Introduction
The Atomwaffen Division (AWD) was founded in 2015 by Brandon Russell while he was a teenager living in Florida. The name “Atomwaffen” is German for “nuclear weapons.” The group was initially composed of teenage members active on an online forum dedicated to the extreme right. AWD remained largely covert until January 2018, when one of its members was arrested for a hate crime after murdering a gay Jewish college student. AWD operates with a highly decentralized structure in the United States. AWD operates as a network of localized cells, each containing several individuals. Russell’s U.S.-based organization was the first to use the Atomwaffen name and ideology, commonly known as “Siege culture.” Between 2018 and 2020, several European far-right extremist organizations adopted the AWD brand and began operating as AWD affiliates.
2015-2017: Early recruitment online and on college campuses
The Atomwaffen Division (AWD) traces its origins to Iron March, a now-defunct internet forum for neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other members of the extreme right. Founded by a Russian known as “Alexander Slavros,” Iron March was active from 2011 to 2017 and hosted over 1,200 accounts.[6] Brandon Russell, then a teenager living in Florida, founded AWD in June 2015 and used Iron March as a training ground for recruitment and propaganda. Using the screen name “Odin,” Russell attracted followers for the nascent group, which he named the “Atomwaffen Division” and bragged in July 2015 was “almost a militia.”[7] By September, the group had approximately 15 members, mostly teenagers.[8] Many young people came into contact with AWD via online video game communities and became more radicalized over time as they engaged with right-wing extremist content.[9]
Beyond online activism, Russell initially sought to expand AWD by appealing to students and young people. Between 2015 and 2017, AWD members embarked on a recruitment campaign targeting college campuses. They anonymously distributed flyers at universities across the United States, including the University of Central Florida, Old Dominion University in Virginia, Boston University, the University of Chicago, the University of Washington, Texas A&M University, the State College of Florida Manatee–Sarasota, the University of Pennsylvania, Evergreen State College in Washington state, Arizona State University, and the University of Colorado.[10] This recruitment campaign is one of AWD’s earliest major offline activities.
AWD first came to widespread public attention in May 2017 when a member of the group killed two of his compatriots. On May 19, Devon Arthurs, an AWD member who had recently converted to Islam, took three people hostage at gunpoint in a Tampa smoke shop in anger over the U.S. military’s bombings in Muslim countries. No one was injured in the incident. When police arrived, Arthurs revealed that he had earlier killed two of his roommates.[11]
Arthurs lived with three other members of AWD in Tampa, Florida. The apartment housed AWD leader Brandon Russell and AWD members Andrew Oneshuk and Jimmy Himmelman. After Arthurs confessed to killing two of his roommates, law enforcement authorities went to the apartment. There, they discovered that Arthurs had shot and killed Oneschuk and Himmelman, and they learned that the four men had connections to AWD.[12] Police found Russell crying outside the apartment.[13] The story quickly spread on U.S. media.[14] Arthurs later told law enforcement that he committed the murders because the victims had allegedly disrespected his conversion to Islam.[15]
In the apartment and its garage, authorities found homemade fuses, Geiger counters, and explosive and radioactive materials. This included a cooler labeled with the name “Brandon Russell” and filled with hexamthylene triperoxide diamine (HTMD), a highly volatile explosive.[16] The residence was also littered with racist paraphernalia, including a Nazi flag and helmet, a framed photo of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, and copies of books such as Mein Kampf and The Turner Diaries, a key text of the American white supremacy extremist movement.[17] Though released on the day of the killings, Russell was later arrested in a traffic stop when police found guns, body armor, ammunition, and no other luggage in his car.[18] A deputy at the scene stated that he was convinced that a mass shooting had just been foiled.[19] This event marked a turning point in AWD’s history. The raid on AWD’s Tampa apartment earned the group a certain notoriety in the public eye and led to Russell’s arrest, paving the way for a change in the group’s leadership.
