Frank Collin

Frank Collin is remembered primarily as a leader in the American neo-Nazi movement. He had been a member of George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party, but left soon after the assassination of "the Commander" due to his disagreements with the new leader, Matt Koehl. Collin then founded the National Socialist Party of America, taking with him the Chicago-area membership of the ANP (now renamed the National Socialist White People's Party) and a few members scattered throughout the Midwest. It made headlines in 1977, when Collin announced plans to march through the Chicago suburb of Skokie, Illinois in retaliation for the City of Chicago banning the NSPA from speaking publicly in Marquette Park. Skokie was an area with a high Jewish population, including many Holocaust survivors, and this was most likely a deliberately provocative act. Ultimately, the NSPA won the right to march, but without their swastika armbands (yet with their Nazi military uniforms). However, the Skokie march was called off when the city of Chicago, at the behest of Skokie's Jewish leaders and residents, decided to allow Collin to speak in the city. The end of Frank Collin's career as neo-Nazi leader was the revelation that his father's real surname was either "Cohn" or "Cohen" and had reportedly been a prisoner at the Dachau concentration camp. Collin was now known to be at least half-Jewish by ancestry. A psychiatrist who interviewed Collin when he was a Nazi concluded that he was consumed by hatred for his father which may have influenced him to reject him in extremis by becoming a Nazi and adopting and publicly espousing antisemitic beliefs. At around the same time Frank Collin was convicted of the sexual molestation of young boys and sent to prison in 1979 on charges of child molestation. He abandoned National Socialism and began writing under the pseudonym "Frank Joseph". In 1987 his book, The Destruction of Atlantis: Compelling Evidence of the Sudden Fall of the Legendary Civilization was published. Collin is now a self-described neo-pagan and edits The Ancient American, which promotes the theory of diffusion of peoples in and out of the Americas during ancient eons.