Documenting Hate: New American Nazis

Tonight, from Charlottesville to Pittsburgh, an ongoing investigation. He's identifying Jews as a threat to our people. What he means there is white people. A violent neo-Nazis. What do you think was going on in this house? They were making bombs. The Pacific and the West, power lines, nuclear reactors, synagogues, they might go forth and right. Through interviews with insiders, The main thing is normal activity. frontline and pro-publica reporter A.C. Thompson uncover the movement's methods. They are actively recruiting military members. Does that surprise you? And expose their hate. Make America great again. In order to make America great again, you'd have to make America white again. Tonight, Documenting Hate. New American Nazis. Hold the perimeter, we're under fire. We're under fire. He's got an automatic weapon, he's firing out of the front of the synagogue. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. October 27th, 2018. 3410, please send the money up here. I got one of the... Robert Bauer storms into the Tree of Life synagogue with an AR-15 and allegedly kills 11 Jewish worshipers. We have multiple casualties inside the synagogue. We have three officers who have been shot. Members of the Tree of Life synagogue conducting a peaceful service in their place of worship were brutally murdered by a gunman targeting them simply because of their faith. Another act of terror in America. The country again left to ask, where does this hate come from? Could it have been prevented? It's just been 24 hours since Robert Bauer stormed into this synagogue and said, I just want to kill Jews. Over the past few years, I've been reporting on a resurgent white supremacist movement. I've seen its ideas migrate into the mainstream. I've seen violence in cities across the country. And now this, the deadliest known attack on the Jewish community in American history. I fear there will be more to come. Today's All Right Unite the Right rally is expected to draw over 6,000 people. A year ago, the white supremacist movement shocked the nation with a show of force in Charlottesville, Virginia. You will not replace us! You will not replace us! They spilled blood in the streets, militant and unafraid. Panic and horror in Charlottesville. A car slams into a crowd of counter-protesters. A driver plowed into the crowd, killing a young woman and injuring 19. White supremacists killed one protester and injured dozens of others. After Charlottesville, I identified some of the groups behind the violence. With a team of reporters, I exposed a neo-Nazi fight club called the Rise Above Movement, or RAM. They were involved in melees in four different cities. Following our investigation, eight members or associates of RAM are now facing federal charges. But the most extreme organization I've been looking at is called the Adam Woffin Division. Atomwaffenen means atomic weapons in German. The group embraces Nazi ideology and preaches a hatred of minorities, gays, and Jews. It calls for lone wolf acts of violence, much like the massacre in Pittsburgh. For months, my colleagues and I have been talking to a former Atomwaffenen member who asks us to call him John and disguise his voice. He says the group's ranks swelled after Charlottesville. So after Charlottesville, people start coming into the group. People had a huge part in that, of the influx. Applying and asking because they're like, oh, you know, wow, this didn't work. Huge rallies don't work. All that happens is people get arrested, people lose jobs. You get put on some FBI watch list. So if protests don't work, what is the answer? The answer Adam Woffin embraced is to go underground. John tells me that Adam Woffin's ideology draws from the writings of an obscure neo-Nazi named James Mason, who published a newsletter in the 1980s called Siege. James Mason talked about terrorism. There's a huge passage in Siege about terrorism. It's dropping out of the system. So that you can conduct lone wolf activity. The group followed James Mason's Siege. Like a bible, it was like a bible to them. It's the handbook on how to operate. Often has made Siege required reading for all of its members. Siege by James Mason. To them, Mason is the latest in a long line of Nazi leaders, inheriting the role from American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell, who in turn took his inspiration from Adolf Hitler himself. I learned that Mason's writings are kept at the University of Kansas. The bulk of the collection came to us in the early 2000s. Rebecca Schulte is the curator of the Wilcox Collection, an archive of contemporary political movements. Is this the only collection of his work? Yes, this is his archive. We are the only ones that have them. Enclosed with this letter is a sample copy of Siege, the newsletter of the National Socialist Liberation Front. Mason's archive is highly disturbing. His writing lays out an apocalyptic neo-Nazi vision. He says the white race in America is under siege by people of color and undermined by Jews in positions of power. We do not wish for law and order. For law and order means the continued existence of this rotten, rip-off, capitalist Jew system. We wish for anarchy and chaos, which will enable us to attack the system while her big brother pigs are trying to keep the pieces from falling apart. And this is a pay stop. You know, it's that. Yeah. See that? Mason advocated attacks on institutions like Hollywood, media, and the courts. Notorious killer Charles Mason is one of Mason's heroes, and the two had a long correspondence. So this is an object that Charles Mason... Knitted in prison and gave to James Mason. So it's some kind of ornament or... Yes. Some kind of artwork. Knitting, yeah. I don't know exactly. Exactly. Looks like they corresponded a lot. Yeah, it looks like over a long period of time, like 81 to 90s. We've had the collection described online for many years, and we haven't... I haven't seen a lot of action. But in the last few years, there have been more people coming to use the collection. So that's always an indicator that there's something happening out there. There's an interest. We don't always know what it is. So people are starting to look at his writings again. It's very interesting. We're not the first people to come visit you. No, you're not. Back in New York. Our Adam Woffin source, John, agreed to talk over video chat with me and my colleague Alan Winston. So I'm walking division to a Nazi extremist group seeking to spread terror. The main thing is lone wolf activity. When you say lone wolf attacks, it sounds to me like you're talking about basically terrorist acts. Yeah, they don't see themselves as terrorists. Rather, they see the United States as the ultimate terrorist. Like what Adolf Hitler said, how do you meet terrorism? You meet it with stronger terrorism. Adam Woffin is made up of about 60 guys, and then you have what is called initiates. That guys were in the process of becoming members, and in order to become a member, you have to prove yourself. So how many initiates would you say there are? Or were. When I left, there was more initiates than there were members. So that doesn't mean anything. All it takes is one guy to snap and to do something like that. That's what Dylan did. I'm tired of saying nothing's been done in the white nationalist community, so I'm going to take us in and I'm going to go into church and I'm going to kill all these black people because no one else is doing anything. Who knows, there could be another Dillinger from Adam Woffen. John tells me that if I want to investigate the group, I need to start where it began, in Tampa, Florida. Adam Woffin was founded in 2015 by Brandon Russell, a National Guardsman in his early 20s. He moved into this apartment complex with three other members of the group. One of them, an 18-year-old high school dropout named Devin Arthurss, would bring Adam Woffin to the attention of the authorities. Friday night, Tampa police arrested 18-year-old Devin Arthurss. He confessed to killing his roommates, 22-year-old Jeremiah Himmelman and 18-year-old Andrew Onishuk. Arthurss told cops a fourth roommate, Brandon Russell, participates in neo-Nazi chat rooms. The common thread that connected all four roommates was neo-Nazi beliefs. Wyatt Arthurss apparently shot two of his roommates. His father agreed to talk to me about what happened that day. I was working in my office, and the cell phone went off, and it was Devin. And he said, Dad, I'm sorry. I've really messed up. I've really messed up. I said, what's what's the matter buddy? What's going on? That's what the two guys the two was stay in or whatever they're they're dead I I shot him They upset me and I shot them. I tried to hold it together and I said, put the gun down or any weapon down and go turn yourself in right now. Right now. All I was hearing, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Dad. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I said, just turn yourself in. Alan Arthurs says Devin began gravitating to neo-nazi ideas when he was 13 or 14 years old. So is this junior ROTC? What is, what is... Yeah, that's, that's ROTC in high school. He was really interested in the military. That's what he said. What do you, what do you think he was really interested in? There were two other brothers and another member of that ROTC that were obviously into the neo-Nazi stuff. So you think he was joining the ROTC group because there were other kids that were into Nazism in the group? Yes, definitely. Arthurs says his relationship with his son became increasingly strained. By the time we weren't talking, and I didn't even, you know. Devin ended up dropping out of high school. He eventually moved into the Tampa apartment with Russell and the other Adam Woffin members. Did you ever talk to Devin since the incident? He said that he would not, when he figured out what Brandon was going to do, he couldn't live with himself. That's all he's ever said to me. Tampa police refused to talk to us about the case, but I obtained video of Devin Arthurs's police interview. Over and over, he tells detectives about Adam Woffin. Adam Woffin Division is a terrorist organization. It's a neo-Nazi organization that I was a part of. But the things that they were planning were horrible. They were planning bombings and stuff like that on countless people. They were planning to kill civilians in life. What were they specifically planning? Power lines. nuclear reactors, synagogues. Inside the Atomwaffenen apartment, police discovered Nazi paraphernalia, guns, radioactive material, and handmade explosives. On a dresser was a framed photograph of Oklahoma City bomber Timothyothy McVeigh. Holy cow, about a third of the building has been blown away. On April 19th, 1995, Gulf War veteran Timothyothy McVeigh detonated a truck bomb in front of the Oklahoma City Federal Building. Scores were killed. For you, what are the lessons that we should know today about Oklahoma City? I think it's not only Oklahoma City, it's the lessons that we've been learning about lone wolf terrorism. It doesn't take a large organization to cause mass casualty. Kerry Myers was an FBI bomb tech who... I investigated the Oklahoma City bombing. I show Myers the crime scene photos from the Adam Woffin apartment. We have close-ups of that. Oh, now let me look. They document a wide range of explosives, including some of the same ingredients used by McVeigh in his Oklahoma City attack. They were making bombs. This is a bomb maker's workshop. There's the cooler. This is the HMTD. This is actually what caused them the most concern, and rightfully so. HMTD is not very common. It has to be handmade. It requires a process, and you have to... be sophisticated. And how powerful is it? I mean, is this something that... It goes off about 14,000 feet per second. It's probably more powerful than ammonium nitrate. They could make a car bomb if these materials were put together correctly and went off in this classroom. it'd kill or seriously injure every person in this classroom. So obviously these guys aren't master criminals. Are we focusing too much on a group that's not really a threat? Well, in this case, we have two dead, two young men dead, shot with an assault rifle, and we recovered enough explosives here to blow up a car, blow up an airplane, blow up a bus, blow up this room. We have the same basic... explosive kit here that the Boston Marathon bombers had. The night of Arthurs's arrest, Brandon Russell was also detained and questioned by local police and the FBI. He told a different story. He said the explosives were his, but insisted that he was only using them to power model rockets. Atomwaffenen was nothing more than a club. The police released Russell without charging him. They even gave him a ride home so he could pick up his car. Russell promptly disappeared. He met up with another Atomwaffenen member and began driving south. As the men drove, the FBI issued an arrest warrant for Russell on explosives charges. We had his picture. We were told that he could possibly be going up near Turkey Point for some type of terrorist act. That's all we knew. That's all you knew? He turned into the Burger King. I put my patrol car right behind his car to block it in, and I didn't even think. I just got out of the car. I said, Brandon, come here. And he looked at me, and he looked startled for a second. And before I gave him reaction to do anything, I just grabbed his arm and started handcuffing him. Do you have any weapons on you? Do you have any weapons on you? Put your hands on your back. He was shaking. Which made me shake because I didn't know what he had on him. Explosive materials? All I could think is that he had some type of detonator on him because he was so nervous. Stop fidgeting. Why are you fidgeting? What are we gonna find in that car? Guns, ammunition. You have at least two long guns, in excess of a thousand rounds of ammunition, homemade body armor, no suitcases, no toiletry bags. It was the abs- of the other things that was a little bit concerning. He's too nervous, man. He's way too nervous. We were very, very thankful that we contacted them away from that car. Yes. Because if we had pulled them over, the outcome of that event could have been way different for everybody involved based on what they were doing. they had inside the car. Given all the weapons. The weapons were right behind them within hand reach as well as the ammunition. And I believe they had loaded magazines in the center console for the rifles. When we found all the weapons, we were convinced that we had just stopped the mass shooting. The Monroe County Sheriff's Department believes they stopped some kind of violent attack. But it's still not clear what Brandon Russell may have been planning. He had the weapons and ammunition to kill dozens of people. And the FBI bulletin said he might have been targeting the nearby Turkey Point nuclear power plant. Russell eventually pleaded guilty to illegal possession of explosives. He was sentenced to five years in prison. But according to Devin Arthurss, Russell wasn't the only threat inside Atomwaffenen. If I could just talk to an FBI agent, like individually or something like that, if I could get my computer as resources, I could show them like all these channels and stuff. So on your computer, there's stuff that you've been a part of. You can find encrypted channels, you can find names easily. It'd be very easy to identify who these people are. So you think having an FBI agent, as you requested, sit down... and go over the stuff you think then You would open some eyes. Yeah, I definitely do. I think that it would open some eyes to a much bigger thing than what happened today. And I think that that could definitely, like, you know, basically save a lot of lives. It's unclear what the authorities did in response to Arthurs's plea to investigate Adam Woffin. The FBI won't talk to me about its handling of the case. But here's what I do know. Adam Woffin continued to operate, and its violence didn't end. Seven months later in Virginia, Adam Woffin follower Nick Giampa allegedly killed his ex-girlfriend's parents. They had objected to his Nazi views. Giampa is yet to stand trial, but the 17-year-old appeared to be fascinated with Adam Woffin. His social media accounts were full of its propaganda. Weeks later, in California, Sam Woodward was arrested for allegedly killing Blaise Bernstein, a gay Jewish college student. Shortly after the arrest, I published a story identifying Woodward as a member of Atomwaffen. Woodward is pleaded not guilty, but in a cache of confidential chat logs I obtained, Atomwaffen and celebrated the slaying. They referred to Woodward as a one-man gay Jew wrecking crew. Three killings in the eight months after the arrest of Brandon Russell and Devin Arthurss. Devin Arthurss'predictions of violence seem to have come true, but Arthurss had given police one more warning. They have a guy in the U.S. Army that re-enlisted specifically for the group. He claimed Atomwaffen had members inside the military. He re-enlisted specifically for the group. to go into his uh to go into his supply room and steal stuff like steal night vision goggles we have guys in the american military that literally literally would go to go to like bases and steal huge amounts of equipment well brennan's uh currently he joined specifically for the knowledge and the training and he wants to use that training against the government i'm telling you stuff that the fbi should also be from everything i've learned devin arthur's is a deeply troubled young man He gave conflicting explanations for the killings and was ultimately deemed mentally unfit to stand trial. But as I continue my investigation, his description of Atomwaffenen and its ambitions is checking out. Atomwaffenen's confidential chat logs support Arthurs's claim that the group is recruiting soldiers, and they reveal the existence of what they describe as hate camps. in which members with military experience provide training in firearms and guerrilla tactics. One hate camp early this year took place here in Death Valley, on the border between Nevada and California. Atomwaffenen filmed themselves training out in the desert. The group was drawn to Death Valley because of its association with Charles Mason. They made a pilgrimage to Devil's Hole. This small gap in the rock opens up into a massive, 500-foot-deep cavern. Mason planned to found an underground city here after the apocalypse. Adam Woffin's communication showed this hate camp was convened by a member who used the online handle Commissar. I'm able to identify Commissar as Michael Hubsky, based in Las Vegas. Hubsky isn't a soldier himself, but claimed to have been a private military contractor. He boasted in Atomwaffenen chats about his short-barreled CZ Scorpion rifle. Hubsky discussed attacks on infrastructure and claimed to have a classified map of the West Coast power grid. At Hubsky's Death Valley hate camp and at other Atomwaffenen gatherings around the country, the group shoots propaganda videos. Their members fire assault rifles, storm buildings, and clear rooms. Hubsky hoped to organize regular training for Atomwaffenen and encouraged members to join a Nevada weapons facility called Front Sight. The idea was for Atomwaffenen members to get schooled in advanced firearms tactics. I contacted Front Sight, and they were shocked to learn about the group. They agreed to meet with me out at their facility. Frontside is unique. We're a 550-acre firearms training facility about 40 minutes outside of Las Vegas. We have 50 ranges and a capacity of approximately 2,000 people at one time. When did you first learn about Michael Hubsky? the Atomwaffenen leader who wanted to come train here. I believe initially we were contacted by you folks, and you asked some questions. And as a response to that, we investigated with our law enforcement contacts, and that was enough to convince us that they needed to not be coming to Front Sight any further. Hi Michael, it's AC Thompson from ProBublica and Frontline. I'm in Las Vegas and still interested in talking to you. When I reached Hubsky, he'd been banned for life from FrontSite. He tells me he left Atomwaffenen and has renounced Nazism. He won't go on camera for an interview. But using information from the chat logs, I'm able to identify other hate camp participants. One of them agrees to talk to me. He's a 20-something army veteran who asks me to call him Jeremiah. He came back from a combat tour damaged and angry. There were a lot of people that were dis- enchanted with the mission. I'd say about half the guys in my unit. I think a lot of guys, they're lost and they want hope. They're looking for answers. How big would you say the white nationalist movement is within the armed forces? There's a good amount of them. They keep quiet about it, especially when they're in. You can get in a lot of trouble. Going on to Facebook, I never mentioned the military. How did the group regard combat veterans and service members? We definitely wanted to appeal to veterans. We would say they had the fighting spirit that the National Socialists of the 1920s had, that the people of the alt-right lack. Take an average 19-year-old from... Adam Woffin. His only experience of war is video games versus some guy like me who knows how to handle himself in a war. People looked up to the military guys. You were at least using the training that they had given you to hit back at them. When you guys did do training, what kind of training was it? What did you learn? What kind of skills were shared? Going to the range, clearing rooms, medical, how to wage an effective insurgency. A lot of the Iraq and Afghan war vets, they took what they saw the Taliban or al-Qaeda in Iraq doing and applied it. to what's going on here. Jews were the number one enemy. We would say the Jews were the virus, and the people of color, the homosexuals, they were the symptoms. By studying Atomwaffenen chat logs, my colleagues and I develop a list of more than 80 Atomwaffenen members. Seven of these men have military experience. I already know about Atomwaffenen founder Brandon Russell and his time in the National Guard. But there are also three active duty soldiers or marines and three military veterans. And my sources say there could be more. I want to better understand the link between Adam Woffin and the military. I go to see Professor Kathleen Ballou at the University of Chicago. She's been researching the history of the white power movement. We're looking at a current group called the Adam Woffin Division. and they are actively recruiting military members. Does that surprise you? Not at all. That's a strategy pioneered by the white power movement in the period of my study and continued throughout the post-Vietnam period. When... One thing to understand is that throughout American history, there's always a correlation between the aftermath of warfare and this kind of vigilante and revolutionary white power violence. So if you look, for instance, at the surges in Ku Klux Klan membership, they align more consistently with the return of veterans from combat. and the aftermath of war than they do with anti-immigration, populism, economic hardship, or any of the other factors that historians have typically used to explain them. Nationalist fervor, populist movements, those are all worse predictors than the aftermath of war. Post-war periods tend to correspond then with an upsurge in white power, white supremacist activity. Always, yes. Ballou outlines a long history of military men who became key figures in the white power movement. George Lincoln Rockwell. World War I veteran and founder of the American Nazi Party. Richard Butler, World War I veteran and founder of the Aryan Nations. Louis Beam, Vietnam veteran and grand dragon of the KKK. Timothyothy McVeigh, Gulf War veteran and Oklahoma City bomber. It's important to remember too that returning veterans that join this movement and active duty troops, we're talking about a tiny, not even statistically significant percentage of veterans. But within this movement, those people who did serve are playing an enormously important role in instruction of weapons, in creating paramilitary activist mentality and training. When we speak to people involved in this movement today, they talk about leaderless resistance. Can you explain that to me? Sure. Leaderless resistance is basically what we would understand today as cell-style terrorism. The idea that you can recruit a small number of committed activists, organize them, and then they will behave on their own in a cell without direct ties with movement leadership. If we think, for instance, about the Oklahoma City bombing, Timothyothy McVeigh is sort of the ideal soldier of leaderless resistance. He's in an infantry unit and serves in the Gulf and is involved in white power groups while he's on post. He's consistently involved in this movement right up to the moment of the Oklahoma City bombing. We know that this is part of the white power movement and an act of leaderless resistance, but we have this memory of that as an act of one person. And as a result, I think we've never really delivered a decisive stop to this activism. That because we don't understand Oklahoma City as being an outgrowth of an organized movement that has been around for decades, that is modeling the military, that is involving military members, that the authorities have never really been able to put a stop to it. That's right. The military response to white power activism, like the court response to white power activism and the police response to white power activism, reflects the many ways that our society has not been prepared to deal with this kind of a movement. In Washington, a senior analyst at the Department of Homeland Security had tried to draw attention to some of these same concerns. In 2009, Daryl John wrote an intelligence report looking at the rise of white supremacist groups. and their connection to the military. The wars that have gone on in Afghanistan and Iraq, we had the rise of Islamophobia. That's a huge factor in both the anti-government groups and the militias that rally with firearms outside of mosques, but also the white supremacist groups that hate people of other nations and other skin colors. John's report warned that the U.S. faced a growing terrorist threat from white supremacist and anti-government groups. and that these groups might recruit military veterans. What we've seen happen in the years since that report was released is basically everything that we had predicted has come to fruition. And it's actually worse than what we had anticipated. And I'm afraid that more law enforcement officers, more innocent civilians, more minorities and faith-based communities are going to be targeted and actually victimized by these violent offenders. It's like every month we have something, whether it's a shooting, a stabbing. Even bombing's starting to happen now. Today, John's report might seem prophetic, but its publication nearly a decade ago provoked a political backlash from conservative lawmakers and veterans groups. The report was retracted, and his unit disbanded. Our unit got shut down in 2009, and then the money started drying up. These communities are basically left to fend for themselves. This threat is out there and it's... After speaking to John, I hear from two former Homeland Security officials who say the government remains under-resourced and out of position for dealing with the white supremacist threat. For months, I've been trying to get someone in the government, especially at the Department of Defense, to talk to me. No one at the Pentagon, not even a spokesperson, will agree to an interview. But Congressman Keith Ellison has read my reporting. He's written a letter to the Department of Defense, demanding an accounting of their efforts to rid the ranks of extremists. Well, let me tell you, I am a believer in our nation's military. I have very close relatives who serve, including active duty. And I can tell you that it's an institution that even in my family we've always revered. To think that somebody who does not support the true goals of the U.S. military, which is to protect Americans, and actually wants to use that training to hurt Americans, is revolting to me. And I hope that that people in the military really do take this seriously. We've identified seven members of one neo-Nazi group who are current or former military. Is that Adam Woffin? That's Adam Woffin. What do you make of that? Well, I think that they have decided this is a strategic initiative for them. They want their people to go into the military. There's a real legitimate fear here, and I think that we've got to be vigilant about it. The Pentagon responded to Ellison with a letter stating that the military aggressively screens new recruits. The DOD also said it had received 27 reports of extremist activity over the past five years and had disciplined 18 service members. I put those numbers to He Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center. That's laughable. You think so? Yeah, I do. That's ridiculous. So you think that's low? I think it's crazy low. I mean, look, hate groups are telling their people to join the military, and this is something that's been documented both in FBI reports and in DHS reports, to gain these skills. There's not only going to be 27 of them in a military force of, I don't know, one and a half to two million people in the United States who are under arms. It's not possible. I think it's actually, that's just an indicator to me of how low a priority. is to root these people out. We presented the military and committees in Congress, like the armed services committees, with 130 profiles off of the National Socialist Movement's equivalent of Facebook, this thing called New Saxon. Nazi Facebook. Exactly, Nazi Facebook. And we keep sending stuff to the military, like examples of people saying, yeah, you should look at this guy. He looks like he might be in violation. And most of the time, we never even hear anything back from them. I just think that the military needs to have pressure put on it to put this at the top of its list, if that means shuffling around resources, so be it. We don't want another McVeigh, right? You just can't have this. With nobody at the DOD willing to talk to me, I sit down with a former military prosecutor who has handled white supremacist cases. Okay. And I can see this is a response to a congressman who's apparently asked a question. Yeah. As a follow-up to some of the work you guys were doing in these articles about service members. Mason General John Altenburg served as the Deputy Judge Advocate General. the second highest ranking JAG officer in the U.S. Army. He later oversaw the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay. It sounds like they understand the issue and they've laid out for the reader all the different ways that they approach this issue and that they believe they've got control of this issue. And from that, your impression is they have a handle on it? they're dealing with this. Yeah, and I mean, I'm pleased to see that they're doing all this. This looks very thorough to me, and it looks like they're on top of it. So it's been put to me, look, this is a very small. fraction of the U.S. military. The vast bulk of service members are wonderful people. You're disparaging the whole armed forces by raising this. Do you think that's true? No. No, I think it's too important. There's no question that there are organizations that would like for people to go in the military to acquire the training that you get in the military. And how we could screen all those people out, you know. is pretty difficult, but there always could be corners of a given organization where people could hide out and not be seen. In its letter to Congressman Ellison, the DOD also said, it had investigated the Atomwaffenen members I'd identified, but they didn't say what they had done. All I know is that only one member, a Marine, Vassilios Pistolas, was court-martialed and expelled from the service. In response to our questions, a Pentagon spokeswoman sent a statement saying she couldn't provide information on individual cases, but, quote, our standards are clear. Participation in... Extremist activities has never been tolerated and is punishable under the uniform code of military justice. She added that commanders are, quote, encouraged to be preventive and proactive, and they are doing that. I've been writing stories about Atomwaffenen and talking to insiders for nearly a year, and it seems like the group has been paying attention. From federal prison, Atomwaffenen founder Brandon Russell issues a thinly-veiled threat to former members, people he believes are leaking information about the group. A lot has transpired in the years since my incarceration. You know, the prison I heard of war, war against society. To all of those who abandoned ship, woe to you. Adolf Hitler once said, there's no room in this world for cowardly people. So there is certainly no room for you in the Adam Walton division. The game goes for all the pathetic rumor spreaders, opportunistic parasites, and any other traitors. The sword has been drawn. There is no turning back. I learned the video was put out by the group's Texas cell, led by John Cameron Pentagon, who calls himself Rape. In 2017, Atomwaffenen began barring its members from appearing in public demonstrations. But I find pictures from an earlier anti-immigrant protest. Pentagon can be seen at the rally with a shotgun and a skull mask. And then afterwards, posing with his fellow neo-Nazis, with his mask off. I get a tip that Pentagon may be attending a black metal festival here called Destroying Texas. After a year of tracking Adam off and online, I have a chance to confront the group in person. If I do find them inside the club, I'm not sure what to expect. The show is packed. Most of the concert goers look like typical metalheads, but I do spot a few obscure neo-Nazi patches on some people's clothing. I find Rape drinking outside, along with two other Atomwaffenen members I recognize from my reporting. Hey Rape, I'm AC. I wanted to come out here and talk to you about Atomwaffenen. No comment. No comment? No. Y'all gonna do an interview? Are you worried about going to prison? Nope. Atomwaffenen members stand accused of multiple murders, and their propaganda is filled with violent threats. But after all of the online posturing, rape and the others aren't physically intimidating. And they are far less aggressive in person than the skinhead gangs I've followed in the past. Hey Jeremiah. Hey, how are you doing? I met Rape out at a metal show in Texas. How'd that go? I was kind of surprised because they talk all this violent stuff online. But they were just kind of quietly hostile and seething. That figures. If they were wanting to do something violent, they wouldn't do it publicly. These guys, they're not stupid. They're not like these skinhead types. Jeremiah. says I shouldn't underestimate rape. He has a direct relationship with Adam Woffin's intellectual leader, James Mason. Did you ever get to talk to Mason or meet him? We heard him over a couple of voice chats. I never met him in person, though. Rape and Mason had their own little thing. What kind of sense did you get of him when you were talking to him on those chats? I thought he was a genius. In propaganda videos, Adam Woffin say that Mason disappeared for 15 years until they located him. They pose for photos with Mason dressed in a Nazi uniform and celebrate their collaboration. I'm unable to find a phone number for Mason, but I learn he's living in the Denver area. Mason has no online profile, no social media. He doesn't even appear to have an email account. He spent time in a Colorado prison for menacing someone with a pistol. A bankruptcy Filing from a few years ago reveals a solitary life, working at Kmart and living alone. I've gotten several possible addresses for Mason and I begin to search neighborhoods for him. Then I get a call. It's Mason and he wants to talk to me. So how big do you think the Adam Roffin division is these days? How many members? I haven't the foggiest idea. But they come visit you? On occasion they will come through the territory, yes. I'm always happy to meet with them. Mason is evasive at first. I try to get him to talk about the killings and violence linked to Atomwaffenen. I'm glad I didn't know about it, and I don't want to know. Because if I did know, I'd be involved in it. And I don't want to be involved in it. You don't want to go back to prison. I do not urge anybody to do anything like that. But when it gets done, I won't disown them. I kind of welcome the chaos. What did you think of James Fields, the guy who allegedly drove his car into the crowd in Charlottesville? I say, bless his heart. Because he sure is in a jam. So you're sympathetic? Oh, very sympathetic. Totally sympathetic. To you, Fields is a hero. Yes. What do you think of Timothy McVeigh? Another hero. The white race is in danger. And it's not by accident. It's driven. It's planned. Who's planning it? The Jews. We know it's the Jews. I mean, we know that. Mason has a lot more to say, the kind of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories I've come to expect from white supremacists. But I'm struck by what he says next. With Trump winning that election by surprise, and it was a surprise, I now believe anything could be possible. After decades of railing against the government, Mason says Trump is giving him hope. As Trump says, and he has it printed right across the front of his hat, make America great again. In order to make America great again, you'd have to make America white again. Okay? It's interesting. We're headed for interesting times. The darkest day in the history of Pittsburgh said the mayor and you're looking right now at the memorial. Outside the synagogue today mourners struggled to process. I'm in Pittsburgh, weeks after speaking to Mason and just days after the massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue. Before he allegedly stormed the synagogue, Robert Bowers posted on social media writing about Jews helping immigrant invaders who were killing his people. Kathleen Ballou examined the posts. Even a cursory look at his social media. indicates that he is decisively part of a white power ideology. What did you see when you were looking through those accounts? His last post expressed that he was going to go in shooting, and it's an anti-Semitic rant. But it also repeats twice the phrase, our people, that he needs to protect our people, that he's identifying Jews as a threat to our people, that what he means there is white people. And then through the rest of the account, there's a whole bunch of other markers of white power ideology. All of that content is deeply, deeply disturbing, but is historic. We have a history. You've seen it before. Absolutely. I think this is an example of leaderless resistance in that it is a... what appears to be a lone gunman, but someone who is motivated and propelled by a worldview and by a social network of like-minded people who push and enable violence. This movement has been using these structures for decades. Our community was devastated with this attack. with the senseless slaughter of 11 people. The entire community was affected. The Jewish community, absolutely. The Brunovit, but the entire Pittsburgh community was devastated. Retired FBI agent Brandon Orsini is the director of security for the Jewish Federation of Pittsburgh. Even while Pittsburgh was grieving, he says neo-Nazi propaganda was appearing around the city. And what... What's going on here? These are posters that are up at various parts of the city. There are stickers? Flyers, posters, stickers. This week in particular, we've seen an increase. After what's happened in recent days, you have a fascist group coming in here. Yes. And I got numerous reports on Tuesday. Orsini says even before the shooting, he had decided to take additional precautions. We have... Put casualty bags in each one of our synagogues and schools. There's tourniquets, there are compression pads, there's wound packing material. And so basically you have extreme first aid kits, life-saving kits, in the synagogues, the schools, and other institutions around here. Every one of our major institutions, we have them. It's kind of sad. It's incredibly sad to think we're in a day where we have to worry. about security for people going into pray. Pittsburgh is still mourning, and the questions it provokes still linger. Can these kind of killings be prevented? I now know the FBI is looking at Atomwaffenen. Agents in several states have been talking with former members. And it turns out the Bureau is investigating Robert Bauer's relationship to two neo-Nazi brothers. with connections to Atomwaffen. But what I've learned in my years covering white supremacist groups is that there are many, and they draw from a deep reservoir of ugliness in America. Just this month, the FBI announced hate crimes had spiked again, the third year running. This story is far from over. Go to pbs.org slash frontline for our latest reporting with ProPublica. Then, starting November 29th, our original podcast series, The Frontline Dispatch, returns with a new season. It's so risky. I don't want to be walking around like this. I don't want someone... I think it's gut-wrenching that he knew that he could go out there and he could get shot by... Subscribe now on our website or wherever you listen to podcasts. For Frontline's Documenting Hate, New American Nazis on DVD, visit ShopPBS or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS. This program is also available on Amazon Prime Video.

