Death of a Demagogue

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It was just after noon on a warm warm day near the end of summer when the demagogue died.

A single bullet, fired from a rooftop by his assassin, killed him almost instantly.

A man who'd seemed larger than life bled out in front of horrified onlookers as his killer fled the scene on foot.

He'd devoted his entire adult life to preaching hate.

In the last few years of his hateful life, he'd spent much of his time touring colleges and universities, delighting in the controversy his appearances provoked and wailing about free speech when venues refused to host him.

On college campuses across the country, he gave fiery speeches about the evils of communism, telling his young audiences that they were being brainwashed by liberalism and force-fed Marxist propaganda.

He railed against the Civil Rights Act, which he called a mistake.

He said it was a weapon wielded against the white race, and he publicly disparaged Martin Luther King Jr.

He likened homosexuality to a disease, and he dreamed of the day when he would have the power to strip queer people of their rights entirely.

Above all else, though, he was preoccupied with his belief that the white race was in danger of being replaced.

Conspiracy theories about his death abounded.

and his movement made him a martyr for their cause.

But in the end, the man who fired the shot that killed George Lincoln Rockwell wasn't a Jew or a communist or an agent of the state.

It was a man who'd loved him like a father.

I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird La Guy.

This is a story about history.

That's all.

It's the story of an assassination that rocked the right wing, reverberating through the white power movement for decades.

Sometimes I'll open an episode by describing the meandering mental process through which I have arrived at that week's subject.

Some half-formed thought that led me down a rabbit hole or some tangent from a past episode that I'm following up on.

Something like that.

But maybe there's no reason in particular that I was thinking this week about the sudden, violent end of a man who spent his entire adult life stoking violence against everyone else.

George Lincoln Rockwell died in the parking lot of a laundromat in a strip mall in Arlington, Virginia at 12.02 p.m.

on August 25th, 1967.

This isn't really an episode about George Lincoln Rockwell, except for the fact that he's dead.

Rockwell was the commander of the American Nazi Party, a group he founded in 1959.

There isn't much to say about Rockwell that hasn't been said before.

He was the founding father of American neo-Nazism.

He was a pioneer in the field of Holocaust denial barely a decade after the Holocaust ended.

He invented the term white power.

He took a Volkswagen bus full of Nazis across the country to Montgomery, Alabama, just to antagonize the Freedom Riders.

He followed Martin Luther King Jr.

all over the country, holding Nazi counter demonstrations.

And when one of his stormtroopers punched King in the face in front of a crowd in Birmingham, Rockwell promoted the assailant to the head of the party's Chicago office.

Rockwell was a monster.

But this isn't a story about George Lincoln Rockwell.

It's about the Nazi who killed him.

When that man was convicted of first-degree murder in 1967, his name was John Patler.

But it wasn't always, and it isn't anymore.

The Nazi best known as John Patler was born John Patzalos in New York City in January of 1938.

He was the first of two sons born to Christos and Athena Patzalos.

Christos, often referred to by the Anglicized version of his name, Christ, immigrated to New York as a teenager in 1913,

three years before his future wife was born.

He married Athena Marogianus, the daughter of Greek immigrants, in the fall of 1937, just a few months before their son John was born.

His younger brother George would follow a year later.

In 1943, when the Patsalos boys were just four and five years old, their father murdered their mother.

Newspaper articles from the Times say the couple had been arguing for hours on the afternoon of August 7th.

Christos Patzalos then took a taxi to a nearby police station and announced, My wife has been fighting with me.

Now she is shot with my revolver, for which I have a permit.

None of the newspaper articles from 1943 that I can find mention the boys.

It's almost unbearable to imagine that these two little boys had been left alone in the home with their dying mother.

But in a later autobiographical essay that Patler wrote for the American Nazi Party's Stormtrooper magazine, he said that she'd actually dropped them off at her mother's house before heading back home to pack her bags.

She was planning to leave her husband.

Christos was initially booked only on a charge of felonious assault.

But when Athena died the next day, his charges were upgraded to first-degree murder.

