American Nazi Party - Koehl Succession and Ideological Divisions

Koehl Succession and Ideological Divisions

Rockwell's deputy commander, Matt Koehl, a staunch Hitlerist, assumed the leadership role after a party council agreed that he should retain command. Koehl continued some of Rockwell’s reforms such as emphasizing the prospect of a future all-white society, and toning down public denigration of non-whites. Koehl retained the swastika-festooned party literature and pseudo-Nazi uniforms of the party's "Storm Troopers" who had been modeled on the NSDAP's Sturmabteilung. In 1968 Koehl moved the party to a new headquarters at 2507 North Franklin Road, clearly visible from Arlington's main thoroughfare, Wilson Boulevard. He also established a printing press, a "George Lincoln Rockwell Memorial Book Store", and member living quarters on property nearby.

The party began to experience ideological division among its followers as it entered the 1970s. In 1970, member Frank Collin, who was himself secretly the son of a Jewish father, broke away from the group and founded the National Socialist Party of America in Chicago, which became famous due to an attempt to march through Skokie, Illinois, home to many Holocaust survivors. This led to the United States Supreme Court Case. Other dissatisfied members of the NSWPP chose to support William Luther Pierce, eventually forming the National Alliance in 1974.

Further membership erosion occurred as Koehl, drawing heavily upon the teachings of Hitlerian mystic Savitri Devi, began to suggest that National Socialism was more akin to a religious movement than a political one. He espoused the belief that Hitler was the gift of an inscrutable divine providence sent to rescue the white race from decadence and gradual extinction caused by a declining birth rate and miscegenation. Hitler's death in 1945 was viewed as a type of martyrdom; a voluntary, Christ-like self-sacrifice, that looked forward to a spiritual resurrection of National Socialism at a later date when the Aryan race would need it the most. These esoteric beliefs led to disputes with the World Union of National Socialists, which Rockwell had founded and whose leader, Danish neo-Nazi Povl Riis-Knudsen, had been appointed by Koehl. Undaunted, Koehl continued to recast the party as a new religion in formation. Public rallies were gradually phased out in favor of low-key gatherings in private venues. On Labor Day 1979, in a highly unpopular move for some members, Koehl disbanded the party's paramilitary "Storm Troopers". The Koehl organization is now known as the New Order and operates so far from the public spotlight that few of today's neo-Nazis are aware of its existence or know that it is the linear descendant of Rockwell's original ANP.

On November 3, 1979, some members of the NSWPP and a Ku Klux Klan group attacked a Communist Workers' Party protest march in Greensboro, North Carolina. The alliance of neo-Nazis and Klansmen shot and killed five marchers. Forty Klansmen and neo-Nazis were involved in the shootings with sixteen Klansmen and neo-Nazis being arrested. The six strongest cases were brought to trial first, but the two criminal trials resulted in the acquittal of the defendants by all-white juries. However, in a 1985 civil lawsuit the survivors won a $350,000 judgment against the city, the Klansmen and the neo-Nazis for violating the civil rights of the demonstrators. The shootings became known as the "Greensboro Massacre".