They are easy to spot, the neo-Nazi and his driver, strolling side by side down Main Street in the midday sun, flanked by the two-story brick and limestone buildings of Beatrice, Nebraska. but it’s not the way they’re dressed.
gerhard lauck, the man they call the “führer of the farm belt” doesn’t inadvertently draw attention to himself, he doesn’t wrap himself in swastikas, not anymore, anyway, and not here in southeastern nebraska , where he eventually retired after serving a four-year sentence in a German prison for distributing neo-Nazi propaganda. he doesn’t bark “heil hitler!” he doesn’t throw his right arm into the air.
You are reading: Third reich books fairbury ne
no, it’s not the way they’re dressed, although lauck is wearing a brown military shirt and his unidentified driver is too buttoned up for a warm spring day. it’s something about the posture of his, a seriousness reflected in his step, as if they weren’t doing business so much as playing.
At 6-foot-4 and approximately 240 pounds, Lauck towers over his rider. Were it not for his illicit activity abroad, his tireless promotion of “racial purity,” his cult of Adolf Hitler (whom he likes to call “too human” just to revel in outrage), the pair would seem almost comical. a laurel and hardy, or closer still, a pinkie and the brain.
“a joke? It was never a joke,” said Bob Wolfson, former director of the Plains States region of the Anti-Defamation League, when I questioned the importance of Lauck. “If you’re talking about American Nazis who have had an international impact in the last 50 years, Gerhard is probably number one.”
for wolfson, lauck’s journey is a valuable case study, a narrative worth repeating to recognize the signs of a budding hatemonger.
according to the southern poverty law center, “the radical right was more successful in breaking into the political mainstream last year (2016) than it has in half a century.” This extremism has reared its head in both violent and purely ideological forms, from the explosion in popularity of websites like the Daily Stormer, founded by an avowed Hitlerite, to the wave of hate crimes in the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s election.
lauck fits perfectly into a succession of far-right ideologues pushing an anti-globalization agenda. But unlike so many who shout I hate him today, he has been selling his particular brand in Europe for decades: before, during and after the internet disrupted traditional propaganda channels.
“its methodology and effect have been changed by technology,” says wolfson, “but the fact that it’s still running a hosting site, that it hasn’t lost its ability to connect all these groups, that it has very good relations with thousands and thousands of neo-Nazis around the world, that is not insignificant.”
I watch them from across the street as they enter the restaurant. above them, a crew of Hispanic workers dangle legs from scaffolding as they re-mortar the exterior. he is not worried. It’s not the individuals that bother him, it’s the groups, which slowly “miscegenate” the planet, he believes, playing the long swindle of “white genocide”.
the room is the size of a banquet and it is empty. the lights are dim and the driver, still in his square jacket, is standing by our table. he doesn’t greet me when I walk in. I ask him if he is with Gerhard. he nods toward the bathroom.
seconds later, lauck bolts out, belly forward, thumbs tucked into his waistband, mustache bushy, hair sprinkled with spices and neatly trimmed.
The world’s leading provider of printed neo-Nazi propaganda is set for its first interview with the mainstream media in years.
“You do a great public service by saying that these people are here,” says Wolfson, who devoted years of his career to following Lauck’s work. “It’s healthy for people to get close to the dark so they can triangulate what the dark looks like.”
I first contacted lauck last February, after studying the recently released “map of hate” by the southern anti-poverty law center.
Of the 917 active hate groups displayed across the country, 99 were Nazi groups and five were within the borders of my home state of Nebraska. two of them in the neo-Nazi category: the ndsap/ao, the German acronym for the national socialist german workers’ party/overseas organization, and the books of the third reich, both headed by gary “gerhard” lauck. The former was listed in the capital city of Lincoln, the latter in Fairbury, with a population of 3,800.
After finding the third reich books website, I quickly emailed the only address listed, amazed to find someone with lauck’s story living quietly among us. I didn’t think he would reply to me, but just 20 minutes later, his reply was in my mailbox.
“I’m semi-retired,” he wrote, “and routinely decline interviews from state and local media.” however, if I were writing for a national or international publication, I would be willing to make an exception. Although correspondence with a neo-Nazi made me nervous (the mere thought of his name in my inbox kept me up at night), we stayed in touch for several months before finally settling on a time and place to meet. p>
In person, the fault is nothing if it is not self-aware.
jokes about his “excessive modesty” as often as he calls himself a “sex symbol”, which is to say: frequently. he’s okay with being called a Nazi propagandist. he does not argue otherwise, although he insists that he fabricates “far less than most propagandists” and certainly less than “the media.” the more appropriate question, he tells me later, is not whether what he says is true or not, but how much he omits. he says these things frequently, deliberately throwing himself into doubt, relishing the gray area between fact and fiction.
