Death of a Demagogue, Pt. 2

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 Christopher Vidniyevitch 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 Waqua, I'm Molly Conger, and this is where 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 at conspiracy theory. You know that. And before we can get into why Frank Smith believes 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 nineteen sixty three. 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 nineteen sixties. 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 Rockwall's nineteen sixty five 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 nineteen sixty five 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 piezing together this timeline is the question of why why did John Patler murder

George Lincoln Rockwell in August of nineteen sixty seven. Truthfully, no one knows, But in the absence of that elusive truth, competing and conflicting narratives arose, and the question becomes what motivates those 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 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, your politics? 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

skin 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 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 Claws in nineteen thirty five, 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 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 nineteen seventies 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 storm troopers 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 through a birthday celebration for Hitler every year on April twentieth, 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 nineteen sixty one 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 nineteen sixty five, 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 nineteen sixty five didn't exactly have the same concentration of Germans as Germany. In nineteen thirty five, it was becoming painfully clear that without broadening this definition of whiteness, he would never have enough white people to do anything with it 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 nineteen sixty five, but the evidence of that is own only in his private letters. It's not until nineteen sixty six 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 nineteen sixty six, Stokely Carmichael, who was not yet called Kuame Toure, gave a speech

in Greenwood, Mississippi. The words black power had been spoken before plenty of times. Richard Wright wrote a book in nineteen fifty four called Black Power. Grace Lee Boggs founded

the Organization for Black Power in nineteen sixty five. Adam Clayton Powell Junior, a congressman representing Harlem, used the phrase in a speech earlier in nineteen sixty six, But for some reason, when Stokely Carmichael said those words in Mississippi, they stuck, and black power entered the broader American lexicon. Paper 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 Schmaltz's twenty thirteen 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 ringing op eds, I bet the first time someone shouted white power, it probably at least an ended up in the newspaper. And it did.

But it wasn't Rockwell who said it. Chicago newspapers on the morning of August first, nineteen sixty six ran headlines like white mob battles Negro marchers and sixty 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 twenty first, So who's

yelling white power in the park three weeks earlier. A definitive answer to that question is probably lost a 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.

in south side 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 Junior 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 the slabor 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

nineteen sixty eight. But on this day, August fifth, nineteen sixty six, Martin Luther King Junior 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 ranged 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 was an aryan superiority. It was white power that had united those racist throngs in Chicago. These people throwing rocks at Martin Luther King Junior were white, sure, but they weren't Arian. 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 henhouse in rural Spotsovania 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 fourteenth. As I was poring over the newspaper archives from August of nineteen sixty six, the first time I found a name attached to a

chant of white power? Was it that march on August fourteenth. It had been chanted by the crowd on July thirty first and on August fifth. 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 nineteen sixty eight, 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 Junior 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 nineteen sixty six was a twenty two year old named Christopher Vidnyevitch. 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 Vidnyevitch. 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 nineteen sixty eight. So I

did a little of my own digging. It might have been faster in retrospect, who 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 thirteen year old boy named Kristo Vidnievitch, 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 new story from nineteen fifty seven about a thirteen year old boy named Kristo Vidniyevitch and his seventeen 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 nineteen fifty Lydia Vidnyevitch and her two children, aged ten and six 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

Internet National Refugee organization. In nineteen forty eight, Lydyavidnyevitch's application for refugee status was denied, and the stated reason is quote petitioner is a crow up woman from Zagreb who is evacuated by the Germans to Austria in December nineteen forty four, 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 nineteen forty five, when Lydia Vidnyevitch 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 nineteen forty five, 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 Vidnyevitch's father wasn't just a Nazi collaborator, he was a war criminal. Ivan Vitnyevitch was tried alongside several high ranking officials of the Nazi puppet government that carried out mass murder in

Croatia in the nineteen forties. Lydia told that reporter in nineteen fifty seven 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 Rejim'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 Jewish. In one afternoon in nineteen forty one, Ivan Vitnyevitch sentenced one hundred people to die at the Yasenovats concentration camp. So yes, I guess Christopher Vidnyevitch 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 dissidence. 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 beats civil rights marchers every weekend all summer in Chicago in nineteen sixty six. 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. It wasn't ironic or edgy or joke when he put on that swastika armband. He did it to fulfill his father's legacy. 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 nineteen sixty six, Nazis raised hell in Chicago. After Patler arrived in town on the fourteenth, he and

Vitnyevitch 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 twenty first 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 heckel, 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 Junior 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, they would eventually be collected into the book Siege, that bible of the modern neo Nazi terrorist He called this the Apex Moment of the nineteen sixties. But the magic was short lived. Martin Luther King Junior 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 hate the civil rights movement. But it was proof still for Rockwell that white power was the way forward. By the end of nineteen sixty six, 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 first, nineteen sixty seven, 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 sea khuiles would be replaced with shouts of white power. In the director of 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 Varian superiority. This new expanded definition of whiteness was offensive to Nazi hardliners and factions formed. For men like Mattias Cole and William Luther Piers.

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. William Luther Piers 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 two thousand and two, heerce 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 nineteen sixty six had the living memory of fighting the Nazis in World War Two.

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 sea kile 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 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 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 Willie Luther Pearce in producing Pearce'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 nineteen sixty seven. 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 Paller 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 Rockwall'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 characterized the memo drafted on March thirtieth, nineteen sixty seven, as an ordered 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 thirteen numbered paragraphs, the first seven outlines the reason Patler is being disciplined. He's been at sent 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 dark's verse, life's 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. But he

doesn't dismiss Patler from the party. That's not what this letter says. Quote. 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 there two. The discipline

he imposed was definitely humiliating, for sure. Rockwell sent Mattia's coal 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. Patler 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 nineteen sixty one with Dan Burrows. You know, he spent a few months cursing Rockwell's name, and he got over it. They'd been through this before.

They'd known each other for nearly a decade. Hatler 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 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 Vidnyevitch 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, Vidnyevitch 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.

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 of 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 Vidnyevitch, 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 Vidnyevitch. The pair had worked closely together in Chicago the summer before, but Vidnievitch was firmly in the Aryan superiority camp in

this schism. He was with Matias Kohle. 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, Vignievitch's testimony that Patler had made those threats in June was the

only evidence they cited as a motive. And then we have Matias Cole, who said that when he was watching Patler pack his things after being relieved of his duties at the Spotsylvanian 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 Cole 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. Matias Cole had been the loudest voice within the party against Rockwell's shift away from Hitler's ideas about Germanic racial purity, a matter 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 and 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 nineteen sixty four nineteen sixty five 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 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 nineteen sixty six. 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 rock Well. 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, Patler 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. It's last week, but maybe it's for the best that I didn't make it up to nineteen seventy six. 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 Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by me, Molly Conger. Our executive producers are Sophie Lieuchdmann and Robert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan that the music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer.

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