After unsuccessfully pleading temporary insanity, Christos was allowed to plead guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter in early 1944, and he was sentenced to just seven and a half years.

While their father was away at Sing Sing, George and John lived with their maternal grandmother.

Bessie Mavro Giannis was only a few years older than her son-in-law, and she was recently widowed and still had a teenager of her own at home.

Pattler would later write that she supported them by selling flowers at a stand on Park Avenue, and he remembers her hatred of the Jewish vendors that she had to share space with at the market.

It isn't entirely clear if their father actually wanted them back, but their grandmother died in 1954, just a few years after Christos was released from prison.

John and George were placed briefly in a youth home before ultimately being returned to their father's custody.

After a decade of hearing their grandmother curse his name as the murderer of her daughter, suddenly they were living with their father in the very same home in the Bronx where he'd killed their mother.

Patler started getting into trouble with the police that year.

In September, he and another 16-year-old boy stole a car, got into a police chase, crashed into a tree, and then ran off into the woods, evading the police for hours.

That story sounds completely made up, and if it was just Patler's retelling of it years later, I wouldn't believe it.

But there really is a 1954 newspaper headline that reads, 25 cops seize two teens after hot car crash.

The other boy was sent off to a reform school.

But Patler hadn't been in serious trouble before, so he just got probation.

By his own account, this was when he, quote, began to take a keen political interest in the Jews.

Most biographies of George Lincoln Rockwell have a few pages devoted to Patler's childhood, and they all seem to agree that Christos Patsalos and Bessie Malrogianis were very outspoken in their anti-Semitism.

So it's not like he hadn't been exposed to the idea before.

But at 16 years old, John Patler found a copy of Mein Kampf in the school library.

And he was really vocal about his newfound interest in National Socialism.

His admiration for Hitler was no secret, and it was causing him problems in school.

One afternoon, while he was boxing in the park, he was chatting with another teenage boy about the need to do something about how the Jews are responsible for the malevolent influence of communism,

as teenage boys did in the 50s, I guess.

And his friend offered to introduce him to some like-minded individuals.

A newly formed group called the Nationalist Youth League.

Doest Hooker, a wealthy businessman, had formed the Nationalist Youth League ostensibly as the youth arm of his nationalist party, but it mainly functioned as a teenage gang run by a middle-aged man.

The boys wore matching black uniforms and busted up communist meetings and marched around the city handing out anti-Semitic pamphlets.

Patler idolized Hooker and quickly grew attached to this man as a sort of surrogate father.

He later wrote that Hooker gave him his first political training and taught him, quote, everything he knew about the Jews.

Part of that training, I guess, was making his own anti-Semitic flyers.

And in 1956, Patler tried his hand at drawing up his own pamphlets and he was subsequently arrested on a charge of criminal libel because the leaflets targeted a specific Jewish businessman by name.

He was still on probation for that midnight joyride in a stolen car two years earlier, so he was sent to a psychiatric hospital for evaluation.

Usually we only have people's recollections after the fact.

You know, years later, with the benefit of hindsight, people will say, oh, I knew him back then.

I remember he used to say this or that.

You have to take it with a grain of salt, usually, when a biography says that a man has always been an anti-Semite.

But in John Patler's case, there is an incredible trove of archival evidence.

For his 1999 biography of George Lincoln Rockwell, historian Frederick Simonelli was actually able to access Patler's case file at the Maurisania Hospital Mental Hygiene Clinic.

I don't know how that's possible, come to think of it.

I mean, those are medical records?

But the footnotes are very thorough.

In American Führer, Simon Elliot writes that a caseworker at the hospital made a note in Patler's file in 1956 about his frequent anti-Semitic comments to the hospital staff.

A psychiatrist wrote that Patler told him, quote, I go to church every Sunday morning and fight the Jews.

The same doctor later wrote in the file, quote, The patient may become dangerous.

He appears as a potential murderer.

After a short stay in the hospital, Patler was released, but he had to continue with court-mandated outpatient treatment.

In 1957, the doctor's notes show Patler's mental state was deteriorating.

He was paranoid, delusional, and exhibiting violent tendencies.

