Francis Parker Yockey

Yockey was born in 1917 in Chicago, Illinois, the youngest of four siblings in an upper-middle-class Catholic family of Irish and German descent.[14][17][18] Yockey may have been one-quarter Jewish.[19] His father was a stockbroker.[18] Yockey was raised in Ludington, Michigan.[14]

Yockey attended at least seven universities. He studied for two years (1934–1936) as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, and then transferred to Georgetown's School of Foreign Service. He completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Arizona, and graduated cum laude from the Notre Dame Law School in 1941.

Early on, Yockey was attracted to left-wing movements for a perceived shared interest in antisemitism.[20] He flirted with Marxism before becoming a devotee of elitist and anti-materialist Oswald Spengler. Another influence was the Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt, whom Yockey was later accused of plagiarizing.[10][21] Like Spengler, Yockey rejected a strict biological view of race, preferring a spiritual definition married with Karl Haushofer's idea of geopolitics; but unlike Spengler, Yockey believed in Nazism, and supported various Fascist and neo-Fascist causes for the remainder of his life, including anti-Semitism.[22]

Yockey joined pro-German and pro-fascist groups in the late 1930s.[9] In 1938, his essay "The Tragedy of Youth" was published in Social Justice, a periodical known for publishing antisemitic tracts that was distributed by the "radio priest" Charles Coughlin.[23][24] In 1939 Yockey spoke at a gathering of Silvershirts.[8][9]

Yockey enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1942, serving in an intelligence unit. He went AWOL from his camp in Georgia in November 1942 on a Nazi mission to Texas and Mexico City.[9] According to Yockey's biographer Kevin Coogan, Yockey secretly helped German Nazi spies who had landed in the United States and Mexico.[4] Yockey received an honorable discharge from the Army in 1943 after suffering a nervous breakdown or feigning one.[4][18] He was placed on a government list of Americans suspected of pro-Nazi views.[18] In 1944 he became an assistant prosecuting attorney for Wayne County, Michigan, leaving in 1945.[9][18]

In early 1946, Yockey began working for the United States War Department in Wiesbaden, Germany, as a post-trial review attorney for the Nuremberg Trials. Evidence suggests Yockey may have tried to help accused Nazi war criminals including SS General Otto Ohlendorf by sharing top-secret documents with German defense lawyers.[4] He agitated against Allied occupation of Germany and accused the Nuremberg tribunal of bias. He was fired for "abandonment of position" in November 1946 when it was noticed that he was siding with the Nazis.[8] He later worked for the Red Cross in Germany but deserted his post.[8] U.S. intelligence began tracking Yockey in Germany in 1946 or 1947.[25] Yockey left his estranged wife and two daughters in Germany in 1947 for exile in Ireland.[18]

Yockey was a central figure in early postwar Nazi networks.[2] Over time, he contacted or worked with far-right figures and organizations including the German-American Bund, the National German-American Alliance, William Dudley Pelley's Silver Shirts, Sir Oswald Mosley's Union Movement, George Sylvester Viereck, the American H. Keith Thompson, Gerald L. K. Smith, and James H. Madole's National Renaissance Party. After the war Thompson and Madole became advocates of Yockey's worldview and published some of his essays.

Yockey identified the United States, not Russia, as Europe's main enemy, urged Europeans not to collaborate with America in the Cold War, and wanted to act against American forces in Germany and England.[26] He hoped to weaken or overthrow the government of the United States.[8] Yockey's ideas were usually embraced only by those who could countenance an alliance between the far left and the far right. The American Nazi Party of George Lincoln Rockwell rejected Yockey's anti-American attitude and willingness to work with anti-Zionist communist governments and movements. (Yockey told Willis Carto that he had never heard of the ANP when Carto visited him in prison in 1960.) Other neo-Nazis such as Rockwell's ally Colin Jordan disagreed with Yockey's views on race, and saw Yockeyism as advocating a "New Strasserism" which would undermine Nazism.

