Dan Burros

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Daniel "Dan" Burros (March 5, 1937 – October 31, 1965), was a former member of the United States Marine Corps who, after exhibiting bizarre behavior, joined the American Nazi Party, which had been founded in Virginia by a former Naval aviator named George Lincoln Rockwell. However, Burros' behavioral problems worsened, and it alienated him from his comrades in the ANP. Not long after being kicked out, the Bronx-born Burros moved back to New York State and became the kleagle, or recruiter, of the state's Ku Klux Klan organization.

Dan Burros is sometimes cited as an example of a self-hating Jew.

After a New York Times reporter named McCandlish Phillips revealed that Dan Burros was, in fact, Jewish (something several members of the American Nazi Party had long suspected), he committed suicide. During a press conference after Burros' death, George Lincoln Rockwell railed against Jews, whom he called "... a unique people with a distinct mass of mental disorders" and ascribed Burros' instability and suicide to "this unfortunate Jewish psychosis". (William H. Schmaltz, Hate: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party, 1999., Pg. 263)

The story of Dan Burros was the origin of Henry Bean's movie, The Believer. It also inspired an episode of the TV series Lou Grant.

Burros was not the only Jewish member of the American Nazi Party. Leonard Holstein, who was the head of the ANP's Los Angeles division, was a Jew. However, unlike Burros, Holstein never tried to hide the fact.

[edit] References

One More Victim: The Life and Death of an American-Jewish Nazi by A. M. Rosenthal and Arthur Gelb (New American Library, 1967)
Henry Bean, The Believer: Confronting Jewish Self-Hatred. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2002. ISBN 1-56025-372-X.