And the doctor again wrote that the patient may one day commit murder.

Inexplicably, his case file was actually closed out soon after that.

And there's a note that his probation officer felt that he was making satisfactory adjustments.

And it's around this time that John Patler first met George Lincoln Rockwell at a party at DeWest Hooker's home.

Rockwell hadn't yet formed the American Nazi Party, but he was an up-and-coming right-wing extremist.

It was actually DeWest Hooker who encouraged Rockwell to come out, so to speak, to stop speaking in coded language and just put on the swastika armband already.

In that autobiographical essay Patler later wrote in the Nazi magazine, he claims that he chose to leave high school and enlist in the Marine Corps in 1958.

But the timeline is a little muddy here.

In Simonelli's book, he writes that Patler's probation violation had actually landed him back in court, and this time he was given two choices.

He could face the charges as an adult, or he could enlist.

And he chose to enlist.

In 1959, his father, Christos Patzalos, died.

De West Hooker had moved away to Italy, apparently to run a seven-up bottling factory.

John Patler was a 21-year-old Marine, alone in the world, when he was assigned to a duty station in Northern Virginia, just a short drive away from the headquarters of the newly organized American Nazi Party.

Now, I've been calling him John Patler all this time, just for the sake of simplicity, because that's how we know him.

But from the time he was born in 1938 until this point in the story, 1960, his name is John Patzalos.

But in 1960, after he became one of the first stormtroopers in the American Nazi Party, he legally changed his name to John Patler.

Not only did it sound less Greek, which was a little too ethnic for the Nazi Party, he liked it because it sounded like Hitler.

There are some sources that claim that he was actually born Yannaki Patsalos.

And I can't quite make sense of that.

Yannis, sure, that's just Greek for John.

I wouldn't be surprised if his grandmother probably called him that.

But there's never any citation for the claim that he was born Yannaki.

I mean, I don't think that's anyone's name.

Sometimes you see a Yannakis.

But this mysterious fake name is always spelled Y-A-N-A-C-K-I.

And I don't think that's a name at all.

Mostly I saw this claim repeated in old stormfront posts.

So that's not a great source.

I don't need to track that down.

That's just trash.

But it was on his Wikipedia page without a citation until someone removed it in 2011.

And it still shows up on the German and Finnish language Wikipedia pages.

And it even appears in a recently published doctoral dissertation about the white power movement.

I guess it doesn't matter that much, but I did track down a copy of the 1940 census, and his father recorded his two-year-old son's name as John Adam Patzalos.

When he was arrested at 16 in 1954, the newspaper recorded that the boy who was arrested was named John Patzalos.

When he enlisted in the Marines in 1958, Marine Corps muster records list him as John C.

Patzalos.

But I do think I found the original source of this strange mistake.

And I think it's the faded recollection of a former rival.

Before William Luther Pierce wrote the Turner Diaries, before he founded National Alliance, all the way back in 1966,

Pierce picked up his family and moved them to Virginia to be closer to George Lincoln Rockwell.

His time at the American Nazi Party headquarters only overlapped with Patler for about a year.

But in that year, Patler and Pierce were pretty open in their hatred of one another.

And Pierce made no secret of the fact that he thought Patler was not white.

So maybe that's why he gave Patler a much more ethnic-sounding made-up name when he was recounting that period of his own life to his biographer in 2000.

Who knows?

So in 1960, the Marine private John Patzalos became Nazi stormtrooper John Patler.

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From his duty station in Quantico, he was making weekend trips to Arlington to attend American Nazi Party meetings and rallies.

And he very quickly became quite close to Rockwell.

At a rally in Washington, D.C.

over Memorial Day weekend in 1960, Rockwell proudly told the crowd that the man standing right next to him was, in fact, a United States Marine.

And that fact quickly made it back to the military police.

The man the Marine Corps knew as Private John Pazzalos was arrested, questioned, and given a psychiatric evaluation.

In July of 1960, he was given a general discharge under honorable conditions.

So, not a dishonorable discharge, but it isn't an honorable discharge either.

