Francis Parker Yockey

Francis Parker Yockey (September 18, 1917 – June 17, 1960) was an American fascist and pan-Europeanist ideologue.

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.

His father was a stockbroker.

Yockey was raised in Ludington, Michigan.

He learned classical piano.

He began college as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, then transferred to Georgetown University, and later completed his degree at the University of Arizona.

In the 1930s he contacted or worked with the Nazi-aligned Silver Shirts and the German-American Bund.

Yockey had been attracted to Marxism in early life before gravitating to Adolf Hitler and Nazism in the 1930s, and in college, Oswald Spengler.

Other influences include Karl Haushofer and the Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt, whom Yockey was later accused of plagiarizing.

Yockey joined pro-German and pro-fascist groups in the late 1930s.

In 1938, his essay "The Tragedy of Youth" was published in Social Justice, a journal known for publishing antisemitic tracts that was distributed by the "radio priest" Charles Coughlin.

In 1939 Yockey spoke at a gathering of Silvershirts.

Before starting law school at Northwestern University, he also studied law at De Paul University, and graduated from the Notre Dame Law School in 1941.

In college, he declared he would not dine with black, Jewish or communist students.

He served in the U.S. Army in 1942–43, and went AWOL to help Nazi spies.

After

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.

According to Yockey's biographer Kevin Coogan, Yockey secretly helped German Nazi spies who had landed in the United States and Mexico.

He was also a friend of a German American intelligence officer Herbert Hans Haupt, who stayed at the home of his wife and was later executed for espionage for his participation in Operation Pastorius.

Later, Yockey received an honorable discharge from the Army for "dementia praecox, paranoid type" in 1943 after suffering a nervous breakdown or feigning one.

He was placed on a government list of Americans suspected of pro-Nazi views.

legal appointments in Detroit in 1944–45, he worked for eleven months on the War Crimes tribunal in Germany before he either resigned or was fired for siding with the Nazis.

In 1944 he became an assistant prosecuting attorney for Wayne County, Michigan, but was bored by the work, leaving in 1945.

In early 1946, Yockey found a job with the United States War Department in Wiesbaden, Germany, as a post-trial review attorney for the Nuremberg Trials, and he moved to Germany with his wife and two daughters.

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.

Often absent from his job, he was fired for "abandonment of position" on the 26th of November 1946, when it was noticed that he was siding with the Nazis.

He agitated against Allied occupation of Germany, and later worked for the Red Cross in Germany but deserted his post.

U.S. intelligence began tracking Yockey in Germany in 1946 or 1947.

Yockey left his estranged wife and daughters in Germany in 1947 for exile in Ireland.

Yockey was a central figure in early postwar Nazi networks.

A lawyer, he is known for his neo-Spenglerian book Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics, published in 1948 under the pen name Ulick Varange, which was dedicated indirectly to Adolf Hitler and called for a neo-Nazi European empire.

Yockey supported far-right causes around the world and remains an influence of white nationalist and neo-fascist movements.

Yockey was an antisemite, revered German Nazism, and was an early Holocaust denier.

In London, he worked for the British fascist Oswald Mosley's Union Movement, and after falling out with Mosley, founded the breakaway European Liberation Front in 1949, leading it until it fizzled around 1954.

During the Cold War, Yockey reportedly worked with Soviet bloc intelligence, and argued for a tactical far-right alliance with the Soviets against what he saw as Jewish-American hegemony.

He also briefly wrote anti-Jewish propaganda in Egypt, where he met its president Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Yockey remained influential in fascist circles until his suicide in FBI custody in 1960.

Yockey's last visitor in prison was Willis Carto, who became the leading advocate and publisher of his writings.

Yockey had many aliases, and some facts about him are not certain. Acquaintances and declassified FBI files described him as a talented speaker, brilliant, well-read, sometimes charming, humorous and a gifted mimic — but also haughty, immature, secretive, a loner, and, in the FBI's words, "nervous, high-strung, erratic, unpredictable and dictatorial", with "an amazing capacity for alienating people".