Adam Popescu

James Hart Stern, the 55-year-old preacher from Los Angeles, took control of the group, the National Socialist Movement, in January. He is now struggling with Burt Colucci, 43, a longtime member, over leadership of the group. The fight has thrown the organization into upheaval during a time when far-right extremism is on the rise and other white supremacy groups are gaining ground.

The two men are fighting over who has control over the group’s official website. That site is now more important than ever, as more hate groups recruit with memes than marches. The NSM, as the group is known, has struggled to keep up as its membership dwindles.

The bizarre and twisting tale of how the battle came to be involves an unlikely prison friendship, lawsuits and even a team of Hollywood producers.

With roots in the American Nazi Party, the NSM dates back to 1974. It once had 61 chapters in 35 states, and was known for leaders who galvanized followers to commit violence against Jews and African Americans.

Although more of their hate these days is expressed online, the group still marches, armed with rifles, waving swastika flags and Nazi insignia, and looking to provoke groups who advocate for the rights of gay, black and Jewish people, its biggest targets.

Stern, who considers himself a civil rights activist, has moved the NSM’s corporate registration from Michigan to his native California in a bid, he said in interviews, to dismantle the group. For a few months this year, he controlled the domain of the group’s website, but then lost it to Colucci. He is now suing to get it back.

Because so many people who are attracted to hate messages are online and skew young, he said, his plan in taking over the group is to bombard visitors to its site with videos about Jewish history, including a continuous run of Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List.” This would serve, he argued, to educate people who initially came looking for hateful propaganda.

Stern acknowledges that having a black man at the helm probably won’t shift the hearts and minds of hard-core believers, but he thinks stunts like showing “Schindler’s List” can affect impressionable young people. “If you’ve never heard the truth about the Holocaust, this could change everything,” he said.

Stern has gotten so much attention for his effort that he scored a deal for a biographical series with Mark Wahlberg’s production company.

For his part, Colucci, the longtime member, argues that he is the one who is actually in command of the NSM. He has registered the group in his home state of Florida, and in an effort to increase its appeal to more strident believers, he has reinstated the swastika as the group’s symbol. He and several armed members of the group crashed Detroit’s Pride weekend.

The leadership battle comes at a time when far-right attacks have been rising. Legislators and experts who monitor far-right groups say the uptick illustrates the challenge of policing movements that are increasingly splintered.

Brad Galloway, who spent 13 years in one group, called Volksfront, and now works to counter extremism at the Organization for Prevention of Violence, warns that despite the infighting within the NSM, the group still presents plenty of danger.

That Stern was even able to gain legal title to the group shows just how fractured organizations like it have become. And it is the result of an even stranger alliance.

After a conviction for wire fraud, Stern was housed in prison for a time with Edgar Ray Killen, the Ku Klux Klan leader who was sentenced to 60 years for the 1964 murders of three civil rights activists. At that time, Killen was in his 80s, and so feeble that he could barely eat.

Stern says he kept Killen alive, and gave him his own meals when other inmates put feces in Killen’s food tray. During the 15-month period when they were housed in close proximity, Stern says, the older man confided in him about dozens of additional murders for which he was never convicted.

Stern was paroled in 2011, and left the Mississippi State Penitentiary with power of attorney over Killen’s estate and a cache of documents written by Killen in prison that white supremacists considered sacrosanct. In those documents, according to Stern, Killen confessed to having links to 32 additional murders.

The Clarion Ledger, a newspaper based in Jackson, Mississippi, reported in 2011 that Killen was willing to admit to those murders if the authorities would agree to move him from prison to house arrest. But investigators were not able to link those cases to Killen, and he was still in prison when he died in 2018.

“Someone once asked Edgar Ray Killen, why did he write me those letters, close to 100,” Stern said. “Because of the things we endured, we grew a bond.”

In 2016, now free and living in California, Stern legally disbanded the White Knights, the Ku Klux Klan chapter that Killen once led. He then wrote a book about his actions. It was the same plan he wanted to bring to the NSM, he said.

But it was not going to be that simple. The far-right group’s previous leader, Jeff Schoep, who ran it beginning in 1994, also wanted Killen’s letters as a keepsake and to burnish his reputation as a pillar of the white nationalist movement.

Schoep had tried to broaden the group’s base in the past few years as new organizations emerged online. For instance, he dropped the group’s longtime symbol, a swastika over a shield-shaped American flag, because younger white nationalists were apparently less interested in overt displays of Nazi symbolism.

