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 on the cover ■ ■ ■