Richard ButlerThe death, at the age of 86, of the elder statesman of America's white supremacists, Pastor Richard Butler, marks a generational shift in the movement's leadership, and possibly an ideological switch from its distorted version of Christianity towards Scandinavian paganism.
Butler, head of his self-created Church of Jesus Christ Christian, and its political wing, the Aryan Nations, presided over his 20-acre "world headquarters of the white race" in Idaho from 1974 to 2000, when he lost a law suit and was forced into bankruptcy.
His church then fragmented. Within two years, it was facing competition from a rival church in Pennsylvania, a move that seemed to end the ailing Butler's dream of establishing a "white quarter" in the US Pacific north-west. Despite apparently having lost everything, he continued to live in a house bought for him by a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, though he did little more than update his website.
A younger generation, typified by the skinheads ardently recruited by Butler and the racist ideologue William Pierce, whose book inspired the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, seemed keener on the cult of Odin, as favoured by their fellow neo-Nazis in Europe.
This Scandinavian supreme god and creator offered a more exciting myth - as well as rock music - than the bizarre Christian theology promoted by Butler and his kind. He preached that the "Aryan" nations of northern Europe and their American and Canadian emigrants were really the 10 lost tribes of Israel.
Jews, he claimed, were descended from a union between Eve and Satan, and non-white people were subhuman and lacked a soul. Ironically, this mish-mash of racist nonsense had its origins in the 19th century British-Israelite movement.
In the US, Butler's neo-Nazi theories had a wider influence than his supporters' tiny numbers suggested. He helped to foment racial violence in American jails with his so-called prison ministry, though unlike many of his followers, he himself was never incarcerated.
In 1988, a trial for seditious conspiracy against the US government ended in his acquittal, along with that of 13 others.
Butler was born in rural Colorado, the son of an Anglo-German machinist and his wife, and, at an early age, listened to his father's anti-Semitic stories.
Years later, he recalled reading, at the age of 11, a magazine story entitled The Red Napoleon about a mixed-race Bolshevik conquest of the US, which left a deep impression on him.
The great depression forced his family to move to Los Angeles, and, after high school, he studied aeronautical engineering at Los Angeles City College. He found a job with an aviation company, and was sent to Bangalore to service aircraft for the Royal Indian Air Force.
As an honorary officer he was given a Hindu batman, and, the story goes, the two became friends, with Butler listening avidly to his servant's talk of the caste system and racial purity.
Returning to the US in 1941, Butler married the former Betty Litch. They had two daughters, who later rejected their father's politics, but Betty remained loyal until her death in 1995.
After the war, which Butler spent working in military aviation technology in America, he got a job at the Lockheed plant in Lancaster, near Los Angeles. Then, in 1961, he and Betty began attending the Church of the Anglo-Saxon Christian Congregation, headed by Dr Wesley Swift, a former Ku Klux Klan member.
Swift taught Butler about the Christian Identity movement, while his political mentor was Swift's friend, Col William Potter Gale, a former aide to Gen Douglas MacArthur and a founding member of the violently racist Posse Comitatus.
Swift then formed the white supremacist Christian Defence League, of which Butler became national director. By 1968, he had been ordained by a mail-order theology school.
In 1974, with money he made from a patent, Butler moved to an old farmhouse at Hayden Lake, Idaho, founded his own church, built a chapel decorated with a bust of Hitler, installed guards on a watchtower, and posted a notice declaring "Whites Only" at the gate.
Butler's ruin began when his guards fired on a mother and son who had paused outside his church in 1998. The Southern Poverty Law Centre, a powerful human rights group, mounted a civil law suit on behalf of the pair, and won an award of $6.3 million in 2000. The compound was bought by a Massachusetts human rights group, and Butler moved into his benefactor's house. His days as the most visible white supremacist in America were over.
Richard Gernt Butler, neo-Nazi, born February 1918; died September 2004