S34 EP3: The Disappearing Nazi | Dirtbag Climber

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Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, we're closing the whole park.

We're gonna have to move up to the 8th Street.

Thank you.

We are in Washington, D.C.,

trying to have a conversation with a man named Eddie Becker.

Why are you closing it?

Why are you closing it?

Asking to meet Eddie here across the street from the White House seemed like the perfect place to walk down memory lane.

Now, why would they be closing the park?

I mean,

it's hard to say, right?

Everyone here, the tourists, the protesters, the guys who sell you water and pop, we're all being pushed north outside of Lafayette Square as Capitol Police secured the area.

Guys, we gotta move up.

NATO is in town and security is tight.

But that's not why we're here.

And they're not bullshit.

So when they say you got to leave, you got to leave.

They're not bullshit.

All of this commotion is oddly appropriate because we're asking Eddie to recall another moment that happened at this same spot 26 years ago.

I'm a documentarian.

I documented the demonstration that Davis Hawke organized, this Wolfgang Hawk.

Davis Wolfgang Hawke was the identity Britt Greenbaum chose to usher in the next chapter of his life.

As soon as he turned 18, he legally changed his name, severing ties to his father's Jewish heritage.

When we last left Hawke, or Britt, it was 1996.

He had just graduated high school and started a neo-Nazi group called the Knights of Freedom.

A far cry from the chaos he would cause here on the streets of Washington in 1999.

And the police had their cars,

and on the cars were these amplifiers where they would give instructions to people sort of remotely.

The streets closed, sir.

You are inside a police line.

You're going to have to leave.

In just three short years, Davis Wolfgang Hawk would go from planning moves in chess club to plotting what he hoped would be the largest white pride rally in American history.

This is from the documentary that Eddie Becker made that day, August 7th, 1999.

Thousands of people are in attendance.

Police are everywhere.

The city of Washington was on high alert, reportedly spending over a million dollars on security.

I've never experienced anything like it.

One of the hundreds of cops out there that day was Detective Sergeant Richard Banks, up from South Carolina.

No, it was pretty serious.

Anytime you think about it, anytime somebody like that can organize and disrupt law enforcement to the point where you've got law enforcement agencies for four different states,

the District of Columbia, our United States Capitol Police, closed down Pennsylvania Avenue for a protest.

That young man caused all that.

Do you know how just

extensive that is?

He calls that.

All of this chaos, all of this money, and all these resources in Washington was because of Davis Wolfgang Hawk.

In high school, people wrote him off, but Hawk found a way to be noticed.

His ideas finally resonated with a wider and dangerous audience.

I'm Stephen Chua, and this is Dirtbag Climber from CBC's Uncover, Chapter 3, The Disappearing Nazi.

I mean, he was really a nice child.

And then I don't know what kind of, some kind of metamorphosis occurred in high school.

This is Davis Hawk's mother, Peggy Greenbaum.

Peggy has since passed away, but before she died, she spoke to reporter Brian McWilliams about her son.

He's a big storyteller and all this kind of thing.

You know, you can't believe a thing he said.

Not a thing.

While Hawk was in high school, he started a group called called the Knights of Freedom, or KOF, as Peggy calls it.

You have to remember, see, I didn't even know about KOF until he was in college.

In 1996, after Britt Greenbaum changed his name to Davis Wolfgang Hawk, he headed off to Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

Well, he told me it was the cold weather, but in hindsight,

obviously, it was because he thought his KOF ideas would be well received down there.

He wanted to go to Wofford College.

This again is Hyman Greenbaum, Hawke's father.

We were never quite sure why.

It's like a small southern liberal arts college, but later we figured that it must be because he thought he could influence his classmates and he thought that they would be more into the conservative politics.

To the Greenbaum's point, It's a little mind-boggling as to why Hawke chose Wofford, a college well known as a liberal progressive campus.

It was never going to be a place that would embrace Hawke's racist views.

But those views weren't out in the open initially.

For two years, he lived on campus undetected.

He kept good grades, got a girlfriend, and blended pretty seamlessly into the student body.

While at Wofford, Hawke studied German and history.

But, more significantly, it was where he moved the Knights of Freedom online.

The forum became a place where he could spew hate and lean into his evolving white supremacist beliefs.

It was also a place where he could reach a lot of people.

It's clear that Hawk had an instinct early on that the internet could be a moneymaker.

For a membership cost of $5 a month, he made the website an active place for neo-Nazis across the internet to visit with a chat room, a membership portal, and even poetry.

