A team of power company workers was trudging through a seldom-visited thicket in Southwest Washington when they spotted something odd in a ditch.
Protruding from the grass was a rectangular slab of granite.
They looked closer, and an inscription on the surface came into focus. What they saw astonished them.
It was a memorial. In honor of Nazi spies. On U.S. government property.
“In memory of agents of the German Abwehr,” the engraving began, “executed August 8, 1942.”
Below that were six names, and below those was another cryptic line: “Donated by the N.S.W.P.P.”
...
Until the mid-1960s, the National Socialist White People’s Party had gone by a more familiar name: the American Nazi Party. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the group’s founder, George Lincoln Rockwell, had given it the new title shortly before his assassination in 1967.
By the 1970s, though, the group had begun to split apart and had lost much of its relevance, leading Rosenstock to believe the Nazi memorial dates back to that time.
The party didn’t entirely cease to exist until 1983, the law center said, so the stone may had been carved more recently — though that still means it likely sat on Park Service land for more than two decades before the power company’s discovery.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...orial-on-federal-land/?utm_term=.41e4b6103b48
That sort of thing never completely goes away. They hide in the sewers until they see an opportunity.
Protruding from the grass was a rectangular slab of granite.
They looked closer, and an inscription on the surface came into focus. What they saw astonished them.
It was a memorial. In honor of Nazi spies. On U.S. government property.
“In memory of agents of the German Abwehr,” the engraving began, “executed August 8, 1942.”
Below that were six names, and below those was another cryptic line: “Donated by the N.S.W.P.P.”
...
Until the mid-1960s, the National Socialist White People’s Party had gone by a more familiar name: the American Nazi Party. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the group’s founder, George Lincoln Rockwell, had given it the new title shortly before his assassination in 1967.
By the 1970s, though, the group had begun to split apart and had lost much of its relevance, leading Rosenstock to believe the Nazi memorial dates back to that time.
The party didn’t entirely cease to exist until 1983, the law center said, so the stone may had been carved more recently — though that still means it likely sat on Park Service land for more than two decades before the power company’s discovery.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...orial-on-federal-land/?utm_term=.41e4b6103b48
That sort of thing never completely goes away. They hide in the sewers until they see an opportunity.