In September 2017, Russell pleaded guilty to unlawful possession and storage of explosives. In January 2018, he was sentenced to five years in prison.[20] Following Russell’s arrest and imprisonment, he was replaced as leader of AWD by John Cameron Denton. Denton, who used the aliases “Vincent Snyder” and “Rape” online, took hands-on control of the organization, including its ideological development and propaganda creation.[21] It is unclear how Denton was selected as Russell’s successor and in what capacity he served before assuming command. According to a February 2020 FBI affidavit, Denton was one of the founding members of AWD.[22]
2017-2019: Ideological shifts, increased violence, and international affiliates
The leadership transition began a new phase for AWD. With Denton in charge, the group’s ideology became more extreme. Denton strengthened AWD’s association with James Mason’s accelerationist ideas as outlined in his book SIEGE. “Accelerationism” is the white supremacist idea that extremists must bring about a race war and the collapse of the current political system. According to an AWD-affiliated website cited by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the philosophy of SIEGE “was never implimented [sic] until the year of 2017 when Atomwaffen Division discovered and met James Mason.”[23] Mason, who has a long history of involvement in the U.S. neo-Nazi movement, became something of an ideological leader and advisor to AWD after the group adopted his text.
After Denton took over, AWD moved away from canvassing U.S. college campuses and turned to the production of slick propaganda videos featuring weapons and paramilitary training. He launched a website dedicated to “Siege culture” – the term given to AWD’s Mason-inspired ideology – which AWD hoped to shape the neo-Nazi movement.[24]
Under Denton’s leadership, AWD’s ideology also became increasingly influenced by Satanism, drawing from the beliefs of the British Satanic neo-Nazi organization the Order of Nine Angles (O9A). The group added Satanic texts to its required reading list, including The Devil’s Notebook by Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan; Hostia: Secret Teachings of the Order of Nine Angles, a collection of texts written by O9A members; and Iron Gates, a graphically violent apocalyptic novel published by the Tempel ov Blood, a U.S.-based affiliate of O9A.[25] Neo-Nazi Satanism appears to be a long-term interest for Denton. He made social media postings featuring O9A logos as early as 2014 and 2015, well before he became the leader of AWD.[26] It is unclear if AWD possessed any formal ties to O9A at this time.
AWD’s turn to the occult reportedly alienated some members. An anonymous member of AWD posted a 27-page manifesto condemning AWD’s affinity for O9A’s ideology in January 2018. Others posted messages in AWD’s internal chat room and on the social networking site Gab objecting to Satanism.[27] Nevertheless, Denton appears to have successfully re-oriented the group’s ideology. After the exodus of O9A opponents, the Satanists reportedly solidified their control over AWD’s leadership structure.[28] For example, in 2019, AWD member Corwyn Storm Carver posted photos online of himself with O9A paraphernalia. Carver was reportedly a high-profile member of the organization and was stationed in Kuwait as a Private First Class in the U.S. Army when he posted the photos.[29]
As AWD became more ideologically extreme in 2017 and early 2018, the group increased its use of violence. In September 2017, AWD launched its first “hate camp,” the name the group gives to its secretive paramilitary training programs for AWD members.[30] The debut event took place in the Shawnee State Forest in Illinois. Other training retreats have occurred in Nevada, Texas, and Washington state.[31] The program aims to instruct AWD members in combat and survival skills in preparation for the group’s prophetic race war.[32] The retreats also provide fodder for the group’s propaganda disseminated online.[33]
In August 2017, AWD committed its first apparent attack on a human target not affiliated with the organization. Until this point, the only major attack attributed to a member of AWD was the double-murder of two AWD members committed by Devon Arthurs in May 2017, which may or may not have been sanctioned by the organization. With the embrace of “Siege culture,” AWD began executing more attacks. In August 2017, an unknown number of individuals affiliated with AWD attended the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. There, Vasillios Pistolis, then a lance corporal in the U.S. Marine Corps and a member of AWD, attacked several counter-protesters.[34] AWD members in an online chat room had previously encouraged Pistolis to commit acts of violence at the event.[35] He reported back and bragged, “today cracked 3 skulls open with virtually no damage to myself.”[36] In his attacks, Pistolis utilized a wooden flagpole as a weapon, which bore a custom-designed flag consisting of the Sonnenrad, a circular Nazi symbol, and the Confederate battle flag.[37]