Without notes, Yockey wrote his first book, Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics, in Brittas Bay, Ireland, over the winter and early spring of 1948. Imperium is a Spenglerian critique of 19th century materialism and rationalism that scorns democracy and equality, and its main theme is a metahistoric antisemitism.[27] It subscribes to Spengler's suggestion that Germany had been destined to fulfil the 'Roman' role in Western Civilization by uniting all its states into one empire.[28] It is dedicated to "the hero of the Second World War", intended to describe Adolf Hitler.[2][notes 1] Views expressed in Imperium were endorsed by far-right figures including former Nazi General Otto Remer (who had been Hitler's bodyguard);[29] the American Revilo P. Oliver; and Italian esotericist Julius Evola.[30] Yockey became embittered with Sir Oswald Mosley after the latter refused to publish or review Imperium upon its completion, after having promised to do so. Guy Chesham, one of the leaders of Mosley's movement, actually resigned from it, in part because of Mosley's treatment of Yockey.

With a small group of British fascists including the former Mosleyites Guy Chesham and John Gannon, Yockey formed the European Liberation Front (ELF) in 1948–49. The ELF formed ties with old Nazis along with other fascists.[31] It issued a newsletter, Frontfighter, and published Yockey's virulent anti-American, anti-communist and anti-semitic text The Proclamation of London, which called for a reinstatement of Nazism and the expulsion of the Jews (whom it labeled "the Culture-distorter") from Europe.[32][33]

Declassified FBI files show that Yockey traveled to Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York to collaborate with ultra-right activists, while eluding FBI agents who sought to question him. As a fugitive he spoke at the 1950 Christian Nationalist Party convention in Los Angeles organized by Gerald L. K. Smith.[25] He also spent time in New Orleans writing propaganda for use in Latin America.[8] His intercepted letters to other fascists in the 1950s were often signed "Torquemada" after the torturer of the Spanish Inquisition.[25]

Yockey was approached by the group around the anti-Communist Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1951. He was asked to ghost-write a speech for McCarthy which stressed the importance of greater friendship between Germany and the United States, although McCarthy never delivered it as the theme of the speech, when it was announced, aroused a great deal of controversy.

Yockey collaborated with Soviet bloc intelligence, traveled behind the Iron Curtain, and was suspected of visiting East Germany, the Soviet Union and Cuba.[11][2] He wrote with approval of antisemitic purges in the Eastern bloc countries.[34] In late 1952, he traveled to Prague and witnessed the Prague Trials, and asserted that they "foretold a Russian break with Jewry".[35]

Yockey met Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, whom he called "a great and vigorous man", in Cairo in 1953.[34] He worked briefly for the Egyptian Information Ministry, writing anti-Zionist propaganda. In the Arab world, he made contact with Nazi exiles including Otto Ernst Remer and Johann von Leers.[36]

Yockey was known as a womanizer.[37] In 1957, FBI agents assessed that he was "living in Los Angeles as a pimp or a gigolo" and had written pornography for money, including a sadomasochistic booklet called Arduous Figure Training at Bondhaven that was later found in his suitcase.[25]

After more than a decade of pursuit by the FBI, Yockey was finally arrested in 1960 after returning to the United States from abroad, as his suitcase was sent to the wrong airport. When the authorities opened it to determine whose suitcase it was, they discovered several of Yockey's falsified passports and birth certificates. When this was reported to the federal government, the FBI tracked him down in Oakland, California and arrested him.[32] While in prison, he was visited by Carto,[15] who later became the chief advocate and publisher of Yockey's ideas. Yockey was soon after found dead with an empty cyanide capsule nearby while in a jail cell in San Francisco under FBI supervision, leaving a note in which he claimed that he was committing suicide in order to protect the anonymity of his political contacts. Writing after his suicide, the San Francisco Chronicle declared him "as important a figure in world Fascism as we now know."[4]