naive to take a war criminal at his word
because he was lying in that chaotic document dump. On
(29:25):
Slobodon Prolac's website, I found Tutah's request for the issuance
of those arrest warrants, and I found the arrest warrants themselves,
and they were both signed by Tuta. I clicked through
I don't know, maybe one hundred documents that mostly meant
absolutely nothing to me. I didn't really know what I
(29:46):
was looking for or what might even be there for
me to find. But I did find another document bearing
the signature of the commander of the Convex Battalion, and
this one was dated December second, nineteen ninety three, a
full two weeks before those men deserted, and it's a
(30:07):
list of soldiers under Tuta's command, and it appears to
have been written on a typewriter, and next to the
name of each soldier who had been paid for their
service in the month of November, he had drawn a
check mark in pencil and there twenty four pages into
this list of names are Alexander Nydeline, Stephen Rays, and
(30:30):
Thomas Kunst. Nydeline and Coonst both have a check mark
next to their name, indicating that they'd been paid for
the month of November. Nydline has over the years taken
issue with journalists who characterize him as a mercenary, often
arguing that he never actually got paid, so he can't
(30:51):
be called a mercenary. So this document at least offers
some possible rebuttal to that. Next to Steven and raised name,
though there isn't a check mark. Instead, there's a little
symbol that looks like it might be the letter D.
I think the soldiers who have died are the ones
(31:13):
with a little cross next to their name, and soldiers
who are in the hospital either have a B or
the word bolnikka which means hospital written out. And I
couldn't find any commonly used word for something like dead, deceased, killed, deserted, quit, captured,
(31:33):
any any words like that. I couldn't find any that
would start with D in Croatian. But there are some
words and phrases related to the concept of authorized leave
or a permitted absence that do start with D in Croatian.
(31:56):
I'm just spitballing here. I have no idea what it
could mean. I don't know anything about running a mercenary
unit to do war crimes, and I don't speak Croatian.
I'm just guessing. But regardless of what these mysterious little
symbols mean, here's their commanding officer's signature on a document
listing their names two weeks before. He says they had
(32:20):
only just shown up in the last couple of days.
The obvious next question, then, is why would he lie
(32:41):
about how long they'd been with the unit. The short answer,
obviously is I don't know. I don't think anybody knows,
but if I had to guess, I would say he
was covering his ass. The Convicts Battalion was becoming increasingly
un popular by late nineteen ninety three. It was again
(33:05):
exactly what it sounds like. It was made up of
people who had been in prison for violent crimes, as
well as foreign mercenaries who had volunteered to commit violent crimes,
and they were out of control. A letter sent to
a Croatian general signed by another officer that same month,
December of nineteen ninety three, complained about Tuta's convicts running
(33:28):
a muck. They weren't just committing war crimes, but they
were killing and raping military and police personnel on their
own side, and their commanding officer was protecting them. So
I can only assume that he was trying to distance
himself from another embarrassing act of misconduct by this ragtag
(33:51):
group of foreign murderers when these three Germans deserted the
unit with a bunch of stolen guns and bombs. Other
sources I found writing about the actions of mercenaries in
the Bosnian War single out the German mercenaries in particular
for their brutality. Rob Kratt, a frequent contributor to Soldier
(34:14):
of Fortune magazine, wrote in his book Save the Last
Bullet for Yourself that the Germans he served with during
the Bosnian War had a terrible habit of cutting the
ears off the people they killed and keeping them as trophies.
Austrian journalist Christoph Santner co wrote egayetest rambo Schpielen, which
(34:37):
translates to I'm going to play Rambo now with former mercenary.
Wolfgang Nighter writer and Knight writer recounts seeing a German
mercenary hand a live grenade to a seven year old
Muslim boy in the Bosnian city of Mostar as a
joke of some sort. The mercenary told the boy it
(34:59):
was a toy, and the child was blown to pieces
moments later. There was no shortitch of violence in the
Balkans in the early nineties. There's plenty of blame to
go around, so it seems all the more remarkable that
even in this context, other actual war criminals, people sentenced
(35:21):
to life in prison at the Hague, people who were
guns for hire, they were looking at these German mercenaries
and saying that's a little bit too much.
Speaker 1 (35:35):
Now.
Speaker 2 (35:35):
I hesitate to build a theory on the sand of speculation.
But if that little D next to Stephen Rays's name
does happen to mean that he was on leave in November,
that does line up with some other sort of hazy
details about this time period, because again we know that
(36:00):
there was an international effort to recruit mercenaries to travel
to South Africa. The two men from the beginning of
this episode, Fox Samang and Ralph Morajz, were recruited by
Ronald Doyster personally when he traveled to Bosnia in early
nineteen ninety four, and by all accounts, Nideline Rays and
coonst were recruited by Horsed Clens. But how because remember
(36:27):
Horsed Glens had been in South Africa for years at
this point. He escaped from custody in Namibia nineteen eighty
nine and he fled back to South Africa. He was
arrested again in the summer of nineteen ninety in connection
with the Ordoboro folk bombings, and he didn't end up
getting charged with anything, but he spent a while in
jail while South African courts tried to figure out if
(36:50):
they needed to extradite him to Namibia. He was eventually,
probably in late nineteen ninety two, released on bond depending
a final decision in the extradition matter, and then he disappeared.
