Gary Lauck

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Gary Rex Lauck (born 1953; also known as Gerhard Lauck) is the leader of the current incarnation of the NSDAP/AO in the United States and probably the largest producer of neo-Nazi literature in the world. He has been dubbed the "Farmbelt Fuehrer" by Jewish organizations and the "Evil Genius of Germany's Neo-Nazis" by the Reader's Digest (British edition, September 1995).

Lauck, a resident of Lincoln, Nebraska, was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on May 12, 1953. In 1964 the Lauck family moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, where his father became a professor of engineering. Lauck was an honor roll student in high school, received but turned down a West Point nomination, majored in German at the University of Nebraska and later become a marketing executive in a Chicago mail order company. While a student he also was a reporter for the campus newspaper.

Over the years, Lauck's NSDAP/AO has received extensive media coverage, including a CBS 60 Minutes television interview with Dan Rather in 1979 and a Swedish television documentary "Wahrheit macht frei" in 1990. Over a dozen books about neo-Nazism in various languages have chapters on the NSDAP/AO.

News media reports, all obviously influenced by the highly controversial subject, portray Lauck in different ways, ranging from laughable buffoon to dangerous "evil genius". Some claim he speaks English with a "fake German accent" while others - no less hostile - claim his unusual accent is the remnant of a childhood speech defect. Some claim his mustache is modeled after Hitler's, although he himself denies that. But they generally agree about his fanaticism. Lauck has stated that Adolf Hitler was the greatest man who ever lived, but that his only mistake was to be "too humane".

Lauck was able to subvert German law by producing neo-nazi material, which is constitutionally protected in the United States, and then smuggle it into Germany. In the United States, all political speech is protected by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, while in Germany, political speech that advocates undermining the German constitution or overthrowing the government is illegal. Under a motion from the Adenauer administration, the German Supreme Court had banned the neo-Nazi Socialist Reich Party in 1952 and the Communist KPD in 1956 for their "anti-constitutional" platforms and messages.

In 1995, Lauck was arrested in Denmark. He fought extradition all the way to the Danish Supreme Court, but lost. He was extradited to Germany for disseminating "anti-constitutional" literature. He was convicted by a Hamburg Court and was sentenced to four years in prison.

Lauck returned to Lincoln upon his release from prison in 1999, and retaliated by becoming active in the Internet. In addition to his own websites, he hosts scores of other European neo-Nazi websites, registered through Lauck in order to hide the identity of their webmasters from the authorities in Europe. Among other things, he has repeatedly registered domain names extremely similar to those of the German government and pointed them at his own neo-Nazi website, thereby gaining major publicity and greatly increased website traffic ("hits") before the German government manages to wrestle the domain names away from him. One such case involved the domain name republicofgermany.com - as a result, Germany sued the United States in an intellectual property case. Lauck lost the case.