Radicals: Finis for the Fuhrer

George Lincoln Rockwell was a failure at just about everything he tried.

Like his idol Adolf Schicklgruber, he was an unsuccessful painter. He went bust in the advertising business and broke as a traveling salesman, and was a dropout as publisher of a woman’s magazine. Both his marriages failed.

And in politics his risible handful of strutting, beswastikaed American Nazi Party bullyboys, agape at their Fuhrer’s harangues of hate, made even the sneering epithet “Halfpenny Hitler” sound overpriced.

Jews above all he detested. It was Communist Jewry, Rockwell prated, that spurred the Negro, his other bugaboo, to “mongrelize” the white race.

In a letter to Magazine Editor Ralph Ginzburg, he even insisted that it was the “Hebes in Moscow” who provoked the Arab-Israeli war in order to give Israel more territory, including “that glorified gentlemen’s pissoir, the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.” In the fantasies of Rockwell’s chimerical world, he envisioned shipping 20 million American Negroes to Africa and gassing Jews after a grateful nation elected him President in 1972. After the depression that Rockwell predicted for 1969, the U.S. would clamor for “a white leader with the guts of a Malcolm X.”

The Commander. Rockwell came upon his tortured creed by accident. Born in 1918, the son of a vaudeville co median, he dropped out of Brown University in 1940 to become a Navy pilot because, as he later said, he believed “all that hooey about Hitler.” Recalled during the Korean War with the rank of commander, he got his first glimpse of racist literature from a Navy couple in San Diego. At first he skimmed, then read deeply. Soon he had graduated to a secondhand edition of Mein Kampf. “I was hypnotized, transfixed,” said Rockwell. “Within a year I was an all-out Nazi.”

In 1958, he founded a Nazi Party of his own with a membership estimated now at between 20 and a few hundred, and moved into a sprawling, ramshackle house in Arlington, Va. Driblets of cash, perpetuated the party’s existence, and Rockwell’s storm troopers were soon garnering headlines in ugly street brawls and riots. With almost no cash left, Rockwell last January renamed his group the National Socialist White People’s Party to woo extreme racists.

Unbleached White. Some thought Rockwell better dead, and several made the attempt. “Stand next to me,” he was fond of quoting. “I’m bulletproof.” But as he backed his Chevrolet away from Arlington’s Econ-o-wash laundry last week, two bullets fired by a rooftop sniper drilled the windshield. Sprinkled with soap flakes, the dying Nazi staggered from his car. His meager wash was inside the laundry, and his last words were to a 60-year-old grandmother. Said white supremacy’s champion: “I forgot my bleach.”

Police later charged John Patler, 29, with murder. He had often stood next to Rockwell as the Nazis’ “Minister of Propaganda” and even changed his name from Patsalos to make it sound more Germanic. Rockwell had fired him some months back—but not before heaping unstinted praise on his accused assassin. In the latest issue of The Stormtrooper Magazine, which Patler had edited, Rockwell lauded the “dedicated work he has been doing for our people and our cause these many years.”