Death of a Demagogue, Pt. 2

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There was still a little bit of snow on the ground in Ellsworth, Maine, as the sun began to set on March 17, 1968.

Claudia and Frank Smith had been informed by a neighbor that a suspicious-looking car with out-of-state plates had been driving back and forth past their house all weekend.

And by Sunday evening, Frank had had enough.

He wanted to get a good look at the driver.

With Claudia at the wheel, The couple began following the mysterious Volkswagen that had been shadowing them for two days.

Who was chasing who, who loaded his gun first,

no one can quite agree.

By the time the dust had settled, two members of the American Nazi Party had spent the better part of an hour exchanging gunfire.

Somehow, no one was injured, but both cars were riddled with bullet holes.

After Krzyszto Vidnevich was taken into custody, an officer overheard Frank Smith ask him,

what was the reason?

I thought we were friends.

But the reason should have been obvious to Frank.

Surely he knew why a loyal lieutenant of the American Nazi Party would take a shot at him.

They were both men on a mission.

The same mission, in fact.

They were both conducting their own investigation into the murder of George Lincoln Rockwell.

I'm Molly Conger,

and this is Weird Little Gods.

That shootout in Maine took place more than six months after George Lincoln Rockwell died.

His killer had already been convicted of murder.

But a closed case file never stopped a conspiracy theory.

You know that.

And before we can get into why Frank Smith believed John Patler didn't do it, we have to get up to the point in our story where he did.

When we left off last week, it was 1963.

John Patler had been allowed to rejoin the American Nazi Party after failing spectacularly at his brief attempt to lead a splinter group.

Over the protests of most everyone who'd known John Patler, Rockwell welcomed him home again.

I struggled a bit this week with the question of where to focus this episode.

It would be easy enough to take a straightforward chronological journey through the activities of the American Nazi Party in the mid-1960s.

There are some good stories in there, some wild anecdotes that I'm sure I'll revisit some other time, through the lens of some other weird little guy who was there for them.

After all, this show is just one long story told out of order.

Listeners with long memories might remember I actually talked briefly about George Lincoln Rockwell's 1965 campaign for governor of Virginia in an episode last fall.

It was a story about the history of Virginia's crossburning laws.

So I reserve the right to come back to 1965 another day.

I hate to think I wasted half my week collecting old newspaper clippings about events I'm skipping over entirely.

But what I found most interesting in piecing together this timeline

the question of why.

Why did John Patler murder George Lincoln Rockwell in August of 1967?

Truthfully, no one knows.

But in the absence of that elusive truth, competing and conflicting narratives arose and the question becomes, what motivates those beliefs?

Even when you can't sort out what the truth actually is,

trying to discern the motivations behind those half-truths can shed some light on things.

So instead of telling you about every time a member of the American Nazi Party got arrested for disorderly conduct at a rally that got out of hand, every trip across the country to disrupt a civil rights march, every wild stunt pulled by a guy in a swastika armband,

instead of all that, I want to ask you a question.

What is a white person?

Who is white?

That's easy, right?

You know what a white person is.

It's like what the Supreme Court said about pornography.

You know it when you see it.

But how do you know?

Is it the color of your skin?

Is it the birthplace of your parents?

Is it your hair?

Your culture?

Your religion?

Yolits?

Who is white?

Are people of Slavic descent white?

Are fair-haired northern Africans?

Can a Jewish person be white?

Can a communist be white?

Italians are Europeans.

Surely that makes them white.

But what about a dark-haired, olive-skinned Sicilian?

I'm no sociologist.

I'm not an expert on the idea of race as a social construct, but

for me, the clearest evidence that the boundaries of whiteness are constantly shifting, that the definition is a highly politicized moving target, that whiteness is something something that can be given and taken away,

is the fact that the most racist people on the planet are usually the ones writing and rewriting that definition.

In the American South, we had the one drop rule.

The faintest trace of black ancestry excluded you from whiteness.

