The former leader and founder of the American Nazi Party, George Lincoln Rockwell, was shot to death outside a shopping mall in Arlington, Virginia, 38 years ago reports Fréttabladid in its daily “This happened” column yesterday.
According to Fréttabladid, Rockwell was known as the American Hitler and founded the American Nazi Party in 1959. He was a pilot in the US armed forces in the Second World War.
Fréttabladid details how he was killed and by whom. It also reports that he was often fined and sent to jail for his actions. Fréttabladid describes Rockwell’s funeral and that the Pentagon refused to allow his burial at the Culpepper Cemetery because his supporters intended to wear Nazi armbands.
Not much has been written about George Lincoln Rockwell in Iceland until late last year when writer and Time Warner Executive VP Ólafur Jóhann Ólafsson based a character on him and his Icelandic wife in Ólafur’s new novel, the Innocents. Rockwell appears in the novel under his own name, but his wife’s character is called Lilja Jónsdóttir. In real life Rockwell was married to Icelander Thóra Hallgrímsson but they separated in the mid-sixties.
Thora Hallgrímsson is now married to Björgólfur Gudmundsson, father of Björgólfur Thor Björgólfsson, Iceland’s first USD billionaire. Björgólfur is also the owner of Edda, Ólafur’s publisher in Iceland.
In an interview in Morgunbladid in October last year Ólafur was asked if this connection had caused any conflicts in connection with his new book. He replied, “No, not at all. Of course this is a sensitive issue and has not been widely discussed [in Iceland]. But I believe that I’ve handled the matter in such a way that the contents of the novel shouldn’t hurt anyone, that was not the purpose anyway.”
Earlier this year, Ólafur Ólafsson joined forces with Björgólfur Thor Björgólfsson and several other investors to bid for Iceland Telco but lost out to another group of investors.