After the August rally, AWD members continued to engage in violence. Individuals affiliated with the group committed three murders between December 2017 and January 2018. Days before Christmas in 2017, Nicholas Giampa, a 17-year-old neo-Nazi and a follower of AWD, shot and killed his girlfriend’s parents in their Reston, Virginia home. The victims, Buckley Kuhn-Fricker and Scott Fricker, had objected to his extremist views and forbidden their daughter from continuing to date Giampa.[38] Though it is unclear if Giampa was formally a member of AWD, an anonymous AWD member confirmed to ProPublica that Giampa was in contact with the organization.[39]
A few weeks later, in January 2018, a 20-year-old AWD member named Samuel Woodward stabbed a man to death in Orange County, California. The victim, Blaze Bernstein, was a 19-year-old gay Jewish sophomore attending the University of Pennsylvania.[40] A former high-school classmate of Woodward, Bernstein represented a double target for AWD due to his sexual orientation and religion. The murder is being prosecuted as a hate crime.[41] Prior to the killing, Woodward attended a three-day AWD “hate camp” in Texas, where he trained in firearms, hand-to-hand combat, and outdoor survival skills.[42] AWD members celebrated the murder, lauding Woodward as a “one man gay Jew wrecking crew” and lamenting only that he’d gotten caught in connection with the group.[43]
The killing of Bernstein in January 2018 exposed AWD to greater public scrutiny. Aside from the May 2017 murders, the group had operated covertly for most of its history. Following Bernstein’s murder, the public interest investigative news outlet ProPublica began publishing a series of articles describing AWD’s activities and revealing the identities of some of its leaders. Drawing on interviews with anonymous AWD members and leaked internal communications, ProPublica published a half-dozen articles. The outlet also collaborated with PBS in the creation of a two-hour documentary on AWD and the rise of violent white supremacy extremism in the United States between January and November 2018.[44] A.C. Thompson, a ProPublica reporter, won a Walter Cronkite Award in 2019 for the project.[45] ProPublica’s work also informed the writing of this profile.
As news of the Atomwaffen Division spread in early 2018, facilitated by ProPublica’s reporting, technology companies began restricting AWD’s access to their services. YouTube, the messaging app Discord, the gaming platform Steam, and the online T-shirt company Inktale banned AWD in February 2018.[46]
Starting in November 2018, AWD began a harassment campaign against various domestic targets. The group employed swatting, the practice of illegally placing false calls to emergency services with the goal of triggering an armed raid by law enforcement on a particular address. Between November 2018 and April 2019, AWD leader Denton and other members allegedly made over 100 swatting calls.[47] Targets of the campaign included U.S. Cabinet members; a historically Black church in Alexandria, Virginia; Old Dominion University in Virginia (the alma mater of AWD member John William Kirby Kelley); and journalists with ProPublica, the investigative news outlet that published reporting on AWD in early 2018 and exposed Denton as its leader.[48] The plot was discovered after the AWD members involved made mistakes, including inadvertently disclosing personally identifiable information online and failing to block a personal cell phone number when placing a swatting call.[49]
As the U.S.-based AWD increased its domestic activity, overseas affiliates of the group began to emerge. Some pre-existing groups declared an affiliation with AWD, while other new groups were founded explicitly as affiliates. For more detailed information on AWD affiliates, please see the “Relationships with Other Groups” section of this profile.
The Sonnenkrieg Division (SKD), which operates in the United Kingdom, announced itself as a new affiliate of AWD in 2018. SKD had split off from the System Resistance Network, an alias of the British neo-Nazi organization National Action (NA), in mid-2018. NA had rejected SKD leader Andrew Dymock and others’ growing interest in Satanism, pedophilia, and rape.[50] These ideas, in addition to murder, became core tenets of SKD’s ideology, and the group announced its affiliation with AWD in mid-2018.[51] The group attracted widespread attention in December 2018 when two teenage members, Michal Szewczuk and Oskar Dunn-Koczorowski, posted threats against the life of Britain’s Prince Harry on the Internet for his marriage to Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, who is of mixed race.[52]
AWD’s German affiliate, known as AWD Deutschland or AWD Germany, also emerged in mid-2018. The group announced its launch in a video featuring a masked individual and an AWD flag in front of a castle where Nazi SS officers trained during the Second World War.[53] AWD Germany has since gained notoriety for its threats against Muslims and Green Party politicians.[54]
In October 2018, the Feuerkrieg Division (FKD) launched as an Estonian affiliate of AWD. FKD soon expanded overseas and established a presence in Belgium, Ireland, western Germany, Latvia, the Netherlands, Norway, Russia, and the United Kingdom.[55] Reportedly operating mostly online, FKD boasts approximately 30 to 70 members.[56] Most members are youth and teenagers, including the group’s anonymous founder, who was revealed in 2020 to be a 13-year old Estonian boy.[57]