But without DNA testing or consistent record keeping, How could you know who had a black great-grandmother?

In apartheid South Africa, the law required all people to be officially registered with the government as black, white, colored, or Indian.

But how you were classified wasn't up to you.

It was determined by someone else.

Not just based on how you looked, but how you lived.

What language do you speak at home?

How educated are you?

How poor are you?

And it wasn't uncommon for members of the same family, children with the same parents, to end up classified differently by the government.

And famously, Germany adopted the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, codifying a definition of who is German and who is Jewish.

In all three of these chapters of history, those who fell outside the legal boundaries of whiteness were excluded from the benefits of citizenship.

And it isn't just governments who have struggled with classifying who exactly should be excluded.

You'd think that no no one would be more firm than the Ku Klux Klan when it comes to defining whiteness.

But the Klan had to hold a vote in the mid-1970s to determine whether white immigrants and Catholics were white enough to don white robes.

For George Lincoln Rockwell and his American Nazi Party, the parameters were set by Hitler himself.

Rockwell was America's Hitler.

or at least he hoped to be.

He wasn't just repeating some of the same ideas Hitler had in Nazi Germany.

He felt he was Hitler's spiritual successor.

His Nazi Party headquarters were adorned with gigantic swastika banners, and his stormtroopers wore Nazi uniforms.

He founded the American Nazi Party after weeks of intense, vivid dreams that always ended when he walked into a room to find Adolf Hitler sitting there waiting for him to arrive.

He threw a birthday celebration for Hitler every year on April 20th.

The first full issue of the party's newsletter was far from the only one to bear a photo of Hitler on the front cover.

He dedicated his 1961 memoir to Hitler.

And in that memoir, Rockwell is pretty clear what he means when he talks about the white race.

He's talking about blonde, blue-eyed Aryans, Hitler's Aryan race, people of Nordic and Germanic heritage.

He lists Slavs, Italians, and Greeks in the same sentence as Chinese and Japanese immigrants.

These are minority groups.

These are races outside his definition of whiteness.

But in 1965, the commander of the American Nazi Party was starting to wonder if he was using the wrong definition of whiteness.

Rockwell's political philosophy had always relied on the legacy of Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany, but the United States in 1965 didn't exactly have the same concentration of Germans as Germany in 1935.

It was becoming painfully clear that without broadening this definition of whiteness, he would never have enough white people to do anything with at all, and the movement would be doomed.

Even in predominantly white areas, American-born Protestants of pure Nordic or German blood were usually outnumbered by Catholics, first-generation white immigrants, and people whose ancestors came from southern or eastern Europe.

He wasn't abandoning Hitler's vision, exactly.

He was just adapting it for an American movement.

This idea of a broader coalition of whites was on Rockwell's mind as early as 1965.

But the evidence of that is only in his private letters.

It's not until 1966 that the perfect opportunity for rebranding the movement landed right in his lap.

And that's when he invented the phrase, white power.

Or so the story goes.

In June of 1966, Stokely Carmichael, who was not yet called Kwame Ture, gave a speech in Greenwood, Mississippi.

The words black power had been spoken before, plenty of times.

Richard Wright wrote a book in 1954 called Black Power.

Grace Lee Boggs founded the Organization for Black Power in 1965.

Adam Clayton Powell Jr., a congressman representing Harlem, used the phrase in a speech earlier in 1966.

But for some reason, when Stokely Carmichael said those words in Mississippi, they stuck.

And Black Power entered the broader American lexicon.

Newspaper archives from that week show a sudden explosion of articles and op-eds about Black Power.

What is it?

What does it mean?

What do they want?

Should we be afraid?

And biographies of George Lincoln Rockwell all credit Rockwell with the invention of the phrase white power as a direct response to Stokely Carmichael.

And that's kind of true.

I guess it is at least as true as it would be to say that Stokely Carmichael invented the phrase black power.

