Hella Hitler

Andrew Holter revisits ‘The California Reich’ 50 years on and considers the legacy of the neo-Nazi documentary.

By Andrew HolterJanuary 8, 2026

• Film

• Cultural Studies

IN KEITH F. CRITCHLOW and Walter F. Parkes’s 1975 documentary The California Reich, the Nazis have a PR problem. Ken McAllister, who looks like the father from The Brady Bunch but with a large gun collection and visions of race war in his eyes, complains that the average white American is ignorant of the Nazi movement growing across the country. “All they know about it is what they learned out of Hollywood,” he whines, invoking the old antisemitic chestnut about who really runs the industry. “They’re the biggest authorities on National Socialism.”

Little could Obergruppenführer McAllister have known that Walter Parkes, one of the young longhairs behind the camera, would go on to become among the most accomplished Hollywood producers of his generation. Parkes’s credits include dozens of blockbusters, many of them directed by Steven Spielberg, who hired him to run Amblin Entertainment in 1993. If the Nazis thought they were getting a bad rap from Hollywood in 1975, they had only to wait 20 years for Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan to really give them something to complain about.

Over the course of its 55-minute running time, The California Reich examines the West Coast presence of the National Socialist White People’s Party (NSWPP)—formerly known as the American Nazi Party, and renamed following the 1967 murder of leader George Lincoln Rockwell by one of the party’s own. The California Reich is not a history lesson, however; it is, rather, a series of conversations and set pieces with these loud, proud whites. They include Allen Vincent, unformidable leader of the NSWPP in the Bay Area; the no doubt long-suffering but vile Mrs. McAllister, with her Nazi flag sheet cake (“The swastika is melted licorice”); and Staff Sergeant Fred Surber, who was recently disciplined, we learn, for “soliciting funds and membership for the Nazi Party while on U.S. Army property.” His punishment? A $200 fine.

Surber is by far the most reptilian of this group. He rears his preteen son, James Surber, as a latter-day Hitler-Jugendliche, depriving him of school friends and time to himself on the weekends—of a happy childhood, in other words. Each Saturday, James, who would rather be riding his bike, is dragged to a series of NSWPP meetings and self-congratulatory jamborees. His father’s hopes rest in James becoming a career Nazi too. It would “probably hurt his feelings if I didn’t, if he was the only one,” the boy tells Critchlow and Parkes.

The film has no plot but is structured around two appearances of Vincent’s Nazis at San Francisco State University, where they are invited by some “nonconformist” on the faculty to speak to a classroom. The first of these visits, especially, yields astonishing footage. Holed up in an office on campus, the Nazis are quiet, anxious, perilously outnumbered by the protesters outside. Eventually, they make a break for it, with Critchlow and Parkes running alongside them to the waiting vans—the proverbial last choppers out of Saigon—but some of the less fit are overcome and catch an ass-whooping.

Incidentally, the one interview subject in the film who declines to appear on camera is the man who sells the Nazis their illegal guns. That is not so surprising. The stranger omission is the absence of any reference to Vietnam. As the historian Kathleen Belew has written, it was the Vietnam War, which ended the year of this film’s production, that shifted the politics of white power into a paramilitary insurgency with the aim of “bringing the war home.”

The guns and the war lend a retrospective gravity to The California Reich because we know what’s coming. The Nazis’ humiliation at San Francisco State was avenged four years later in Greensboro, North Carolina, where five anti-fascist demonstrators were shot to death by gunmen from a local Klan-Nazi coalition, some of whose members had past careers in the NSWPP. The California Reich captures a moment when sentimental Hitlerites like Vincent were on their way offstage. The new breed of white supremacists just wanted to kill as many “subhumans,” “race traitors,” and other representatives of the “New World Order” as soon as possible. Waiting in the wings, with his dog-eared paperback of The Turner Diaries (1978) and his bags of fertilizer, was Timothy McVeigh—not much younger in 1975 than James Surber.

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Many public television stations refused to air The California Reich upon its release; the manager of one called it “almost a recruitment film,” and another, “certainly pro-Nazi.” A representative of the Anti-Defamation League decried it as “incredibly immoral.” One screening in New York City was disrupted by a communist groupuscule. Nevertheless, it was nominated for an Academy Award in 1976, thanks in part, apparently, to the advocacy of Hollywood’s handsomest lefty, Burt Lancaster.