Her fluency in German has led many in the past to mistake a very real speech impediment for an affected German accent. struggle with the “r” sound, substituting a “w” or removing it altogether. and he often resorts to the phrase “kind of a thing”, even when the phrase doesn’t apply: “i’m not saying we should, kind of a thing, but living space conkst to poeticize your own space, yuh own culcha is fine.”
Born in Milwaukee in 1953, Lauck grew up in a bubble of pro-German sentiment. Once dubbed the “German Athens of America,” in the 1930s, Milwaukee was home to the largest German-born population in the country outside of Chicago and New York City. but a number of factors shattered the myth of a monolithic German-American community, one of which was the political focus to preserve its heritage after World War I, an era of fierce anti-German sentiment, and the looming shadow . of the third reich.
Lauck’s parents, both from Wisconsin, grew up in this polarized atmosphere, though he says they weren’t political. “Of course, there were comments about America fighting on the wrong side,” he says. “but, after all, that’s pretty obvious.”
protected by his heritage, lauck developed a keen sense of family and ethnic identity, something he would make a fetish of for the rest of his life.
“I’ve been an American for over 60 years,” he says. “I have been German for more than 4000.”
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when lauck was 11 years old, his father, francis, a former engineer with ao smith corporation, accepted a professorship at the university of nebraska and moved the family to lincoln. they moved into a modest house on a quiet, tree-lined street on the eastern edge of town: middle class, upwardly mobile, and overwhelmingly white.
Although Nebraska also had a strong German heritage, Germans here were more Americanized, Lauck says. Few of them retained the language, but more than that, they had lost what they now considered to be the hallmark of German culture.
This sudden departure from his nationalist upbringing in Milwaukee, combined with a burgeoning American counterculture, pushed him over the edge. he considered Lincoln “a spiritually foreign country.”
He retreated into the books and filled his room with German war insignia. when he finally ordered mein kampf, aged just 14, it didn’t seem all that peculiar for the same precocious kid who had ordered the communist manifesto the week before. he hated the former, of course. but mein kampf “made perfect sense,” crystallizing the pro-German values he was raised on and giving way to the “master race” myth he still preaches today.
He graduated from Lincoln East High School in just three years, slipping further into the National Socialist philosophy, submitting essays to Nazi publications, and converting both his father and older brother, Robert, to the party.
In an act of “ethnic awareness,” he changed his name from gary to “gerhard,” and neighbors say he often corrected them. “If Cassius Clay can be Muhammad Ali,” he tells her, “then Gary Lauck can be Gerhard Lauck.”
The neighbors say that his mother, Laura, was “the sanest there”. She remembers her with sadness, noting that she gave everything to that family and seemed to receive very little in return for her. They say Lauck’s sister, Janice, struggled for years with what the family thought was a mental disorder, only to discover that she had a brain tumor.
What the neighbors didn’t know, what they couldn’t, was that the youngest son of this peculiar Wisconsin family would soon establish one of the largest and most far-reaching neo-Nazi organizations in history, and that he would do it all on his own. plain view, right there in the basement of his parents’ house.
after two years in college, lauck dropped out to focus his efforts abroad. He first connected with a fledgling cell of neo-Nazis in New York before flying to “the motherland” in 1972, where she found swastikas and slogans written in graffiti, though there was no sign of a unified movement. He was arrested for distributing Nazi literature, specifically prohibited by the German penal code as part of the post-WWII denazification program, but that gave him an idea.
He describes it in the education of an evil genius, his self-published autobiography:
“a foreign organization based in a free country would provide the underground resistance with professionally produced printed material. would have a uniform contact address in the free country. applicants would receive free samples of literature and their own unique “identification number” to use in future correspondence in place of their real name and address. this protected his identity in the event of a later interception of the mail.”
Thus the National Socialist German Workers’ Party/Overseas Organisation, or ndsap/ao, was born.
The idea couldn’t have been simpler, but in the pre-internet era, never before has the neo-Nazi resistance in Europe been so connected. Breakaway cells that previously knew nothing of each other were now in communication, and Gerhard Lauck, in his early 20s, once a bookish teenage outcast, served as a conduit from thousands of miles away.
started with a print run of just 1,000 swastika stickers mailed to germany. A year later, Lauck writes in his autobiography, the average print run was 100,000. Soon, the ao published a German-language newspaper, the ns kampfruf, and later still, an English version called the National Socialist Report.
for the next two decades, between 1975 and 1995, he moved between lincoln, chicago and new york, but always used the same return address on advertising. newspapers expanded into nearly a dozen languages and 30 countries. Driven by his own reflection: “We realized that we weren’t just a bunch of old men ready to die,” says Lauck, the resistance movement in Europe, and especially in Germany, exploded.
