How Concerned Citizens Drove a Neo-Nazi Out of Rural Maine

Mira Ptacin | The Atavist Magazine | October 2024 | 2,720 words (10 minutes)

This is an excerpt from issue no. 155, “The Crash of the Hammer.”

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The first step in establishing a neo-Nazi compound is to clear and level the land. These sites tend to pop up in rural America, which means that there’s brush to hack down, tree stumps to pull up, and piles of debris to burn. All this work is done to make room for the barracks, kitchens, and meeting halls where modern-day devotees of Adolf Hitler will live, work, and train together.

When Christopher Pohlhaus moved to the forested lot where, like other neo-Nazis on other forested lots before him, he planned to start a fascist revolution, he brought two RVs with him. That meant he had somewhere to bunk down at night. But he didn’t have running water. I can’t say how he bathed when he first arrived; as for other matters of hygiene, perhaps he used the woods.

Pohlhaus’s parcel of 10.6 acres does not have an address. Technically, it’s in Springfield, Maine, a hamlet of fewer than 300 people. The closest city, about an hour’s drive away, is Bangor. That’s where Pohlhaus, a gym rat, eventually joined Planet Fitness. To get home after a session of lifting, showering, and doing whatever else he needed to do, Pohlhaus would take Route 2 north, then turn eastward on Route 6. He would drive to Bottle Lake Road, take a right, and drive about two miles before taking another right on a gravel lane called Moores Road. Eventually, among scattered hunting camps, Trump banners, and “Support the Blue” signs, he would come to a metal gate situated on a dirt road. Behind the gate sat the land of Pohlhaus’s dreams.

Pohlhaus, 37, is a former U.S. marine, an itinerant tattoo artist, and a hardcore white-supremacist influencer. He is loud and hostile, and proud to be both. His voice is pitched surprisingly high, and he has a slight Southern drawl. He has a large body and small bald head; a blue-black tattoo crawls up the right side of his face, from his chin to his forehead. Over the years, Pohlhaus has collected thousands of social media followers, who know him by his nickname: Hammer.

Hammer had been living in Texas for a few years when, in March 2022, he bought the land in Maine. He told his followers that he was going to use it to build a haven, operational center, and training ground for white supremacists. He invited them to join him. Together, he said, they would plant the seed of a white ethnostate, and they would engage in violence, if necessary, to nurture it. “An unarmed man sacrifices his family to the unpredictably [sic] of chaos,” Hammer wrote online in 2021.

Hammer packed his bags and headed north, meeting with various white supremacists along the way. He solicited donations for his new compound in the form of cryptocurrency, and later set up a page on GiveSendGo, a Christian crowdfunding site. He raised close to $10,000 before the campaign was shut down earlier this year.

Once he’d settled in Maine, Hammer kept his followers abreast of his progress breaking ground, frequently posting photos and uploading videos to Telegram. There was Hammer standing next to a pile of freshly chopped wood, snowshoeing through the forest, holding a beer in front of a bonfire. Followers saw him cradling an AK-47 in his arms. (Caption: “All this Slavic war training in the Maine woods has me exhausted!”) Hammer posted footage from a celebration he held with about eight of his followers, where he claimed they sacrificed a goat. Another clip showed Hammer helping a man in a balaclava slice the palm of his hand as part of an initiation ritual.

Hammer appeared excited, optimistic. He was careful—or thought that he was careful—not to reveal his exact location, lest it attract unwanted attention from his enemies, including the media and the FBI. If people wanted to join him at the compound, they could get in touch directly.

But unbeknownst to Hammer, he was being followed. A longtime Mainer was determined to wipe the smirk off the neo-Nazi’s face. Indeed, he hoped to run Hammer out of the state for good.

Maine has fewer than two million residents, most of whom live on a mainland about the size of Ireland. Others, myself included, live on one of the state’s 4,000-plus islands flecking the Atlantic Ocean. Maine is a place of independence and modesty, of irreligious Catholics and liberal conservatives, where the unofficial slogan is “The Way Life Should Be.” It is the country’s number one supplier of blueberries and lobsters, and home to the world’s leading provider of genetically engineered mice. The state’s rocky, rolling landscape is a point of pride—billboards are banned, lest they sully the views from Maine’s roads.

Maine is also the grayest state in America, with a median age of 45. It tends to attract retirees and to retain older residents. One of those residents is Crash Barry. Crash, 56, is a lot of things: a homesteader, a lumberjack, a rabble-rouser. In past lives, he was a McDonald’s grill cook, a clerk at a health-food store, an alpaca herdsman, and a janitor. He is tall and broad-shouldered, with soft eyes and hair the color of rain clouds. In the summer he wears paisley Crocs, size 12, when he isn’t barefoot, which he prefers to be. He is gritty and clever, and speaks in sweeping, unfiltered paragraphs.

