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One More Victim: The Life and Death of a Jewish Nazi
(back cover): ONE MORE VICTIM chronicles the short and tragic life of a man who lived a lie - who not only hid his Jewish heritage, but became a rabid Jew-baiter, Jew-hater - whose favorite pastimes were collecting Nazi souvenirs and devising instruments of torture for his intended Jewish victims. ONE MORE VICTIM takes us into the racist cell of Lincoln Rockwell, introduces us to John Patler, Rockwell's future assassin. From street brawls and swastikas, it penetrates the grand masquerades fo the hooded Ku Klux Klaners. ONE MORE VICTIM reveals the agony of a man sick in mind, heart and soul, who hopelessly trapped and facing exposure, at last destroys the self he so desperately hated.
- GenresHistory
176 pages
First published January 1, 1967
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
April 16, 2022
One More Victim opens with the end of Dan Burros' life on October 31, 1965. Distraught at New York Times journalist John McCandlish Phillips' article exposing his Jewish heritage, the rabid anti-Semite, Nazi and Ku Kluk Klan member commits suicide by shooting himself in the chest and head. Over the course of its brisk 176 pages, Arthur Rosenthal and Arthur Gelb's book reckons with Burros' quixotic bigotry and makes the case for the inevitability of his death, framing his demise as the fulfilment of a death wish that Burros -- described by McCandlish Phillips as a 'round, short sallow young man who looked like a small heap of misery' -- had nurtured since childhood. If the authors' theory isn't exactly convincing (it is reminiscent of the dubious belief that serial killers who become increasingly reckless secretly want to get caught) his account of Burros' long, dangerous association with Neo-Nazism nonetheless makes for fascinating reading. Even as he fantasised about elaborate contraptions that would torture Jews and carried a bar of soap claiming to be made from Jewish fat, Burros would drop hints of his own suppressed identity, favour Jewish food and utter 'if only you knew' when his American Nazi Party and KKK allies commented on his blond hair and "Aryan" features. Taking a page out of his former leader George Lincoln Rockwell's book, he sought publicity and hastened the exposure of what he considered his most shameful secret. Dan Burros was a truly bizarre character even by the lofty standards of right-wing extremists and One More Victim does a fine job documenting the pitiful, wasted life of a young man who swallowed the most hateful propaganda and built a false identity around an ideology that essentially advocated his destruction. In the end, he destroyed himself.
March 11, 2013
Daniel Burros, a 20-something New Yorker who became a leader in the American Nazi Party and, later, in the KKK, killed himself after a reporter reveals that he was in fact born and raised Jewish. For years Burros had been keeping this secret from his fascist friends. Unlike infiltrators or journalists, Burros really was infatuated by Hitler and Nazism, and made no secret of his desire for a violent “Final Solution”. This non-fiction report, published in the late 60s, does not match, in quality, the story it is covering, but is the basis for the excellent feature film The Believer. Burros himself was a bragging, swaggering loner, low on the pecking order even among the thuggish lunatic fringe. Surprisingly Burros was not alone. Even the far-right was peppered with Jews passing as Aryans. Curiously, Burros was part of the National Guard detachment that escorted black schoolchildren in Little Rock. His drift towards the far right is mostly unexplained, but even anomalies deserve analysis.
April 21, 2014
This is the biography of an obscure man who lived a short and largely uninteresting life. There would be no reason to read about him at all, if he were not representative of a disturbing trend in American society. He was a member of various organizations, such as the American Nazi Party, the New Renaissance Party, and the United Klans of America, which today are labeled “hate groups” and at the time of his adult life (1950s and 60s) were considered the “far right fringe.” They advocated a radical transformation of American politics to remove minority ethnic groups from power and in some cases their complete physical removal as well, they attracted men with a penchant for violence and paramilitary trappings, and they used symbols designed to offend in order to arouse maximum media exposure through reaction. They all regarded Jews as enemies of all that was decent about America and carriers of Communism and other Bad Things.
