National Socialist Movement

Jeff Schoep led the NSM as its self-styled "Commander" for 25 years (1994-2019), taking over at age 21 and building a personality-driven leadership central to the group; his 2019 departure triggered a succession crisis. Burt Colucci became de facto leader thereafter, reinstating the swastika and personally directing rallies. [8][1][2] The NSM’s leadership structure remained visibly centered on individual authority after Schoep’s exit: ADL says Colucci has led the NSM since March 2019, and Wikipedia notes that the dispute over control between James Hart Stern and Colucci left Colucci as the de facto leader after Stern’s death in October 2019. [1][2] This pattern fits a movement organized around named commanders rather than a diffuse collective, with the office of "commander" used publicly for both Schoep and Colucci. [6][8] More broadly, the Nazi movement itself is often described as relying on charismatic leadership, with Hitler portrayed as the movement’s most charismatic public speaker and sole source of inspiration in fascist rule, which provides contextual support for why neo-Nazi offshoots like NSM tend to organize around commanding personalities rather than impersonal institutions. [10][6]

The NSM is described as "openly worshipful of Hitler" and "one of the more explicitly neo-Nazi groups," venerating Adolf Hitler through annual Hitler birthday rallies and treating Nazi ideology as foundational sacred dogma. [SPLC 2023][ADL 2023] The group's name "NSM88" encodes "Heil Hitler" (88), and members embrace antisemitic conspiracy beliefs such as ZOG (Zionist Occupied Government). [SPLC 2023][ADL 2023] The new material reinforces that Nazism itself was built around a quasi-sacralized political worldview: Britannica describes Nazism as a totalitarian movement led by Hitler, while scholarly material in the new results notes that fascist ideologues consciously sought to fuse culture, spirituality, and politics within a secular religion. [Britannica][CSUSB et al.] Another new source on Nazi ideology notes that National Socialists believed in a higher power and developed a racist religious outlook centered on an Aryan version of faith. [University of Denver] Together, these facts show that NSM’s rhetoric is not merely programmatic but framed around revered symbols, leader-veneration, and conspiratorial truth-claims treated as non-negotiable identity commitments.

The NSM's stated mission is the transformation of the United States into an all-white ethnostate from which Jews, non-whites, and LGBTQ people would be stripped of citizenship and expelled. [1][SPLC 2023] This sweeping racial-revolutionary goal is used to justify armed paramilitary training and members' legal/physical risk-taking, including the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally. [SPLC 2023][1] The group’s platform also calls for an all-white “greater America” that would deny citizenship and virtually all legal protection to non-whites, Jews, and the LGBTQ population, and it frames its 25 points around building a white nation. [1][5] Historical Nazi precedent shows how such movements present programmatic goals as an overriding cause: the Nazi Party platform declared that party leaders would promote the program “at all costs,” even at the sacrifice of their own lives. [Avalon Project][USHMM] That older model helps contextualize why NSM’s political program functions as a transcendent mission claim rather than a routine policy agenda.

The NSM is paramilitary in structure: members adopt military ranks such as lieutenants and sergeants, chapters are called “units,” and members wore standardized uniforms including Hitler-army-style brown shirts and swastika armbands, later an all-black “battle dress uniform,” subsuming personal identity into the collective. [SPLC 2023][SPLC 2019] Rally ritual and uniform conformity are the group's primary organizational expression. [SPLC 2023][SPLC 2019] The new web results reinforce the broader Nazi pattern of enforcing conformity at the expense of individuality; a source on Gleichschaltung explicitly notes that social and economic unity was produced at the expense of individuality, and a resource on conformity in the National Socialist “national community” describes the regime’s effort to create a racially pure collective identity. [Gleichschaltung][Facing History] Nazi dress scholarship likewise notes that uniforms were used to promote a specific collective image rather than personal distinction. [Encyclopedia.com] Applied to NSM, these facts show that the group’s organizational style visually and linguistically absorbs the individual into a disciplined, uniformed collective.

