Dan Burros

Daniel Burros (March 5, 1937 – October 31, 1965) was an American neo-Nazi affiliated with several far-right organizations. Burros was at one point the third highest ranking member of the American Nazi Party, and later a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in New York. Within the far-right movement, Burros was known for the severity of his antisemitism. He edited several neo-Nazi periodicals and publications, including his magazine The International Nazi Fascist, which became popular with neo-Nazis. When The New York Times published an article revealing that he was Jewish, Burros killed himself.

Born to a Russian Jewish family in the Bronx, Burros was enrolled in Hebrew school in Richmond Hill, where his bar mitzvah was held. He became antisemitic as a teenager. After serving in the Army for several years, he was discharged under honorable conditions in 1958 and joined the American Nazi Party in 1960. In 1961, Burros left the party alongside his close friend John Patler. Patler and Burros moved to New York and founded a splinter group, the American National Party, and a magazine, Kill! Soon after they had a falling out, their group and magazine failed, and Patler returned to the American Nazi Party. Influenced by fascist ideologue Francis Parker Yockey's book Imperium, Burros joined James H. Madole's neo-Nazi National Renaissance Party in 1963. After a dispute with Madole, he left the group and became an Odinist.

In 1965, Burros was recruited into the Ku Klux Klan by Roy Frankhouser, and quickly became the King Kleagle and the Grand Dragon of the New York chapter of the Ku Klux Klan's United Klans of America. On October 31, 1965, his Jewish heritage was exposed to the public by American journalist McCandlish Phillips, who published an article about Burros in The New York Times. Some hours after the article was published, Burros fatally shot himself in Frankhouser's home. His suicide was widely publicized; The New York Times received both criticism and praise for running the story. A biography of Burros, One More Victim, was written by A. M. Rosenthal and Arthur Gelb in 1967, and his life was the basis for the 2001 film The Believer.