There's a brief mention in one New York City newspaper after his discharge that he was going to file a lawsuit alleging that it had been a conspiracy to violate his rights, naming the Marine Corps as well as a group called Jewish War Veterans of the United States as defendants.

He was asking for $1,575 in back pay.

and $500,000 in damages for the harm to his reputation.

Again, this is a man wearing a Nazi uniform outside of the White House.

I don't know what reputation he thinks is being damaged.

He didn't have an attorney, and aside from that one news story about the Jewish Veterans Group telling a reporter that they had received service of the complaint, I can't find anything else about it, and it's possible he never actually filed it.

But now, in the summer of 1960, he's completely untethered.

He's an orphan.

He's not a Marine.

He has no day job.

He has no family.

There's only Rockwell.

Marine Corps Private John Patsalos is dead.

And stormtrooper John Patler quickly rose through the ranks of Rockwell's party.

He was promoted to editor of the party's official publication, the National Socialist Bulletin, before the fourth issue was published in the fall of that year.

He appeared right by Rockwell's side at countless rallies that year.

And in 1960 alone, he was arrested at so many Nazi Party rallies that it's hard to sort out which news stories about his court appearances are connected to which arrests.

There were disorderly conduct charges after a brawl broke out at a rally near the White House.

And then a week later, another disorderly conduct charge when they came back to protest the original arrest.

And then a week after that, he's arrested again for putting up swastika stickers at the ADL headquarters.

Rockwell gave Patler his blessing to marry Erica, a blonde woman of German descent.

And she was already heavily pregnant with their first son when she had to drive to D.C.

in the middle of the night to bail her husband out of jail for defacing the offices of the ADL.

The January 1961 issue of the National Socialist Bulletin lists Lieutenant John Patler as both the editor and the art director.

A few pages into the issue, there's an announcement congratulating Lieutenant Patler on the birth of his firstborn son.

Now, Patler's children are private individuals.

They're not part of their father's story voluntarily.

Aside from a handful of notable public comments from his son, Nick, his children aren't your business or mine.

But in the interest of being thorough, I did do my own background research.

This Nazi newsletter proudly announces that Patler had named his firstborn son Horst Wessel.

There's a photo of Patler wearing his Nazi party uniform, cradling his infant son in his arms underneath text that reads in all caps, Horst Vessel lives.

Horst Vessel was a Nazi.

I'm not talking about this baby boy.

I'm talking about the original Horst Vessel.

And he wasn't a Nazi the way John Pattler is a Nazi, he was a real one in Nazi Germany.

He joined the Sturmabteilu in 1926, and he made quite a positive impression on a young Joseph Goebbels.

By 1929, Wessel was living in Berlin and serving as the street cell leader of the Alexanderplatz unit of the Sturmabteilu.

As Stormführer, Wessel led a gang of young Nazis that got into violent altercations with communists around Berlin.

In 1930, one of them shot and killed him.

As the leader of this Nazi street fighting gang, Wessel had received a lot of encouragement from Goebbels.

And now that he's dead, and Goebbels is the party's chief propagandist, he sees this death as a golden opportunity.

In death, Horst Wessel is more than a violent man.

He's a symbol.

He's a martyr for the Nazi cause.

So by naming his son Horst Wessel, Hatler is invoking the Germany of 1930, a nation on the eve of the Third Reich.

I get it.

I get what he's going for.

The problem is, it's not true.

And this is a big part of why every episode takes me, I would say, three times longer than is healthy.

I can't trust anybody.

Even mostly reliable sources, you know, books that are well researched and well-regarded, sometimes people forget the number one rule of writing about Nazis.

Nazis lie.

You can't take a Nazi newsletter at face value, not for anything.

Just because the birth announcement in the National Socialist Bulletin says that the baby's name is Horst Vessel Patler, doesn't make it true.

But the claim does appear in several books, always without a citation.

I'm assuming they got it from this Nazi newsletter.

And it isn't true.

Like I said, Patler's kids aren't our business.

They're private individuals who did not choose to involve themselves in this.

So I'm not going to tell you what his name actually is.

