John Patler (born January 6, 1938) is an American neo-Nazi who assassinated American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell on August 25, 1967.
Patler was born Yanacki Christos Patsalos in New York City, the son of poor Greek immigrants. He has a younger brother named George, who was born in 1939. When Patler was five, his mother left her husband and had taken her sons with her, and they stayed with their grandmother in Harlem. She was murdered on October 7, 1943 by Patler's father, who exacted revenge on her for leaving him. His father was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to ten years in prison at Sing Sing Prison. After his mother's death, he moved with his brother and grandmother into a tenement in upper Manhattan.
During adolescence, Patler became a member of a street gang, and had allegedly murdered a childhood friend at age 16. When he was 15, his grandmother had died, and Patler and his brother were sent to live in the Bronx with their father, who was recently released from prison on parole. Shortly after, he and his brother were placed in the Youth House, while their father was facing child abuse charges. However, Patler and his brother spent two weeks in the Youth House and were returned into the custody of their father.
After a serving brief stint in the U.S. Marine Corps, he joined the American Nazi Party in 1960, and legally changed his name to John Patler, to make his surname sound like Hitler. He had formerly been a captain in the American Nazi Party and was the editor and cartoonist for the party magazine, Stormtrooper. Patler began to develop Marxist leanings, which caused friction between fellow party members. Patler was expelled from the party in March 1967.
On August 25, 1967, he fired two shots with a Mauser semi-automatic pistol from the rooftop of a beauty salon in the Dominion Hills shopping center in Arlington, Virginia into George Rockwell's car. Two bullets went through the windshield, hitting him fatally in the head and chest. Rockwell struggled out of the passenger side of his automobile and died on the pavement. In December 1967, Patler was sentenced to 20 years in prison for Rockwell's murder. Patler was paroled in 1975, but violated his parole and served an additional six years.
   | 1967: 'American Hitler' shot dead - BBC ON THIS DAY | 25 | 1967: 'American Hitler' shot dead |
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