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The National Socialist Movement (NSM) is planning a rally in the Kansas City area on November 9. They are talking about having a show of forces between 3:00 and 5:00 pm on that Saturday. Most of the chatter about the would-be rally place it in downtown Kansas City, Missouri; although it should be noted that the NSM leaflet advertising this event places it in Kansas City, Kansas.

Kansas City area NSM members have already received promises to attend from NSM members in other states, including Alabama. A faction calling itself Aryan Nations in Iowa have also promised to attend. Matt Heimbach from Maryland is also planning to bring a couple of people, according to the organizer. Heimbach has created a string of white student groups at Towson University outside Baltimore, and the latest incarnation is called the Traditionalist Youth Network. He has also traveled across the country, speaking at white-ist events, and is a likely candidate to give a speech in the Kansas City area.

The Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club, which considers itself part of Aryan Nations, might also participate in this rally. And the Kansas City-area organizer claims to be seeking out the Traditionalist American Knights of the KKK, led by Frank Ancona in Park Hills, Missouri. This group has rallied with the NSM previously, most recently in Memphis. Whether or not all these factions do attend the November 9 event, it will be a significant event in the Kansas City area.

A private swastika-lighting is slated at the end of the day, away from the rally site, a ceremony not unlike the Klan’s crossburning.

The lead organizer appears to be a Kansas City-area resident with the name Buddy Rumble. Rumble is a regional organizer for the NSM, and the primary contact person for a number of states, including both Kansas and Missouri. And the NSM has been active—off and on—in these states for a number of years.

The NSM held a “white unity” rally in Topeka in 2002, where almost two dozen members dressed in Hitler-era brownshirt uniforms. They also had a rally in Lansing, Kansas in 2006 with about three dozen attending. The marched in Columbia, Missouri in 2006 and they held a November 8 march in Jefferson City in 2008. At that affair, 63 uniformed NSM members were escorted by about 200 area police. In protest, an anti-racist rally by 250 took place in a public park at the same time.

2005 National Socialist Movement gathering(2005 National Socialist Movement Gathering in Kansas City)

In 2005, over the Hitler birthday weekend in April, the NSM held its national convention in a Kansas City-area hotel. That evening they held a uniformed celebration at a now-defunct German restaurant on Wornall Road. A fight occurred after the rally when NSM organizer Steve Boswell got into a fight with Rabbi David Fine

A dispute over a piece of Missouri highway began in 2009, when the Springfield NSM unit began an Adopt-a-Highway clean-up program and won an Adopt-a-Highway recognition sign. After several years of controversy, the state legislature, at the initiative of Rep. Sara Lampe, named that same swath of highway in memory of Rabbi Ernest I. Jacob, who was born in Breslau, Germany and served congregations in Germany before the Nazi onslaught. In 1938, Rabbi Jacob had been arrested and sent to the Dachau camp, but was released in 1939 and ultimately made his way to Springfield. Now the NSM members were forced to keep the good rabbi’s highway clean.

It should be noted that November 9, 2013 will be the 75th anniversary of Kristallancht, when Nazi Storm Troopers and others killed almost an estimated 91 Jews, sent almost 30,000 to the camps, destroyed synagogues, Jewish homes and shops, and began the process that became the Holocaust.

The National Socialist Movement is aware of the anniversary.

Leonard Zeskind

is founder of IREHR. For almost four decades, he has been a leading authority on white nationalist political and social movements. He is the author of Blood and Politics: The History of White Nationalism from the Margins to the Mainstream, published by Farrar Straus & Giroux in May 2009. [more..]

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