They were making bombs. The Pacific and the West, power lines, nuclear reactors, synagogues, they might go forth and right. Through interviews with insiders, The main thing is normal activity. frontline and pro-publica reporter A.C.

Thompson uncover the movement's methods. They are actively recruiting military members. Does that surprise you? And expose their hate. Make America great again.

In order to make America great again, you'd have to make America white again. Tonight, Documenting Hate. New American Nazis. Hold the perimeter, we're under fire. We're under fire.

He's got an automatic weapon, he's firing out of the front of the synagogue. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. October 27th, 2018. 3410, please send the money up here. I got one of the... Robert Bauer storms into the Tree of Life synagogue with an AR-15 and allegedly kills 11 Jewish worshipers.

We have multiple casualties inside the synagogue. We have three officers who have been shot. Members of the Tree of Life synagogue conducting a peaceful service in their place of worship were brutally murdered by a gunman targeting them simply because of their faith.

Another act of terror in America. The country again left to ask, where does this hate come from? Could it have been prevented? It's just been 24 hours since Robert Bauer stormed into this synagogue and said, I just want to kill Jews.

Over the past few years, I've been reporting on a resurgent white supremacist movement. I've seen its ideas migrate into the mainstream. I've seen violence in cities across the country.

And now this, the deadliest known attack on the Jewish community in American history. I fear there will be more to come. Today's All Right Unite the Right rally is expected to draw over 6,000 people.

A year ago, the white supremacist movement shocked the nation with a show of force in Charlottesville, Virginia. You will not replace us! You will not replace us! They spilled blood in the streets, militant and unafraid.

Panic and horror in Charlottesville. A car slams into a crowd of counter-protesters. A driver plowed into the crowd, killing a young woman and injuring 19. White supremacists killed one protester and injured dozens of others.

After Charlottesville, I identified some of the groups behind the violence. With a team of reporters, I exposed a neo-Nazi fight club called the Rise Above Movement, or RAM. They were involved in melees in four different cities.

Following our investigation, eight members or associates of RAM are now facing federal charges. But the most extreme organization I've been looking at is called the Adam Woffin Division. Atomwaffenen means atomic weapons in German.

The group embraces Nazi ideology and preaches a hatred of minorities, gays, and Jews. It calls for lone wolf acts of violence, much like the massacre in Pittsburgh. For months, my colleagues and I have been talking to a former Atomwaffenen member who asks us to call him John and disguise his voice.

He says the group's ranks swelled after Charlottesville. So after Charlottesville, people start coming into the group. People had a huge part in that, of the influx. Applying and asking because they're like, oh, you know, wow, this didn't work.

Huge rallies don't work. All that happens is people get arrested, people lose jobs. You get put on some FBI watch list. So if protests don't work, what is the answer?

The answer Adam Woffin embraced is to go underground. John tells me that Adam Woffin's ideology draws from the writings of an obscure neo-Nazi named James Mason, who published a newsletter in the 1980s called Siege. James Mason talked about terrorism. There's a huge passage in Siege about terrorism. It's dropping out of the system.

So that you can conduct lone wolf activity. The group followed James Mason's Siege. Like a bible, it was like a bible to them. It's the handbook on how to operate. Often has made Siege required reading for all of its members.

Siege by James Mason. To them, Mason is the latest in a long line of Nazi leaders, inheriting the role from American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell, who in turn took his inspiration from Adolf Hitler himself. I learned that Mason's writings are kept at the University of Kansas.

The bulk of the collection came to us in the early 2000s. Rebecca Schulte is the curator of the Wilcox Collection, an archive of contemporary political movements. Is this the only collection of his work? Yes, this is his archive. We are the only ones that have them.

Enclosed with this letter is a sample copy of Siege, the newsletter of the National Socialist Liberation Front. Mason's archive is highly disturbing. His writing lays out an apocalyptic neo-Nazi vision.

He says the white race in America is under siege by people of color and undermined by Jews in positions of power. We do not wish for law and order. For law and order means the continued existence of this rotten, rip-off, capitalist Jew system. We wish for anarchy and chaos, which will enable us to attack the system while her big brother pigs are trying to keep the pieces from falling apart.

And this is a pay stop. You know, it's that. Yeah. See that? Mason advocated attacks on institutions like Hollywood, media, and the courts.

Notorious killer Charles Mason is one of Mason's heroes, and the two had a long correspondence. So this is an object that Charles Mason... Knitted in prison and gave to James Mason. So it's some kind of ornament or...

Yes. Some kind of artwork. Knitting, yeah.

I don't know exactly. Exactly. Looks like they corresponded a lot. Yeah, it looks like over a long period of time, like 81 to 90s. We've had the collection described online for many years, and we haven't...

I haven't seen a lot of action. But in the last few years, there have been more people coming to use the collection. So that's always an indicator that there's something happening out there.

There's an interest. We don't always know what it is. So people are starting to look at his writings again. It's very interesting. We're not the first people to come visit you.

No, you're not. Back in New York. Our Adam Woffin source, John, agreed to talk over video chat with me and my colleague Alan Winston. So I'm walking division to a Nazi extremist group seeking to spread terror. The main thing is lone wolf activity.

When you say lone wolf attacks, it sounds to me like you're talking about basically terrorist acts. Yeah, they don't see themselves as terrorists. Rather, they see the United States as the ultimate terrorist.

Like what Adolf Hitler said, how do you meet terrorism? You meet it with stronger terrorism. Adam Woffin is made up of about 60 guys, and then you have what is called initiates. That guys were in the process of becoming members, and in order to become a member, you have to prove yourself.

So how many initiates would you say there are? Or were. When I left, there was more initiates than there were members.

So that doesn't mean anything. All it takes is one guy to snap and to do something like that. That's what Dylan did. I'm tired of saying nothing's been done in the white nationalist community, so I'm going to take us in and I'm going to go into church and I'm going to kill all these black people because no one else is doing anything. Who knows, there could be another Dillinger from Adam Woffen.

John tells me that if I want to investigate the group, I need to start where it began, in Tampa, Florida. Adam Woffin was founded in 2015 by Brandon Russell, a National Guardsman in his early 20s. He moved into this apartment complex with three other members of the group. One of them, an 18-year-old high school dropout named Devin Arthurss, would bring Adam Woffin to the attention of the authorities.

Friday night, Tampa police arrested 18-year-old Devin Arthurss. He confessed to killing his roommates, 22-year-old Jeremiah Himmelman and 18-year-old Andrew Onishuk. Arthurss told cops a fourth roommate, Brandon Russell, participates in neo-Nazi chat rooms. The common thread that connected all four roommates was neo-Nazi beliefs.

Wyatt Arthurss apparently shot two of his roommates. His father agreed to talk to me about what happened that day. I was working in my office, and the cell phone went off, and it was Devin. And he said, Dad, I'm sorry.

I've really messed up. I've really messed up. I said, what's what's the matter buddy?

What's going on? That's what the two guys the two was stay in or whatever they're they're dead I I shot him They upset me and I shot them. I tried to hold it together and I said, put the gun down or any weapon down and go turn yourself in right now.

Right now. All I was hearing, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Dad. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I said, just turn yourself in.

Alan Arthurs says Devin began gravitating to neo-nazi ideas when he was 13 or 14 years old. So is this junior ROTC? What is, what is...

Yeah, that's, that's ROTC in high school. He was really interested in the military. That's what he said.

What do you, what do you think he was really interested in? There were two other brothers and another member of that ROTC that were obviously into the neo-Nazi stuff. So you think he was joining the ROTC group because there were other kids that were into Nazism in the group?

Yes, definitely. Arthurs says his relationship with his son became increasingly strained. By the time we weren't talking, and I didn't even, you know. Devin ended up dropping out of high school. He eventually moved into the Tampa apartment with Russell and the other Adam Woffin members.

Did you ever talk to Devin since the incident? He said that he would not, when he figured out what Brandon was going to do, he couldn't live with himself. That's all he's ever said to me.

Tampa police refused to talk to us about the case, but I obtained video of Devin Arthurs's police interview. Over and over, he tells detectives about Adam Woffin. Adam Woffin Division is a terrorist organization. It's a neo-Nazi organization that I was a part of.

But the things that they were planning were horrible. They were planning bombings and stuff like that on countless people. They were planning to kill civilians in life. What were they specifically planning? Power lines.

nuclear reactors, synagogues. Inside the Atomwaffenen apartment, police discovered Nazi paraphernalia, guns, radioactive material, and handmade explosives. On a dresser was a framed photograph of Oklahoma City bomber Timothyothy McVeigh. Holy cow, about a third of the building has been blown away.