A string of similar documentaries—a whole Anglophone subgenre, really—has followed. They include Anne Bohlen, Kevin Rafferty, and James Ridgeway’s Blood in the Face (1991); Nick Broomfield’s The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife (1991), about Boer separatists at the end of apartheid; multiple television films by Louis Theroux; and shorts produced by Vice. Fifty years after The California Reich’s release, it’s worth asking whether the neo-Nazi documentary, as a type, has been useful in apprehending the problem of fascism and eradicating it.

The familiar moral risk run by documentaries like these lies in “sanitizing” the Nazis one way or another. They will appear to us as complex individuals deserving of sympathy, we fear; from Parkes and Critchlow’s interview with Vincent, for example, it’s clear that he is deeply traumatized from a childhood spent in and out of institutions. And we are certainly witnessing a type of child abuse in James Surber’s indoctrination by his father.

There is also the hazard of amplifying the Nazis’ ideas and calls to action—especially if, as in The California Reich, they are recorded without direct challenge by the filmmakers. Critchlow and Parkes adopt the fly-on-the-wall approach of cinema verité, while Theroux and Broomfield like to engage their subjects in a dogged but gently prosecuted conversation about morality that tends to unwind over the course of the film, allowing the ironies and hypocrisies to reveal themselves along the way. They will needle and bait, but self-deprecation keeps the line open. (Michael Moore, who gave Theroux his start and has also worked in the neo-Nazi lane, has always been more adversarial as an ironist and mischief-maker; his influence can be felt in Sacha Baron Cohen’s work as much as Theroux’s.)

In one memorable scene of Theroux’s film about Afrikaners in South Africa, an episode of Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends from 2000, he asks a white woman who loves Lionel Richie’s music whether she would allow Richie himself to enter her home. She says no, of course, but when Theroux then asks her how she imagines Richie would feel to hear her say this, reminding her that Richie might plausibly see the film they are making, she is thrown for the briefest moment. “Hopefully he’ll respect me for my beliefs,” she says, holding fast. Theroux and Broomfield aren’t really so naive, you think, as to believe that people like this can be swayed by the tender advances of liberal humanism. They have to try, though, as viewers might wish them to in their stead, and what’s more, they know it makes for good footage.

Likeliest of all the dangers in these films is that they will cast the Nazis as entertainment, freak show oddities safely contained on the other side of the screen. This was Theroux’s modus operandi around the time he made Louis and the Nazis in 2003, which brought him to California to interview NSWPP progeny like Tom Metzger of White Aryan Resistance (WAR, a group favored by skinheads) and Prussian Blue, a neo-Nazi folk act comprised of twin teenage girls. Something like the opposite approach can be found in the more recent PBS Frontline series Documenting Hate, which is soberly investigative. Some entertainment-seeking viewers might find it dry, even.

The extent to which any documentary about Nazis is useful as an anti-fascist resource probably lies in what it clarifies about the society that produced and nourished them, more than what it suggests about the motivations and personal deficiencies of individual Nazis themselves. The concern that The California Reich “humanizes” its subjects is misplaced; they are human, obviously. More helpful to examine is the threshold that is alleged to separate “extremism” from the familiar features of conventional liberal order.

The California Reich is more provocative in this respect than some of the films it later inspired. It gestures toward the Nazis’ links to the existing US military and police, along with the patriarchal family. We don’t hear much from the Nazi women, but they are there, standing by their men. “What are you going to be when you grow up?” one of them asks her little boy for the camera. “Policeman,” he chirps. Why? To “kill n—,” he says.

Out of the mouths of babes, then, The California Reich arrives at its nadir. Could anyone doubt, in 1975, that this child’s logic belongs at least as much to the white America in which he already lives as it does to the one his parents want to create? And who, reviewing the last 50 years of police killings in the United States, could go back and tell this boy honestly that his dream can never come true?

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To date, the most controversial documentary of the past year is The Settlers, Theroux’s BBC film about the messianic pioneers of Israeli expansion in the West Bank. The Settlers is a mature work by the standards of what Theroux was doing 25 years ago; it’s no gonzo lark. The force of the film comes from how unguardedly the settlers express their genocidal designs on Palestine—and the unavoidable inference, with the smoke of Gaza mostly off-screen, that the settlers might not be the eccentrics of Israeli society so much as its exemplars. (Corroboration can found in one of the most indelible cinematic images of the last few years: the camp commandant’s radiant back garden beside Auschwitz in Jonathan Glazer’s 2023 film The Zone of Interest; it has already become a kind of cultural shorthand for the blinkered tranquility that accompanies atrocity—one of the most important lessons of the Holocaust. Glazer himself, of course, has pleaded with audiences to think about Israel when they see it.)

