George Lincoln Rockwell's Coffin Flop

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Coal Zone

Philip Hirschcock had worked his way through Georgetown law as a patent examiner.

But even before graduation, he knew he was never going to be a patent attorney.

While he was still a student, he met civil rights attorney Dean Robb at a party.

The summer before his last year of law school, he traveled with Robb to Danville, Virginia to help defend the civil rights demonstrators arrested in the aftermath of Bloody Monday, a particularly brutal state response to protests for racial equality.

By the time he graduated law school, Hirschkopp was already working on a case that would protect the right of public school teachers to engage in civil rights protests in their personal time.

And on that afternoon in 1964, as he was chatting with his old professor, Another of the professor's former students stopped by.

Bernie Cohen had been working on a civil rights case in Virginia for more than a year already, but he was looking for some help.

It was a perfect coincidence, maybe, that Philip Herschcock was there that day, and the pair spent the next several years working together on the case.

In April of 1967, just three years out of law school, Philip Hirschcock stood before the Supreme Court of the United States and argued on behalf of his clients, Mildred and Richard Loving.

You have before you today what we consider the most odious of the segregation laws, the slavery laws.

And our view of this law, we hope to clearly show, is that this is slavery law.

A few months after winning the right to interracial marriage for not only the lovings, but all Americans, Philip Hirschcock took on a very different kind of client.

He agreed to represent the American Nazi Party.

I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.

Philip Hirschkop is not our Weird Little Guy,

but the case he took on in the fall of 1967 concerns the corpse of George Lincoln Rockwell.

Herschkop's career as a civil rights attorney spanned decades.

He won the case that forced the University of Virginia to admit female students.

He won a case that outlawed the common practice of placing pregnant teachers on unpaid leave.

He defended the right to teach evolution in schools.

He represented thousands of demonstrators arrested for protesting the Vietnam War, including novelist Norman Mailer.

He was an outspoken advocate for prison reform.

In his later years, he worked on cases for animal rights, representing PETA for many years.

He is listed as the counsel of record for Tillicum the Whale in a 2012 lawsuit against SeaWorld.

Taking on the American Nazi Party as a client seems out of step with the rest of his career.

In a 2017 article in the American Bar Association Journal, he says he turned the case down when it was first presented to him, but his colleagues at the American Civil Liberties Union pressured him.

It was a matter of free speech, was it not?

It comes up every now and again on this show that the ACLU has a long-standing habit of representing American fascists.

They call it a principled commitment to constitutional rights, regardless of how odious the speaker or how unpleasant the speech.

Personally, I would call it short-sighted at best, and more often than not, a dangerous, foolish, and morally bankrupt course of action.

And I'm sure they would defend my right to say it.

Real life doesn't have the same clean rules as a hypothetical scenario in a bar exam question.

In theory, defending the rights of everyone equally should result in more equal rights for everyone.

In practice, it would seem that the only reward you get for honing your enemy's weapon is the blood on your face the next time he strikes you.

Here in Charlottesville, None of us have forgotten how the ACLU's 11th hour defense of the organizers of the Unite the Right rally rally led to the violence in our streets less than a day later.

They defended the rights of those neo-Nazis to demonstrate in the heart of downtown.

And in turn, those Nazis used that right to violate the rights of everyone they encountered.

But I'm sure I'll have an opportunity to talk more about the ACLU's history of defending the indefensible some other time.

In that article in 2017, Hirschkob says his own parents refused to speak to him for two years after he represented the American Nazi Party.

But what exactly did those Nazis need his help with?

The ACLU had gone to bat for the American Nazi Party before.

They represented George Lincoln Rockwell when the New York City Parks Commissioner denied him a permit to speak in 1960.

And the ACLU came to Rockwell's aid again when a group of Jewish war veterans sought an injunction to prevent him from leading another Nazi march in Chicago after the violent assault his stormtroopers unleashed in Marquette Park in 1966.

But in the fall of 1967, the ACLU couldn't very well represent George Lincoln Rockwell because George Lincoln Rockwell was dead.

This case was about his dead body.