The NSM is not structurally isolated in the sense of a closed commune, but the available evidence does show partial social insulation and secrecy. The ADL says NSM membership is “scattered around the country,” which suggests a dispersed membership rather than a local open civic organization, and the OJP abstract states that the ADL’s investigation into the NSM produced the complete or partial identification of just over 300 of about 500 members and close associates nationwide. [1][4] That scale of hidden membership indicates that outsiders and even researchers had difficulty mapping the group’s internal community. [4] The SPLC similarly describes the NSM as an organization that specializes in theatrical and provocative protests, while other reports note its “veil of secrecy.” [7][4] However, the evidence in this packet does not show a sealed residential compound, compulsory residence, or strict geographic isolation; instead, it shows a far-right network that is difficult to penetrate and document, with members spread across the country. [1][4]

The NSM uses a coded private vernacular shared across neo-Nazi movements: “88” (Heil Hitler), the “14 words,” “ZOG” (Zionist Occupied Government), and naming chapters “units” with Nazi-style ranks. [SPLC 2023][ADL 2023] The group brands itself “NSM88,” embedding the code directly in its identity. [SPLC 2023][ADL 2023] The new web results show that Nazi movements more broadly developed specialized vocabularies, euphemisms, and bureaucratic jargon, and that terms such as “Parteigenosse” emerged from the Nazi era as in-group language. [Nazi-Deutsch lexicon][DW] This broader linguistic pattern matters because it demonstrates that coded language is a known organizational tool in Nazi and neo-Nazi milieus, not merely a casual slogan set. In NSM’s case, the coding works as both a membership marker and a way to communicate openly to insiders while obscuring meaning from outsiders.

The NSM's entire ideology is built on an us-versus-them racial framework, casting Jews, non-whites, immigrants, and LGBTQ people as enemies to be expelled, and propagating ZOG conspiracy theory that Jews secretly control government and media. [1][SPLC 2023] This rhetoric has fueled confrontations such as the 2005 Toledo riot and 2016 Sacramento clashes. [SPLC 2023][ADL 2023] The ADL says the NSM reserves the brunt of its vitriol for Jews and immigrants and espouses crudely racist and antisemitic ideology, while its platform denies citizenship and legal protection to targeted groups. [1] New contextual material on Nazism notes the movement’s tendency to make widely separated adversaries appear to belong to one category, illustrating the logic of enemy aggregation that NSM also uses. [Britannica] The evidence documents a persistent boundary-making system in which group identity is defined by hostility toward multiple out-groups at once.

The current search results do not provide direct evidence that the NSM itself systematically exploited labor in the sense of unpaid work, forced labor, or compulsory member labor for organizational gain. The available sources instead concern Nazi-era forced labor and wage theft more generally, which are historically relevant but not specific to the NSM. [ZWANGSARBEIT-ARCHIV][DW][Nazi economy Wikipedia] Because no verifiable NSM-specific labor-exploitation facts are present in the supplied evidence, this criterion should be treated as thinly documented rather than absent in principle. The older background material does show that Nazi systems broadly subordinated labor rights and labor councils to state control, but that is contextual rather than proof of NSM labor practices. [Nazi economy Wikipedia] On the current record, the best-supported statement is simply that no specific NSM labor-exploitation mechanism is documented here.

The available evidence does not show a structurally sealed NSM membership system with formal penalties for leaving, but it does show contested exits, public shunning, and organizational collapse pressure. In the U.S. NSM case, leadership disputes produced litigation over control of the organization, and after Stern’s death Colucci continued to operate the group, indicating that departure from leadership did not end conflict cleanly. [2][1] The SPLC also reports that Bill White, the neo-Nazi group’s spokesman, quit and took several NSM officials with him, suggesting factional departure rather than a frictionless exit. [SPLC 2023] More broadly, the OJP abstract describes an investigation that identified a large portion of the membership, implying that belonging carried some exposure once documented. [4] The strongest explicit exit-cost evidence in the new results comes from the Dutch NSB comparison, where former members were shunned and sometimes imprisoned after the party’s collapse; that is not the NSM itself, but it shows how Nazi movements have historically imposed social and legal costs on defectors. [NSB Wikipedia] On the present record, NSM exit costs are suggested by factional rupture and stigmatization rather than by documented formal punishment.

NSM members and leaders have repeatedly engaged in and justified violence in pursuit of the cause: a federal jury found the NSM and Schoep liable for civil conspiracy in Sines v. Kessler over the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally, where a counter-protester was killed and more than 35 people were injured. [Sines v. Kessler verdict / Wikipedia][SPLC 2023] Leader Burt Colucci was arrested for pulling a gun on a Black man in 2021 and convicted of battery for attacking a Jewish man in 2024; the group has published bomb recipes and conducted armed paramilitary training. [ADL 2024][SPLC 2023] The new search results do not add NSM-specific, independently verified factual detail on this point, but they do show a broader Nazi template in which leaders promise to execute their program “at all costs,” even at the sacrifice of their own lives. [Avalon Project][NSDAP 25 points simple wiki] In NSM’s case, the documented pattern is a recurring willingness to use intimidation, weapons, and violence to advance explicitly ideological goals.