Has One of the World's Biggest neo

For 25 years, Jeff Schoep headed the biggest neo-Nazi group in the United States. What made him renounce his past – and why do many find it hard to believe him? 'For the first time, something cracked in my belief in what I was doing,' he tells Haaretz

NEW YORK – In a hotel room in central Manhattan, Jeff Schoep speaks mournfully about the 25 years in which he led America's National Socialist Movement. Eyes downcast, talking for over an hour and a half, he wants to repent his many sins.

Under Schoep's leadership, the NSM – which supports white supremacy – went from a small organization of a few dozen activists to the largest, loudest, neo-Nazi movement in the United States. The movement had 60 branches and thousands of skinhead activists.

Schoep ran things high-handedly. "We had a hierarchy like in the military with regional commanders, sergeants, officers, and I was at the top," he says. He used to attend public events accompanied by bodyguards, always wearing the faux SS outfit that became the movement's trademark: a brown shirt (like those worn by SS troops), which at a certain point was replaced by black shirts, black trousers, leather boots and a large swastika armband.

'You see, I hurt my mother's career. Because of me, she didn't realize her great dream of being a district judge.'

He traveled the length and breadth of the country and at every gathering of a racist, far-right organization, preached his extreme nationalist doctrine advocating xenophobia and the hatred of Blacks, the LGBTQ community and, above all, Jews.

"Every bad thing that happened in the country in those years was because of the Jews, and it doesn't matter what. All someone had to do was drop a glass of water in one of the meetings and Jews were to blame," he recounts.

Schoep, 49, single, lays out his story honestly and without inhibition. He describes his burning hatred for Jews, his admiration for the Nazi Party, worshipping Hitler's doctrine. Only once throughout our conversation does his voice crack.

"My mother was a successful lawyer and at the start of the 1990s was supposed to be appointed as a district judge in Minnesota," he says. "After she was already chosen, there was a formal procedure in which the governor was supposed to sign all the new judges’ appointments. But then he called her and said ‘Mrs. Schoep, we’ve found out your son is the leader of a Nazi movement. We cannot appoint you.’"

Schoep curls up in embarrassment, gripped by guilt he still seemingly hasn't managed to shake off. "You see, I hurt my mother's career. Because of me, she didn't realize her great dream of being a district judge."

'It doesn't matter that we were the aggressive ones. When you’re in the movement, you persuade yourself that you’re playing defense against the other side – in this case, the Jews.'

His mother didn't speak to him for several years after that day, he says. But even that didn't make him doubt his total commitment to the neo-Nazi movement he headed.

"When you’re there, it's like a cult. I had force, I had status, I had great power," he says. "We started talking to each other again a few years later, but my greatest regret is that she passed away in 2018 – a few months before I left the movement and began the change."

Diluting the white race

Schoep never got to rectify the situation with his mother. But he is now trying to do so with the Jewish community – that same community he for years saw as the greatest threat to the purity of the Christian white race.

"It doesn't matter that we were the aggressive ones. When you’re in the movement, you persuade yourself that you’re playing defense against the other side – in this case, the Jews. That they’re the ones trying to hurt you in all kinds of ways. Like, for instance, advancing mixed marriages whose only aim is to dilute the white race."

'At school we learned about World War II and the Holocaust, but it never seemed to make sense to me. I thought it didn't make sense what happened there; that there had to be an explanation. That if the Germans persecuted the Jews, then they must have had a reason. That they wouldn't have done it for nothing.'

He's had those ideas since he was 16, when he first read Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf." One may wonder what makes a youngster from a small Minnesotan town called Montevideo, with a population of barely 5,000, read a radical, complex, hate-filled political manifest that most youngsters his age hadn't even heard of.

"My mother's parents are from Germany," he explains. His grandfather fought in the German Army in World War II, as did two great-uncles. "At home they never spoke about the war," he says, stressing that as far as he knew, his grandfather was sent to the Russian front, while his great-uncles fought in Stalingrad. One of them was wounded, but none was a member of the Nazi Party.

He grew up in a middle class home and, in addition to his lawyer mother, his father had a factory for manufacturing hunting clothes and field outfits. They raised him and his elder sister in a bourgeois neighborhood that was entirely white and Christian. Needless to say, he never met any Jews in school. Nor did he meet any Black or Hispanic students (at least not until after high school, where there were a few of them).

Even at a young age, he felt drawn to the family's German side. "At school we learned about World War II and the Holocaust, but it never seemed to make sense to me. I thought it didn't make sense what happened there; that there had to be an explanation. That if the Germans persecuted the Jews, then they must have had a reason. That they wouldn't have done it for nothing."

