MAY 21 • 2020 | 11
I
n summer 2019, Rick Eaton heard something
shocking. One of the most prominent neo-Nazis
in the U.S. was leaving the movement.
As co-director of the digital terrorism project
at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Los Angeles-
based Jewish human rights organization which
tracks hate group activity, Eaton interacts with his
fair share of white supremacists. And he was very
familiar with the National Socialist Movement (NSM), the
largest neo-Nazi group in America, and its “commander”
,
Jeff Schoep (pronounced “Scoop”), who had been in the
group for the past 27 years and led it for the last 25. Until
now, it seemed. Schoep, now 46, had just walked away from
hate groups for good.
“I wanted to go and meet him immediately,
” Eaton said,
remembering how, more than a decade prior, he had met
Schoep while working undercover at an NSM barbecue. So
he flew from the center’
s L.A. offices to Detroit. This time
the two were meeting as each other’
s authentic selves, in
a hotel lobby by the DTW airport.
(Schoep will only say he lives in “the
Detroit area,
” not wanting to reveal his
location for fear of retaliation from the
group he once led. “They view me as a
traitor,
” he said.)
The two talked for hours about
Schoep’
s journey, and Eaton pushed
him to bring his message to a broader
public. Schoep wanted to enter the
world of peacebuilding, where he
could try to use his story to deter people from joining hate
groups like he had. Eaton could help him do it.
“
As soon as I sat down with Jeff in the lobby and started
talking to him, personally, I felt that he was real from the
beginning,
” Eaton said.
Six months later, he brought Schoep to face a crowd of
Jews at Skokie Valley Agudath Jacob, a Modern Orthodox
shul in Skokie, Illinois. It was the same Chicago suburb
where, four decades earlier, a different neo-Nazi infamously
won a Supreme Court case that allowed his hate group to
march through a neighborhood filled with Holocaust survi-
vors.
But Schoep was there to ask forgiveness. And he
received it.
“The people were so kind and forgiving and loving,
” he
told the Jewish News two months later, from COVID quar-
antine, after fumbling with his Zoom settings. “I don’
t think
I ever received so many hugs in my entire life, until I got
there.
”
Ever since he could remember, Jeff Schoep had wanted to
be a Nazi.
His grandfather was one, he said: an ethnic German from
Prussia, he fought in the Wehrmacht (Nazi armed forces)
against Allied troops during WWII, on the Eastern Front as
well as in the Ardennes. After the war, Schoep’
s grandparents
were sent to POW and refugee camps before finally coming
to the U.S.
Growing up in rural Minnesota, Schoep was fascinated by
his grandfather (who died last year) and read everything he
could about Nazis. He didn’
t come from a traumatic child-
hood like many who are drawn into far-right ideologies;
both of his parents had good jobs, and his family was mid-
dle-class, he said. Schoep’
s interest in Nazism was purely his
own decision.
When he was 15, Schoep traveled to Germany to visit a
great-uncle who had also fought for the Nazis and had half
his face burned off at the Battle of the Bulge. This was short-
ly before the Berlin Wall fell, and while in Germany, Schoep
met his first group of skinheads. “I was fascinated by the
Third Reich,
” he said. He didn’
t know any Jews, but he hated
them all the same. “The Jew was
the cancer and the other races were
symptoms of that cancer,
” he said of
his beliefs at the time.
When Schoep got back to the U.S.,
he wrote letters to every American
neo-Nazi group he could find. In
1992, at age 18, he joined what was
then called the National Socialist
American Workers Freedom
Movement, based near him in St.
Paul, Minnesota. Members read literature like Hitler’
s Mein
Kampf and Henry Ford’
s The International Jew. Before long
Schoep was enthusiastically attending the group’
s rallies,
holding anti-Semitic signs like “Six Million More.
”
Shortly after Schoep joined, the group’
s leader stepped
down and appointed him in charge of the movement. He
was 21 at the time. Schoep shortened the group’
s name to
the National Socialist Movement — a more direct nod to
Nazism — and his long career at the head of the country’
s
most prominent hate group had begun.
Up until he left the NSM in 2019, Schoep had spent his
entire adult life in the movement. He earned his income
from operating a white-supremacist music and apparel label
called NSM88 Records; “88” is white nationalist code for
“Heil Hitler.
” He orchestrated their rallies and their entire
public image, and issued strict edicts to his followers: no bad
words or racial slurs (except, of course, for the swastika on
their flags); no sharing of violent or racist memes online; no
real-world violence, “only self-defense.
”
All of this was done against the wishes of his own fam-
ily, including his grandfather, who warned him not to get
involved in any Nazi movements. Schoep was unwilling to
discuss more details of his family on the record, but Eaton
continued on page 12
JEWISH NEWS
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