Francis Parker Yockey

Yockey was born in 1917 in Chicago, Illinois, the youngest of four siblings in an upper-middle-class Catholic family of Irish and German descent.[17][21][22] His biographer Kevin Coogan wrote that Yockey's associate James Madole once claimed Yockey was one-quarter Jewish, but there is no evidence for this.[23] His father was a stockbroker.[22] Yockey was raised in Ludington, Michigan.[17] He learned classical piano.[20]

He began study as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, then to transfer to Georgetown University,[24] before completing at the University of Arizona, before starting law school at Northwestern University, also studied law at De Paul University, and graduated from the Notre Dame Law School in 1941.[22][2] In college, he declared he would not dine with black, Jewish or communist students.[20]

Yockey had been attracted to Marxism in early life[25] before gravitating to Adolf Hitler and Nazism in the 1930s, and in college, Oswald Spengler.[22] Other influences include Karl Haushofer[26] and the Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt, whom Yockey was later accused of plagiarizing.[10][27][28] Yockey joined pro-German and pro-fascist groups in the late 1930s.[9] In 1938, his essay "The Tragedy of Youth" was published in Social Justice, a journal known for publishing antisemitic tracts that was distributed by the "radio priest" Charles Coughlin.[29][30] In 1939 Yockey spoke at a gathering of Silvershirts.[8][9]

Yockey enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1942, serving in an intelligence unit. He went AWOL from his camp in Georgia in November 1942 on a Nazi mission to Texas and Mexico City.[9] According to Yockey's biographer Kevin Coogan, Yockey secretly helped German Nazi spies who had landed in the United States and Mexico. He was also a friend of a German American intelligence officer Herbert Hans Haupt, who stayed at the home of his wife and was later executed for espionage for his participation in Operation Pastorius.[31] Later, Yockey received an honorable discharge from the Army for "dementia praecox, paranoid type" in 1943 after suffering a nervous breakdown or feigning one.[4][22][32] He was placed on a government list of Americans suspected of pro-Nazi views.[22] In 1944 he became an assistant prosecuting attorney for Wayne County, Michigan, but was bored by the work, leaving in 1945.[9][22]

In early 1946, Yockey found a job with the United States War Department in Wiesbaden, Germany, as a post-trial review attorney for the Nuremberg Trials, and he moved to Germany with his wife and two daughters.[22] Evidence suggests Yockey may have tried to help accused Nazi war criminals including SS General Otto Ohlendorf by sharing top-secret documents with German defense lawyers.[4] Often absent from his job, he was fired for "abandonment of position" on the 26th of November 1946,[33] when it was noticed that he was siding with the Nazis.[8][22] He agitated against Allied occupation of Germany,[34] and later worked for the Red Cross in Germany but deserted his post.[8] U.S. intelligence began tracking Yockey in Germany in 1946 or 1947.[35] Yockey left his estranged wife and daughters in Germany in 1947 for exile in Ireland.[22]

Yockey was a central figure in early postwar Nazi networks.[2] Over time, he contacted or worked with far-right figures and organizations including the German-American Bund, the National German-American Alliance, William Dudley Pelley's Silver Shirts, Sir Oswald Mosley's Union Movement, George Sylvester Viereck, the American H. Keith Thompson, Gerald L. K. Smith, and James H. Madole's National Renaissance Party. After the war Thompson and Madole became advocates of Yockey's worldview and published some of his essays.[36]

Yockey identified the United States, not Russia, as Europe's main enemy, urged Europeans not to collaborate with America in the Cold War, and wanted to act against American forces in Germany and England.[15] He hoped to weaken or overthrow the government of the United States.[8] Yockey's ideas were usually embraced only by those who could countenance an alliance between the far left and the far right. The American Nazi Party of George Lincoln Rockwell rejected Yockey's anti-American attitude and willingness to work with anti-Zionist communist governments and movements. (Yockey told Willis Carto that he had never heard of the ANP when Carto visited him in prison in 1960.) Other neo-Nazis such as Rockwell's ally Colin Jordan disagreed with Yockey's views on race, and saw Yockeyism as being "Strasserist" which would undermine Nazism.[37]

Without notes, Yockey wrote his first book, Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics, in Brittas Bay, Ireland, over the winter and early spring of 1948. Imperium is a Spenglerian critique of 19th century materialism and rationalism[38] that scorns democracy and equality, extols Nazism, and blames Jews for various problems.[39][22] It subscribes to Spengler's suggestion that Germany had been destined to fulfil the 'Roman' role in Western Civilization by uniting all its states into one empire.[40] It is dedicated to "the hero of the Second World War", intended to describe Adolf Hitler.[2][notes 1] In an early example of Holocaust denial, it also claims that the Nazis' gas chambers were faked, even though in private Yockey praised the Holocaust against the Jews.[11][22] Yockey mailed copies of Imperium to far-right figures in Europe and America.[22] Views expressed in it were endorsed by former Nazi General Otto Remer (who had been Hitler's bodyguard);[41] the American Revilo P. Oliver; and Italian esotericist Julius Evola,[42] as well as the praise of Hans-Ulrich Rudel, Giorgio Almirante, Heinz Knoke, and Karl-Heinz Priester.[43]