Unlike the loosely affiliated hate movements that have been popping up online, the NSM still requires members to formally apply, and to document their ethnicity before they are accepted into the group. Stern never went through that process.

Schoep struggled to gain traction among new extremists. Under his leadership, the group was not hard-core enough for veterans of the movement, yet remained too far out on the fringe for younger adherents, said Brian Levin, who heads the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.

Then Charlottesville happened. Members of the NSM helped plan the Unite The Right Rally at the Virginia city in 2017 that erupted in clashes. The group’s participation resulted in several lawsuits, including a state suit accusing the group of employing a paramilitary strategy to engage in violence at the event, using “clubs, flagpoles, and shields to batter their ideological opponents.” A suit in federal court claimed that the NSM and two dozen other groups caused emotional harm to people in the city and at the University of Virginia campus there when they chanted “Jews will not replace us” and trapped some bystanders in a building.

Schoep’s motivation for handing over the legal ownership of the organization and control of its website to Stern was not clear. But Stern said Schoep was so weary of the lawsuits that he did not need much convincing to agree.

Schoep did not return multiple calls seeking comment.

With a stroke of a pen, the transfer happened in January. Stern became the group’s legal president, and promptly dismissed the group’s lawyers and filed a motion asking the judge overseeing the federal lawsuit to rule against the NSM.

In March, though, Schoep changed his mind about Stern. In a letter shared on the group’s website, he wrote, “James Stern used deception and manipulation in an attempt to gain control over the organization,” without detailing his own motives.

The same day, Stern filed suit against Schoep and the group’s members, claiming theft, defamation, and pain and suffering, and seeking damages of $500,000. But by April, his plans were fizzling. The judge in the federal case recognized Schoep’s lawyers as representing the group, and barred Stern from participation in the case.

In May, as Stern signed the deal for the biographical series, the group that he claimed to lead was imploding.

“If I was a member of NSM, this would be an occasion to immediately quit,” said Arno Michaelis, who in the late 1980s co-founded and led a branch of Hammerskin Nation, a neo-Nazi group.

Many members did quit, according to Matthew Heinbach, the group’s former community outreach director. Heinbach estimated in March that in 2018, before Stern became involved, the group had about 40 dues-paying members.

Sensing his chance, Colucci, who lives in a suburb of Orlando, Florida, and says he works in the oil industry, moved to incorporate the group under his own leadership in Florida, and gained control of the group’s website. He says Schoep no longer has any role in the organization.

It is unclear how the rival claims of leadership will be resolved.

For now, Stern insists that the group remains based in California. “I’m still the president of the NSM,” he told The New York Times.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/us/national-socialist-movement-james-hart-stern.html" id="4074a8c6-80a0-38d4-af13-fb6337ae891e">The New York Times</a>.

LOS ANGELES — A pitched leadership battle is taking place inside one of the country’s oldest neo-Nazi groups. On one side, a true believer is pushing to attract new members and expand the ranks. On the other, a black former Baptist preacher is hoping to destroy the hate-spewing group from the inside.

Why a Black Preacher Is Fighting for Control of a Neo-Nazi Group

“I was born in 1932, so you can make your own arithmetic,” responded Pinchas, in a Polish accent.

“He asked me to do the math!” Spielberg laughed. “How did you survive when so many did not?”

“How did I survive?” the screen responded. “I survived, I believe, because provenance watched over me.”

The chat went on for five minutes, and while the artificial intelligence looked eerily reminiscent of Spielberg’s earlier films, the goal wasn’t entertainment — it was education. On the sound-sensitive screen was an interactive biography of Pinchas Gutter, a Polish Holocaust survivor and part of a tour the director was leading through the redesigned headquarters for the USC Shoah Foundation, the organization he founded in 1994 to collect testimony from Holocaust survivors.

Now Spielberg has expanded the foundation’s footprint on the University of Southern California campus, along with its mission and public focus: to fight hate, which he says has become commonplace globally.

“The presence of hate has become taken for granted,” Spielberg said. “We are not doing enough to counter it.”

The prerecorded video conversation is part of a series using playback technology that invites visitors to converse with 16 survivors of genocide, based on specific word patterns and more than 2,000 questions that vary from views on God to personal history. Earlier this month, the testimony of Pinchas was displayed at the United Nations on the 70th anniversary of the adoption of genocide laws, a storytelling tool to raise awareness.