He sought out any answers he didn't get from his teachers in the library. "I’d sit on the library floor reading books no child had touched in 20 or 30 years," he says. He recalls that already in fourth grade he felt drawn to the Nazi Party's propaganda. "I felt a strong attraction to the uniform, the swastika, the salutes. I thought it was cool, something special."

In 1988, he ordered his copy of "Mein Kampf," which he managed to read with difficulty. "It was heavy and boring – especially the first chapters where Hitler describes Germany after World War I. But by this stage I was already hypnotized. I wanted to learn as much as possible about Hitler and the Nazi Party."

'Throughout the meeting they didn't stop talking about the Jews: illegal migration, lack of good workplaces, mixed race marriages – all because of the Jews.'

Two years later, he attended his first NSM meeting, in a Minneapolis suburb. The movement was founded in 1974 by two former members of the U.S.’ Nazi Party, Robert Brannen and Clifford Herrington. The meeting was held in a modest room in a simple condo, offering food and alcohol, and large flags with swastikas hanging off the walls.

"Throughout the meeting they didn't stop talking about the Jews: illegal migration, lack of good workplaces, mixed race marriages – all because of the Jews. By that stage, I already believed that all the suffering my family went through during the war in Germany was solely because of the Jews."

His parents didn't share those feelings, which now became obsessive. "To get me away from the movement, they sent me to live with my father's brother out of Minnesota. But by that stage I was already deep inside what can only be described as a cult. It was the only thing I could think of and it preoccupied me all day."

Schoep describes one of the first operations he took part in for the movement, called One-Man Demonstration. He and two other activists accompanied their counselor to a Minneapolis shopping center. "The counselor wore the Nazi Party uniform, with a swastika armband, and he carried a large swastika flag." He instructed them not to intervene in any way and to refrain from coming to his aid if he was attacked by angry passersby.

"The purpose of the activity was to demonstrate to us how even one person can stage an effective protest," he recounts, recalling how some of the people around expressed support, some honked their horns, some cursed him out and some even made the fascist salute in solidarity. "And then a security guard from the nearby administration building came and asked him to leave. But our counselor insisted that as long as he wasn't standing in one place, no one could ask him to leave. It was a lesson that helped me later on when I organized demonstrations and rallies all across America. I learned that you don't need to obtain permits from anyone as long as you keep moving."

The Holocaust ‘myth’

In 1994, when he was just 24, Schoep was chosen to head the National Socialist Movement. "At the time, I was the leader of a small cell of activists in the St. Paul area, but then the national leader of the movement, Cliff Harrington, decided to step down and asked if I’d like to replace him."

'The organization, which had only a few dozen members at best when I first came aboard – barely 10 of them outside Minnesota – grew during my time at the helm to have thousands of members all over America.'

Why did Harrington choose him, of all people? Schoep still cannot really say for sure, beyond Harrington being impressed with his deep commitment to the movement's principles – with antisemitism at the forefront.

What is certain is that not everyone in the movement was pleased to see such a young activist be given this major role. Yet despite the initial misgivings, Schoep went on to hold the position for 25 years. "It's very unusual for a leader to run a movement for 25 years without other activists deposing or even killing him," he says with a note of satisfaction – but then rushes to clarify that he doesn't mean to say he is proud of his actions during those years.

That same tone is detectable when he notes that "the organization, which had only a few dozen members at best when I first came aboard – barely 10 of them outside Minnesota – grew during my time at the helm to have thousands of members all over America."

This success becomes more unfathomable when you meet Schoep in person and discover that he doesn't exactly ooze charisma. He is a stocky guy with a strong handshake and an air of menace about him. He is not an eloquent speaker, is quite blunt and humorless, and is largely devoid of personal charm.

"I was a heavy, I was tough. I knew there were veteran activists who had a hard time accepting my leadership," he says. But he didn't let that deter him. "Our movement is a dictatorship, not a democracy. Anyone who's unhappy is welcome to leave," he says. Some indeed did leave, or were kicked out, but others who stayed tried to take violent measures – including at least one time he knows of when several activists from the movement tried to assassinate him.

How does he know this? "When you’re a member of a far-right movement, whether it's a neo-Nazi movement or the Ku Klux Klan, you need to be paranoid all the time," he says. "It's part of the reality in these organizations. You constantly suspect everyone of being a government plant." Indeed, one day, a member of the movement brought him secretly recorded information in which two activists were heard discussing killing him.

The way in which Schoep chose to respond to the internal coup is illustrative of the violent movement's organizational culture. "I sent a few activists to them who made it crystal clear that they had just one option – to get out of the state," he says. Which is what they did – they quit their jobs, sold their homes, said goodbye to their friends and never set foot in Minnesota again. "I don't know exactly how that conversation went but, presumably, violence was involved too," he acknowledges, declining to go into more detail.