It was actually really hard to find, which...

tells me he's gone to some trouble to prevent people like me from finding it.

And as an adult, he actually changed his name again, swapping the last name Patler for something unrelated.

But his first name was never Horst Vessel.

It's something perfectly ordinary, the kind of boring, white American name that you probably went to elementary school with a dozen of.

1961 was a tumultuous year for the Patler family.

That spring, his young wife Erica, was home alone with baby Horst Vessel, because John Patler was the driver when the Nazis went on tour in the hate bus.

I assume he had a great time with his friends on the Nazi road trip in the spring, but by the end of the year, John Patler quit the American Nazi Party for the first time.

He and another member named Dan Burroughs had decided to strike out on their own to form a new splinter group.

This is a classic problem in American neo-Nazi organizing.

Everybody wants to be Hitler.

In November of 1961, John Patler packed up his pregnant wife and their infant son and moved to New York City.

In a converted garage in Queens, a handful of disaffected members of the American Nazi Party formed a new group that they called the American National Party.

Patler was the group's chairman and Dan Burros was his second in command.

Patler also edited the party's magazine, a publication called Kill with an exclamation point.

But the whole endeavor never amounted to much at all.

There were never more than about a dozen members.

In the January 1962 issue of the Rockwell Report, a secondary publication of the American Nazi Party, George Lincoln Rockwell wanted to make sure that everyone knew he wasn't mad.

He actually didn't care at all, and it did not hurt his feelings that he'd been abandoned by his most devoted lieutenant.

He wrote:

In the attempt to justify their failure in the Nazi Party here and overthrow our leadership of the right wing, this group of selfish malcontents, loafers, fakers, sissies, cowards, or damn fools is beneath mention.

They are held together solely by their hatred and jealousy of my person and the American Nazi Party, and will disintegrate soon enough from lack of leadership and idealism.

See,

he doesn't care at all.

He's not mad.

But he was

exactly right about their motivation and how they'd end up.

In March, the New York Daily News ran a headline, 10 youths in Hollis Shack, poking fun at these young men playing make-believe Nazi living in a shanty in this neighborhood in Queens.

In April, another newspaper in New York speculated that the group might actually be be a front group rather than a splinter of the American Nazi Party, writing, quote, a little band of eccentrics calling themselves the American Nazis has sent a few Gauleiters into the New York Long Island area.

And Rockwell played coy with the reporters.

I think he may have been trying to save face.

He didn't want to admit that he'd been abandoned.

So he refused to confirm or deny any connection to this group.

But he hinted that sometimes, sometimes I do use a front group and maybe I am working on something in New York City.

Sort of insinuating that, yes, these men do still answer to me.

The same article though quotes John Patler saying, Rockwell hates my guts and I hate his.

Patler really wanted to make it work.

He wanted to be the Fuhrer.

He wanted a party.

He wanted his own newspaper and his own followers and his own headquarters and his own uniforms.

But they couldn't afford uniforms.

And a dozen guys in a shanty in Queens just doesn't have the gravity to keep the followers in orbit.

There is a 1967 biography of Dan Burroughs called One More Victim.

And the book offers some fascinating insight into this period of their lives.

A lot more detail than I was able to piece together from Rockwell's newsletters, FBI memos, and local news stories published in Queens in 1962.

I should tell you, though, why the editor of the New York Times wrote a book about Dan Burroughs in 1967.

He's hardly so important at this point in our story, 1962.

So, how could there be a whole book's worth of information about this man in his 20s, just a few years later?

It's because he died.

Not just that he died, but how and why he died.

In 1965, the New York Times published a story revealing that Dan Burros, who was at that time a former member of the American Nazi Party who had by then joined the Klan,

was Jewish.

His parents were both the children of Russian Jewish immigrants.

They were married by a rabbi.

He attended Hebrew school and he had a bar mitzvah.

For neo-Nazis, being Jewish isn't something you can leave behind.

Just because Boros had blonde hair and considered himself an Odinist doesn't mean he wasn't still a Jew in the eyes of the anti-Semite.

And honestly, if you ask any of the Nazis he spent a decade with, they'd tell you he was as anti-Semitic as any of them.