You see, George Lincoln Rockwell was a veteran.

He was, technically, entitled to a military funeral and burial in a national cemetery.

As the leader of the American Nazi Party, he'd called called himself Commander Rockwell.

And that wasn't just an affectation.

He had reached the rank of commander in the United States Navy.

The man who believed that he was America's Hitler had,

technically, served honorably in World War II.

Rockwell joined the Navy after dropping out of Brown University in 1940, and he was commissioned as a naval aviator just days after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

He never flew any combat missions, but he served in both the Battle of the Atlantic and in the Pacific Theater.

By the end of the war, he was a lieutenant commander, a rank he held as a reserve officer until he was recalled to active duty during the Korean War.

He returned to reserve status at the rank of commander in 1954.

Before we get into the battle to bury Rockwell with military honors, I should answer a question you might be asking.

I mean, I was asking it.

How could he possibly have been eligible for for this?

He was discharged from the Navy in 1960, and that discharge was absolutely, explicitly, because he was a Nazi.

Parading around in a Nazi uniform is the kind of thing that gets you a dishonorable discharge, surely.

Right?

In this case, no.

By the late 1950s, Rockwell was making a name for himself as an anti-Semite.

In 1959, he set up shop just outside of Washington, D.C., and he was holding frequent demonstrations in the nation's capital.

There he was, declaring himself the head of the American Nazi Party, wearing a swastika armband, passing out hateful literature right outside the White House.

And some of his fellow veterans were understandably disgusted.

In 1959, irritated by a series of unflattering articles digging into his less public affairs, Rockwell filed a libel lawsuit against columnist Drew Pearson.

During a deposition in that case, Rockwell said, quote, here in this country, I have the right to pass out literature.

If anyone tries to stop me, the police protect me.

I was in the Navy once.

When people complain to the Navy about me, the Navy says, that's okay.

He has a right to belong to a political party.

And he wasn't wrong.

As a reservist, He wasn't really the Navy's problem.

It's not that they didn't know what he was up to.

They did.

Even before those weekly rallies in DC put him in the public spotlight, the government had been keeping an eye on him.

By the spring of 1959, the FBI was monitoring his bank accounts, surveilling his home, receiving photocopies of the exterior of every piece of mail he sent or received, and for several months that year, They were intercepting all of his household garbage.

But J.

Edgar Hoover's neuroses didn't necessarily concern the Navy.

Rockwell hadn't been on active duty for years.

And according to a statement from a Navy spokesman, he wasn't subject to the Uniform Code of Military Conduct while on inactive status.

But the stunts continued.

And remember, this is 1960.

World War II is not some distant past.

It's not a piece of history.

If you stop by your local VFW hall today,

you might see a couple of very old Vietnam veterans.

But in 1960, the men hanging out at the Veterans of Foreign War posts had very fresh memories of fighting the Nazis in Europe.

And they were starting to make noise.

In January of 1960, the Fairfax County, Virginia VFW adopted a resolution by unanimous vote, to ask the Navy to strip Rockwell of his rank.

The ADL was complaining to the press.

The Jewish Labor Committee was making public demands for an investigation by the Attorney General.

After their initial public statements that, as a reservist, Rockwell's political activities were the free speech of a private citizen, the Navy changed their minds.

There's no clear public statement pointing to exactly what it was that changed their minds, but it seems like all the public attention had escalated the issue to the point that it was now a problem in need of a solution.

The Navy sent Rockwell a letter notifying him that his, quote, mobilization potential has been reduced to a point where he is of no further value to the Navy.

And they called him to appear before a board of officers in DC in February of 1960.

A Navy spokesman told the press that proceedings to discharge reserve officers are not of a public nature.

So I don't have any primary source documentation from their end as to what charges Rockwell was defending himself against.

But I do have the statement he presented to the Navy in his own defense.

According to this bizarre eight-page letter, the proceedings concerned five primary allegations.

That he had been, quote, an active participant and leader of various organizations styled along Nazi lines.

That he had, quote, publicly and openly espoused race and religious hatred.