Onto the battlefield we gallop with swastikas raised high.

We are four horsemen for race and blood and we watch our enemies die.

It was ultimately an act of hubris that uncovered his alter ego.

In his third year, Haack or Commander Bo Decker as he was known online, posted a photo of himself in Nazi regalia to the KOF website.

A fellow student connected Commander Decker to the skinny kid with a Hitler mustache and called the local paper.

An article in the Spartanburg Herald Journal appeared exposing the Nazi hiding in their midst.

Wofford student-run's neo-Nazi website, Watchdog Group has followed 20-year-old junior since high school.

This prompted about 300 Wofford students to organize a candlelight protest against Hawk.

When the administration got wind of the student, whose dorm room was covered in posters of Nazi leaders and whose evening activities were making racist speeches or arranging gatherings with other southern white supremacists, they called the police.

I was notified for the Directorate of Public Safety to report to his office and the chief of police of Walford College was there and I was briefed on a case.

The assignment was made that I was placed in charge of the investigation.

This is Richard Banks, retired detective from the Spartanburg Police Department.

He investigated Davis Wolfgang Hawk extensively during this period, although it was news to him as to how things finally ended up for the Wofford Nazi.

So are you telling me that he's deceased?

Yeah, so he was murdered.

Okay.

Well, I'm surprised it took that long.

Detective Banks says that Hawk was under 24-hour surveillance.

Because of the

threat to the college, number one,

and the threat to the community, number two, and the threat of him bringing those different violent extremist groups into the city of Spartanburg.

We had pretty good uh eye on the Ku Klux Klan.

We have a pretty good eye on a lot of the bootleggers and the drug dealers.

We had our eye on all of those groups.

And then here comes of all things a neo Nazi college student from Wofford

and

having meetings in a parking lot of Wofford College with

four different extremist groups that don't get along.

I mean, we spent an awful lot of time having to watch him, not to have some sort of mass casualty because of

his nonsense.

The news of this Nazi living in plain sight got traction.

The dean of Wofford told the Boston Globe reporter that it was an embarrassment to his small college that Hawk was a student.

While Hawk was not kicked out of college, the administration was eager that he leave campus.

So Hawk moved to a nearby town and set up shop in a trailer.

He was a domestic terrorist threat that had to be watched.

Others were watching too.

Rolling Stone magazine did a profile on him with the headline, The Rise and Fall of the Campus Nazi.

The magazine gave Hawk a lot of ink.

The story was more than 5,000 words, and it followed Hawk and his girlfriend as they went about building the KOF.

And during the first ever Nights of Freedom Party Congress in Chesney, South Carolina, the TV news program Hard Copy was there.

And not long after that, Hawk sat down for an interview with Chris Cuomo on Fox Files.

Hitler's brand of hate still exists, and it's thriving on the internet.

It's been called.

As pictures of Nazi Nazi symbols and Holocaust victims flash across the screen, Cuomo's warning about the proliferation of online hate is eerily prescient.

In 1995, at the time of the Oklahoma City bombing, there was only one identified hate site on the World Wide Web.

Today, there are over 250.

Among them is this one that advocates the revival of the Nazi Party.

The Jewish world conspiracy is destroying us.

We have no choice but to defend ourselves.

It's just that simple.

Sitting in front of a huge red flag with a massive swastika emblazoned on it, Hawk is dressed in a full Nazi uniform.

He's immersed in his role.

I think 4,000 years of prejudice against the Jews and hatred of the Jews tends to indicate that there's a problem with the Jews.

Watching this old footage, it's easier to understand why Hawk's father downplays his son's Nazi years.

The truth is, he looks utterly ridiculous, like a child playing dress-up.

You can see how Hyman Greenbaum would feel like Hawk is just playing a role for attention.

But Hawk's mother Peggy took it a lot more seriously.

I called him and I

said, are you happy now?

And of course I was yelling.

It's important to understand when this all happened.

The Fox Files interview aired two days after the deadly Columbine massacre, where two young men shot and ultimately killed 14 of their fellow students and one teacher.

I yelled, are you happy now, Brett?

And he said, what do you mean?

And I said, well, don't you think some of your followers,

maybe these two guys even, how do you know, even if you're not for violence and you claim and you tell other people that you're not in favor of violence, and how do you even know that these two crazed idiots at Columbine didn't log on to KOF?

And your website might have spurred them on more than any other website.

How do you know?

I said, are you happy now?

And I slammed the phone down.