But this revelation, this revelation that he had been hiding this from them,

that was an unforgivable sin.

You can't be a Jewish Klansman.

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It wasn't even noon on the day the story was published when Burroughs died.

His official cause of death is suicide, with one bullet wound to his head and another in his chest.

I know,

I know,

but that's what the official records all say.

There were three witnesses, and their stories all matched.

And Burroughs was the only only one with gunshot residue on his hands.

That's what it says.

Now, I've read enough FBI memos about Roy Frankhauser to be a little skeptical of his account of anything, especially his account of how a man died in his bedroom.

I'm not saying it wasn't suicide.

I'm just saying I understand what this looks like, and I don't know what to tell you.

There are several books that contain a description of this event, and they'll say that the FBI speculated that maybe Burroughs did shoot himself the first time,

and maybe Frankhauser put him out of his misery with the second shot.

Which is still weird, but it makes a lot more logical sense than the version Frankhauser tells that appears in this book in 1967.

Now, without spending a week tearing my hair out over it and maybe still not getting the answer to this question,

I don't know if Frankhauser was already working for the FBI in 1965.

But I guess either way, whether he's an informant at this point or not, he probably wouldn't want to admit to shooting a guy in the head.

But this version, Frankhauser's version, the official version of these events, it's dramatic.

I mean, it's

theatrical.

Wagner is playing a little too loud on the radio in the house.

There's a hysterical woman screaming at Burroughs to put the gun down.

And Burroughs cocks the gun and he looks Frankhauser in the eye.

His good eye, I assume, since Frankhauser famously lost an eye in a bar fight and he once auctioned off his glass eye and a clan fundraiser.

Anyway, so Burroughs is looking his friend in his good eye and he says, long live the white race.

And then he non-fatally shoots himself in the chest.

And he stands there there unmoving.

And then he raises the gun to his head and fires again.

I mean, what a scene.

It's horrific.

In 1997, Martin Lee wrote in his book, The Beast Reawakens, A History of American Fascism, that Frankhauser never cleaned it up.

Dan Burroughs shot himself two times in Roy Frankhauser's bedroom,

and the bullet holes and the bloodstains were still on the wall and ceiling 30 years later.

Now you know I like to find my own sources.

So in addition to this anecdote in Lee's book, I found an old post on Stormfront.

It's about a decade old and the poster says he saw the holes for himself.

when he went to Frankhauser's home sometime in the early 2000s, a few years before Frankhauser died to buy some old Nazi memorabilia.

So it's a fascinating story with a lot of murky truths and uncomfortable possibilities about state involvement.

The New York Times did their own work confirming the details and writing the story.

But it was the FBI who tipped them off in the first place that Dan Burroughs was Jewish.

And that brings me back to the point I was trying to make.

The New York Times journalist who was tipped off by the FBI to write the story that led to Burroughs' death wrote a book about it two years later.

And I assume in the course of writing this book, they got more tips from the FBI, which may be why it has such interesting descriptions of police files.

We might come back to Dan Burrows another time.

If I do, I'll even watch the 2001 movie Loosely Based on His Life, starring Ryan Gosling as the Jewish Nazi and Billy Zane as the leader of the Nazi gang.

But for now, I was getting to a point about the embarrassing failure of the American National Party in 1962.

In that biography of Burroughs, A.M.

Rosenthal and Arthur Gelb wrote that the American National Party never had more than a few members.

And it never really got a lot of press.

But the detectives at the NYPD's anti-subversive squad were fascinated by them, and they kept very close tabs on all of the members and their associates.

One detective said of the group, quote, these young toughs live and breathe the atmosphere of violence.

That's all they talk about, getting this guy or blowing up this or that.

A lot of them have guns, and it's as if they're making love to them.

They're not for anything, but they're against an awful lot of things and people.

They all got excited, you might say, aroused by the civil rights movement.

It got them all worked up.

Now, you probably know it pains me to say this NYPD detective is really cooking here, but listen to this.

Quote, most of these people are liars and not smart, and most of them are cowards.