It is possible, I guess that Glenn's could have gone
to Bosnia at some point in nineteen ninety three, but
(37:13):
I don't think so because there's a much more likely explanation.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
Fan fass On torsis not nice and sent Nsael that
there's some about er v Moule's striker game at MNEM.
Dolphin said Oskar Wolf and Vaughn.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
That probably didn't mean anything to you. I speak a
little German, but that guy's accent was a little tricky
for me. I had to ask a friend who was
fluent for some help with this one. That's a clip
from a segment that aired on a German TV news program,
and the man speaking is an unnamed hotel guest. Unnamed,
(37:57):
probably because the hotel in question was a cedy establishment
in Hamburg's Red light district, and the man is recalling
for a reporter from Derspiegel an incident that happened in
late October nineteen ninety three. Stephen Rays was thrown out
of the hotel after some kind of loud argument and
(38:19):
just Stephen Rays. According to researchers from Germany's anti fascist Infoblot,
Klen's was also spotted in Hamburg in October of nineteen
ninety three, and we know Stephen Rays did go back
to Bosnia after he got kicked out of that CD
motel because he deserted in December. So what it looks
(38:42):
like to me is that Rays made contact with Klen's
in Hamburg in October, and then he went back to
Bosnia and told his friends about this exciting new opportunity.
All they had to do was steal a bunch of
guns and find a way to get to England. What
we do know for certain is that all three of
(39:04):
those mercenaries left Bosnia on December sixteenth, nineteen ninety three,
and on December thirtieth, they robbed a post office in
the German city of Lubec, making off with around eighty
five hundred Deutsche marks. I don't entirely know how to
sort out how much money that is. In nineteen ninety three,
(39:29):
one US dollar was equal to about one point six
Deutsche marks, so that would make it a little over
five thousand dollars. But those are nineteen ninety three dollars,
so I guess you could best understand the actual value
of this money is around ten thousand US dollars today.
(39:49):
Don't email me about math. And with cash in hand,
they traveled from Germany to Ramsgate, that little seaside town
in England, where members of the League of Saint George
drove them to the airport, and, just like the mercenaries
that would follow them two months later, they were given
a name Monica hug It would pick them up from
(40:11):
the airport when they got to South Africa. They arrived
on tourist visas in January of nineteen ninety four, and
Monica was there as promised to pick them up. She
sorted other paperwork and work permits and their mercenary assignments,
passing them off to Horst Cleans. They were assigned as
(40:36):
armed guards at Radio Pretoria, an illegal radio station that
broadcast African Internationalists propaganda, and they participated in military drills
led by Willem Ratta, a former Rhodesian military officer. Everything
seemed to be going according to plan until March fourteenth,
(40:57):
nineteen ninety four. By the time the next round of
mercenaries arrived a few days later, there was no one
there at the airport to greet them. Thomas Coonst was dead,
and Alexander Nydelein, Horst Clean's, Stephen Ray's, and Monica Huggett
had all been arrested. I really do hate to leave
(41:21):
you hanging again. I promise I'm not dragging this story
out on purpose to torment you. I was a little
preoccupied this past week, and I'll be entirely otherwise occupied
during the week you're hearing this. If you're listening to
this on the day it comes out, I am almost
certainly sitting in court right now. In October of last year,
(41:43):
I did a couple of episodes about Virginia's burning objects law.
There was a pair of episodes on Berry Black, the
Pennsylvania clansman who challenged Virginia's cross burning statute and eventually
won his case at the Supreme Court. And there was
a third episode about a man who broke the law
Virginia wrote to replace that original crossburning ban. In that episode,
(42:07):
I talked a bit about the Nazi torch march that
took place here in my hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia on
August eleventh, twenty seventeen. The episode was about Tyler Diykes,
but he was just one of about a dozen men
who've been charged with burning an object with the intent
to intimidate. That's the law that replaced the old crossburning statute. Well,
(42:31):
this week, another one of those men is taking his
case to trial. So I lost a little bit of
time this week reviewing the facts so I can be
prepared to sit through the trial. And I'm going to
lose the entire next week. Sitting on a wooden bench
taking notes by hand, I would love to promise you
the final chapter of Monica Huggett's story is going to
(42:53):
come next week, but if I'm being realistic, it'll be
something else. I've been planning to do sort of a
Q and A episode, so it might be that you
can submit questions for that on the Weird Little Guy's subreddit.
Just please don't send them to meet anywhere else, Like
on any other social media platform, I'll just lose them.
(43:16):
So if you have a question, please post it to
the subreddit, or if you absolutely for some reason cannot
do that, you can email it to me, but nowhere
else please, And depending on how things go during the trial,
I might have a minisode about the defendant, Basilio's pistols.
If you're curious about pistolis, I'll include a link in
(43:38):
the show notes to the pro publica article about his
discharge from the Marines after he was revealed to be
a member of Adam Woffen. So thank you for bearing
with me as I tell the story of Monica Stone
in these strange little chunks. I've really been enjoying how
much digging this one has demanded of me. I just
(43:58):
need a little more time to read some very weird
racist prophecies before I'm ready to write the last chapter.
(44:25):
Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media
and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by me Ellie Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lettterman and Robert Evans. The
show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The
theme music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email
me at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com.
(44:46):
I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other
listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. If you have
a burning question for me about the show, it's not
too late to get over to the subreddit. Apply to
a thread for an upcoming Q and a episode, but
pass always. Just don't post something that's gonna make you
(45:07):
one of my Weird Little Guys
Host
Molly Conger
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