Above all Crash is a storyteller. Years ago, for a magazine called The Bollard, he wrote “One Maniac’s Meat,” a series of essays in which he waxed with affection and dark humor about his quest to live more closely with nature. He has authored several books, including the novel Sex, Drugs & Blueberries. (Amazon synopsis: “Failed Portland rocker Ben Franklin moves Down East with his poet wife to start a new life. Desperate for cash, Ben signs on for the Maine blueberry harvest where he’s lured into a seamy world of sex and drugs that could lead to his downfall.”) Crash has also published a memoir, Tough Island, which recounts the years he spent 20 miles out to sea on Matinicus, Maine’s most remote inhabited island, working as a sternman on a lobster boat with “resourceful individuals and scoundrels.”

I first met Crash about a decade ago, when we were both  invited to compete in a live storytelling event in Portland called Literary Death Match. He arrived with a large wicker basket filled with cannabis, which he’d cultivated himself. This wasn’t to bribe the judges. Crash just wanted to share his harvest, spread the love. He handed the basket to a person in the front row and invited everyone to take a bud and pass the rest along. He was a force on stage, both in stature and in performance—he has the physicality you’d expect of someone who works in the woods, and he has a background in improv comedy. By the time Crash finished presenting the story he’d prepared for the event, the basket of weed was empty.

These days, Crash still spends a lot of time around cannabis—his wife grows it near their homestead in the western hills of Maine. When Crash isn’t outdoors tending to his land, he’s often researching people he calls the “sewer-dwelling monsters of New England.” People like Hammer.

For years, Crash has been doing the dirty work for the rest of us, documenting pockets of hate in America. He first started tracking fascists as a journalist in 2003, going undercover to report on the World Church of the Creator, a white-supremacist cult that promoted “racial holy war.” (The WCOTC collapsed in 2004, after its leader was convicted of solicitation of murder—he asked someone who turned out to be a government informant to kill a federal judge.) Crash got back on the beat in earnest in 2017, amid a surge of far-right recruiting and organizing after Donald Trump was elected president.

Crash isn’t an armchair reporter. He isn’t content to merely gather information online—though he does plenty of that, going down rabbit hole after rabbit hole. When he can he tails people, sometimes in disguise, and reports what he learns in his newsletter, The Crash Report; on social media; and on his podcast, The Crash Program. He focuses his energies on bad guys in his own backyard. “If I didn’t limit myself to Maine, I would never get anything done,” Crash told me. “There are just so many of them.”

With his podcast cohost, Andy O’Brien, he exposed Tom Kawczynski, the town manager of Jackman, in the western part of the state, for espousing white-supremacist views. A few weeks after Kawczynski was booted from office, Crash donned a long wig and hid recording devices near a table at a Thai restaurant, where Kawczynski and a collection of like-minded folks planned to talk about their grand plans for establishing an all-white community. (Crash knew about the meeting because he’d posed as a man named Walt—“one of my numerous online alter egos”—to get into Kawczynski’s good graces.) Crash later turned his attention to Larry Lockman, an arch-conservative state representative and the founder of the Maine First Project, which seeks to defund sanctuary cities, eliminate the state income tax, and ban “political indoctrination” in public schools, among other objectives. Crash has also covered local chapters of Moms for Liberty and the work of anti-trans zealots.

Hammer is different from Crash’s other subjects: He is a virulent white supremacist in the vein of onetime WCOTC acolytes. In 2020, while living in San Antonio, Hammer burst onto the right-wing scene when he created an Instagram account that mainly shared hateful memes; it was eventually banned. He created another Instagram account, which was also banned, then another, and so on. Eventually he pivoted to Telegram, then Odysee, BitChute, Gab, and other dark corners of the internet that tolerate neo-Nazi chatter. He launched a Web-based talk show, Hammerstream, in which he exhorted the dominance of whiteness and the importance of physical fitness. He summoned white people to a “last stand, a righteous war” against those who “call for the destruction of their birthright and posterity.” He also peddled propaganda and swag: books by or about Hitler, swastika flags and fitted caps, and “Hammer Shades”—Oakley knockoffs available for $25.95 a pop.

By 2021, Hammer’s popularity had grown to the point that he was able to launch a membership-based organization called Blood Tribe, or Blutstamm; Hammer is fond of German terminology. Blood Tribe joined a bewildering array of neo-Nazi groups active in the U.S. today: the Goyim Defense League, Werewolf 88, Aryan Freedom Network, and the Nationalist Social Club (often styled as NSC-113), to name a few. While these bands of fascists hold the same core beliefs about racial superiority and the pressing need to protect Western civilization, some venture into more obscure territory. Blood Tribe subscribes to Odinism, a neo-pagan faith that honors ancient Norse gods. Some neo-Nazis appropriate the religion to celebrate the white race, which they contend originated in Northern Europe. Ron McVan, one of the most prominent ideologues of this bigoted variant, which is sometimes called Wotanism, has described it as “an ancestral faith that puts race first” and “the inner voice of the Aryan soul.”