That he had used or permitted to be used his rank and status in the Naval Reserve in printed matter distributed to the public, fostering racial and religious hatred, that he had left the United States without permission from the Navy, and that as an officer, if he were to be recalled to duty, he would be commanding members of the races and religions at which his propaganda was aimed.

He admitted guilt on just one of the charges.

He had left the United States in late 1959 to visit his estranged wife in Iceland.

He promised it would never happen again, which was probably true.

That was the last time he ever saw his second wife.

As for the rest of it?

Well, he felt like they were being very unfair to him.

Is it even really hatred if the people you hate deserve it?

He wrote, quote, I have never promoted or advocated hate except of traitors or subverters and others deserving of the hate of all decent moral moral people.

After a few pages of rambling vitriol about how Jewish people are responsible for the evils of communism, and really isn't he actually more loyal to the United States because he's so committed to rooting out their influence?

He caps things off by saying he's never promoted unfounded hatred of any innocent person or group.

He brought two witnesses with him to the hearing.

A member of the American Nazi Party who testified that the group didn't support hatred or violence.

And a weird old Holocaust denier who gave a 40-minute speech accusing the Assistant Secretary of Defense of being a communist.

The board voted unanimously to discharge Rockwell.

But this was purely administrative.

He wasn't court-martialed, wasn't punished, or disciplined, or demoted.

He wasn't on active duty.

So,

again,

technically, when he died in 1967,

George Lincoln Rockwell was a United States Navy veteran who had been honorably discharged after 19 years of service.

And apparently, he wanted a full military funeral.

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George Lincoln Rockwell died at noon on Friday, August 25th, 1967.

His family had not shared his politics, and they'd mostly fallen out of touch.

His parents divorced when he was a child, but at the time of his death, they were both still alive.

His father told reporters that he'd seen less and less of his son in the final years of his life, saying,

He'd always have those bloody stormtroopers around him and we could never talk.

So the visit stopped.

His brother had cut off contact nearly a decade earlier when newspapers reported a possible connection between Rockwell and the bombing of a synagogue in Atlanta.

His mother and sister kept in touch by letter over the years, but they saw each other infrequently.

But now he was dead.

And family is family.

He'd been their son, their brother.

After the autopsy was performed, his body waited in the hospital morgue.

His father got on a train from Maine and headed south.

Matthias Cole, having assumed command of the American Nazi Party, claimed to be in possession of a last will and testament that entrusted him personally with Rockwell's remains.

Rockwell's brother Bobby said the family wished to have a private service in the small town in Maine where they'd spent their childhood.

And just a quick interjection here, in case anyone was wondering about this, I've been saying and will continue to say Kohl, Matthias Kohl.

His name is German, and it's spelled K-O-E-H-L.

In German, it would be something closer to Kohl,

but English speakers tend to read that as Kohl.

So that's what I settled on.

But apparently, he pronounced it Kahl.

Here's Frank Smith talking about it back in the 60s.

Matthias Kale.

Now, I don't know where he gets the name Kahl.

I think the German pronunciation would be Kerl, and the

little translation in English would be coal.

And I don't think that's acceptable to him, so somehow or other, he's get Kale.

Unless I'm wrong on the German pronunciation, I don't know.

But anyway, it's Kale, is how he goes using his name.

Frank's close enough on the German pronunciation, but it doesn't mean coal.

It's closest to the German word for cabbage, but it's not a word at all.

It's just a last name that probably originated as an occupational name for someone who grows crops.

Anyway, Cole, Curl, Kale, whatever you want to call him, he's the guy in charge of the American Nazi Party after Rockwell's death.

On Saturday, the body was moved to the funeral home.

Bobby Rockwell told reporters that the family was probably going to have to get a lawyer.

to fight Cole for custody of the remains.

But just a day later, the same newspapers reported that the funeral home in Virginia had received a telegram from the family, and it read only,

The family no longer wishes to contest the claim of Matt Cole concerning his right to make funeral arrangements for G.

Lincoln Rockwell.

Bobby Rockwell told reporters that the family had made the difficult decision for personal reasons and offered no further explanation.