On April 19th, 1995, Gulf War veteran Timothyothy McVeigh detonated a truck bomb in front of the Oklahoma City Federal Building. Scores were killed. For you, what are the lessons that we should know today about Oklahoma City? I think it's not only Oklahoma City, it's the lessons that we've been learning about lone wolf terrorism.

It doesn't take a large organization to cause mass casualty. Kerry Myers was an FBI bomb tech who... I investigated the Oklahoma City bombing.

I show Myers the crime scene photos from the Adam Woffin apartment. We have close-ups of that. Oh, now let me look. They document a wide range of explosives, including some of the same ingredients used by McVeigh in his Oklahoma City attack. They were making bombs.

This is a bomb maker's workshop. There's the cooler. This is the HMTD.

This is actually what caused them the most concern, and rightfully so. HMTD is not very common. It has to be handmade.

It requires a process, and you have to... be sophisticated. And how powerful is it?

I mean, is this something that... It goes off about 14,000 feet per second. It's probably more powerful than ammonium nitrate.

They could make a car bomb if these materials were put together correctly and went off in this classroom. it'd kill or seriously injure every person in this classroom. So obviously these guys aren't master criminals.

Are we focusing too much on a group that's not really a threat? Well, in this case, we have two dead, two young men dead, shot with an assault rifle, and we recovered enough explosives here to blow up a car, blow up an airplane, blow up a bus, blow up this room. We have the same basic...

explosive kit here that the Boston Marathon bombers had. The night of Arthurs's arrest, Brandon Russell was also detained and questioned by local police and the FBI. He told a different story. He said the explosives were his, but insisted that he was only using them to power model rockets. Atomwaffenen was nothing more than a club.

The police released Russell without charging him. They even gave him a ride home so he could pick up his car. Russell promptly disappeared. He met up with another Atomwaffenen member and began driving south. As the men drove, the FBI issued an arrest warrant for Russell on explosives charges.

We had his picture. We were told that he could possibly be going up near Turkey Point for some type of terrorist act. That's all we knew.

That's all you knew? He turned into the Burger King. I put my patrol car right behind his car to block it in, and I didn't even think. I just got out of the car. I said, Brandon, come here.

And he looked at me, and he looked startled for a second. And before I gave him reaction to do anything, I just grabbed his arm and started handcuffing him. Do you have any weapons on you? Do you have any weapons on you? Put your hands on your back.

He was shaking. Which made me shake because I didn't know what he had on him. Explosive materials? All I could think is that he had some type of detonator on him because he was so nervous. Stop fidgeting.

Why are you fidgeting? What are we gonna find in that car? Guns, ammunition. You have at least two long guns, in excess of a thousand rounds of ammunition, homemade body armor, no suitcases, no toiletry bags. It was the abs- of the other things that was a little bit concerning.

He's too nervous, man. He's way too nervous. We were very, very thankful that we contacted them away from that car. Yes. Because if we had pulled them over, the outcome of that event could have been way different for everybody involved based on what they were doing.

they had inside the car. Given all the weapons. The weapons were right behind them within hand reach as well as the ammunition.

And I believe they had loaded magazines in the center console for the rifles. When we found all the weapons, we were convinced that we had just stopped the mass shooting. The Monroe County Sheriff's Department believes they stopped some kind of violent attack.

But it's still not clear what Brandon Russell may have been planning. He had the weapons and ammunition to kill dozens of people. And the FBI bulletin said he might have been targeting the nearby Turkey Point nuclear power plant.

Russell eventually pleaded guilty to illegal possession of explosives. He was sentenced to five years in prison. But according to Devin Arthurss, Russell wasn't the only threat inside Atomwaffenen.

If I could just talk to an FBI agent, like individually or something like that, if I could get my computer as resources, I could show them like all these channels and stuff. So on your computer, there's stuff that you've been a part of. You can find encrypted channels, you can find names easily.

It'd be very easy to identify who these people are. So you think having an FBI agent, as you requested, sit down... and go over the stuff you think then You would open some eyes. Yeah, I definitely do. I think that it would open some eyes to a much bigger thing than what happened today.

And I think that that could definitely, like, you know, basically save a lot of lives. It's unclear what the authorities did in response to Arthurs's plea to investigate Adam Woffin. The FBI won't talk to me about its handling of the case. But here's what I do know. Adam Woffin continued to operate, and its violence didn't end.

Seven months later in Virginia, Adam Woffin follower Nick Giampa allegedly killed his ex-girlfriend's parents. They had objected to his Nazi views. Giampa is yet to stand trial, but the 17-year-old appeared to be fascinated with Adam Woffin.

His social media accounts were full of its propaganda. Weeks later, in California, Sam Woodward was arrested for allegedly killing Blaise Bernstein, a gay Jewish college student. Shortly after the arrest, I published a story identifying Woodward as a member of Atomwaffen. Woodward is pleaded not guilty, but in a cache of confidential chat logs I obtained, Atomwaffen and celebrated the slaying. They referred to Woodward as a one-man gay Jew wrecking crew.

Three killings in the eight months after the arrest of Brandon Russell and Devin Arthurss. Devin Arthurss'predictions of violence seem to have come true, but Arthurss had given police one more warning. They have a guy in the U.S.

Army that re-enlisted specifically for the group. He claimed Atomwaffen had members inside the military. He re-enlisted specifically for the group. to go into his uh to go into his supply room and steal stuff like steal night vision goggles we have guys in the american military that literally literally would go to go to like bases and steal huge amounts of equipment well brennan's uh currently he joined specifically for the knowledge and the training and he wants to use that training against the government i'm telling you stuff that the fbi should also be from everything i've learned devin arthur's is a deeply troubled young man He gave conflicting explanations for the killings and was ultimately deemed mentally unfit to stand trial. But as I continue my investigation, his description of Atomwaffenen and its ambitions is checking out.

Atomwaffenen's confidential chat logs support Arthurs's claim that the group is recruiting soldiers, and they reveal the existence of what they describe as hate camps. in which members with military experience provide training in firearms and guerrilla tactics. One hate camp early this year took place here in Death Valley, on the border between Nevada and California.

Atomwaffenen filmed themselves training out in the desert. The group was drawn to Death Valley because of its association with Charles Mason. They made a pilgrimage to Devil's Hole. This small gap in the rock opens up into a massive, 500-foot-deep cavern. Mason planned to found an underground city here after the apocalypse.

Adam Woffin's communication showed this hate camp was convened by a member who used the online handle Commissar. I'm able to identify Commissar as Michael Hubsky, based in Las Vegas. Hubsky isn't a soldier himself, but claimed to have been a private military contractor.

He boasted in Atomwaffenen chats about his short-barreled CZ Scorpion rifle. Hubsky discussed attacks on infrastructure and claimed to have a classified map of the West Coast power grid. At Hubsky's Death Valley hate camp and at other Atomwaffenen gatherings around the country, the group shoots propaganda videos.

Their members fire assault rifles, storm buildings, and clear rooms. Hubsky hoped to organize regular training for Atomwaffenen and encouraged members to join a Nevada weapons facility called Front Sight. The idea was for Atomwaffenen members to get schooled in advanced firearms tactics. I contacted Front Sight, and they were shocked to learn about the group. They agreed to meet with me out at their facility.

Frontside is unique. We're a 550-acre firearms training facility about 40 minutes outside of Las Vegas. We have 50 ranges and a capacity of approximately 2,000 people at one time. When did you first learn about Michael Hubsky?

the Atomwaffenen leader who wanted to come train here. I believe initially we were contacted by you folks, and you asked some questions. And as a response to that, we investigated with our law enforcement contacts, and that was enough to convince us that they needed to not be coming to Front Sight any further. Hi Michael, it's AC Thompson from ProBublica and Frontline. I'm in Las Vegas and still interested in talking to you.

When I reached Hubsky, he'd been banned for life from FrontSite. He tells me he left Atomwaffenen and has renounced Nazism. He won't go on camera for an interview.

But using information from the chat logs, I'm able to identify other hate camp participants. One of them agrees to talk to me. He's a 20-something army veteran who asks me to call him Jeremiah. He came back from a combat tour damaged and angry. There were a lot of people that were dis- enchanted with the mission.