Although figures varied widely at the time, the Anti-Defamation League estimated in 1993 that almost 60,000 Germans were involved in neo-Nazi activities. the German government itself surmised that while only 2,000 Germans fit a strict Nazi mould, nearly 43,000 right-wing extremists were active in various hate groups, and as many as 6,400 had been militarized. either way, all estimates had multiplied significantly since lauck’s arrival in the 1970s.
in november 1976, celebrating the 38th anniversary of kristallnacht, neo-nazis in frankfurt blanketed the city with banners reading “we are here again. the red front perishes. don’t buy Jewish food.”
When an anti-Semitic crime wave broke out in Hannover in February 1978, German sources alleged that the protesters were financed by the AO through a Swiss bank account.
And when a 26-year-old construction worker shot and killed himself and three foreigners with a pistol in a nightclub in Nuremberg in August 1982, police found his pockets full of AO stickers.
In 1992, lauck’s propaganda was found at the crime scenes of more than 200 criminal investigations, nearly all of which were sparked by violent activity. And in the early days of the Yugoslav Wars, Lauck used the AO newspapers to recruit and solicit money for a unit of more than 100 neo-Nazi militants of various nationalities to fight for Croatia, a Nazi ally in World War II.
Lauck’s activities were heavily supervised by the FBI, the CIA and the Anti-Defamation League. and yet the foul remained virtually untouched on American soil. despite his disdain for democracy, he had armored himself with the first amendment.
there were setbacks. Caught in March 1976 with 20,000 stickers, a fake passport, and a large sum of money, Lauck spent four and a half months in a German prison, or as he calls it, a “state luxury hotel.” and once he received in the mail a black powder bomb the size of a cigar box, powerful enough to kill anyone within a five to ten foot radius. That could have been his mother, his father, or his brother Robert, who frequently picked up his mail. Or it could have been his Lithuanian wife, a sympathizer he met in Chicago named Janina Bareisa.
however, his brother jerry, who had publicly repudiated his brother’s ideology, never picked up the mail.
lauck says politics had nothing to do with it, but on february 7, 1978, he loaded a 12-gauge shotgun, pointed it at jerry and pulled the trigger, wounding him. At the hearing, Jerry, who had not set foot in the house for more than two years, testified that he had dropped by the house to drop off a package for his sick twin sister, but his father, weak from breast cancer, lung, rejected it. Lauck, who had a shotgun nearby in case of political backlash, heard the commotion and ran upstairs. when jerry slapped his father, lauck took aim and fired. The charges, which carried a sentence of up to 50 years, were dropped after Jerry refused to appear and time ran out for a speedy trial.
None of that slowed down the laughter. not deportations. not bomb threats. not the family drama. the mail kept coming. the mail continued. And in the early 1990s, Lauck was considered “the biggest supplier of neo-Nazi materials on the German scene,” according to Bodo Becker, spokesman for the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution, established specifically to monitor neo-Nazi activity.
“That’s what I do,” says Lauck. “It’s a very good job.”
His sins would catch up with him. In December 1993, after years of frustration with German law enforcement and a powerlessness to prosecute the man perhaps most responsible for the rise of right-wing extremism in his country, then-FBI Director Louis Freeh opened an investigation focused on in the Americans who facilitated German neo-Nazis.
Although he did not identify the people, those who followed the case knew exactly where he would start.
two years later, in march 1995, lauck was arrested in denmark with arrest warrants issued from hamburg through interpol charging him with 36 separate charges of “distributing propaganda against the german constitution, encouraging racial hatred, inciting commit criminal acts and participate in criminal acts”. organization.” He was soon extradited to Germany, which had been monitoring his activities and tapping the phones of his German cohorts. It is unclear what role, if any, the FBI played in the seizure of Lauck, although both Lauck himself as other sources close to the case who asked not to be identified affirm that US officials were involved.
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Either way, lauck was sentenced to four years in a German prison. he maintains that he knew the arrest was coming, citing the continued publication of the ns kampfruf after his arrest as proof of the year’s foresight.
however, what I wasn’t prepared for was the internet.
by the time he finished his sentence and returned to the states (first to chicago and then back to his mother’s basement with his wife in tow), the internet had undermined the importance of his work. dissident neo-Nazi cells around the world could now easily connect online, and the printing industry had lost almost all of its currency.