It's probably a stretch to think that Hawk had any connection to Columbine, but Peggy's remarks show that she did not play around when it came to talking to her son about his online hate-mongering.

One person who knew him well during his years at Wofford but wanted to remain anonymous told us that Hawk never really held Nazi beliefs, that all he cared about was making money.

Quote, he saw he could create a buy-in membership group, and they would pay him for nothing but a card and a fake Nazi title.

He had no real idea how hard it would hit others, how deep some hated Nazis.

This person added that Davis, quote, liked the symbols and uniforms.

They were strong and military and so gave him a sense of power.

That he didn't think much of the members.

If anything, he considered the people that paid him to be mostly stupid.

Basically, according to this person, Davis was not a racist, but rather played one for money.

The questions surrounding the authenticity of Britt's beliefs was something we asked throughout this investigation, because at the end of his life, as Jesse James, he was known to post on social media about the importance of inclusiveness.

But back in 1999, all anyone knew of Hawk was that he was online selling his version of an America free of Jews and other minorities.

At least, that was until someone at a national and influential civil rights organization decided to look a little bit deeper.

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A kidnapped child whispers dark secrets from his past in a language he no longer understands.

But a lost cassette will reveal the ugly truth.

From Curious Cast and Blanchard House comes a cross-continental odyssey to recover a stolen past.

This is Stop Rewind, The Lost Boy, available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.

We understood very much, very far in advance of most people, that the radical right was an extremely dangerous development in society and that it was growing and growing fast.

Mark Potok and the Southern Poverty Law Center had been keeping the wry on Hawk when he was still a Brit from Westwood High School, handing out flyers.

But their focus on him ramped up when Hawk went to college and took his group online.

I was editor-in-chief of our magazine, The Intelligence Report, which was an investigative magazine.

And that is where we published, you know, the first big story of ours about Hawk.

The reason for our interest wasn't simply that here was a kid who was a sophomore in a pretty spiffy college who was self-identified as a Nazi, but that he represented something that was really happening at that time and was very much on our agenda to look at, and that was, you know, the use of the internet.

It's easy today to see the connection between the internet and the actions of radicals, be it the far right or others.

But in 1999, there wasn't social media and the world of recruiting online was still in its infancy.

So it was in that context that we really got interested in Hawke.

And, you know, because there were many, many, many people we could have written about.

But Davis Wolfgang Hawke was a kid who, it seemed, and it turned out to be essentially true, had really managed to build a group of some size via the internet entirely.

You know, he claimed to have a thousand members when we met him in 1999.

That was absurd, ridiculous bullshit.

But he probably did have 100 to as many as 125 or even 150 people, meaning followers.

Even with a small audience, if he charged them five bucks, he was probably able to generate about $750 a month.

Not bad for a college student in the 90s.

Certainly enough to make Mark want to know more.

And Hawk was open to being interviewed.

We played it completely straight with him.

We explained to him, this is for a magazine.

It's called The Intelligence Report.

It's published by the Southern Poverty Law Center and so on.

But, you know, he wasn't interested in that at all.

He was just interested in being, you know, world famous, going to be the dictator of America or the entire globe or whatever it was going to be.

Hawk opened up his door to the Southern Poverty Law Center, offering them an unfiltered view.

When we said that Davis Wolfgang Hawk was a neo-Nazi, we weren't kidding, right?

I mean, this is a guy who literally dressed up in SS outfits.

He had a whole collection of SS knives, you know, Mein Kampf on his bookshelf, and went on and on and on about the Jews.

They were the principal enemies.

The Jews needed to be either murdered wholesale or, at the very least, every last one of them sterilized, you know, along the lines of Hitler's wishes.

Marx says that he and his colleagues did not view Hawke as a deadly threat.

They didn't think that he would be going out to kill people.

But he represented something real.

He was young.

He was quite bright.

So Hawk was interesting to us more from the point of view of what he represented than, you know, this guy's going to blow up a federal building one of these days.

This was all laid out in Mark's article.

But there was another detail that they reported on that would spell the end for Hawk, the Nazi king.

And the shocker, of course, was that Davis Wolfgang Hawk, you know, Mr.

super Nazi sounding name guy, had once been named, had been named at birth as Andy Greenbaum.

People close to Hawk, who were aware of his background, knew that his father was half-Jewish, but the wider world did not.

So, when the Southern Poverty Law Center published its story on Hawk, it was a barn burner.

The headline read, Hyman Greenbaum's son hard at work with neo-Nazi group.

