Dan Burros - Political Activity

Political Activity

Burros eventually joined the American Nazi Party, which had been founded by George Lincoln Rockwell, an ex-United States Navy pilot who had seen action in both World War II and the Korean War. In the late 1950s, Rockwell adopted a National Socialist philosophy because he felt it was another name for white nationalism. He also stated that he felt guilty that he had killed Germans during the Second World War and came to believe that they had a shared enemy: Jews, a group he accused, among other things, of creating and propagating communism. As a Naval pilot, Rockwell had attained the rank of commander. He retained the title upon founding the American Nazi Party.

Dan Burros' Jewish heritage had been suspected by a number of fellow American Nazi Party members. Many of Rockwell's stormtroopers distrusted Burros not only for being Jewish, but also a self-hating Jew, and for his bizarre behavior. Burros would sometimes bring knish to the American Nazi Party headquarters and make such outrageous statements as: "Let's eat this good Jew food!" Burros also frequently spent time with Jewish women. In one incident, described in William H. Schmaltz' 1999 book, Hate: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party, Burros once publicly described a lurid fantasy in which the keys of a piano were modified to deliver electric shocks via wires attached to the Jewish victim of their choice. He believed that the combination of music from the piano and the electric shocks would cause them to convulse in rhythm to the piano and provide entertainment. Another example of Burros' macabre state of mind is the fact that he owned a bar of soap wrapped in paper with the words "made from the finest Jewish fat" imprinted on it.