He entered prison a king among his people, says wolfson. He came out something less.
Lincoln’s neighbors say he kept quiet after he returned. Many times, a neighbor told me, the only way to know he was home was by the strange smell of cigarettes wafting from the backyard.
but lauck wasn’t completely out of the game. In 2000, just a year after his return, he launched a web hosting platform called zensurfrei.com, which means “censorship-free.”
Aimed primarily at European hate groups, the website boasts: “we… believe that there is no such thing as ‘hate speech,’ only freedom of expression that is hated by the established authorities. zensurfrei.com is the first fully managed, secure web host for those denied access to primary hosting due to “offensive” content.
In addition to its still-expanding web hosting platform, the AO continues to publish print translations of original SS literature through its online bookstore, Third Reich Books. In all, they publish more than 400 titles in 13 languages, says lauck, and recently bought their own binding equipment, moving the entire bookmaking process in-house.
“If it were up to me, I’d move back to Germany to be on the front lines,” he says. “but it’s not practical… I can do more good here.”
After our interview, the photographer and I waited for Lauck and his driver to drive away. I had no interest in following them, not in a clandestine sense, anyway, but wondering how the neighbors would feel about an internationally renowned Nazi propagandist quietly camping among them, so we drove 30 minutes west, through cornfields budding on route 136.
However, I hadn’t planned on running into lauck again just five minutes after I parked the car.
He quickly appointed himself as my liaison and took me to various businesses around town. he asked me if I would like to see his hiking trail. we left the square and walked towards the little blue river, where the city converted an old railroad for recreational use.
during the tour, i asked him about white house chief strategist steve bannon, whom nancy pelosi once called a “white supremacist.” he considers it “watered down” compared to the “hitler youth and the wehrmacht” he once knew in germany; about Donald Trump, whom he calls a transitional figure on the road to revolution, comparable to “Kerensky in Russia”, admitting “the fact that he could be elected because of the message he presented… is extremely significant”. /p>
I also asked him about the sharp rise in anti-Semitic crimes in 2017. “Jews claim that, but a lot of times Jews commit the crimes themselves and fake it to get sympathy,” he says. “You’ll know they’re really making progress if you look on the stock market for a company that makes a lot of zyklon b.”
Lauck bought a house sometime around 2008. By then, his father had long since died, and Lauck had let his parents’ house fall into disrepair, termites eating up the floors and even the base of the piano. of his mother.
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Neighbors say he rarely took his mother out of the house. she finally moved her to a nursing home outside of lincoln, quickly packing up her belongings and what was left of her operations in the basement. a small series of new owners came and went. no one stayed.
most residents here in fairbury don’t recognize your name. those who raise their eyebrows, whisper about his activities, laugh as if it’s a quirk from this avid walker’s past. they certainly don’t condone Nazism, but they won’t kick it out. they respect his privacy and expect him to reciprocate. “As long as it stays out of my yard, I don’t care what it does,” says David George, owner of Plan Mor Lanes and Cafe. “As long as he stays on his side of the fence, I won’t have to put a barrel in his face.”
lauck asks me to leave fairbury out of the story, telling me a cautionary tale about blackmailing a journalist who spied on his mother. she tells me that he is not a threat.
“if I wanted to threaten you, I would have taken you further into the woods, drawn my luger and pointed it at you.”
* * *
In 2008, a Baghdadi construction worker named Rafid Al Nada, fearing for the safety of his young family in a radicalized Iraq, began working his way through the US visa application process.
After five interviews, they landed in Lincoln, Nebraska. he eventually found employment with a local construction firm, where he was able to put his considerable skills to work. at first they lived with his cousin, then in their own apartment and then in a small house. in 2015, they renovated again, this time in a modest house on a quiet, tree-lined street on the city’s east side: middle class, upwardly mobile, and overwhelmingly white.
the patio was a mess and the floors were completely rotten. lucky for them, they knew a guy who could fix it cheap, a skilled handyman with decades of experience behind him.
they are still working on the patio, but the interior is in immaculate condition today. new floors. new paint framed photos of family members hanging on the walls, not a single one leaning. built a new front porch. paved a new sidewalk to the front door. The basement hasn’t been finished yet, but it’s on the list. when they first moved in, he says, he found something strange down there.
“He found a book that talked about Hitler and stuff,” says his son Mustafa in perfect English, translating for his father.
I ask if I can see it. At nothing she laughs and gestures towards the trash can.
“I’m sorry, my friend. I threw it away.”
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