He didn't, but he popularized it.

But William Schmeltz's 2013 biography says that Rockwell coined the term for the first time while speaking at a rally in Chicago.

So I figured, if the first popular usage of black power spawned a thousand hand-wringing op-eds,

I bet the first time someone shouted white power,

it probably at least ended up in the newspaper.

And it did.

But it wasn't Rockwell who said it.

Chicago newspapers on the morning of August 1st, 1966, ran headlines like, White mob battles Negro marchers and 60 injured as angry crowd breaks up rights march.

And the articles all describe a very violent, large white mob attacking a few hundred black civil rights marchers near Chicago's Marquette Park.

And the people throwing rocks at the marchers were all screaming, white power.

So far, this all makes sense with what I already know about that summer.

There were several famously violent assaults on civil rights marches in and around Marquette Park that summer.

And Rockwell did speak at some of those events.

But I double-checked my timeline.

Rockwell didn't speak at Marquette Park until August 21st.

So who's yelling white power in the park three weeks earlier?

A definitive answer to that question is probably lost to time.

But I think I found what could be the earliest recording of someone using the phrase white power movement to describe the thing we know it as today.

Mr.

Carmichael, if I may interrupt,

you may see right here an indication of where Mr.

Rockwell is aligning you as the antithesis of his movement, a white supremacy movement.

Oh, I think he is.

A white power movement.

I think he is, no question about it.

That's Chicago-area news anchor John J.

Madigan on the July 29th, 1966 episode of his political discussion show, At Random.

The guests that evening were Stokely Carmichael and George Lincoln Rockwell.

It's not until nearly the end of that hour-long segment that Rockwell seems to have grabbed hold of the phrase, and he makes an ominous statement about the violence that would visit Chicago in the weeks to come.

But I think we're building up to an inevitable confrontation between black power and white power, no matter what euphemisms you use.

Just two days after this segment aired, the phrase white power is suddenly on the lips of this white mob setting cars on fire in Southside Chicago.

It's what they were screaming as they hurled rocks at the nuns who marched with the demonstrators from the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations.

The following weekend, that screaming white mob faced off again with civil rights marchers.

This time, Martin Luther King Jr.

himself was in town to lead the march, part of a series of demonstrations that summer centered around housing discrimination.

King wouldn't live to see the fruits of this labor, but the Chicago Freedom Movement is generally credited as the driving force behind the passage of the Fair Housing Act, which was signed into law just a week after his death in 1968.

But on this day, August 5th, 1966, Martin Luther King Jr.

was struck in the face with a rock as he entered Marquette Park, so hard that he fell to his knees.

And the crowd, the crowd was all screaming white power as the rocks rained down.

King later told reporters, quote,

I've been in many demonstrations all across the South, but I can say that I have never seen, even in Mississippi and Alabama, mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as I'm seeing in Chicago.

And Rockwell was thrilled.

This was all the proof he needed.

Limiting himself to Hitler's ideas of racial purity was holding him back.

It wasn't Aryan superiority, it was white power.

that had united those racist throngs in Chicago.

These people throwing rocks at Martin Luther King Jr.

were white, sure.

But they weren't Aryan.

Many of them were Polish and Lithuanian, the kinds of white he hadn't tried to appeal to before.

But white power.

White power brought them together and it could be the way forward.

Rockwell couldn't make it out to Chicago right away, but he got to work.

The party's printing press, housed in a converted hen house in rural Spotsylvania County, Virginia, ran all night long, churning out signs that said, white power.

As soon as Rockwell could scrape together the funds for a plane ticket, he flew his most loyal lieutenant out to Chicago to try to take advantage of this violent momentum.

John Patler arrived at O'Hare Airport with a suitcase full of white power posters on August 14th.

As I was pouring over the newspaper archives from August of 1966, the first time I found a name attached to a chant of white power was at that march on August 14th.

