Thread by @egavactip

Today I decided to go trawling for neo-Nazis, to learn something I did not previously know, and discovered an interesting (to me) story.

It starts in 1967 when the Overseas Weekly, a sometimes lurid tabloid newspaper designed for U.S. military personnel (sample below) published

an expose of neo-Nazis in the U.S. Army in Germany. I can't find the original article, but here, in this tweet and the next, is a summary subsequently published in Jet Magazine. Please read.

Note that the story reveals 21-year-old medic Bobby Lee Pace of Nacogdoches,Texas, as one of the leaders of this group of American Nazi Party members in the U.S. Army in Europe.

This was 1967, a year before the first DoD regulations on extremism (and those would primarily be concerned with left-wing extremism, given opposition to the Vietnam War). The Army wasn't sure what to do with Pace, who got a write-up of his activities in Stormtrooper Magazine.

But it was a little embarrassing for the U.S. to be sending Nazis to Germany (we kind of had a history of not liking Nazism in Germany), so the Army shipped him home--not disciplining him--and gave him leave.

It turned out that Pace had become a neo-Nazi years earlier, while a young teen in east Texas, and tried to recruit others. He later dropped out of high school and joined the Army.

Pace arrived back in the U.S. just as the American Nazi Party was beginning its slow disintegration in the wake of the assassination of its founder, George Lincoln Rockwell. But Pace kept himself busy in subsequent years, as Nazis do.

In fact, in 1976, he was charged with possession of an explosive weapon after his Houston, Texas, apartment, went up in flames. Note that investigators found Nazi literature as well.

One might think this would be a warning call, but Bobby Lee Pace was not a man who learned lessons easily. A handful of years later, in 1982, he was arrested for trying to sell a machine gun.

He more or less disappears from the record at this point, but seems to have died around 2010 or so. I leave you with this remembrance from one of his former classmates: "Bobby Pace was different..."