Theroux, whose persona is that of an inquisitive naïf, is far more present in his films than Critchlow and Parkes were in The California Reich. Still, The Settlers is one of its descendants. Like The California Reich, The Settlers has been faulted for its depiction of ethnonationalist hate. Zionist critics, predictably, have rejected the film as an example of antisemitic bias at the BBC. Writing in The Spectator, Jonathan Sacerdoti even accused Theroux of “picking on Israeli settlers,” as if they were helpless and harmless victims, rather than eminently worthy subjects of the world’s opprobrium.

The criticisms to take seriously are those of the Palestinians who put themselves in danger by participating in the film. In May, the home of activist Issa Amro, one of Theroux’s interlocutors, was raided by the Israeli military and nearly overrun by a mob of settlers. Another interview subject, Mohammad Hureini, wrote in an editorial for Mondoweiss that he regrets how shallowly the film treats the duration and depth of Zionist oppression. The enormity of the ongoing Nakba, he says, “was left on the cutting room floor.”

On the subject of filmmaking, Hureini continues:

I do not reject the idea of documenting the settlers and their words. The world needs to see how normalized hate and supremacy have become in Israeli society. But any documentary that gives platform to that kind of rhetoric must, with equal seriousness and depth, amplify the stories of those resisting it; not just in the present, but in memory, in history, and in legacy.

A modest demand, to be sure, and one that may distill the responsibility of documentarians working in the tradition of The California Reich. This was the approach taken by Marcel Ophuls—an Angeleno whose family escaped the Holocaust—in The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), about Vichy France, and Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (1988), about the infamous SS officer who fled to Bolivia. (Ophuls’s final project, which he began in 2014 and left unfinished when he died this year at age 97, was to confront the violence of Israeli occupation.)

It’s hard not to wonder how the explanatory power of The California Reich might have been enhanced had Critchlow and Parkes followed a rubric like Hureini’s. Without resorting to black-and-white newsreel footage of the Nuremberg rallies, they might have spoken to Californians who were resisting the NSWPP and what it stood for: émigré Holocaust survivors would have been a powerful choice, but there were other possibilities too.

Consider that alongside its nascent Reich, California in the sixties and early seventies had incubated many of the country’s most perceptive and militant thinkers on the subject of fascism. Angela Davis, Elaine Brown, Ericka Huggins, George Jackson (killed by the state in 1971), and Cedric Robinson, to name a few, were all California figures of this period who addressed their work to the enduring problem of “racial fascism” that had long incarcerated, surveilled, and imperiled Black Americans, albeit under the stars and stripes rather than the swastika. It was that cohort of Black radical thinkers, many of them based in California, who, 50 years later, remain among the most astute diagnosticians of how we got to where we are in this country today.

And what about the people who harried the Nazis out of San Francisco State? These sixties holdouts, as most Americans in 1975 would have derided them, don’t get much airtime; they simply weren’t the co-stars of the film Critchlow and Parkes wanted to make. But rewatching the film in 2025, you wish Critchlow and Parkes had made that film. Today, what makes an American Nazi may be a less mysterious or urgent question than what makes an American anti-Nazi, especially one with the physical courage to confront the enemy in public.

In The Settlers, Hureini objected to what Theroux omitted about, and from, Palestinians—not that Theroux allowed the settlers to talk in the first place. But for the filmmaker soliciting fascists on the West Coast or in the West Bank, the imperative should not be to present “both sides” (so that the audience can do what, make up its mind?). The imperative, instead, is to recognize that victims can take the measure of their oppressors with far greater acuity than the oppressors can of themselves.

Reviewing The California Reich 50 years ago in Film Comment, the great radical critic Amos Vogel found the film “curiously cold” but instructive, he wrote, and accurate in its depiction of the “strange combination of silliness, ominousness, and pathological dogmatism that indeed characterized the prototypes of these sad epigones.”

Vogel knew of what he spoke. Born in 1921 to a family of Austrian Jews, he left Vienna as a teenager shortly before the Anschluss. He came to the United States to study in Georgia, of all places, where Jim Crow segregation reminded him very much of the fetid atmosphere of home. It was during this same period, he once told an interviewer, that he “became more and more disturbed about the way in which the Arab question was being handled by the Zionists. […] I realized I was becoming an anti-Zionist.” To Vogel, the symmetries between these forms of supremacist thought were self-evident. “It’s important to discover that you do not have to be a German to be a Nazi,” he wrote in his review of The California Reich.

Read, and watch, carefully, Vogel reminds us. The necessary discovery to make in these films is not about them.