It had been chanted by the crowd on July 31st and on August 5th, but in all of those stories, it's not coming from anyone's mouth in particular.

It doesn't say where it started.

So if the newspaper is any official record of history,

The first man to stand in front of a crowd and lead an organized chant of white power wasn't George Lincoln Rockwell.

It was the man who would shoot Rockwell dead almost exactly a year later.

It was John Patler standing on a bench in Marquette Park.

There is another, albeit slightly less cinematic, possibility.

As thrilling as it is to put the first public rallying cry of Rockwell's most famous slogan into the mouth of his killer, I can at least speculate about the identity of the nameless member of that crowd who may have started the chant the first time.

If nothing else, this is an opportunity to introduce you more fully to the man who opened fire on that couple in Maine in 1968.

The American Nazi Party had an office in Chicago.

John Patler was living in Virginia, where the party had its headquarters, and he flew out to Chicago a week after Martin Luther King Jr.

was hit with that rock.

But that first week in August, there were members of the American Nazi Party in the crowd, and they may have been the ones to get those chants going.

The head of the Chicago chapter of the American Nazi Party in 1966 was a 22-year-old named Christopher Vidnevich.

Now you know I love to be thorough.

I love to make a whole timeline of the lives of even the most ancillary characters in a story.

I guess I just love wasting my own time.

And you know, I don't believe at face value the biographical details that I read in Nazi newsletters.

But those newsletters make some extraordinary claims about Vidnevich.

He says that he joined the Nazi Party as a teenager because of his burning bone-deep hatred of communists.

That's pretty standard.

But he says that he hated communists because they murdered his father.

And it's a claim he would later repeat on the stand, under oath, when he testified in his own trial for shooting at Frank Smith in 1968.

So I did a little of my own digging.

It might have been faster, in retrospect, to work backwards by assuming that he was telling the truth and searching for a man with that last name who was executed in Yugoslavia after the war.

But that isn't what I did.

The first thing I found were naturalization records for a 13-year-old boy named Kristo Vidnevich.

And on the back of the card, it was written that his name was changed to Christopher when he gained his citizenship.

And from there, I was able to find a news story from 1957 about a 13-year-old boy named Kristo Vidnevich and his 17-year-old sister taking their oath of citizenship in a courtroom in Chicago.

By the time they were naturalized, they'd been in the United States for seven years.

In 1950, Lydia Vitnevich and her two children, aged 10 and 6 at the time, were listed as stateless when they arrived at the port of New York aboard a ship that had sailed from Germany.

So I kept digging.

And I found a document produced by the International Refugee Organization.

In 1948, Lydia Vitnevich's application for refugee status was denied.

And the stated reason is: quote,

Petitioner is a Croat woman from Zagreb who was evacuated by the Germans to Austria in December 1944 with a number of other women and children whose husbands were left behind by reason of their official functions.

Despite the very good impression which applicant has made upon the board, there are reasons to believe that only the wives of persons who assisted the Germans were taken care of by the Wehrmacht.

She later filed an appeal and was ultimately deemed eligible for refugee status because the family could not be safely repatriated to Yugoslavia due to threats from someone, quote, moved by a spirit of revenge for actions of petitioner's husband.

Well, now I'm committed.

I need to know what the story is here.

I'm so far afield of what I was supposed to be working on, and there's really no excuse for a digression this long.

But I had to know what it was that this man had done that might move someone's spirit that way.

So I spent an entire day trying to find and translate documentation about war crimes tribunals in Yugoslavia in 1945.

When Lydia Vidnevich spoke to a reporter at her children's naturalization ceremony, she said that she had last heard from her husband by letter.

in May of 1945 when he was attempting to cross the border into Austria.

She neglected to mention that his letter was written shortly after the remnants of the fascist government of Croatia attempted to flee to Austria and before he was captured by the British army and sent back to face a tribunal.

He was executed a month later.

Christopher Vidnevich's father wasn't just a Nazi collaborator.