I'd say about half the guys in my unit. I think a lot of guys, they're lost and they want hope. They're looking for answers.

How big would you say the white nationalist movement is within the armed forces? There's a good amount of them. They keep quiet about it, especially when they're in.

You can get in a lot of trouble. Going on to Facebook, I never mentioned the military. How did the group regard combat veterans and service members?

We definitely wanted to appeal to veterans. We would say they had the fighting spirit that the National Socialists of the 1920s had, that the people of the alt-right lack. Take an average 19-year-old from...

Adam Woffin. His only experience of war is video games versus some guy like me who knows how to handle himself in a war. People looked up to the military guys. You were at least using the training that they had given you to hit back at them.

When you guys did do training, what kind of training was it? What did you learn? What kind of skills were shared? Going to the range, clearing rooms, medical, how to wage an effective insurgency.

A lot of the Iraq and Afghan war vets, they took what they saw the Taliban or al-Qaeda in Iraq doing and applied it. to what's going on here. Jews were the number one enemy.

We would say the Jews were the virus, and the people of color, the homosexuals, they were the symptoms. By studying Atomwaffenen chat logs, my colleagues and I develop a list of more than 80 Atomwaffenen members. Seven of these men have military experience. I already know about Atomwaffenen founder Brandon Russell and his time in the National Guard. But there are also three active duty soldiers or marines and three military veterans.

And my sources say there could be more. I want to better understand the link between Adam Woffin and the military. I go to see Professor Kathleen Ballou at the University of Chicago. She's been researching the history of the white power movement.

We're looking at a current group called the Adam Woffin Division. and they are actively recruiting military members. Does that surprise you? Not at all.

That's a strategy pioneered by the white power movement in the period of my study and continued throughout the post-Vietnam period. When... One thing to understand is that throughout American history, there's always a correlation between the aftermath of warfare and this kind of vigilante and revolutionary white power violence. So if you look, for instance, at the surges in Ku Klux Klan membership, they align more consistently with the return of veterans from combat. and the aftermath of war than they do with anti-immigration, populism, economic hardship, or any of the other factors that historians have typically used to explain them.

Nationalist fervor, populist movements, those are all worse predictors than the aftermath of war. Post-war periods tend to correspond then with an upsurge in white power, white supremacist activity. Always, yes. Ballou outlines a long history of military men who became key figures in the white power movement.

George Lincoln Rockwell. World War I veteran and founder of the American Nazi Party. Richard Butler, World War I veteran and founder of the Aryan Nations.

Louis Beam, Vietnam veteran and grand dragon of the KKK. Timothyothy McVeigh, Gulf War veteran and Oklahoma City bomber. It's important to remember too that returning veterans that join this movement and active duty troops, we're talking about a tiny, not even statistically significant percentage of veterans.

But within this movement, those people who did serve are playing an enormously important role in instruction of weapons, in creating paramilitary activist mentality and training. When we speak to people involved in this movement today, they talk about leaderless resistance. Can you explain that to me? Sure. Leaderless resistance is basically what we would understand today as cell-style terrorism.

The idea that you can recruit a small number of committed activists, organize them, and then they will behave on their own in a cell without direct ties with movement leadership. If we think, for instance, about the Oklahoma City bombing, Timothyothy McVeigh is sort of the ideal soldier of leaderless resistance. He's in an infantry unit and serves in the Gulf and is involved in white power groups while he's on post.

He's consistently involved in this movement right up to the moment of the Oklahoma City bombing. We know that this is part of the white power movement and an act of leaderless resistance, but we have this memory of that as an act of one person. And as a result, I think we've never really delivered a decisive stop to this activism.

That because we don't understand Oklahoma City as being an outgrowth of an organized movement that has been around for decades, that is modeling the military, that is involving military members, that the authorities have never really been able to put a stop to it. That's right. The military response to white power activism, like the court response to white power activism and the police response to white power activism, reflects the many ways that our society has not been prepared to deal with this kind of a movement. In Washington, a senior analyst at the Department of Homeland Security had tried to draw attention to some of these same concerns. In 2009, Daryl John wrote an intelligence report looking at the rise of white supremacist groups.

and their connection to the military. The wars that have gone on in Afghanistan and Iraq, we had the rise of Islamophobia. That's a huge factor in both the anti-government groups and the militias that rally with firearms outside of mosques, but also the white supremacist groups that hate people of other nations and other skin colors. John's report warned that the U.S. faced a growing terrorist threat from white supremacist and anti-government groups.

and that these groups might recruit military veterans. What we've seen happen in the years since that report was released is basically everything that we had predicted has come to fruition. And it's actually worse than what we had anticipated.

And I'm afraid that more law enforcement officers, more innocent civilians, more minorities and faith-based communities are going to be targeted and actually victimized by these violent offenders. It's like every month we have something, whether it's a shooting, a stabbing. Even bombing's starting to happen now. Today, John's report might seem prophetic, but its publication nearly a decade ago provoked a political backlash from conservative lawmakers and veterans groups. The report was retracted, and his unit disbanded.

Our unit got shut down in 2009, and then the money started drying up. These communities are basically left to fend for themselves. This threat is out there and it's... After speaking to John, I hear from two former Homeland Security officials who say the government remains under-resourced and out of position for dealing with the white supremacist threat.

For months, I've been trying to get someone in the government, especially at the Department of Defense, to talk to me. No one at the Pentagon, not even a spokesperson, will agree to an interview. But Congressman Keith Ellison has read my reporting.

He's written a letter to the Department of Defense, demanding an accounting of their efforts to rid the ranks of extremists. Well, let me tell you, I am a believer in our nation's military. I have very close relatives who serve, including active duty. And I can tell you that it's an institution that even in my family we've always revered.

To think that somebody who does not support the true goals of the U.S. military, which is to protect Americans, and actually wants to use that training to hurt Americans, is revolting to me. And I hope that that people in the military really do take this seriously. We've identified seven members of one neo-Nazi group who are current or former military. Is that Adam Woffin?

That's Adam Woffin. What do you make of that? Well, I think that they have decided this is a strategic initiative for them. They want their people to go into the military. There's a real legitimate fear here, and I think that we've got to be vigilant about it.

The Pentagon responded to Ellison with a letter stating that the military aggressively screens new recruits. The DOD also said it had received 27 reports of extremist activity over the past five years and had disciplined 18 service members. I put those numbers to He Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center. That's laughable. You think so?

Yeah, I do. That's ridiculous. So you think that's low?

I think it's crazy low. I mean, look, hate groups are telling their people to join the military, and this is something that's been documented both in FBI reports and in DHS reports, to gain these skills. There's not only going to be 27 of them in a military force of, I don't know, one and a half to two million people in the United States who are under arms. It's not possible.

I think it's actually, that's just an indicator to me of how low a priority. is to root these people out. We presented the military and committees in Congress, like the armed services committees, with 130 profiles off of the National Socialist Movement's equivalent of Facebook, this thing called New Saxon.

Nazi Facebook. Exactly, Nazi Facebook. And we keep sending stuff to the military, like examples of people saying, yeah, you should look at this guy. He looks like he might be in violation. And most of the time, we never even hear anything back from them.

I just think that the military needs to have pressure put on it to put this at the top of its list, if that means shuffling around resources, so be it. We don't want another McVeigh, right? You just can't have this.

With nobody at the DOD willing to talk to me, I sit down with a former military prosecutor who has handled white supremacist cases. Okay. And I can see this is a response to a congressman who's apparently asked a question. Yeah.

As a follow-up to some of the work you guys were doing in these articles about service members. Mason General John Altenburg served as the Deputy Judge Advocate General. the second highest ranking JAG officer in the U.S. Army.

He later oversaw the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay. It sounds like they understand the issue and they've laid out for the reader all the different ways that they approach this issue and that they believe they've got control of this issue. And from that, your impression is they have a handle on it? they're dealing with this. Yeah, and I mean, I'm pleased to see that they're doing all this.

This looks very thorough to me, and it looks like they're on top of it. So it's been put to me, look, this is a very small. fraction of the U.S. military. The vast bulk of service members are wonderful people. You're disparaging the whole armed forces by raising this.