Years later, Rockwell's biographer Frederick Simonelli interviewed one of Rockwell's cousins, and the picture became a little bit clearer.

The family gave up the fight for Rockwell's body because they were afraid.

Matthias Cole had threatened to stage demonstrations outside Rockwell's mother's home.

She was in her 70s and living alone in an apartment in a predominantly Jewish Brooklyn neighborhood.

Nothing good could come from provoking the Nazis.

So they relented.

The Nazis could have the body.

On Monday, three three days after the murder, as John Patler was being arraigned for that murder in an Arlington courtroom, Matthias Kohl was busy making funeral arrangements.

The Pentagon granted the burial permit.

They had no valid reason to deny the application.

Rockwell had served in two wars and received an honorable discharge.

He'd never been convicted of a crime more serious than disorderly conduct.

And he'd never been formally linked to any group on the government's list of subversive organizations.

For some reason, the American Nazi Party was never on that list.

Decorated veterans who'd been dragged through the mud of McCarthyism were denied burial in national cemeteries for being communists.

But the Nazi?

He was good to go.

They would allow George Lincoln Rockwell to be interred in a national cemetery, but there would be conditions.

The letter Rockwell left Cole with his final wishes requested burial in Arlington National Cemetery.

The government said they could have any cemetery but Arlington, so they settled on nearby Culpeper National Cemetery in central Virginia.

The Navy did not agree to the request that the military honor guard consist only of white officers.

They said they would get whoever was available.

And in the end, no honor guard showed up at all.

And while they would allow Rockwell's corpse to be dressed in a Nazi uniform inside the coffin, they would not allow any visible display of Nazi iconography.

No Nazi flags, no swastika armbands.

The official statement from the Department of Defense read,

Unseemly demonstrations, such as the wearing of the uniform, insignia, and emblems, or the display of flags or banners of the American Nazi Party or or its members, will not be permitted in ceremonies at a national cemetery.

A national cemetery is a permanent shrine in honor of the dead of the armed forces of this country.

Burial ceremonies must be conducted with dignity and with proper concern for the sensibilities of those whose loved ones lie there.

The rules were relayed to Cole on Monday afternoon, and the funeral was scheduled for 11 a.m.

on Tuesday morning.

As long as the Nazis wore normal clothes and behaved like normal mourners, they could have a perfectly normal funeral at Culpeper National Cemetery.

On Monday evening, Cole told reporters that they intended to give George Lincoln Rockwell the kind of funeral he would have wanted.

And the army was ready for them.

The funeral procession left Arlington at 9 a.m.

Tuesday morning, accompanied by a police escort from the Arlington County Police.

In a later issue of Stormtrooper magazine, the Nazis claimed this procession was made up of 60 vehicles, but most news accounts put the number of total mourners at around 50, so that can't be right.

The line of cars was led by a white Cadillac convertible full of men in Nazi uniforms.

Matthias Kohl rode in the front seat of the hearse, which was decorated with a giant red swastika wreath.

I wonder if they assumed they would be allowed to break the rules.

Did they think that there would be no one on scene to ensure they were following the guidelines?

Or did they think that whoever was there to see them breaking the rules wouldn't be willing or able to stop them?

Or were they hoping for a confrontation?

Whatever it was they expected, I don't think it was busloads of military police, with helicopters full of even more soldiers landing in nearby fields.

When they arrived in Culpeper at 10.30 a.m., the entrance to the cemetery was blocked by state and local police.

The poor funeral home employee who got stuck driving the hearse that day must have been fairly rattled by the whole experience.

He was so surprised at the line of officers that he stopped the hearse directly over the train tracks as a freight train was approaching.

By all accounts, there were mere seconds and inches between this near miss and an accident that would have rendered the whole thing moot.

When the train passed, Cole stepped out of the hearse.

He wasn't wearing a Nazi uniform, just a plain black suit, and he was clutching Rockwell's personal copy of Mein Kampf in his hands.

The cemetery superintendent explained to him that if they would all agree to remove their Nazi armbands and swastika lapel pens and put away the giant swastika wreaths, they would be free to enter the cemetery and conduct the funeral.