He was a war criminal.

Ivan Vidnevich was tried alongside several high-ranking officials of the Nazi puppet puppet government that carried out mass murder in Croatia in the 1940s.

Lydia told that reporter in 1957 that her husband had been a judge in Zagreb, but he was a judge in name only.

He was the presiding judge of Zagreb's mobile court-martial,

an instrument of the Ustasha regime's program of mass murder.

These judges roamed the country carrying out show trials.

The trials lasted mere minutes, and the accused had no chance to speak for himself.

The defendant was always guilty, and the sentence was almost always death.

He would try dozens of people at once for crimes as minor as reading forbidden political pamphlets, or simply for being Serbian, or Romani, or Jewish.

In one afternoon in 1941, Ivan Mitneyevich sentenced 100 people to die at the Yasenovats concentration camp.

So,

yes, I guess Christopher Vidnevich isn't technically wrong when he said communists killed his father.

But it was only after he stood trial for handing down death sentences for thousands of Jews, Serbs, Roma, and political dissidents.

A long tangent, I know.

But I think it's worth knowing that one of the most fervent, violent supporters of Rockwell's Nazi Party, this young man whipping up crowds that beat civil rights marchers every weekend all summer in Chicago in 1966,

he was a true believer.

He wasn't misguided.

He wasn't confused.

He knew exactly what it meant to call yourself a Nazi.

He knew exactly what he was advocating for and who would have to die for him to get it.

He wasn't ironic or edgy or a joke.

When he put on that swastika armband, he did it to fulfill his father's legacy.

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But we were talking about white power.

It's Rockwell who gets credit for the term, even if it was a TV news anchor who put the words in his head and his lieutenants who got those crowds to chant it.

In August of 1966, Nazis raised hell in Chicago.

After Patler arrived in town on the 14th, he and Vidnevich whipped up an angry mob in Marquette Park.

One police officer called the resulting violence the closest thing he'd ever seen to an all-out war.

In his rousing speech from the park bench, John Patler announced to the crowd that Rockwell himself would be speaking in that very spot the next weekend.

The August 21st rally was George Lincoln Rockwell's finest hour.

He'd never commanded such an audience, and he never would again.

Sure, he'd spoken to huge theaters of people, but this was different.

Thousands of people were there, not to gawk at the Nazi, not to protest, not to heckle,

but because they wanted to hear him speak.

A few lone hecklers were quickly handled by the crowd, but the people who were there were enthralled by him.

This was no college auditorium full of curious skeptics and silent protesters.

This was a roaring crowd.

And standing atop his camper with a giant swastika banner draped down the side, Rockwell capped off his speech by asking the crowd to yell, white power, loud enough for Martin Luther King Jr.

to hear them on the other side of town.

Over and over again he led them in a call in response, yelling, white,

and basking in the response as thousands of voices responded, power.

Years later, when James Mason was writing the newsletter that would eventually be collected into the book Siege, that Bible of the modern neo-Nazi terrorist,

he called this the apex moment of the 1960s.

But the magic was short-lived.

Martin Luther King Jr.

moved on from Chicago to other cities, and it turned out the racist white people of Chicago didn't actually like George Lincoln Rockwell.

They just really hated the civil rights movement.

But it was proof, still, for Rockwell, that white power was the way forward.

By the end of 1966, Rockwell was drafting his final book, White Power, although he had no way of knowing he would die just days before it was released.

On January 1st, 1967, he issued a formal announcement to party members that they were rebranding.

The American Nazi Party would from that day forward be called the National Socialist White People's Party.

The mandatory Sieg Heils would be replaced with shouts of white power.

In the directive announcing the change, Rockwell wrote, quote, we must strive among our white family of people to include all and alienate no white non-Jews.

He was commanding his Nazis to stand shoulder to shoulder and to accept as equals lesser whites.

Not everyone shared the commander's vision.