Yockey became embittered with Sir Oswald Mosley (Hitler's leading British proponent[11]) after the latter refused to publish or review Imperium upon its completion, after having promised to do so.[44] Mosley punched Yockey in the nose during a dispute in London's Hyde Park.[11] With a small group of British fascists including the former Mosleyites Guy Chesham and John Gannon, Yockey formed the European Liberation Front (ELF) in 1948–49. The ELF formed ties with old Nazis along with other fascists.[45] It issued a newsletter, Frontfighter, and in 1949 published Yockey's virulent anti-American, anti-communist and antisemitic text The Proclamation of London, which called for a reinstatement of Nazism and the expulsion of the Jews (whom it labeled "the Culture-distorter") from Europe.[32][15][46] The ELF was opposed by other neo-fascist groups and essentially disappeared by 1954 due to members being alienated by Yockey's imperious personality.[12][22]

Declassified FBI files show that Yockey traveled to Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York to collaborate with ultra-right activists, while eluding FBI agents who sought to question him. As a fugitive he spoke at the 1950 Christian Nationalist Party convention in Los Angeles organized by Gerald L. K. Smith.[35] He also spent time in New Orleans writing propaganda for use in Latin America.[8] His intercepted letters to other fascists in the 1950s were often signed "Torquemada" after the torturer of the Spanish Inquisition.[35]

Yockey was approached by the group around the anti-Communist Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1951. He was asked to ghost-write a speech for McCarthy which stressed the importance of greater friendship between Germany and the United States. Although McCarthy never delivered it as the theme of the speech, when it was announced through posters in the Yorkville neighbourhood of New York City, the-then Left Wing newspaper The Daily Compass ran a front page expose, alongside negative press attention from the New York Post, probably influenced by the fact that a series of well known Holocaust deniers were going to speak alongside him.[47]

Yockey collaborated with Soviet bloc intelligence, traveled behind the Iron Curtain, and was suspected of visiting East Germany, the Soviet Union and Cuba.[48][2] One theory for this derives from a September 1956 story about a mysterious American man, who went by the name of "Frederick C. Hopkins" who was released from Soviet police custody on the 6th of September 1956.[49] He wrote with approval of antisemitic purges in the Eastern bloc countries.[11] In late 1952, he traveled to Prague and witnessed the Prague Trials, and asserted that they "foretold a Russian break with Jewry".[50] He then became a Czechoslovak Secret Service courier.[22] He is suspected of having been in contact with a Soviet agent by the name of Alfred Francke-Gricksch.[51]

Yockey met Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, whom he called "a great and vigorous man", in Cairo in 1953.[11] He worked briefly for the Egyptian Information Ministry, writing anti-Zionist propaganda.[52] In the Arab world, he made contact with Nazi exiles including Otto Ernst Remer and Johann von Leers.[53] Yockey reportedly tried to persuade Nasser to finance development of a cobalt bomb by ex-Nazi scientists.[54]

Yockey was known as a womanizer, and had an affair with Hazel Guggenheim McKinley.[55] In 1957, FBI agents assessed that he was "living in Los Angeles as a pimp or a gigolo" and had written pornography for money, including a sadomasochistic booklet called Arduous Figure Training at Bondhaven that was later found in his suitcase.[35] The 62 pages booklet was published by Nutrix Company of Jersey City and according to the FBI "contained numerous sketeches of partially clad females and [...] was of a masochistic or sadistic nature."[56]

After more than a decade of pursuit by the FBI, Yockey was finally arrested in 1960 after returning to the United States from abroad. En route to Oakland, California, his suitcase had either been lost or had broken open at the Dallas airport, and authorities found several of Yockey's falsified passports and birth certificates.[22][32] When this was reported to the federal government, the FBI tracked Yockey down in Oakland, California, and arrested him.[32] While in prison, he was visited by Carto,[18] who later became the chief advocate and publisher of Yockey's ideas. While he was there, he was staying with the principal of a yeshiva called Alexander Scharf, who he had met in Reno and intended to give a loan of 2,000 USD.[57] Yockey was soon after found dead with an empty cyanide capsule nearby while in a jail cell in San Francisco under FBI supervision. Writing after his suicide, the San Francisco Chronicle declared him "as important a figure in world Fascism as we now know."[4]