Obviously, going to the police was not an option anyone would have seriously considered. Like all insular cults, all internal affairs were resolved within the movement, with Schoep having the last word for 25 years – not only on matters directly related to the movement but sometimes also on personal matters.

"When you’re the leader of the movement, you’re also the father, the mother, the police and the court," he says, citing the time he found out that a member of the movement was being violently abusive to his wife. "Let's just say that I sent a few people over who made sure he never lifted a hand to her again," he says.

'The question of how much influence Trump's victory had on the movement is insulting. Trump was part of the mainstream – we weren't.'

At the same time, he wishes to stress that he tried as much as possible to avoid drawing unwanted attention to the organization. "Contrary to what people might think, the National Socialist Movement is not an underground organization. It operates openly and officially," he says, noting that the movement was legally registered in the state like any other nonprofit social organization. Thus, any involvement in violent criminal activity could have endangered their survival.

Not that this prevented them from causing a disturbance at Minnesota's House of Representatives when it was discussing issues that the NSM considered red flags – "such as rights of the local LGBT community, or an application filed by representatives of the local indigenous people to obtain fishing rights in one of the lakes."

When he wasn't storming the legislature or leading a march of skinheads waving Nazi flags, Schoep was mainly busy giving speeches at dozens of far-right events across America, and organizing training camps for what amounted to the movement's militia.

"The activists couldn't just come up and talk to me," he says, describing the hierarchy that was followed in the organization. "They had to go through the chain of command. The only ones who were allowed to speak with me were the senior commanders."

He describes the field training as "survival camps," which included onerous physical activity along with live-fire exercises.

Schoep can be seen in dozens of videos online, appearing at many hate-filled events. Always dressed in black, with tattooed arms and a shaven head, he is invariably surrounded by bodyguards and black flags emblazoned with swastikas and the movement's symbols. The other activists are all dressed in black as well. They all wear swastika armbands and often old military helmets too – a tribute to the German soldiers in World War II.

'The thought of what goes through the mind of a little boy who has to deal with this kind of behavior just because he's Black really got to me. For the first time, something cracked in my belief in what I was doing.'

Schoep is nearly always the person conducting the event. He can be seen spewing his racist doctrine condemning Jews, Blacks, immigrants and anyone who might defile the pure white race. He gives the straight-armed salute, looking like he stepped straight out of a propaganda broadcast from a Nazi Party election campaign in the ’30s.

"I don't believe in the Holocaust myth ... it has nothing to do with the National Socialist Movement today," he told a local reporter at an Ohio protest rally his group held outside a government building there in 2015. "What might have happened – what [the Jews] claim happened – in the 1940s has nothing to do with us here today."

In another video from April 2016, he is seen taking part in a joint event with the Ku Klux Klan that was meant to launch the first partnership of its kind between the two racist movements and was dubbed the National Aryan Alliance. Dozens of activists are seen holding burning torches and marching in a circle around a large swastika, just like in America's darkest days. The KKK members wear white hoods, Schoep's national socialists wear black uniforms and swastika armbands. "Brothers and sisters, this is the dawn of a new age," cries the event host, which Schoep was involved in planning. "The Socialist Movement and the Klan are standing here side by side in unity and solidarity in the name of the joint struggle."

A struggle against whom exactly? "We have here the flag of our traditional enemy," one of the organizer's announces, and a white-hooded Klansman steps into the center of the circle and sets an Israeli flag alight.

‘We didn't like Trump’

When Donald Trump was elected president in November 2016 – a development that gave far-right U.S. groups a huge boost – Schoep decided, in a purely tactical move that did not spell any ideological shift, to abandon the use of the swastika. He explained in one 2017 interview with the VOCATIV website: "We feel that we’re on the edge of really breaking into the mainstream now. Donald Trump was elected by saying nationalist-based things. He's talking about America First, jobs for the American people. ... So, with nationalism on the rise here in the United States and across the world, we feel like now's our time. And if that symbol's [the swastika] holding us back, then we had to get rid of it."

Today, Schoep is singing a different tune. "The question of how much influence Trump's victory had on the movement is insulting. Trump was part of the mainstream – we weren't," he says. "We didn't like Trump. His daughter was married to a Jew, he had Jewish cabinet members and we saw him as someone who did more for Israel than any president before him."

In August 2017, buoyed by that intoxicating election victory, an array of far-right activists, white supremacists and your garden-variety neo-Nazis from across the United States converged on Charlottesville, Virginia, for a show of strength. The Unite the Right rally was marred by violence from the very beginning and culminated in the tragic death of Heather Heyer and serious injuries to dozens of other counterprotesters after they were deliberately run over by an extremist.

'To be part of that kind of organization is to follow a path of self-destruction, chaos and death. I can't tell you how many people died, or ended up in jail, how many killed someone else or killed themselves.'