Now, everyone in the U.S.

knew this Nazi was Jewish.

The story went viral.

So it became a story of, my God, look at this person.

He's running around in these outfits saying that

his father needs to be sterilized or perhaps killed because he was Jewish.

And by the way, Hawk told us, that's not really my father.

He says he is, but my mother had an affair with a visiting German businessman, and, you know, I am the product of that liaison.

This part of the story feels especially hurtful, but when we asked Hyman about it, he didn't see it that way.

My wife and I used to joke sometimes that they gave us the wrong baby.

I mean I guess

I've finally found out they didn't because they were able to finally identify my son through DNA analysis.

It seems as though Peggy Greenbaum found her son's claims a lot less funny.

You know, I talked to Peggy Greenbaum a couple of times.

She called him a coward and some other sort of choice words.

But, you know, I guess all I can say, you know, I've read that Paul has described his mother as being not very smart and so on.

And I just say I have to, I beg to differ.

You know, I found her a very bright woman, interesting,

but you know, deeply, deeply shocked at what her son had become.

I wasn't that shocked because it's not the child that I knew.

You know who else was deeply shocked?

The Nazis.

William Pierce, the head of the National Alliance and really the most important neo-Nazi leader of his day, described him as a Hollywood Nazi, a teenage hobbyist.

There was this enormous kickback against talk, and it very quickly got to the point where, you know, he couldn't go to a skinhead rally again, right?

If he'd go, he would have gotten beaten up very likely.

So, you know, we had pushed him right out of the scene.

According to Hawk's FBI file, one of the more serious threats Hawk received was from a group called the World Church of the Creator, one of the most notorious hate groups of the 1990s.

After Hawk's real identity was made public, the hate group created what they called an anti-KOF Resource Center online.

They wrote about Hawk being a fraud and warned that he should, quote, quit now, leave disappear from the scene completely you will end up being smashed under the hand of vengeance

aside from this group detective banks remembers another very angry follower of hawks

fella that came all the way from kansas

and he was so mad because hawk had promised him something and

I drove all the way here and oh I'm going to kill that motherfucker.

And he was there to kill him.

He didn't know we were in plain clothes.

He just thought we were one of them.

And I had stopped him.

I said, oh, well, you know something.

We're both police officers of the Department of Public Safety, so you're not going to come here and kill anybody.

That's just how

big a mess he had himself in.

In an attempt to get ahead of the blowback, Hawk blasted out a long email to his followers calling the accusations false and slanderous.

He coined it, the green bomb incident.

This is an actor reading from that email, where he also calls his mother a race traitor.

Let them slander me, attack me, and invent even more lies about me.

Let them call me a Jew, a queer, a mixed blood, and whatever else their twisted minds can produce.

Cowardly tactics will never work.

When the smoke clears, we'll see who is left standing on the battlefield.

Hawk knows the articles pointing out his heritage have done him harm.

But instead of backing away, instead of going dark until the chatter fades out, Hawk, in what will become a recurring pattern, doubles down.

I think he had delusions of grandeur or whatever, but

eventually he decided to organize a big march in Washington, D.C.

You know, he thought it was going to be bigger than what was then the million man march or something like that.

Hawke called for this massive demonstration in Washington as a response to our article about him.

And his way of saying, by God, you know, I really am, you know, the next Adolf Hitler, was to promise a massive march on Washington, D.C.

in late 1999.

Hawke pulled the right paperwork, filed it with the right departments, and sent the call out to his followers to march their views down to the White House.

We must spread our message onto the streets to any white man or woman who will take the time to listen.

In a message to his followers, Hawk penned a manifesto he called the Millennium Plan.

The party is generally perceived as a paramilitary neo-Nazi group with an element of Hollywood Nazism mixed in.

Since our goals are political in nature, we must dispel our image as a militia and ensure that the public sees us for what we are.

A legitimate National Socialist Political Party dedicated to defending white rights.

Mass recruitment and mass propaganda will be the goal.

And one part of meeting that goal involved rallying a ton of Nazis to march on Washington.

The night before that event, Hawk set up a staging area at a farm outside the capital.

This would be the place where he would assemble his legions of fellow race warriors for their glorious march the next day.

Journalist Brian McWilliams reported a camping area had been set up in the back of the farmhouse, port-a-potties had been rented, and two vans were parked in the driveway, waiting to taxi the hordes of fellow neo-Nazis into Washington.

It was also on a property owned by a group of domestic terrorists.