All of which is reasonably well known, but what makes Daniel Burros especially interesting to the authors and readers of this book is that he was raised in a Jewish home, by Jewish parents, and took his bar mitvah at 13, from a rabbi at a local synagogue who regarded him as an especially faithful Jewish boy. As he grew up, he became increasingly alienated from the world of his youth, and increasingly dedicated to denying it, but it was always there in the background. Daniel Burros was a Jewish Nazi.
The question this raises, as the authors admit, is “why?” Why would someone adhere to an ideology that advocated his own destruction? Why join with men who would kill him if they had known who he really was and had the power and opportunity to do so? Why was he one of those who called most vehemently for the destruction of the Jews? The authors also admit that the complete answer will probably never be known, although they attempt to answer part of it by researching Burros’s life and the milieu in which he moved with reasonable thoroughness.
When I first read this, perhaps twenty years ago, there weren’t a lot of good scholarly sources on the American Nazi Party, as there are today, and this journalistic account of its early days and major figures was of great interest. I was also fascinated to read about the New Renaissance Party, whose headquarters was just down the street from the New York apartment building I grew up in. Burros was a New York kid, and the authors make some effort to describe childhood in New York during a period not so distant from my own youth.
The book isn’t perfect. The authors attempt to “explain” anti-Semitism at considerable length, and frankly are not very convincing in their analysis. They do bring up some earlier examples of Jews who became Jew-haters, but it isn’t obvious that examples from 19th century Vienna tell us much about cases like Burros. The authors never quite explain how they became so interested in the story, although it seems likely that one or the other of them is the unnamed “editor” from the New York Times who handed the story over to a born-again Christian reporter and sent him out to track down Burros’s past. The final section of the book is based almost entirely on testimony from a Klansman (Roy Frankhouser) who seems to describe himself in a glowing light as Burros’s friend, who tried to save him from suicide, while his life story suggests that he would not have been so tolerant or understanding.
Since this book was published, many other neo-nazis have been exposed as Jews, homosexuals, criminals of one kind or another, or other categories supposedly outside of the “Master Race.” Frank Collin, who ran the Chicago organization the National Socialist Party of America was not just Jewish, but also a child molester. One might even make the argument that no one becomes a neo-nazi unless it is in fear and denial of some part of themselves. In that sense, perhaps understanding Daniel Burros is an important factor in understanding such groups. However, there are more complete sources available for their study today, written from more valuable sociological perspectives.
All of which is reasonably well known, but what makes Daniel Burros especially interesting to the authors and readers of this book is that he was raised in a Jewish home, by Jewish parents, and took his bar mitvah at 13, from a rabbi at a local synagogue who regarded him as an especially faithful Jewish boy. As he grew up, he became increasingly alienated from the world of his youth, and increasingly dedicated to denying it, but it was always there in the background. Daniel Burros was a Jewish Nazi.
The question this raises, as the authors admit, is “why?” Why would someone adhere to an ideology that advocated his own destruction? Why join with men who would kill him if they had known who he really was and had the power and opportunity to do so? Why was he one of those who called most vehemently for the destruction of the Jews? The authors also admit that the complete answer will probably never be known, although they attempt to answer part of it by researching Burros’s life and the milieu in which he moved with reasonable thoroughness.
When I first read this, perhaps twenty years ago, there weren’t a lot of good scholarly sources on the American Nazi Party, as there are today, and this journalistic account of its early days and major figures was of great interest. I was also fascinated to read about the New Renaissance Party, whose headquarters was just down the street from the New York apartment building I grew up in. Burros was a New York kid, and the authors make some effort to describe childhood in New York during a period not so distant from my own youth.
The book isn’t perfect. The authors attempt to “explain” anti-Semitism at considerable length, and frankly are not very convincing in their analysis. They do bring up some earlier examples of Jews who became Jew-haters, but it isn’t obvious that examples from 19th century Vienna tell us much about cases like Burros. The authors never quite explain how they became so interested in the story, although it seems likely that one or the other of them is the unnamed “editor” from the New York Times who handed the story over to a born-again Christian reporter and sent him out to track down Burros’s past. The final section of the book is based almost entirely on testimony from a Klansman (Roy Frankhouser) who seems to describe himself in a glowing light as Burros’s friend, who tried to save him from suicide, while his life story suggests that he would not have been so tolerant or understanding.
