After the catastrophic defeat and destruction of National Socialist Germany in 1945, there were a small band of activists who kept the NS spirit alive in this country throughout the late 1940s and 1950s. These included men like James Madole of the New York-based National Renaissance Party; Conde McGinley, who edited and published the newspaper Common Sense, and the group of activists who formed the Free Ezra Pound Committee, which included such later lights as J. B. Stoner and Dr. Edward R. Fields. Also politically active in the 1950s was the brilliant if somewhat erratic philosopher and author Francis Parker Yockey, who wrote Impenum, one of the major works of racial nationalism, and whose mysterious death in police custody in San Francisco in 1960 has always looked suspiciously like murder.

But post-war American National Socialism owes its existence to one man: U. S. Navy Commander George Lincoln Rockwell. One of the few genuinely heroic figures the American racial nationalist movement has produced, Rockwell formed the American Nazi Party in 1958 after years of floundering around the traditional "right wing" and becoming disillusioned with everything he found there.

Rockwell's method was simple: a supporter had given Rockwell a large Swastika wall banner taken from National Socialist Germany during the war, and Rockwell pulled side the curtains of a picture window in his home on Williams Street in Arlington, Virginia to reveal the flag with its ancient Aryan symbol to the passing world. That night a gang of drunken hoodlums pulled up outside and hurled bricks and bottles through the pcture window, the first in a long series of acts of persecution and terrorism which have been directed against American National Socialists.

In the coming years Rockwell would be arrested, jailed, beaten, shot at, and confmed in a mental institution because he dared to stand up for his constitutional rights as an American citizen to express dissenting viewpoints. Commander Rockwell established for the American Nazi Party the first Four Phase Program. 

Phase One was the most spectacular and in many respects the most misunderstood phase, a misunderstanding which to some degree persists to this day. It involved a series of flamboyant and sometimes downright bizarre publicity stunts such as dressing Rockwell himself and small numbers of supporters in quasi-Third Reich style uniforms and then picketing the White House; trying to conduct chaotic open-air rallies on the Washington Monument grounds; starting a riot when Rockwell tried to speak in Times Square in New York to a mob of thousands of screaming, frothing Jews; dressing up in gorilla costumes and riding around New York posing as the "Lower Volta delegation to the United Nations; donning gorilla suits again and running through the 1964 Democratic convention yelling "Ah's de Mississippi delegation and ah demands mah seat! "; riding through the South in a Swastika-spangled "Hate Bus", etc.

When you hear Movement people today speak of "Phase One tactics", it is this kind of rambunctious and amusing but not really productive activity which is meant. In the early 1960s was an urgent need to break through the blackout of all pro-White activity, the media boycott of all pro-White viewpoints, at any cost-even the cost of making the Party look ridiculous through blatant publicity stunts.

It is sometimes difficult for older comrades to remember, and of course younger comrades never knew, that as bad as the left-wing liberal bias in the news media is today, in Rockwell's day it was even worse.Whereas today the technological developments such as the Internet, computer bulletin boards, CB radios, fax machines,cable access etc. have to a certain degree undermined the power structure's grip on the nation's communications, in those days there were only three networks and the major newspapers were even more completely Jewish-owned and controlled than today. The entire communications industry marched in grim lockstep, the Great Society ruled, the State of Israel was the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy and could do no wrong, blacks were a noble and sensitive race of persecuted paragons, and anybody who suggested differently simply was not allowed to be heard. It was essential that Rockwell smash this paper curtain of silence.

However, it must not be thought that George Lincoln Rockwell was nothing but street theater. He was also a brilliant writer and organizer. In 1960 he wrote his seminal work In Hoc Signo Vinces, the first National Socialist polemic in the English language since 1945; in 1962 he co-founded the World Union of National Socialists and co-authored the Cotswolds Declaration, the fundamental statement of the National Socialist world view in post-war times; his books This Time The World and White Power are today just as fascinating and instructive reading as they were when they were written.

Rockwell was also a riveting and charismatic speaker, as can be heard to this day in recordings of his famous addresses at Brown University and taped excerpts from his interviews, many of which are available from various Movement sources. Today collectors pay fabulous sums for original copies of his magazine, The Rockwell Report, and his "Boat Ticket Back to Africa" is the single most popular racial nationalist item ever created by any right-wing or racialist group; millions of copies have been printed and distributed down the years.

By 1966 the ANP was at last beginning to break through to large numbers of White people. In that year the Party's Chicago unit organized massive White resistance to a physical invasion, massively backed by organized liberalism, which Martin Luther King spearheaded into the various ethnic neighborhoods on the city's South Side. Mobs of young men wearing White Power T-shirts and Swastika armbands battled against the NAACP monkoids and their police protectors. The resistance was so fierce that it caused King to remark that "he would rather lead ten marches into Selma, Alabama than one march into Gage Park in Chicago."

In early 1967 Rockwell obtained major funding from a cartel of wealthy right-wing businessmen, including the Hunt brothers in Texas, and he used this money to print and publish the book White Power and also the newspaper of the same name. In a historic staff conference held in Arlington in June of that year, Commander Rockwell formally changed the name of the organization to the National Socialist White People's Party (now defunct).

Commander George Lincoln Rockwell was murdered in Arlington on Friday, August 25th, 1967. While it is likely that the individual convicted of the murder, a former Party member named John Patler, was indeed the trigger man who shot down the Commander in an Arlington shopping center, what has never been satisfactorily explained was precisely how Patler knew when and where Rockwell would be, in order to intercept and ambush his victim. It is clear from any objective examination of the case that Patler had at least one accomplice inside the old Party headquarters, called "Hatemonger Hill". Patler was convicted after only the most cursory police investigation, received the lightest possible prison sentence allowable under Virginia law, and was released after spending only a few years in comfortable, minimum-security facilities.