As the cemetery superintendent is trying to negotiate with this crowd to get them to take off their Nazi armbands, reinforcements were already on their way.

The Army Provost Marshal, Major General Carl Turner, arrived by helicopter, along with dozens of military policemen and U.S.

Marshals.

So, this small crowd of maybe 50 Nazis was surrounded by dozens of reporters, 100 police officers, hundreds of curious spectators milling around the edges.

And the standoff that followed would last six hours.

Shortly after General Turner arrived, the first arrest was made.

He noticed that one of the soldiers in uniform outside the cemetery gates hadn't arrived with him.

This soldier wasn't standing in line with the others.

He was chatting casually with the Nazis standing around the hearse.

Private First Class James DeWitt told the general he'd been granted emergency leave from his post at Fort Gordon in Georgia to attend the funeral of a friend.

General Turner, who was also out of Fort Gordon, reactivated the soldier on the spot, which is apparently a thing a general can do, and had him taken into custody for violating uniform regulations for the black armband he was wearing, and for violating regulations prohibiting soldiers from participating in political demonstrations in uniform.

As military policemen dragged James DeWitt away, he shouted racial slurs at nearby black onlookers and threw a Nazi salute for the news cameras.

As he passed a gaggle of reporters, he said, I'd like to take this uniform off and throw it away.

The military stinks and I'm ashamed to be a part of it.

It turned out that DeWitt had not been granted leave.

He was AWOL from Fort Gordon.

He'd enlisted in the Army a year earlier, but he'd been a member of the American Nazi Party for two years.

For another hour or so, everyone just stood there at the cemetery gates, waiting for someone else to break.

The funeral scheduled start time of 11 a.m.

came and went.

Around noon, the Nazis were getting antsy.

I wonder if they forgot to pack lunches.

The exact sequence of events is different in almost every single account I could find.

Even the archival video footage I found, this strange 15 minutes of TV news b-roll, looks like it was cut together out of order.

I wish I could have gotten my hands on a copy of the Army's after-action report, because I think that would have helped pin down the specifics.

I know the report exists.

It's referenced in a footnote in a book about the use of the military in domestic disorders in the 20th century, published by the Army's Center for Military History.

But I couldn't find any trace of the actual report.

So in the absence of certainty, here's my best guess at piecing together 30 different reporters' recollections.

One thing I found in that compilation of TV news footage that I didn't actually find written up in any of the reporting is this odd exchange between General Turner and a man I recognize in the footage as Douglas Niles.

Santos, what charge will be placed on him?

I have no idea.

I'm going to be a federal arrest.

I'm going to have to be a federal marshal.

I'm going to be a federal arrest.

Federal marshal.

And will the charge be trespassing?

I don't know what it will be.

If you can make it out over the helicopter noise, that's Nazi funeral attendee and American Nazi Party member Douglas Niles.

And he's asking General Turner what someone might be charged with if they did choose to disobey the orders of the military police.

and attempt to enter the cemetery without removing their swastikas.

He didn't get a straight answer, but he must have felt reasonably assured that it would be something minor like trespassing, because he then made the decision to escalate the situation.

Again, I'm doing my best to put these pieces in order, and this isn't in the video I found.

But according to a write-up in the Washington Daily News, the crowd gets rowdy.

They're screaming taunts at the officers and at General Turner in particular.

And Niles jumps up onto the hood of the hearse and he's shouting, you ain't gonna stop me, you two-star communist swine, let's go.

And as he's standing there on the hood of the hearse, screaming at the general, the hearse starts to roll slowly forward and it bumps gently into the general.

I don't know what Douglas Niles thought would happen, but as he's lunging forward into the line of military police, they just grab him and drag him away.

Christopher Vignievich seemed emboldened by this shift in the energy of the crowd, and he tried to keep the momentum going.

If you're not keeping careful track of all the side characters, Vidnevich was the 23-year-old head of the American Nazi Party's Chicago office.

He immigrated to the United States as a child after his father was executed for war crimes he committed as a Nazi collaborator in Croatia.