Do you think that's true? No. No, I think it's too important. There's no question that there are organizations that would like for people to go in the military to acquire the training that you get in the military. And how we could screen all those people out, you know.

is pretty difficult, but there always could be corners of a given organization where people could hide out and not be seen. In its letter to Congressman Ellison, the DOD also said, it had investigated the Atomwaffenen members I'd identified, but they didn't say what they had done. All I know is that only one member, a Marine, Vassilios Pistolas, was court-martialed and expelled from the service. In response to our questions, a Pentagon spokeswoman sent a statement saying she couldn't provide information on individual cases, but, quote, our standards are clear.

Participation in... Extremist activities has never been tolerated and is punishable under the uniform code of military justice. She added that commanders are, quote, encouraged to be preventive and proactive, and they are doing that.

I've been writing stories about Atomwaffenen and talking to insiders for nearly a year, and it seems like the group has been paying attention. From federal prison, Atomwaffenen founder Brandon Russell issues a thinly-veiled threat to former members, people he believes are leaking information about the group. A lot has transpired in the years since my incarceration. You know, the prison I heard of war, war against society. To all of those who abandoned ship, woe to you.

Adolf Hitler once said, there's no room in this world for cowardly people. So there is certainly no room for you in the Adam Walton division. The game goes for all the pathetic rumor spreaders, opportunistic parasites, and any other traitors. The sword has been drawn. There is no turning back.

I learned the video was put out by the group's Texas cell, led by John Cameron Pentagon, who calls himself Rape. In 2017, Atomwaffenen began barring its members from appearing in public demonstrations. But I find pictures from an earlier anti-immigrant protest. Pentagon can be seen at the rally with a shotgun and a skull mask.

And then afterwards, posing with his fellow neo-Nazis, with his mask off. I get a tip that Pentagon may be attending a black metal festival here called Destroying Texas. After a year of tracking Adam off and online, I have a chance to confront the group in person. If I do find them inside the club, I'm not sure what to expect. The show is packed.

Most of the concert goers look like typical metalheads, but I do spot a few obscure neo-Nazi patches on some people's clothing. I find Rape drinking outside, along with two other Atomwaffenen members I recognize from my reporting. Hey Rape, I'm AC. I wanted to come out here and talk to you about Atomwaffenen. No comment.

No comment? No. Y'all gonna do an interview?

Are you worried about going to prison? Nope. Atomwaffenen members stand accused of multiple murders, and their propaganda is filled with violent threats. But after all of the online posturing, rape and the others aren't physically intimidating.

And they are far less aggressive in person than the skinhead gangs I've followed in the past. Hey Jeremiah. Hey, how are you doing? I met Rape out at a metal show in Texas.

How'd that go? I was kind of surprised because they talk all this violent stuff online. But they were just kind of quietly hostile and seething.

That figures. If they were wanting to do something violent, they wouldn't do it publicly. These guys, they're not stupid. They're not like these skinhead types.

Jeremiah. says I shouldn't underestimate rape. He has a direct relationship with Adam Woffin's intellectual leader, James Mason.

Did you ever get to talk to Mason or meet him? We heard him over a couple of voice chats. I never met him in person, though.

Rape and Mason had their own little thing. What kind of sense did you get of him when you were talking to him on those chats? I thought he was a genius.

In propaganda videos, Adam Woffin say that Mason disappeared for 15 years until they located him. They pose for photos with Mason dressed in a Nazi uniform and celebrate their collaboration. I'm unable to find a phone number for Mason, but I learn he's living in the Denver area.

Mason has no online profile, no social media. He doesn't even appear to have an email account. He spent time in a Colorado prison for menacing someone with a pistol.

A bankruptcy Filing from a few years ago reveals a solitary life, working at Kmart and living alone. I've gotten several possible addresses for Mason and I begin to search neighborhoods for him. Then I get a call.

It's Mason and he wants to talk to me. So how big do you think the Adam Roffin division is these days? How many members?

I haven't the foggiest idea. But they come visit you? On occasion they will come through the territory, yes.

I'm always happy to meet with them. Mason is evasive at first. I try to get him to talk about the killings and violence linked to Atomwaffenen.

I'm glad I didn't know about it, and I don't want to know. Because if I did know, I'd be involved in it. And I don't want to be involved in it. You don't want to go back to prison. I do not urge anybody to do anything like that.

But when it gets done, I won't disown them. I kind of welcome the chaos. What did you think of James Fields, the guy who allegedly drove his car into the crowd in Charlottesville? I say, bless his heart.

Because he sure is in a jam. So you're sympathetic? Oh, very sympathetic.

Totally sympathetic. To you, Fields is a hero. Yes. What do you think of Timothy McVeigh? Another hero.

The white race is in danger. And it's not by accident. It's driven. It's planned. Who's planning it?

The Jews. We know it's the Jews. I mean, we know that. Mason has a lot more to say, the kind of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories I've come to expect from white supremacists. But I'm struck by what he says next.

With Trump winning that election by surprise, and it was a surprise, I now believe anything could be possible. After decades of railing against the government, Mason says Trump is giving him hope. As Trump says, and he has it printed right across the front of his hat, make America great again. In order to make America great again, you'd have to make America white again.

Okay? It's interesting. We're headed for interesting times.

The darkest day in the history of Pittsburgh said the mayor and you're looking right now at the memorial. Outside the synagogue today mourners struggled to process. I'm in Pittsburgh, weeks after speaking to Mason and just days after the massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue.

Before he allegedly stormed the synagogue, Robert Bowers posted on social media writing about Jews helping immigrant invaders who were killing his people. Kathleen Ballou examined the posts. Even a cursory look at his social media.

indicates that he is decisively part of a white power ideology. What did you see when you were looking through those accounts? His last post expressed that he was going to go in shooting, and it's an anti-Semitic rant. But it also repeats twice the phrase, our people, that he needs to protect our people, that he's identifying Jews as a threat to our people, that what he means there is white people.

And then through the rest of the account, there's a whole bunch of other markers of white power ideology. All of that content is deeply, deeply disturbing, but is historic. We have a history. You've seen it before.

Absolutely. I think this is an example of leaderless resistance in that it is a... what appears to be a lone gunman, but someone who is motivated and propelled by a worldview and by a social network of like-minded people who push and enable violence. This movement has been using these structures for decades. Our community was devastated with this attack.

with the senseless slaughter of 11 people. The entire community was affected. The Jewish community, absolutely.

The Brunovit, but the entire Pittsburgh community was devastated. Retired FBI agent Brandon Orsini is the director of security for the Jewish Federation of Pittsburgh. Even while Pittsburgh was grieving, he says neo-Nazi propaganda was appearing around the city. And what... What's going on here?

These are posters that are up at various parts of the city. There are stickers? Flyers, posters, stickers.

This week in particular, we've seen an increase. After what's happened in recent days, you have a fascist group coming in here. Yes. And I got numerous reports on Tuesday. Orsini says even before the shooting, he had decided to take additional precautions.

We have... Put casualty bags in each one of our synagogues and schools. There's tourniquets, there are compression pads, there's wound packing material.

And so basically you have extreme first aid kits, life-saving kits, in the synagogues, the schools, and other institutions around here. Every one of our major institutions, we have them. It's kind of sad.

It's incredibly sad to think we're in a day where we have to worry. about security for people going into pray. Pittsburgh is still mourning, and the questions it provokes still linger. Can these kind of killings be prevented?

I now know the FBI is looking at Atomwaffenen. Agents in several states have been talking with former members. And it turns out the Bureau is investigating Robert Bauer's relationship to two neo-Nazi brothers.

with connections to Atomwaffen. But what I've learned in my years covering white supremacist groups is that there are many, and they draw from a deep reservoir of ugliness in America. Just this month, the FBI announced hate crimes had spiked again, the third year running. This story is far from over. Go to pbs.org slash frontline for our latest reporting with ProPublica.

Then, starting November 29th, our original podcast series, The Frontline Dispatch, returns with a new season. It's so risky. I don't want to be walking around like this. I don't want someone...

I think it's gut-wrenching that he knew that he could go out there and he could get shot by... Subscribe now on our website or wherever you listen to podcasts. For Frontline's Documenting Hate, New American Nazis on DVD, visit ShopPBS or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS. This program is also available on Amazon Prime Video.

Transcript for:Documenting Hate: New American Nazis

Transcript for:
Documenting Hate: New American Nazis