US Political Party’s

August 29, 2022

American Nazi Party., National Renaissance Party

White Patriot Party, Youth International Party

The American Nazi Party (ANP) is an American independent neo-Nazi political party founded by George Lincoln Rockwell and headquartered in Arlington, Virginia. 

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Rockwell founded the organization as the World Union of Free Enterprise National Socialists (WUFENS) but renamed it the American Nazi Party in 1960.[1] Since the late 1960s, a number of small groups have used the name “American Nazi Party” with most being independent of each other and disbanding before the 21st century. The party is based mainly upon the ideals and policies of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party in Germany during the Nazi era and embraced its uniforms and iconography.[7][A]

Shortly after Rockwell’s murder in 1967, the organization appointed Rockwell’s second in command, Deputy Commander Matt Koehl as the new leader. The American Nazi Party, now under Koehl’s command, was subject to ideological disagreements between members in the 1970s and 1980s. “In 1982, Martin Kerr, a leader at the Franklin Road headquarters, announced that the organization was changing its name to the New Order and moving to the Midwest,” effective January 1, 1983.[10] Due to recruitment issues along with financial and legal trouble, Koehl was forced to relocate the group’s headquarters from the DC area, eventually finding his way to scattered locations in Wisconsin and Michigan. After Koehl’s death in 2014, a long-time member and officer of the New Order, Martin Kerr assumed leadership and maintained the New Order website and organization.[11]

A former member of the original American Nazi Party, Rocky Suhayda, founded his own organization using the American Nazi Party name and has been active since at least 2008.[12] Suhayda claims Rockwell as its founder despite no direct legal or financial link between it and Rockwell’s legacy organization.[13] The one connection between the original American Nazi Party and Rocky Suhayda’s group besides ideology is that they sell reprints of Rockwell’s 1960s-era magazine The Stormtrooper on their website.

The Koehl organization changed its name to New Order on January 1, 1983, on the grounds that the people in the area “are not people looking to join revolutionary organizations”, saying that it was moving to an area in the Midwest which it would not reveal for security reasons.[25] The name change reflected the group’s Nazi mysticism and it was still known by that name in 2010.[26]

The organization briefly attracted the media’s attention in October 1983, when it held a private meeting at Yorktown High School in Arlington, Virginia.[27] A non-uniformed gathering of members was held indoors while the police kept a crowd of counter-protesters at bay outside. This event marked the last publicized appearance of Koehl and the New Order in Arlington. From that point forward the only outward sign that the group was still operational was the annual appearance of the swastika and Betsy Ross American Revolutionary War flags flying from the party’s nondescript headquarters building on North Franklin Road every April 20 (Hitler’s birthday).