He joined the American Nazi Party as a teenager.

He testified against John Patler in the murder trial, and his testimony that Patler had made threatening comments about Rockwell in the months before the murder was seen as particularly convincing evidence by an appeals court.

At Rockwell's funeral, Vinievich was one of just six mourners who arrived dressed in a full Nazi uniform.

He was to be one of the pallbearers.

And so, as Doug Niles is being hauled off by the military policeman, Vidnevich now jumps up onto the hearse and he's standing on the roof of the vehicle shouting, You see what the Jews are doing?

They're keeping us out of here.

It's Jewish power.

What we need is white power.

And after he whips the crowd into a frenzy with a couple of Siegheils and a couple of Heil Hitlers, Benjevic jumped down from the hearse and charged directly into the line of military policemen.

I think he thought everyone was behind him, but they weren't.

As he was being taken into custody, a single Nazi half-heartedly broke ranks and tried to follow him.

Mike Stewart is listed in the newspaper as being 16 or 17 years old, and it says that he lives with a guardian in Spotsylvania County.

Although he'd been arrested at a Nazi Party rally in Chicago a year earlier, and in 1966, he told police he was 18.

An issue of the party's magazine says Stewart had been living at the party's printing facility in Spotsylvania for six months, having transferred from the Chicago office.

How old he actually was at the time of either arrest isn't clear, but it does seem likely that he was a minor.

And you have to wonder if his parents knew where he was, if they knew he was living in a converted hen house under the supervision of a couple of middle-aged Nazis.

After that flurry of arrests, the crowd quieted down again.

Matthias Kohl, who'd been sitting inside of the hearse for most of the morning, got out and had a private meeting with General Turner in a nearby maintenance shed.

The Army's position had not changed.

They could hold the the funeral if they could follow the rules.

If they took off the swastikas, they would be allowed to enter the cemetery and bury Rockwell in the open grave that was waiting for him.

If they were dead set on keeping the swastikas on, they would not be allowed past the gates.

But they were running out of time to decide if they were willing to compromise.

The gravedigger's shift ended at 4.30 p.m., and cemetery regulations don't allow a coffin to sit in an open grave overnight.

If they were going to put him in the ground, they had to do it before 3.30 to ensure there was enough time to fill the hole.

When 3.30 rolled around,

nothing had changed.

15 minutes to comply with the instructions

and the regulations prescribed for burial at this ceremony.

It is now 15.30 hours.

In William Schmaltz's biography of Rockwell, the exchange that followed is written to be much more dramatic than I think it really was.

General Turner reiterates the requirements for burial, and Schmaltz includes Cole's reply in the form of a direct quote.

And the quote is verbatim correct.

But in the book, he puts exclamation points in it, and he wrote that Cole was shouting when he replied.

The video, though, does not show a bombastic, defiant Nazi leader.

It's a weary and defeated man.

The body cannot be brought in under those circumstances.

I will remain custodian of the body wherever it may be, whether it's here.

But I cannot allow it to be buried against the express wishes of Commander Rockland.

At 3.30, General Turner gave them 15 minutes.

And that deadline came and went.

The Nazis did nothing with their last 15 minutes.

The Department of Army has withdrawn approval for the burial of George Lincoln Rockwell in this cemetery.

At 3.45, the general announced that the Army had withdrawn its approval for the burial.

If they wanted to bury Rockwell in a national cemetery, They couldn't do it today, and they would have to apply for a new burial permit for a funeral on another day.

A Culpeper County Justice of the Peace grabbed the bullhorn and announced to the crowd that there would be no funeral here today.

And he told everyone to go home.

And remarkably,

they did.

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The whole day can really only be described as

weird.

I'm not just saying that because that's in the name of the show.

It really was the only word people could think of to describe what they had seen that day.

The Associated Press story about the whole affair appeared in newspapers across the country, but with slightly different headlines from paper to paper.

Headlines like, Rockwell unburied after end of weird day in Culpeper.

Nazi unburied after weird day.

Rockwell would have have liked his weird Nazi funeral.

