The violence that erupted in Charlottesville, Virginia when white supremacists clashed with protesters opposing what they called the demonstration of hate stunned Americans with its ferocity and recalled the intensity surrounding George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi party who was gunned down in 1967 by a loyal follower: a Greek-American named John Patsalos.
Rockwell’s discipline had changed his name to John Patler to be more similar to Adolf Hitler and the events that unfolded 50 years ago revealed the rabid roots of anti-Semitism and the extremist ideology that has carried over to today, with the Ku Klux Klan, white supremacists, skinheads and the vestiges of what’s left of the party founded by Rockwell – who fought in World War II.
Rockwell was a galvanizing, charismatic lighting rod in American politics and society, a man who, the Washington Post reported in a feature on his life and death at the hands of Patsalos, a protege of sorts who soured on his mentor, had hung swastikas on a mall and picketed the marches of Martin Luther King Jr. and called for sending black Americans back to Africa and sending millions of “Communist Jews” to the gas chambers.
Bob Dylan had satirized him in a song and Rockwell was a hated figure to most Americans but one who captured the attention of bigots and haters. He had run for Governor of Virginia and got one percent of the vote but that one percent of hard core supporters burned with hatred for Jews, blacks and non-whites.
It all ended just before noon on Aug. 25, 1967 when Rockwell pulled his car into a shopping center in Arlington, Virginia, soon to meet his demise not at the hands of an enemy but a friend: Patsalos, who would serve 10 years for the murder and is now 79 and living in New York.
This day Rockwell was not wearing the Nazi uniform that made him a target and was there not to preach hate but to do his laundry at a laundromat. He had forgotten the bleach and when he went back to his car to return to his Nazi headquarters to get it, two shots rang out.
The morning he died had had worked on his version of Mein Kampf, posthumously published as White Power. He never saw Patsalos on the roof of the mall.
A bullet fired into the car hit Rockwell’s shirt, alarming him enough to look up through the shattered windshield at a man on the mall roof just before a second bullet tore into his chest. His pile fell onto the car seat, the car rolled backward and Rockwell crawled toward the passenger door and tumbled onto the asphalt. Witnesses said the fleeing gunman wore a yellow shirt, hat and a trench coat.
CATCHING AN ASSASSIN
Fifteen minutes later, Arlington police officers spotted Patler, wearing a yellow shirt, his pants wet at the ankles, standing at a bus stop a mile and a half away. They found a hat and trench coat hidden nearby. And the next day, they fished a German Mauser pistol out of a park between the bus stop and the crime scene.
Given Rockwell’s notoriety, the murder made international headlines and made a brief celebrity out of Patsalos, born in New York City in 1938 to Greek parents. He didn’t have a good start: when he was five, his father shot and killed his mother and was sent to prison. Patsalos changed his name to Patler in 1960, after finishing a two-year stint in the Marines and being honorably discharged on the grounds of “unsuitability” after being arrested at Nazi party rally.
Under Rockwell, he rose to the rank of Captain in the Nazi and was the editor and cartoonist for its magazine, Stormtrooper. But, in what would turn out to the the death warrant for Rockwell, Patler was expelled in March, 1967 for alleged “Bolshevik leanings” after disagreeing with Rockwell about some of the party’s policies.
Before the assassination, Patler said of Rockwell: “I loved him like a father and he loved me like a son” and in what was said to be his last known letter to his mentor wrote that, “I don’t think there are two people on earth who think and feel the same as we do. … You are a very important part of my life. I need you as much as you need me. Without you there is no future”.
The bizarre saga didn’t end with Rockwell’s killing and what he wrought was evident in Charlottesville on the faces of haters who felt as he did, with hundreds of torch-carrying neo-Nazis carrying on, few, if any, perhaps knowing who he was although the term he wrote – White Power – is the standard bearer slogan of Hitler’s idolators.
HATE LIVES ON
The Charlottesville rally was “infused with Rockwell’s ideology,” Martin Kerr of New Order, the successor to the American Nazi Party told the Post as he extolled Rockwell.
“He is the grandfather of the white racialist movement as it exists today. To see these many hundreds of racially conscious white men on the streets of Charlottesville, I’m sure he would have been very pleased”.
Rockwell turned after reading Mein Kampf and becoming obsessed with its racist ranting, turning himself from a man who fought fascism to embracing it in an odd switch of ideologies and beliefs, no convert like a zealot.
But it was Patler who was the catalyst for Rockwell’s rising rhetoric. The short, dark-haired Greek American with intense, focused eyes that didn’t waver or seem to blink.
Rockwell began pitching his party to all whites, including southern and eastern Europeans it had previously shunned. Rockwell would eventually change its name to the National Socialist White People’s Party and even eschewed the swastika, according to the biography “American Fuehrer.”
“We will make White Unity the biggest thing in history,” Rockwell wrote to Patler, a Marine marksman who, like his mentor, had turned to bigotry and hate.
Ironically, it was the shift away from Nazism for the Nazi party leader that signaled trouble and the end. A few months after Patler was kicked out, two men – one said to resemble him – shot at Rockwell as he returned to Nazi headquarters and escaped.
When he was killed, the story had legs and stayed on the Post’s front page for a week. Before his family could organize a burial, his Nazi followers tried to put him in a cemetery plot in a Nazi ceremony with a swastika-draped casket.
Soldiers blocked their entrance. The American Civil Liberties Union backed the Nazis, but before a lawsuit could be settled, the Nazis smuggled the body out of an Arlington funeral home and secretly cremated it.
You don’t mean they actually stuck the … in an oven?” Hank Burchard, a Post reporter who had infiltrated Rockwell’s group while in college, asked Rockwell’s second-in-command. Burchard was, he wrote, “struck by the irony of the end of a man who had dreamed of sending ‘the Jews that Hitler missed’ to the ovens.”
At trial, Patler denied killing his mentor. His attorney suggested it could have been another Nazi, upset with the direction Rockwell was taking the party. But the jury found Patler guilty. He was sentenced to 20 years but paroled in 1975 after serving eight before later getting a six-year sentence for violating his parole.
WHITE POWER
Rockwell is gone, Patler isn’t talking but what came from their movement rocked Charlottesville and shook Donald Trump’s Presidency anew.
“White lives matter! You will not replace us! Jews will not replace us!” the men chanted as they carried torches around the University of Virginia. “White power!” they shouted at counter-protesters, the resurgence of white nationalism due in part to Rockwell, who paved the way for KKK leader David Duke.
“I don’t know if we’d have this type of activism or even this kind of president if there hadn’t been a figure like that,” Heidi Beirich, Director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, which tracks hate groups told the Post.
It’s resounding too for Nicholas Patler, who watched the violence and thought of his father, who is now a freelance cartoonist trying to make a living. The Post said John Patler, who it said is a big Trump supporter, refused multiple interview requests.
His son said he didn’t know of his father’s crime until growing up. His parents divorced when his father was in prison, and his mother moved the family to Staunton, Va., near Charlottesville.
His father’s hatred “inspired me to explore different things,” he said of his decision to study African American history and work on a book about Reconstruction. His students don’t know about his father, he said.
But in 2013, Patler wrote an afterword to another Rockwell biography, For Race and Nation, in which he said his father had been traumatized as a child by his mother’s murder and his son wrote then that his father was ashamed of being a Nazi and called it “temporary insanity”.
It may be again. Patler said his father is returning to what he used to be.
“I don’t know what the climate is doing to him,” he said. “Now it seems like, little by little, he’s becoming poisoned again,” he added.
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