There was a growing schism within the party, those who accepted this new commitment to a pan-white unity and those who could never accept any departure from a strict interpretation of Hitler's racial philosophy of Aryan superiority.

This new expanded definition of of whiteness was offensive to Nazi hardliners, and factions formed.

For men like Matthias Kohl and William Luther Pierce, it was unthinkable that lesser races like Slavs or Greeks could be included in the party's ranks.

And John Patler, the son of Greek immigrants with his dark hair and his dark eyes, became the living, breathing manifestation of this heresy that was threatening to tear the organization apart.

apart.

William Luther Pierce hated John Patler.

That's important to remember as we move into the messy work of trying to sort fact from fiction in everyone's account of what happened in the weeks before Rockwell was murdered.

Pierce was not shy about the fact that he was disgusted by Patler's presence in the party.

Even decades later, not long before his own death in 2002, Pierce recalled to his own biographer that Patler was a, quote, dark, greasy-looking little guy, and he was always scheming.

Rockwell was fully committed to his new vision.

He was contemplating another run for office, and this approach had the potential to broaden his appeal.

America is full of racists.

He'd led them on marches up and down the streets of Chicago.

But no matter how racist they are, no matter how many beliefs they share with Rockwell, a huge chunk of voting-age men in America in 1966 had living memory of fighting the Nazis in World War II.

No amount of shared racism could overcome their visceral disgust for the swastika on his shoulder,

even if they hated Jews as much as he did.

But replacing the swastika with an eagle, swapping the Sieg Heil for white power, and preaching a message of white unity, of white power, in this time of a hysterical white fear of black power,

that could help him get his message to the masses.

That could earn him thousands of new followers.

But he was painfully aware of the need to convince the followers he already had first.

He couldn't afford to lose them.

Rockwell Rockwell urged John Patler to be patient, to be diplomatic, to let the commander handle it.

But Patler was still the same volatile, paranoid man he'd been a decade earlier when a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation ominously predicted that he may one day commit murder.

So tensions were high at the Nazi Party barracks.

Perhaps if he'd kept his head down, Rockwell would have eventually achieved party discipline on the the new messaging.

But instead, Patler stoked conflict.

He was reprimanded for calling another stormtrooper a blue-eyed devil.

He fell behind on his duties as publisher of Stormtrooper, the party's quarterly magazine.

And as the man in charge of the printing press, he dragged his feet when Rockwell ordered him to assist William Luther Pierce in producing Pierce's new publication called National Socialist World.

Aside from the existing racial animosity between them, it seems like Patler saw National Socialist World as a competitor to the Stormtrooper, which was his magazine.

And with Pierce on the scene, with his own publication, he was worried that he would lose favor, that he would lose power.

When Rockwell assigned another party member to assist Patler at the printing press, since he was falling so behind in his work, Patler turned the man away and wouldn't let him in the building because that man's views fell more on the pro-Nordic side of the schism.

So he's causing problems on purpose and he's got a bad attitude and he doesn't have a lot of people on his side.

The only person really on his side through all of this is George Lincoln Rockwell.

So that counts for a lot, but he's becoming a liability.

The breaking point finally came in March of 1967.

The last straw is never really the most significant one.

But when Rockwell arrived back home in Virginia after a court appearance in Chicago, he found Patler had once again left his post without permission.

He'd been shirking his duties for months, sometimes disappearing for a week at a time without telling anyone.

During Rockwell's Midwest College speaking tour over the winter, the pair had argued when Patler demanded money for airfare to fly home to take care of his father-in-law, who he said was ill.

Rockwell gave in that time, but Patler had abused the commander's leniency for the last time.

Biographies of Rockwell characterize the memo drafted on March 30th, 1967, as an order dismissing Patler from the party.

But I've read it, and I don't agree.

The two-page document bears the subject, modification of duties.

Of the 13 numbered paragraphs, the first seven outlines the reason Patler is being disciplined.