Since this book was published, many other neo-nazis have been exposed as Jews, homosexuals, criminals of one kind or another, or other categories supposedly outside of the “Master Race.” Frank Collin, who ran the Chicago organization the National Socialist Party of America was not just Jewish, but also a child molester. One might even make the argument that no one becomes a neo-nazi unless it is in fear and denial of some part of themselves. In that sense, perhaps understanding Daniel Burros is an important factor in understanding such groups. However, there are more complete sources available for their study today, written from more valuable sociological perspectives.
January 14, 2023
The needless political slant of this book diminishes its credibility, but it does a decent job of presenting the story of Daniel Burros. The cartoonish representation of George Lincoln Rockwell reminds the reader that it could have easily been published by the ADL or some other parasitic organization. Although Burros is presented as immature by the authors, he was mature enough to realize that murdering the reporter that threatened to expose him would do more harm to his cause, so like Yukio Mishima he decided to defiantly remove himself from a society that he no longer wished to be a part of. It's a sad story and the venom the authors use to insult the subject of this book only prove that while his suicide was unfortunate, his assessment of society was correct.
August 27, 2020
Rosenthal's book tells the bizarre story of Dan Burros, a Jewish American Neo-Nazi and Klansman. Burros was a member of the American Nazi Party and was a devoted follower of George Lincoln Rockwell. Burros had an intense hatred for Jews and often fantasized about killing and torturing them, earning him the nickname "extermination planner." One of the more shocking examples (pun intended) of Burros' deranged torture fantasies was his idea of an electric-shock piano, something he talked about at length with his Nazi buddies. As noted on page 80, "they listened to Burros talk about his dream of a torture machine consisting of a piano whose wires were connected to the nerves of Jews; the Jews would twitch and jump to the tune of the piano player." Burros committed suicide in 1965 after the press revealed his Jewish identity to the public. The 2001 film The Believer, starring Ryan Gosling, is loosely based on Burros' life.
April 3, 2017
This is a fascinating window into the soul of a disturbed young Jewish man from a middle-class 'nice' Jewish home (one of his relatives was the head of a very prominent Yeshiva in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn).
The turbulent 60s and 70s were a time of great social upheaval and an explosion of urban violence. These phenomena did not skip over the Jewish community. Aside from the disproportionate Jewish involvement in the counterculture movement (and numerous born-again Jewish movement, better known as "Baal Teshuva" like Chabad Lubavitch and Shlomo Carlebach et al), individual Jews, often disaffected and angry would lash out in unconventional ways. For instance, Richard Wishnetsky shot his Rabbi in the grandiose vestibule of the gaudy Shaarei Zedek Temple in '66 claiming "that this congregation is composed of phony, materialistic and selfish people who make me ashamed to say that I'm Jewish" (I highly recommend T.V. LoCicero's Excellent MURDER IN THE SYNAGOGUE).
Daniel Burros became disenchanted and disillusioned enough to want to make an extreme statement. The brilliant Jewish kid would come to head a Neo-Nazi organization. His complete unraveling and undoing was a gradual (and sometimes tragicomic) process. The authors have done a masterful job in their psychological autopsying.
The turbulent 60s and 70s were a time of great social upheaval and an explosion of urban violence. These phenomena did not skip over the Jewish community. Aside from the disproportionate Jewish involvement in the counterculture movement (and numerous born-again Jewish movement, better known as "Baal Teshuva" like Chabad Lubavitch and Shlomo Carlebach et al), individual Jews, often disaffected and angry would lash out in unconventional ways. For instance, Richard Wishnetsky shot his Rabbi in the grandiose vestibule of the gaudy Shaarei Zedek Temple in '66 claiming "that this congregation is composed of phony, materialistic and selfish people who make me ashamed to say that I'm Jewish" (I highly recommend T.V. LoCicero's Excellent MURDER IN THE SYNAGOGUE).
Daniel Burros became disenchanted and disillusioned enough to want to make an extreme statement. The brilliant Jewish kid would come to head a Neo-Nazi organization. His complete unraveling and undoing was a gradual (and sometimes tragicomic) process. The authors have done a masterful job in their psychological autopsying.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews