Russell Veh

Russell Raymond Veh (born 1950) is an American political activist and propagandist, who was the head of the San Diego-based neo-Nazi organization World Service. From the early 1970s through the 1990s, Veh edited and distributed neo-Nazi and racist propaganda books, periodicals, and films around the world by mail. Veh also served as leader of the gay neo-Nazi National Socialist League from 1974 until its dissolution in 1984.

Russell Veh was born in 1950, a native of Toledo, Ohio.^[1][2] He dropped out of high school; both his parents had died by the time Veh was 20.^[3] and founded the Ohio Nationalist Party in 1970, renamed the American White Nationalist Party in 1971. The organization was short-lived, however, and he moved to California in 1974.^[4][1][3] In his early years, he operated a number of neo-Nazi "organizations" (of which he was always the only participant), writing several journals.^[5]

In California, Veh led the National Socialist League (NSL), an explicitly gay neo-Nazi organization.^[2][6] While the American neo-Nazi movement had numerous gay participants, infamously and to the chagrin of the neo-Nazis, this was something of an open secret, and until Veh none were open about this.^[2] It had a publishing arm, the World Service.^[2] He managed to get the party advertised in the historically gay Bay Area Reporter newspaper and the gay leather magazine Drummer. Veh and his party distributed membership applications declaring NSL's "determination to seek sexual, social, and political freedom" for Aryans.^[6]

They published a neo-Nazi magazine, the NS Kampfruf, later renamed Race and Nation. Scholar Jeffrey Kaplan described this magazine as, even for a neo-Nazi magazine, "exceedingly strange".^[2] It often featured provocative images of scantily clad SS soldiers with swastikas covering their genitals to emphasize the "sexual trip" described by the recruiting pitch.^[2][7]

From the early 1970s through the 1990s, Veh edited and distributed neo-Nazi and racist propaganda books, periodicals, and films around the world by mail. By 1990, he was "one of the largest purveyors of white supremacist information in the country."^[8] His access to hard to find neo-Nazi media forced other neo-Nazis to consider him despite his sexuality.^[9] Thus, "the American National Socialist community was treated to ads that ran heavily into leather fetishism".^[10] Veh's antics further fueled the constant disputes between neo-Nazis over homosexuality.^[11]

The National Socialist Liberation Front, a militant neo-Nazi group, openly disavowed Veh and the NSL under its original leader, Joseph Tommasi. However, after Tommasi's murder, his successors were more ambivalent; its later leader, David Rust, said he "admire[d] their honesty and courage to bear both crosses, National Socialism and homosexuality", as did James Mason, as long as they were masculine in presentation. As a result the NSLF tolerated him and the NSL (primarily due to Veh's access to hard to find neo-Nazi magazines).^[9]

He moved to San Diego in 1982.^[11] The National Socialist League disappeared in 1984, renamed the World Service. Veh continued to operate the World Service into the 1990s.^[12][11] He gradually became less involved.^[11]

• Michael Kühnen

• Kaplan, Jeffrey, ed. (2000). Encyclopedia of White Power: A Sourcebook on the Radical Racist Right. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press. ISBN 978-0-7425-0340-3.
• Newton, Michael (2014) [2007]. The Ku Klux Klan: History, Organization, Language, Influence and Activities of America's Most Notorious Secret Society. Jefferson: McFarland & Company. ISBN 978-0-7864-9559-7.
• Sunshine, Spencer (2024). Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism: The Origins and Afterlife of James Mason's Siege. New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-429-57601-0.