He's been absent from his post without permission.

He's only produced two issues of Stormtrooper over the past year.

He's abusing his editorial control of the magazine by printing statements without Rockwell's sign-off.

Pretty straightforward stuff.

But the tone shifts when Rockwell gets to the thing that's actually bothering him.

Quote, you have continuously produced catastrophic division and hatred between party members, berated other party officers in the presence of troops, allowed your personal life to cause the disaffection of workers in the party to the point of near explosion, particularly in Chicago, and you have done precisely the same thing you did last time before you ran out on the party with Dan Burroughs to try to set up your own party.

You have agitated and irritated everybody around you until I have on my hands a series of near mutinies and upheavals.

He seems bothered.

Rockwell goes on to say that he will no longer tolerate the disruption of Patler's, quote, damnable constant emphasis on the darks versus lights controversy and his quote irrational inferiority complex over being Greek and dark.

He says that none of that matters to him.

He's always been committed to white unity.

It's Patler who's making this a problem.

I don't know why everyone's surprised that there's racism at the Nazi Party headquarters, but

that was the problem.

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But he doesn't dismiss Patler from the party.

That's not what this letter says.

You have left me no honorable choice but to discipline you as severely as it is in my power, short of ejecting you from the party.

I could also do that, but I do recognize your value to the cause and your dedication thereto.

The discipline he imposed was definitely humiliating, for sure.

Rockwell sent Matthias Cole to cut the lock off Patler's bedroom door at the party's property in Spotsylvania County, which he knew would bother Patler because the men hated each other.

But Patler was only relieved of his duties at the printing press.

He was reassigned to live at the party's barracks in Arlington, where he would continue to edit and publish Stormtrooper magazine.

under Rockwell's direct personal supervision.

Honestly, it's barely a punishment.

Hatler hated being assigned to the Spotsylvania property.

It was way out in the country and far from his family.

That's part of why he kept leaving his post.

Moving back to Arlington would put him closer to his family.

By this time, he'd married his second wife and they had two young sons.

But he did not take the letter well.

Despite what looks to me like a clear statement that he's not kicked out of the party,

Patler walked away.

Surviving letters that Patler wrote to another member of the party in April and May do show that he was angry.

He was angry with Rockwell.

He was angry with the party.

It was a lot like when he walked away in 1961 with Dan Burroughs.

You know, he spent a few months cursing Rockwell's name and Then he got over it.

They'd been through this before.

They'd known each other for nearly a decade.

Patler was one of Rockwell's very first followers.

And aside from all the times that he did quit, he was loyal.

They were close.

And Rockwell had always forgiven him before.

And it seems Patler was willing to forgive too.

In one letter he'd wrote that summer, he not only forgave Rockwell for sleeping with his wife, he gave the commander his blessing to continue the affair if he wanted to, writing, if Alice wants to make it with you, I wouldn't object.

That's the truth.

In his final letter to Rockwell, Patler wrote,

I feel so much better after talking to you.

I want so badly to get back into the spirit of things and push for you all the way.

I don't think there are two people on earth who think and feel the same as we do.

You are a very important part of my life.

I need you as much as you need me.

Without you, there is no future.

There's no evidence that Rockwell ever wrote back, but Christopher Vidnevich testified at trial that Rockwell directed him to meet with Patler several times that summer to discuss reconciliation.

Contrary to the tone of Patler's own letters, Vidnevich paints a picture of a spiteful, bitter man plotting revenge, claiming Patler told him, quote, Rockwell is an evil genius and he must be stopped.

Now I should be clear with you before we go any further.

John Patler murdered George Lincoln Rockwell.

He did.

He was convicted at trial, which makes it legally true, but is it true?

I think so.

Based on my own reading of the evidence against him, I'm convinced the jury reached the correct verdict.

Patler himself has never accepted responsibility for the crime, and there are a handful of holdouts with conspiracy theories to this day.