But they work on each other.

And we have to watch to make sure they don't get each other worked up to the point where they have to prove their manhood by going out and killing people.

So the cops would hang around and watch.

But they'd stop by and chat too.

It was never a secret that they were being surveilled.

Burros, much like his former commander, George Lincoln Rockwell, was happy to talk to the police.

It seems like he kind of got a kick out of it even.

And both Burros and Rockwell would frequently take the initiative to contact the police themselves to inform on other members of the movement.

Although this biography of Burroughs notes that he never accepted any money for it and nothing he offered was ever of much value.

So for most of 1962, Dan Burroughs, the secretly Jewish Nazi, and John Patler are holed up in a shanty in Queens, writing a Nazi newsletter that no one reads.

devoted mostly to bashing the father figure that they have abandoned.

And a squad of detectives is standing outside taking turns watching them make the occasional bodega run.

In August of 1962, Patler was arrested for disturbing the peace after he refused to stop picketing a school integration rally in Englewood, New Jersey.

He was alone.

He attended that event alone.

There was a lot of publicity leading up to it.

He was making these sort of public pronouncements that the American National Party is going to show up and counter-demonstrate against these black families.

Preparations were being made, and the town was in negotiations with him about where they could stand and whether they could have amplified sound, and the police were involved.

But

by the time the actual day comes,

Patler showed up alone.

And he's just standing there in Englewood, New Jersey.

yelling at the parents of black school children.

And for all his trouble, Patler was sentenced to 10 days in jail, which he protested by staging a hunger strike.

And he really did do it.

I've seen plenty of guys like Patler say they're gonna do it.

They say they're gonna do something drastic.

I've recently seen a guy a lot like Patler threaten to go on a hunger strike.

And he didn't do it.

But according to the doctor who examined Patler on his release, he'd lost a significant amount of weight over those 10 days.

So, I guess you can't say he didn't commit.

And again, much like the lead-up to the Englewood rally, during these 10 days Patler's in jail, the American National Party, you know, those two guys in the shanty in Queens, are threatening to picket the jail to demand his release.

But they didn't.

On one of those 10 nights, one member of the American National Party showed up.

Ralph Grandinetti, the group's state chairman, stood outside the jail for about a half hour one evening.

On the morning Patler was released, the Bergen County Record published a photo of him hunched over a plate of breakfast food at a diner.

And they note that there was no crowd waiting for him outside the jail when he was released.

He was arrested again in November, this time for disrupting Eleanor Roosevelt's funeral.

And he was sentenced to 90 days in jail this time.

But worse than this jail sentence was the growing realization that this was a failure.

When he left Virginia with Dan Burroughs, they had a plan.

They were going to do something.

They were going to make something of themselves.

But Burroughs didn't seem all that committed.

He hadn't supported Patler at all when he was on his hunger strike in August.

And on the the day of Eleanor Roosevelt's funeral, he didn't even want to go.

He told Patler he'd rather stay at home and watch sports on TV.

I tried to figure out what game would have been on, I think this was November 10th, 1962, what sports were on that day.

Maybe he was watching a rerun.

Did they have those in 1962?

I don't know.

When the ACLU finally cut Patler out of jail in January of 1963, he was ready to beg Rockwell for forgiveness.

His wife, Erica, put her foot down.

She was done.

She didn't want to move again with her two small children.

If he went back to Rockwell, she wasn't coming with him.

And John Patler chose George Lincoln Rockwell over his wife and sons.

It would take a few years to sort out an actual divorce, I think, but they separated and She didn't follow him back to Virginia.

A few years later, when Patler's on trial for murder, he only ever talks about having two children.

And he's talking about the two children he had after this with his second wife.

His first two sons and his first wife are completely absent from his own telling of his life story after this point.

In February of 1963, Patler publishes the fourth and final issue of Kill, the magazine for the American National Party.

And in it, he announces that the American National Party is no more.

I didn't actually manage to find a copy of that issue of Kill,

but an FBI memo describing it just notes that it announced the end of the group.