Weird performance.

Rockwell burial delayed.

His unfinished funeral weird scene.

I think my favorite one of these headlines is Rockwell's non-funeral weird event.

Newspaper editors everywhere agreed.

That shit was weird.

Defeated, the Nazis drove the hour and a half back to Arlington with the commander's corpse.

James DeWitt, the young soldier arrested while absent without leave, was taken into military custody.

After a hearing the following week, he was demoted to private and given 45 days of extra duty.

Christopher Vidnevich, Douglas Niles, and Michael Stewart were taken into federal custody after their arrests for disorderly conduct, but Stewart's charges were dropped because he was a minor.

Niles and Vidnevich were both eventually convicted, but the court declined to impose any jail sentence because, quote, they were emotionally upset and had not intended to cause any trouble.

After the standoff in Culpeper, Rockwell's brother made another attempt to gain custody of the remains.

But he told reporters, quote,

unfortunately, they beat us to it.

The Nazi Party had already cremated him.

George Lincoln Rockwell was cremated the morning after the failed burial, but the fight didn't end there.

By the end of the day Wednesday, the American Nazi Party had retained counsel from the American Civil Liberties Union, and the ACLU said they planned to seek a court injunction to force the Army to allow the Nazis to inter Rockwell's ashes at the National Cemetery, accompanied by a service that included their Nazi paraphernalia.

Their attorney, Philip Herschkop, sent a letter to the Secretary of the Army in early September.

He offered his personal assurances that the ceremony would be no more than 45 minutes, and any music played would be at a volume low enough that it would only be audible to those at the gravesite.

But they wanted to wear their outfits.

Secretary Stanley Rezor replied weeks later, the Army's position had not changed.

No Nazi uniforms, no Nazi flags, no Nazi banners, no swastika lapel pens.

If they're willing to follow the rules, they can apply for a new burial permit, and that's it.

So the Nazis filed a lawsuit in federal court.

They wouldn't settle for anything less than a spectacle.

It was, I think, in a way, a genuine attempt to give George Lincoln Rockwell what he would have wanted.

But not in the way you might think.

I don't mean that I think he cared really about the specifics of how his body ended up in the ground, about what his funeral would look like, not really.

But I think he would have loved to know that even in death, he could still cause a riot.

He'd lived for wasting people's time and subjecting people to spectacle and getting headlines in newspapers for some silly stunt or another.

It's what he lived for.

Why shouldn't he have a little more in death?

The lawsuit argued that not only was the decision to bar the funeral attendees from displaying certain symbols blatantly unconstitutional prior restraint of their free speech, it was a clear case of discrimination against Nazis specifically, as other types of symbols have been or probably would be allowed.

The order dismissing the suit ruled that it wasn't discriminatory and they had no constitutional right to espouse a political philosophy as part of a burial in a national cemetery.

Now, obviously, this case was filed in 1967 and decided in 1969.

So any cases that came after it aren't really relevant when we're talking about the context of the original decision.

But I did a little poking around anyway, and the majority of the cases involving free speech in cemeteries are about people protesting and picketing at or near funerals,

not so much about the speech of the people organizing the funeral.

But either way, generally, Courts tend to hold that a cemetery is not a public forum.

The government can impose content-neutral restrictions on free expression in a non-public forum,

as compared to a public forum, places like the sidewalk, or designated or limited public forums like City Hall or a meeting room at a public university.

You cannot, to this day, hold a political demonstration of any kind in places like Arlington National Cemetery.

That would be an outrage and a scandal.

And it was for a few weeks in the news when Donald Trump made a partisan speech at a ceremony at Arlington.

The current version of the Code of Federal Regulations and the United States Code contain explicit prohibitions on demonstrations and disruptions at national military cemeteries.

But again, most of these rules are aimed at people protesting a funeral.

It's hard to apply those guidelines to people using the funeral itself as a political demonstration.

But that same Code of Federal Regulations also explicitly prohibits the display of banners, placards, and flags other than the American flag.

