A Former Neo-Nazi on What Hate Groups See in Guns

Arno Michaelis was 16 and furious at the world when he joined America’s white power movement in 1987. At the time, he was deeply involved in the punk scene in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which included a strain of skinhead culture that celebrated racism and swastikas.

Michaelis became the lead singer of a hate-metal band called Centurion, a seminal group among neo-Nazi music fans that has sold tens of thousands of albums. His lyrics advocated for racial holy war, as did the local gang he started, the Northern Hammerskins. The gang later became part of Hammerskin Nation, an international hate organization with branches in France, the Netherlands, and Australia. According to the Anti-Defamation League, Hammerskin Nation is now considered “the most violent and best-organized neo-Nazi skinhead group in the United States.”
 
For years, Michaelis’s belief in racial holy war was total. The movement’s doctrines were spelled out in a canned narrative: Through attempts to integrate minorities into society, Jews were responsible for an ongoing effort to exterminate the white race. Minorities were seen as savages, and whites who did not take up arms were seen as “race traitors.” Waging a holy race war meant attacking anyone who was helping to perpetrate genocide against the white race, beating unwitting strangers or even killing them. In 1991, Hammerksins in Arlington, Texas murdered a 32-year-old black man in a drive-by shooting while he sat on the back of a pickup truck outside his home.

Michaelis, now 44, left the movement in the mid-1990s, after two of his close friends were shot and killed in gang fights. He went on to become a peace activist and is a director at Serve2Unite, an organization that teaches children about the importance of diversity.

A Former Neo-Nazi on What Hate Groups See in Guns