Matt Koehl

Koehl was born on January 22, 1935 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to Hungarian immigrants of German descent. Koehl's father, Matthias Koehl Sr., claimed that his son rarely spoke with him about personal matters, but "was more talkative to his mother". There, he played the violin alongside the civic opera. He subsequently enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and spent two years under them. == Politics ==

In 1956, Koehl visited the "We the People" convention at the La Salle Hotel, where he was told by a member of the Sons of the American Revolution about George Lincoln Rockwell's plans to form a Nazi party. Koehl was initially shocked by the concept, but hoped it was legitimate. Koehl subsequently moved between various white supremacist parties. He helped with the organization of the United White Party, and visited its founding meeting. Koehl became the national organizer of the National States' Rights Party, where he first met Rockwell in 1958; they worked on John G. Crommelin's campaign. By 1959, he was a member of the Fighting American Nationalists, a front group for Rockwell's American Nazi Party (ANP), before he joined the ANP proper in 1960. but Koehl was selected as leader by a group of 16 Party members and succeeded Rockwell as commander of the National Socialist White People's Party, the-at-the-time name of the American Nazi Party. As party leader Immediately after Rockwell's death, groups like the American Jewish Committee believed he would be incapable of keeping the loyalty of the Nazis, believing him not as charismatic as Rockwell. This prediction proved to hold weight, as soon after achieving the position, Koehl became unpopular. His style of leadership alienated old members and made many new members leave. Shortly after Koehl gained power, two other high-ranking members of the Party, Robert Lloyd and William Luther Pierce, requested that he share power between the three of them. Koehl responded distastefully and Pierce was forced to leave the organization. Future Atomwaffen Division advisor James Mason lost faith in Koehl's leadership because of the incident, but stayed in the organization because he "didn't know what else to do". Many former members of the group were purged of their positions in Koehl's attempt to compose the Party of people completely loyal to him. He took control of the World Union of National Socialists (WUNS), and his leadership there was also criticized. Koehl suspended Joseph Tommasi, a California-based Party member, and soon after the group's Cleveland organizer, Casey Kalemba, left; both formed their own Neo-Nazi groups outside of the ANP. An article in The Record Herald claimed he lacked the way Rockwell carried himself and commanded respect. One plot Koehl's party became known for during the 1980s were "Victory Bonds", a scheme mimicking War bonds where money invested would be given back once Koehl achieved power. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission shut down Victory Bonds after they became aware of it in a failed suit from Rick Cooper to get his money back. In the New Order Koehl came to believe that "all the problems [faced] in North America are fundamentally spiritual in origin", and claimed that Hitler said at the end of his life that Nazism could be revived "as a religious movement". He came to believe that the Party was inherently religious, and should stop attempting to pursue politics. Therefore, in 1983, Koehl renamed the organization the New Order and made it more overtly religious, espousing that Hitler had been sent down to Earth by a divine entity, reflecting his inspiration from fascist author Savitri Devi. == Ideology and beliefs ==

Koehl was an obsessive adherent to classic German Nazism and admired Adolf Hitler, being strongly antisemitic. Even from his entrance into the ANP, Koehl was interested in joining the group because of his great respect for the German Führer. While writing for National Socialist World, he depicted him as a visionary ideological thinker with more roots in White nationalism than German nationalism, and thought of Nazism as a new faith. He saw the ideology not as pushing for something political or social, but for a "universal transformation of ideas and things." Koehl was, according to Simonelli, a "rabid germanophile" who opposed the removal of the swastika from the group's image by Rockwell. In an Associated Press interview from after he took power, Koehl claimed he had been "born a racist", opposed miscegenation, and believed in the establishment of an "all-white America". He went on to say that race war was "just around the corner." He pushed to first build up the Party within, constructing a "revolutionary cadre", and then to form a "Grassroots movement in American politics". Koehl said that he wished to "send [African-Americans] back to Africa", and that those who did not go of their own will should be forced to or killed. Years later he claimed again that "Blacks are the pawns of the Jews", and that he had nothing against Black people inherently, but thought miscegenation was a form of genocide and that White separatism was the only way to "build the White race strong again". He said in a 1976 Crawdaddy interview that it was "a mistake" for colonists to bring Africans into the United States, and elaborated on his views on Jewish people; he believed that there would be none in his ideal society, and that a potential solution was to bring them to "a big island somewhere in the middle of the Ocean" where they could "perform hard and honest work", continuing that "if it kills them… it is their tough luck". Koehl further developed his admiration of Hitler by reforming the party into the New Order. In this group, Koehl implemented religious elements, imaging it as a faithful community. In the book Black Sun, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke emphasizes the extents to which the organization's discussion of Hitler was religious; the New Order produced literature praising him in a manner Goodrick-Clarke considered to be imitative of Jesus, Koehl himself directly compared the cause and followers of Hitler to that of the Christian messiah in a 1991 speech to European members of the New Order, and, while talking about Rockwell after his death, compared his role within the Nazi ideology to that of St. Paul within Christianity. Koehl made claims that Hitler was "a gift of Almighty Providence" and that by rejecting him, "we rejected God himself". He claimed in 1985 that Hitler had "risen from the grave", and described him as the "greatest figure to ever walk the face of this earth." His language explicitly rejected democracy as having ruined the world, citing that the victory of the Allied powers led unfavorably to concepts he opposed such as miscegenation, rock music, Alternative lifestyles, as well as HIV/AIDS, crime and corruption. == Works ==

• Some Guidelines to the Development of the National Socialist Movement (1969) • The Future Calls (1972) • ''The Program of the National Socialist White People's Party'' (Cicero, IL: NS Publications, 1980) • Faith of the Future (1995) == References ==