While the foundation continues to archive stories from victims of anti-Semitism, and advocate on their behalf, it is also collecting what Spielberg calls “living testimony” from modern genocide victims.

“The Holocaust cannot stand alone,” he said with conviction. “We decided to send our videographers into Rwanda to get testimony. From there we went to Cambodia, Armenia — we’re doing a critical study in the Central African Republic, Guatemala, the Nanjing massacre. Most recently, we’re doing testimony on the anti-Rohingya violence in Myanmar and the current anti-Semitic violence in Europe. We’re expanding our scope to counter many forms of hate.”

The 10,000-square-foot space — which opened to the public last month — is a far cry from the organization’s beginnings following “Schindler’s List,” in 1993. Spielberg sent an army of videographers around the globe to record Holocaust survivors’ stories. Betamax tapes of the interviews were stored at his Amblin Entertainment offices on the Universal Studios lot, and then at a storage company before the foundation’s move to USC’s Leavey Library in 2006. (There are a little over 51,000 recordings of Holocaust survivors in the visual history archive, a staggering 115,000 hours.)

Today the group has 82 employees and an annual budget of about $15 million, which includes $3 million from the university. It also has received millions in donations. Its new home — part office, part media lab — is packed with video testimonies from 65 countries in 43 languages, along with survivor-inspired artwork (a hanging steel sculpture by British artist Nicola Anthony incorporates phrases from filmed testimony.) Visitors can tour the offices Monday through Friday, between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.

“Everyone thinks the Shoah Foundation is about archiving the past but it’s about understanding empathy and using testimony to shine a light,” said Stephen D. Smith, its executive director.

Reflecting its founder’s legacy, the organization has produced multiple films, including the recent documentary “The Girl and the Picture,” about Xia Shuqin, 88, who witnessed the murder of her family in the Nanjing Massacre in 1937. It was directed by Vanessa Roth, whose mother was an interviewer for the foundation in the early 1990s.

“The Last Goodbye,” a virtual reality memorial screening at Holocaust museums in Florida, New York, Illinois and California, takes audiences into the Majdanek concentration camp in German-occupied Poland, with Pinchas Gutter as guide, using thousands of photos and 3D video to explore a railway car, gas chamber and barracks. David Korins, the scenic designer of the musical “Hamilton,” is now the foundation’s director of museum experiences, with the goal of getting the collection of archival footage into more museums.

Rising anti-Semitism is providing fresh impetus for the foundation’s relaunched efforts. “Not only are people willing to forget about the Holocaust, they’re willing to deny it,” said Aaron Breitbart, a senior researcher at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the human rights organization that has worked with the foundation since the 1990s. “The Shoah Foundation has made a great contribution in that battle for memory.”

The relaunch coincides with the theatrical re-release of “Schindler’s List.” In her 1993 review of the film for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote: “Rising brilliantly to the challenge of this material and displaying an electrifying creative intelligence, Mr. Spielberg has made sure that neither he nor the Holocaust will ever be thought of in the same way again.”

The film ran in about 1,000 theaters in mid-December and was screened free for students nationwide. Although it was digitally remastered in 4K resolution, Spielberg said, “I didn’t touch a frame.” The original version of the film is currently available on Netflix.

A quarter-century on, it remains a complex depiction of Nazi horrors.

“We were surprised that somebody even attempted to make a film about it,” said Renee Firestone, 94, whose story is told at the foundation.

Despite the expansion, some challenges remain, Smith said. Most testimonies are unavailable online, which means they can only be seen at the foundation or the 146 partner libraries and universities (links are free for families of those interviewed). There are no transcripts of the recordings yet, but the foundation is spending $10 million building a free online platform for researchers, schools and the general public starting in late 2019, Smith said.

Days before Spielberg’s 72nd birthday, wearing a suede jacket and 1860s-style boots from his 2012 opus, “Lincoln,” the director munched a granola bar at the foundation’s headquarters. The color of his beard is now saltier, he has a few more inches around the middle, but his gray-green eyes still shine boyishly when he’s discussing his foundation and his seminal film. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.

Q: Why expand the mission of the Shoah Foundation?

A: I think there’s a measurable uptick in anti-Semitism, and certainly an uptick in xenophobia. The racial divide is bigger than I would ever imagine it could be in this modern era. People are voicing hate more now because there’s so many more outlets that give voice to reasonable and unreasonable opinions and demands. People in the highest places are allowing others who would never express their hatred to publicly express it. And that’s been a big change. There’s all kinds of efforts to take the truth and subvert it to twisted ideology. We saw it happen in Europe first, in France, then Poland again — I never thought it would come back home to us like it has existed over the last two years.

