On the same weekend that Nick Griffin was trying to return to the limelight in Madrid, an even older nazi, who’s just as disliked by the rest of the jackboot tendency, made his own comeback at a conference run by the terrorist Nordic Resistance Movement near Gothenburg, Sweden.
Povl Riis-Knudsen first became politically active aged 12 and was soon involved in the 1960s version of the Danish nazi party DNSB. This party was led by Sven Salicath and fellow veterans of the DNSAP that collaborated with the Third Reich during the 1930s and 1940s.
Assassinated
Salicath was a close ally of American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell, who was assassinated by a renegade member of his own movement in 1967.
Though it had very few members, the Danish nazi movement’s cadres were among the core of a grandly titled World Union of National Socialists (WUNS) founded by Rockwell and Colin Jordan (Britain’s leading Hitler-worshipper).
Rockwell’s successor Matt Koehl worked with the young Riis-Knudsen in the USA and eventually promoted him to become WUNS general secretary, liaising with other secretive disciples who aimed to prepare for a Third Reich.
These included the Swiss publisher and Holocaust denier Gaston-Armand Amaudruz and the founders of CEDADE, a supposedly intellectual but violent Spanish nazi cult.
Pseudo- religion
Koehl moved to the esoteric wing of this movement, turning Rockwell’s old party into a pseudo-religion influenced by the mystical crank Savitri Devi. Riis-Knudsen regarded all that as mere eccentricity and headed towards a form of Strasserism and eventually “national bolshevism”.
Having first visited the Soviet Union in 1978, Riis-Knudsen published a booklet in 1984 titled National Socialism – A Left Wing Movement. He argued that European nazis should see the USA and NATO not the USSR as their real enemies, and that they should have more in common with communism than with capitalism.
During the 1980s this was a fringe position on the European right, and though Riis-Knudsen had a certain amount in common with young radicals including Nick Griffin who were then trying to take over the National Front, his past association with WUNS and BM meant that in practice his links with them were limited.
Bitter split
He also faced a rival international nazi network, the NSDAP-AO led by German-American Gary ‘Gerhard’ Lauck, which by the late 1980s had eclipsed WUNS.
Eventually it was Riis-Knudsen’s private life that led to a permanent and bitter split from most of his comrades. In 1992 he became engaged to a woman from the Middle East (sometimes described as a Palestinian Christian and sometimes as an Iranian exile).
Racial purity
This was too much for his fellow nazis who prized racial “purity” above their anti-Israel stance. Riis-Knudsen was expelled from his own party and for most of the past thirty years has been in obscurity.
Around the turn of the millennium Riis-Knudsen again visited the USA and made contact with his old WUNS colleague Martin Kerr.
Expatriate British fascist
Through Kerr he was introduced to Mark Cotterill, an expatriate British fascist who created the American Friends of the BNP and started a magazine, Heritage and Destiny, featuring Strasserites and populists as well as Hitlerites like Kerr.
Cotterill’s magazine still exists but Riis-Knudsen is now unwelcome there due to his outspoken support for the Putin regime and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Earlier this year Riis-Knudsen was interviewed by another fringe extremist and Putin fan, Australia First Party leader and convicted firebomber Jim Saleam. And now he has turned up at the second “European Unity” conference in Sweden.
Violent and pro-Russian
As Searchlight reported after last year’s event, the main conference organisers are the Nordic Resistance Movement including its chairman Fredrik Vejdeland.
This is one of the most violent and pro-Russian groups on the European nazi scene.
Growing out of the Swedish skinhead movement in the late 1990s as the “Swedish Resistance Movement” and originally led by convicted bank robbers and murderers, the NRM has taken a pro-Putin line since 2014.
Vejdeland and his cronies have been denounced by fellow nazis as stooges of Russian intelligence.
The Russian war criminal Yan Petrovsky was arrested while living in the home of an NRM member.
Petrovsky was sentenced to life imprisonment in March this year for crimes including the mutilation of a Ukrainian prisoner.
Riis-Knudsen has for years provided ideological justifications for this criminal invasion, so might be seen as an obvious choice of keynote speaker for the NRM’s conference.
But some fellow Putin fans on the far right still detest him for his alleged “racial treason” over thirty years ago.
Strange feature
Another strange feature of the “European Unity” conference is that just as two years ago there were supposedly pro-Ukrainian speakers present.
Last year the pro-Ukraine side was represented by the young Spanish nazi Isabel Peralta and her German friends from the tiny “Dritte Weg” (Third Way) party.
Splinter group
This year there was an allegedly anti-Putin speaker from Finland, Tuukka Kuru, leader of another tiny splinter group, Sinimusta Iiike (Blue-Black Movement).
The fourth member of the panel in Sweden was Justin Barrett, leader of the Irish nazi party Clann Éireann and every Searchlight reader’s favourite comedy führer.
Barrett has described Hitler as “the greatest leader of all time”. At first better known as an anti-abortion activist, he founded the National Party in 2016, but in summer 2023 began a two-year feud with his former deputy James Reynolds.
A few weeks ago, Ireland’s Electoral Commission confirmed that Reynolds is now officially recognised as National Party leader.
Stolen gold bars
One bizarre feature of the split was a dispute over €400,000 in gold bars that Barrett claimed belonged to his faction of the party. He accuses his rivals of misappropriating the gold.
Opinions within Europe’s far right are split as to whether Barrett, his rivals, or both have obtained funding from mysterious sources.
More division
Whatever the truth about Barrett, it’s certain that the European Unity conference had some serious money behind it, and with Vejdeland and Riis-Knudsen’s well-known pro-Moscow stance it wouldn’t be surprising if this turned out to be yet another element in Russia’s Europe-wide network.
With such low numbers turning out for their Madrid festival, Putin’s nazi godfathers probably have higher hopes from the Gothenburg set-up. But their choice of Riis-Knudsen as main speaker is certain to stir up more division than “unity”.