But on the question of who pulled the trigger, I have no doubt that it was John Patler.

So that's not why I spent days trying to itemize these small discrepancies in every recorded account of the events leading up to Rockwell's death.

I'm not searching for an alternate suspect.

I'm just curious about what people might be trying to gain by muddying the truth.

Because everyone is.

Every account of what happened after that memo in March has to be weighed against the motivations of the man telling the story.

Take Vidnevich, for example.

His trial testimony is the only source for the claim that Rockwell asked him to meet with Patler in June.

But why would Rockwell assign that task to Vidnevich?

The pair had worked closely together in Chicago the summer before, but Vitnevich was firmly in the Aryan superiority camp in this schism.

He was with Matthias Kohl.

He was a fanatical racist.

He joined the American Nazi Party to follow in the footsteps of his father, a Nazi collaborator and a Croatian nationalist who was executed for his role in the ethnic cleansing of Serbs.

He would have been a poor choice to extend the olive branch to Patler that summer.

But his testimony at trial was convincing enough that when the Supreme Court of Virginia upheld Patler's conviction, Vidnevich's testimony that Patler had made those threats in June was the only evidence they cited as a motive.

And then we have Matthias Kohl, who said that when he was watching Patler pack his things after being relieved of his duties at the Spotsylvania property, he just kept muttering over and over again, he's making a mistake.

He'll be sorry.

An ominous statement, to be sure, if he said it.

But Kohl is also the source of claims made just hours after Rockwell's death, that Patler had been expelled from the party because of his Bolshevik leanings, because communist thought kept creeping into his work.

Matthias Kohl had been the loudest voice within the party against Rockwell's shift away from Hitler's ideas about Germanic racial purity, a matter he he rectified when he seized control of the party immediately after Rockwell's death.

I know that sounds like I'm trying to present alternate suspects in conspiracy theories.

I'm not.

Hatler did it.

But in their attempts to keep their own secrets and to write politically advantageous versions of history, they created the perfect conditions for conspiracy theories that will never die.

I never get as far as I think I'm going to when I start writing an episode.

I skimmed over the entirety of 1964 and 1965 so I could get to the end of this murder trial, and I haven't even gotten to the murder itself yet.

And I guess I'll never have a chance to tell you about all those weird FBI memos I found from various members of the American Nazi Party contacting the FBI to accuse each other of killing JFK.

Some other day, maybe.

But there was just something so intriguing to me about this internal struggle over the optics of white power.

Rockwell wasn't getting soft on racism in 1966.

He was trying to find a practical way to inflict that racism on a wider audience.

He still believed in killing every Jewish, homosexual, and black person in the country when he finally got power.

He was just refining the sales pitch to increase the odds that he'd get that power.

And John Patler wasn't kicked out of the party for being a communist.

If anything, he was the member of the party most closely aligned with Rockwell.

Plenty of people hated George Lincoln Rockwell.

People hated him for being a Nazi.

Nazis hated him for failing to live up to Hitler's legacy.

But the man who shot him, he didn't hate him at all.

Next week, George Lincoln Rockwell will die.

There's no way that episode doesn't get to the big moment I've been working up to all this time.

Rockwell gets shot.

Hatler goes to trial.

And the Nazis left in their wake get to work trying to rewrite history.

and claim Rockwell's legacy.

And I promise, I haven't forgotten that strange little incident I teased last week, but maybe it's for the best that I didn't make it up to 1976.

I meant to drive across town this week to double-check my recollection.

When John Patler was arrested for trespassing, the news story listed the address.

And I swear to God, I think I went to a couple of parties in college at the house where John Patler once got caught having an orgy.

There really is something cursed about Charlottesville.

Weird Little Guys is a production of CoolZone Media and iHeartRadio.

It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger.

Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman 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 WeirdLittleGuysPodcast at gmail.com.

I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer if it's nothing personal.

You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.

Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my Weird Little Guys.

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