I spent an inordinate amount of time tracking down every quarterly issue of the Federal Register from the late 1960s, and I can tell you it does appear that they added this section to the Code of Federal Regulations in 1969, which means it was almost certainly specifically because of this incident.

Obviously, you can't apply rules that were written after the fact, but just because the rules weren't in the code of federal regulations doesn't mean there weren't rules.

There were rules in 1967.

According to the court order dismissing the lawsuit, The approved rules governing the operation, maintenance, and burials in national cemeteries are found in the Army Technical Manual.

A portion of that manual is included in some of the court records, and the rules are very specific about flags.

There's a flag in the cemetery, but there aren't any other flags.

There are no flags allowed on graves.

There are no flags at grave sites with a singular exception.

A small American flag is placed on each grave on the business day before Memorial Day and removed on the business day following Memorial Day unless it is wet, in which case it is left in place until it is dry.

Confederate flags may be placed in the same location during the same time periods at private expense.

That's it.

There's no other flags.

And according to that court opinion, that same Army manual already prohibited political demonstrations at national cemeteries.

And it prohibited the use of any foreign flag except during specially permitted flag ceremonies.

The judge didn't specifically specifically use the language of a public versus non-public forum, but I think it's pretty well implied in the opinion.

Quote, The record here made conclusively discloses that it was the intent of the American Nazi Party to dramatize their political philosophy by wearing their Nazi-style uniforms together with combat boots and displaying their banners and flags during the burial of their former leader.

A national cemetery is a public place so clearly committed to other purposes that their use for the airing of grievances grievances is anomalous.

The Secretary of the Army was plainly right in refusing to permit the American Nazi Party to use the Culpeper National Cemetery as a base for the symbolic dissemination of their political philosophy.

No one's saying they can't wear Nazi armbands.

They do it all the time.

They've marched in cities across the country.

They've fought this battle and they've won it.

They can march around this way if they want to, but they can't do it in an Army National Cemetery.

And it's not just Nazis.

No one can demonstrate in those spaces because they are not a public forum for the airing of free expression.

The ACLU appealed the decision to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.

The appeals court affirmed the lower court opinion without writing an opinion of their own.

And in 1970, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

After losing the legal battle to inter Rockwell's ashes at at the National Cemetery, they never interred them anywhere at all.

They didn't give him back to his family or to either of his ex-wives who were raising his children.

They didn't bury him somewhere meaningful to him or scatter him to the winds.

Matthias Cole packed him up into a little white urn and put it on display.

When the Nazis left Virginia for the Midwest in the 1980s, Rockwell's ashes went with them.

Matthias Cole died in 2014.

The new order, the name he'd picked when he rebranded the party again in the 80s, was left to the leadership of Martin Kerr, that old man who held a memorial for Rockwell next to a trash can in 2017.

He was asked at the time, whatever became of Rockwell's remains, but he declined to say any more than that they were in an urn in a secure location.

He was trying to be mysterious, maybe,

to let you imagine that maybe the ashes were somewhere in a place of great honor.

But the urn is almost certainly at his house in New Berlin, a suburb outside of Milwaukee.

Earlier this year, an admirer posted a video he took of the shrine when he made a pilgrimage to Wisconsin to visit Rockwell's remains.

It's just a little white box sitting in the center of a slightly rumpled Nazi flag.

Arranged in a semicircle around the ashes, there are two little tea light candles,

and what I can only call the Nazi equivalent of holy relics.

Rockwell's corncob pipe, the wedding rings from his failed marriages, his aviator sunglasses, and his watch.

In the video, this visitor picks up Rockwell's corncob pipe and he handles it with a religious reverence.

He lifts it up towards his face, which you never see, and inhales deeply, trying to smell the commander.

George Lincoln Rockwell died alone in a parking lot,

murdered by his closest friend.

His loyal followers stole his body from his family and turned his funeral into a sideshow.

Now, decades later, his urn collects dust on a shabby little altar, mostly forgotten.

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

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

Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.

The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan, although I think this week it may be the equally talented Ian Johnson.

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 it.

It's nothing personal.

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

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

This is an iHeart podcast.