Hammer frequently refers to himself as a “son of Wotan,” and the tattoo emblazoned on his face is runic text that spells “Wotan.” He also flirts with esoteric Hitlerism, a fringe belief system holding that Hitler was a deity. “I believe he was an incarnation of Wotan,” Hammer once said on Telegram.

Hammer insists that Blood Tribe is more hardcore than other white-supremacist groups. (This is a claim many fascist organizations make in relation to one another: We’re better neo-Nazis than you are.) To prove his group’s preeminence, Hammer established a vetting system for aspiring members to weed out those he called “snakes” and “fragile people.” In Telegram chats that the group calls the Camps, hopefuls haze one another—think hypermasculine taunting and verbal abuse. “Expect confrontation,” a Telegram announcement about the Camps reads. Wannabe members who are deemed worthy receive an invitation to join Blood Nation, a private chat group. Participants may then be approved to attend Blood Tribe events in real life.

Reportedly, only a select few members become part of the organization’s inner circle, a privilege commemorated by rubbing one’s blood on a spear shaft. According to Hammer, this unites an initiate with the “bros of the past and bros of the future.” Should any of his lieutenants be so brazen as to challenge him for the group’s top job—Hammer calls himself Blood King, or Blutkönig in German—they may do so in a duel with weapons of Hammer’s choosing. “The likelihood of that being legal in this country, I don’t know,” Hammer admitted during a live-streamed meeting to discuss the group’s constitution. “Maybe you could go to, like, some international waters.” (Presumably, this has yet to occur.)

Women are not permitted to join Blood Tribe. Like a hastily scribbled sign on a boys’ treehouse, an invitation to the Camps declares, “No girls allowed.” Hammer doesn’t trust women. It’s fair to say that he doesn’t even like them, especially if they’re white and liberal. “I do find them to be enemies to us,” Hammer has said. “They should be treated as such.” Hammer promotes claiming women as “war brides,” which involves taking away the “rights and control of how their reproductive system is to be utilized.” To his mind, stripping women of their bodily autonomy, and deciding when and how they have children, is a masculine imperative and an urgent matter of racial survival.

What made Hammer this way? It’s hard to say. Radicalization can be a circuitous process. He was born and raised in a middle-class Pentecostal household in Baltimore. As a teen he was devout, a youth group leader. At some point his family moved to Mississippi, after which his parents split up. He went to boarding school for a year, then dropped out and joined the Marines, serving two years stationed in Japan and another two in California. After that he scraped together a living by tattooing, mostly swastikas and other racist symbols. He considers this “a unique niche that I’ve got cornered.” (I tried for several weeks to make contact with Hammer, who openly disdains the media, but only hit dead ends. I pieced together a portrait of him from publicly available source material, including social media videos, chat transcripts, and interviews he’s given to like-minded individuals. When he was reached for comment during the fact-checking process, Hammer declined to answer questions.)

Crash Barry refers to Hammer and his Blood Tribe brood as “chuds,” from the acronym “cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers.” The term is from a 1984 sci-fi horror movie, the plot of which revolves around several New Yorkers, including a cop and a homeless-shelter manager who team up to investigate a slew of disappearances, people who it turns out were killed by sewer-dwelling CHUDs. That’s how Crash sees Hammer—a lowlife, a bottom-feeder. “I’ve been following assholes like him for years. And when you dig down deep into these guys, their most core belief is misogyny. They’re like roided-out orcs,” Crash told me. “They look back at this ‘idealistic’ time when women were essentially property. Perhaps Hammer expected things to be easy, and that’s why he is so full of hate.”

Crash and his wife, Shana, are madly in love. When I met her, she wore gardening clothes and a brimmed hat, still dressed from her job at a nursery. She knows everything there is to know about medicinal plants. She also writes, sings, and records music. Crash sent me one of her tracks—she sounds a little like Edie Brickell—about a pink whale that doesn’t want to be hurt by humans. Crash and Shana have a production booth in their home where she records her songs and he produces his podcast.

Crash has been following Hammer for nearly two years. He has pored over Hammer’s videos and photos to determine where they were shot. He has examined public records and genealogical information. (Crash told me that, based on some sleuthing he did with a volunteer genealogical researcher, he thinks Pohlhaus’s great-great uncle once removed might have been Jewish and sent to a concentration camp.) And he has tracked Hammer’s movements carefully, hoping to understand the one that to Crash mattered most: his relocation to Maine.