Rockwell, on the other hand, claimed in his confidential internal party newsletter, that the fourth issue of Kill was devoted entirely to the theme, Rockwell was right.

In an attempt to, quote, patch up some of the damage he'd done in deserting the party and attacking the commander.

He also claims that Patler sent him a telegram asking to be allowed to return to the party.

Rockwell made a bit of a show of it too, humiliating Patler in the party newsletter on multiple occasions that year, announcing Patler's return by writing that Patler had been, quote, too big for his britches, but he'd come to his senses and come crawling back begging and pleading.

pleading.

And Patler had to start again from the bottom.

He was not Lieutenant Patler.

Party materials referred to him as a probationary stormtrooper for the rest of 1963.

But I think, deep down, there was never any doubt in Rockwell's mind that he would welcome Patler home again.

He'd lost other high-ranking party officers before, and he'd lose more in years to come.

And he always lashes out in the way a man with a bruised ego does.

But Patler's departure seems to have hurt him somewhere deeper than his thin skin.

He was taking a big risk accepting Patler back into the fold.

He probably shouldn't have done it.

He looked weak opening his arms to a man who'd spent a year publicly attacking him.

And not only that,

Patler wasn't popular.

People didn't like him.

Partly because a lot of them didn't see him as white.

Another high-ranking party officer quit over the mere idea that Rockwell might meet with Patler to discuss returning.

I mean, this was a controversial choice.

Rockwell did this because he liked Patler, not because it was a good choice politically or for the party.

By the summer of 1963, Patler was once again editing the party Stormtrooper magazine.

And he'd been assigned to travel across the state of Pennsylvania to try to get publicity for the American Nazi Party's planned counter demonstration for the upcoming March on Washington.

You know the one.

The one where a quarter of a million people heard Martin Luther King Jr.

give his I Have a Dream speech?

That one.

Rockwell spent most of the summer of 63 trying to recruit supporters for his Nazi response to this event.

And they were pulling stunts all over the country, getting members arrested in multiple states.

Rockwell himself was arrested in Virginia for handing out flyers that officials felt were inciting racial violence.

But the publicity tour in Pennsylvania was just two men, John Patler and Roy Frankhauser.

Now, again, the story is a little bit out of order.

Because by 1965, obviously Roy Frankhauser is no longer in the American Nazi Party.

He's just a Klansman.

But here here in the past, in 1963, Frankhauser is still a member of the American Nazi Party.

Sorry about that.

And so their journey across the state of Pennsylvania is called the hate hike.

And they're traveling across the state, standing outside of bus stations and public pools, holding signs that say, we hate race mixing, trying to goad passersby into hitting them, I guess.

If the surviving newspaper archives and FBI memos are anything to go on, it looks like the only person they managed to get a rise out of was a policeman in Pittsburgh, who allegedly hit Roy Frankhauser in the face after they were arrested.

But for the most part, the hate hike seems to have gone largely unremarked on.

And so at the end of the summer, George Lincoln Rockwell shows up in Washington, D.C.

with 50 supporters at most.

A pathetic showing for the months of touring and rallies and stunts he'd been pouring resources into to get the word out.

I don't know how Patler felt about the rally, but overall, at the end of 1963,

life was pretty good for John Patler.

He'd already forgotten the wife and sons he abandoned in New York.

The woman who would later become his second wife was pregnant with their first son.

And most importantly, he was back in his commander's good graces.

I didn't mean to get so lost in the newspaper archives.

I really thought I was going to have this wrapped up in one.

But we'll have to pick back up next week with John Patler's second rise to the highest ranks of the American Nazi Party, his second resignation from the party, his ultimate dismissal, his murder trial, competing Nazi conspiracy theories leading to a shootout in Maine, and, oddly,

that time a guy came home from work one day to find four nude strangers having an orgy in his living room.

And one of those naked people was the recently paroled murderer of America's most famous Nazi.

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

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

Our executive producers are Soby Lichterman and Robert Evans.

The show is edited by the wildly talented Ray Gagan.

The theme music was composed by Brad Dickard.

You can email me at WeirdLittleGuysPodcast at gmail.com.

I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.

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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