Along with other prominent far-right figures, Schoep was sued by people hurt at the rally, saying they conspired to commit violence while planning the event. The lawsuit lasted for almost three years and Schoep was ultimately ordered to pay $500,000 in damages to the victims.

After the trial had started, Schoep decided to hand over the leadership of NSM to a Black activist called James Hart Stern. A year later, on August 12, 2019, he published a letter on his website announcing that he was disavowing the movement and its ideas. "For the first time, in over 25 years, I was able to take time for self-reflection. It was during this time, I realized many of the principles I had once held so dearly and sacrificed so much for were wrong. … It is now my mission to be a positive, peaceful influence of change and understanding for all of humanity in these uncertain times," he wrote.

But not everyone accepted this change of heart, especially since Schoep was in the midst of a lawsuit. Many saw it as a stunt designed to soften public opinion of him, and perhaps to help him wriggle out of his legal woes.

"Those who doubt Mr. Schoep point to his past stunts. They say he tried to escape legal responsibility in the Charlottesville case by signing over control of the NSM to a Black man. The move backfired and upset his members so much that some have said he had little choice but to step down," reported an April 2020 New York Times article entitled "He says his Nazi days are over. Do you believe him?"

High-ranking people inside the movement also viewed Schoep's move as a betrayal intended to improve his standing ahead of the verdict in his lawsuit. "He led the largest white nationalist organization in the country and he just turns his back on it and tries to renounce it," Mike Schloar, who ran security for the movement, is quoted as saying. "To me, that's a traitor."

Schoep acknowledges the criticism, but maintains that it was not manipulation and had nothing to do with his legal predicament. "The movement provided my legal defense, it paid for the lawyer who represented me, it enabled me to continue making a living [he owned an online business selling Nazi propaganda materials]. As soon as I left the movement, I was left with nothing. I went out into civilian life while I was on trial and with no source of income, with a lawyer I had to pay for out of my own pocket, without work, without a network of people supporting me. With nothing."

So if it wasn't the lawsuit, what was it that finally made him turns his back on the movement? "In 2016, the Black musician and social activist Daryl Davis made a documentary about the white supremacist movements in America ["Accidental Courtesy: Daryl Davis, Race & America"]. When he was making the film, he interviewed me at a hot-dog stand in Montgomery, Alabama. He wanted to know why I and people like me hate the Blacks. And then he told me that when he was 12 years old, he was at a Boy Scouts event where he was the only Black kid among dozens of white kids, and that someone in the crowd threw all kinds of stuff at him.

"When he got home, he told his parents what happened to him and that the guy who threw the stuff must not like the Boy Scouts. Then his parents explained to him that it wasn't because he didn't like the Boy Scouts but because he didn't like Black kids like him. He was sure they were lying to him. He couldn't understand why someone would hate a kid he didn't know just because of the color of his skin. The thought of what goes through the mind of a little boy who has to deal with this kind of behavior just because he's Black really got to me. For the first time, something cracked in my belief in what I was doing."

Six months later, he says, he met with Deeyah Khan, a Muslim social activist and film producer from Norway, while she was filming the documentary "White Right: Meeting the Enemy." Khan told him about similar childhood experiences of her own. "She told me how as a little girl she was made to feel unwanted, ugly, rejected. Hearing that was like a punch in the stomach. Daryl Davis was the first one who made me doubt my way and then came Khan, who made me decide to leave it all behind."

Whatever one makes of Schoep's change of heart, whether you believe it's authentic or just a PR stunt, it is indisputable that in the past few years, he has dedicated himself to interfaith dialogue and combating racism – in part through lectures he gives for the Beyond Barriers USA organization and through working with the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

He recalls a talk he gave at a Los Angeles synagogue: "I had never been in a synagogue before; it was a new experience for me. These are the people I fought the most against my whole life. I was really nervous about how they would react to me, how would I feel if the situation was reversed – especially as there were a lot of Holocaust survivors there. But it was a corrective experience for me. They showed me more love and affection than anywhere else I’d been before."

Schoep says the message he wishes to send to anyone who is thinking of getting involved in a far-right organization is the advice he would have given himself if he could turn the clock back 30 years.

"Don't go there," he says. "To be part of that kind of organization is to follow a path of self-destruction, chaos and death. I can't tell you how many people died, or ended up in jail, how many killed someone else or killed themselves. There is nothing positive that can happen in this type of life path." Now on the cusp of turning 50, without a wife or children, having lost his mom before she could see the change in his life, and without many close friends, Schoep says: "At least I don't get up every morning with a feeling of being at war, like I did for 25 years. There's something exhausting about feeling that you’re constantly at war against the whole world."