We know this because the police had been watching him.

Detective Richard Banks' colleagues trailed him there.

They surveilled him to a farm that was owned by another group in Virginia, or that was their staging area, area.

It was

completely sealed, 14-foot

chain leak fence, barbed wire across it to stop a bit.

It was a dirt road, big gates,

and yet they had guards standing out front, machine guns, which is legal.

It was private property.

Banks declined to give details about the group running the camp, but it's clear these were dangerous people.

Whatever you think of Hawk, you gotta admit, this guy had balls.

Here he was, a neo-Nazi recently outed as a Jewish kid, now teaming up with a group of gun-toting domestic terrorists preparing for a show of force in the nation's capital.

Would people show up the next day?

And how much could he trust the group he was with?

It must have been a very long night.

And I was on the bicycle, so I would like just go from one spot to another, sort of, as the police randomly went around.

We are back with documentarian Eddie Becker.

Well, there was supposedly like in me and like a thousand cops who were like special assignment and a thousand cops on duty, so they would show up.

Becker and others had learned about the planned march from an article in the Washington Post.

There were a couple of thousand people who were chanting, who were marching, who were, you know, making speeches.

But I don't trust the cops.

There is no reason to trust the Nazis.

We have to stay.

The thing is, those thousands of people, those speeches, they weren't spouting hate.

There was one guy, Hillbillies.

Hillbillies hate Nazis.

I was very impressed with him.

We don't like Nazis.

The Nazis brought me out.

I wanted to let them know we don't need them anymore.

Hillbillies hate Nazis.

Ain't no good to the Nazis, trust me.

Not a bit of good.

Color is beautiful.

Difference is beautiful.

Racism, stop!

What do we want?

Nazism!

When do we want it?

Well, sir, I am out here because I'm opposed to any kind of injustice against anybody.

In Becker's documentary, you see crowds of people.

You see police on foot, in cars, and even on horseback.

They're controlling people's movements and moving others along.

But what you don't see

are Nazis.

And none of the Nazis, neo-Nazis showed up.

And the city officials, who reportedly ponied up a million dollars on security measures, were pissed.

Here's Sergeant Richard Banks again.

And Chief Ramsey was the police chief of Washington, D.C.

I even think he filed suit against him for the cost of the security.

Are you serious about suing them for this?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Now, whether or not the city does it or not, I don't know, but I think we ought to.

It was a million and something dollars that he cost the city to prepare for that.

What none of the counter-protesters, none of the police knew, was that Davis Hawk was nowhere near Washington, D.C.

on August 7th, 1999.

At the end of the day, four of Davis Wolfgang Hawk's followers showed up in Washington.

Four.

Not a thousand, not 10,000, not 50,000.

And Hawk was not among them.

When the counter-protesters realized that the Nazis were no-shows, they rejoiced.

Instead of showing up to lead his followers into the next phase, Hawk had slinked away.

He was in his car, heading back down south.

All that anyone ever heard from Wolfgang Haock again was this letter that he posted on his website.

Whether through laziness, cowardice, or lack of commitment, almost all of you have let down the party and the white race itself.

The party has failed to achieve the standards that I set forth one year ago, and as a man of honor, I must therefore resign my position as leader and party chairman.

That was essentially the end of Davis Wolfgang Hawke as a Nazi careerist.

Neo-Nazis and white supremacists aren't exactly known for settling their differences by peaceful means.

He had pissed off some pretty violent people.

Our story made it impossible for Hawk to attend really any events of the radical right.

Certainly if he had gone to like a hammer skin concert, he might have been killed.

That's quite possible.

Now, you know, there were other more

sort of polite radical right venues where he probably wouldn't have been killed, but he certainly would have been kicked out.

I'm thinking it's pretty far-fetched to believe that a neo-Nazi would have held on to a grudge for 20 plus years only to find Hawkins squamish and kill him.

But this was a part of Hawk's life that he could never drop.

It was becoming easier to Google someone and harder to truly escape one's past.

And if you ran up against Hawk, as many people did over the next few years, and you found out that at one time he had been a leading neo-Nazi, well, it sure didn't help him seem like any less of an asshole.

And in the next stage of his life, Hawk would piss off millions and millions more people.

When we next heard about Davis Wolfgang Hawk, a story crossed the wires telling how America Online, AOL, had just won a massive default judgment, $12.8 million, against Davis Wolfgang Hawk.

Why?

Penis enlargement bills.

That's next time on Dirtbag Climber.

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