Q: Many groups are clamoring that they have it harder than others — how do we overcome that?

A: We can commiserate with each other about suffering and pain, but we should never compete that way. Being marginalized, being discriminated against, having racist and anti-Semitic slurs hurled is something that unites (all people). Everything against black society is also against the Jewish community. Everything against the gay and lesbian, LGBTQ community is against black and Jewish communities. Hate is hate and the spillover makes us all responsible for watching each others’ backs and standing up for each other. None of us could ever be bystanders again.

Q: How can Hollywood combat this?

A: Look how many movies are now telling the stories of women. There’s a huge shift that is gender-centric, and we saw it happen at the beginning of the Harvey Weinstein downfall. Storytelling is fundamentally human. But the art of listening is what I’m hoping the Shoah Foundation is able to inspire.

[In 2018, Amblin Television, a division of Amblin Partners, Spielberg’s production company, was one of three parties to a $9.5 million settlement agreement with an actress on the CBS show “Bull” who was dropped after she confronted its star about inappropriate comments. A representative for Amblin declined to comment, directing inquiries to CBS, “the sole owner of the show."]

Q: You are re-releasing “Schindler’s List” after 25 years. Do you believe it can still make an impact?

A: At the Tribeca Film Festival, I experienced my first audience in 25 years watching “Schindler’s List.” It was a full house, and the reaction — I turned to Kate (Capshaw, his wife) and said “Oh my God, they’re still listening.” With this renewed cycle of hate, and initiatives at the Shoah Foundation, I thought it could open up a conversation that genocide can happen anywhere when an ordinary society goes wrong. Charlottesville and the aftermath made a huge impact on wanting to reissue the film.

Q: If you made the film today, what are the things you would have changed?

A: No. There’s nothing I would have changed, absolutely nothing. I stand by the film as it has stood its own test of time.

Q: What sticks with you 25 years later about filming in Poland, where the carnage happened?

A: In four months’ filming in Krakow, the hair on the back of my neck never went down. It was really hard every morning to simply get out of the car and walk to the set. I wanted to use the locations where Schindler stayed in Krakow, including the Jewish Ghetto, even shooting very close to the Płaszówforced labor camp. We shot just outside Auschwitz, building a barracks and backing the train into Auschwitz proper, so when the train exits Auschwitz, it appeared in the film as if it’s entering the death camp. That was one of the coldest nights I ever experienced. That mournful silence within the company of actors — you could hear a pin drop.

Q: The foundation decided to include modern testimonies about genocide when it already has over 51,000 testimonies on record about anti-Semitism. My grandparents were filmed by the foundation in 1996; is video the best teacher?

A: Look, we’re all storytellers. There’s no one alive who isn’t a storyteller, even if they don’t think they are. Every day is a story. Maya Angelou said: “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”

Q: What are your earliest memories of being different?

A: My grandmother taught English to Hungarian Holocaust survivors in Cincinnati. I was 2 or 3, and I would sit with them around the table. That’s where I learned my numbers — on the arm of an Auschwitz survivor who showed me the numbers of his forearm. That was my “Sesame Street.” That’s how I first learned to count.

Q: What more can we do? What do you plan to do?

A: Teachers and parents who need to take responsibility for the acceptance of hatred in the fabric of society. I’m working with the Discovery Channel and the Academy Award-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney on a six-hour study called “Why We Hate.” I’m not planning any more dramatization on the Holocaust itself. I’m putting all my attention on the documentary format.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/arts/design/steven-spielberg-on-storytellings-power-to-fight-hate.html" id="faccdb34-3977-37c3-acec-4ec086e80ec0">The New York Times</a>.

Steven Spielberg on Storytelling's Power to Fight Hate

LOS ANGELES — “Pinchas, how old are you?” Steven Spielberg asked the wall screen, a life-size video image of an elderly man in a cardigan, who blinked and answered without missing a beat.

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Adam Popescu

Articles written by the author

Why a Black Preacher Is Fighting for Control of a Neo-Nazi Group

Why a Black Preacher Is Fighting for Control of a Neo-Nazi Group

Steven Spielberg on Storytelling's Power to Fight Hate

Steven Spielberg on Storytelling's Power to Fight Hate