AWD continued targeting its usual enemies in 2019, including journalists, Jews, LGBT people, and people of color. In July 2019, AWD left neo-Nazi flyers in various locations around a Detroit suburb, including a Jewish cemetery.[58] In August 2019, AWD member Conor Climo was arrested by the FBI for a plot to bomb a synagogue and gay club in Las Vegas, Nevada.[59]
Beginning in summer 2019, a number of AWD members launched a harassment campaign against journalists. The campaign was known internally as Operation Säule (German for “First Pillar”). Cameron Shea, a member of AWD and of the U.S. branch of the neo-Nazi group the Base, described the project in these terms: “We will be postering journalists [sic] houses and media buildings to send a clear message that we too have leverage over them.”[60] Shea, Taylor Ashley Parker-Dipeppe, Johnny Roman Garza, and AWD Washington state cell leader Kaleb Cole participated in the campaign. They targeted journalists of color, Jewish journalists, and members of the Anti-Defamation League by printing and delivering or mailing threatening posters with imagery of weapons and neo-Nazi symbols.[61] Their antipathy towards journalists stemmed from ProPublica’s series of exposés on AWD in 2018, which revealed Cole’s identity as a high-ranking member of the group.[62] In the wake of ProPublica’s investigation, Cole said in an internal AWD recording that “the matter of these nosy reporters coming into our daily lives, where we work, where we live, where we go in our spare time. We must simply approach them with nothing but pure aggression [...] We cannot let them think they are safe in our very presence alone.”[63]
2019-2020: Crackdown from law enforcement and AWD’s reorganization as the National Socialist Order
In late 2019 and 2020, AWD and its affiliates began to face greater pressure from authorities both in the United States and abroad. In October 2019, law enforcement seized a cache of guns from AWD’s Washington state leader Kaleb Cole. Authorities justified their actions under Washington’s “red flag” law for individuals deemed to pose a high risk to themselves or public safety.[64] In December 2019, Cole and fellow AWD member Aiden Bruce-Umbaugh were stopped in Post, Texas for speeding.[65] During the traffic stop, police found handguns, a knife, rifles, ammunition, and marijuana in the car. This discovery led to Cole being charged with violating a court order associated with the “red flag” law.[66]His case is pending as of August 2020. Bruce-Umbaugh was charged with possession of ammunition and firearms while using a prohibited substance.[67] He pled guilty and was sentenced to 2.5 years in prison in April 2020.[68]
In February 2020, U.S. law enforcement authorities executed a nationwide series of arrests of AWD leaders and members. AWD leader Denton was arrested and charged for his role in AWD’s 2018-2019 swatting campaign, while Cole, Shea, Parker-Dipeppe, and Garza were arrested and charged for their harassment of journalists.[69]
Around the same time as the arrests, Rep. Max Rose (D-N.Y.) introduced a resolution in Congress calling on the U.S. State Department to list AWD’s international affiliates as terrorist organizations.[70] In early March 2020, POLITICO reported that the U.S. Department of State, in its effort to designate at least one white supremacist organization as a terrorist group, was considering AWD.[71] A month later, the State Department designated the Russian Imperial Movement, an ultra-nationalist, white supremacist militant organization based in St. Petersburg, Russia, and its leaders as Specially Designated Global Terrorists.[72] Neither AWD nor any of its affiliates have been designated by the U.S. government as of August 2020.
As U.S. law enforcement continued to crack down on AWD in 2020, the United Kingdom began combatting the group as well. In February 2020, British authorities designated the UK-based AWD affiliate Sonnenkrieg Division as a terrorist organization and followed up in July 2020 with a terrorist designation for the Feuerkrieg Division.[73]
Amid the increasing pressure on AWD, the group’s advisor and ideological leader, James Mason, announced that the group was disbanding. In an audio message released on March 9, 2020, Mason declared that AWD had disbanded, effective immediately, because federal counterterrorism efforts had degraded the organization’s ability to function.[74]Sources familiar with Mason’s voice have indicated that the message sounds authentic.[75] Nevertheless, AWD members appear to have remained active following the announcement.
Two months later, in May 2020, the group publicly revealed a new Russia-based chapter and released Russian translations of its ideological texts.[76] AWD Russia then launched a channel on the encrypted messaging app Telegram and began broadcasting propaganda in Russian, including manifestos from extreme-right terrorists Dylann Roof and Anders Breivik, Mason’s SIEGE, and The Turner Diaries, a foundational anti-Semitic text in the American neo-Nazi movement.[77]
Around this time, a possible AWD splinter group emerged. In June 2020, a secretive organization known as the “RapeWaffen Division” (RWD), came to public attention when two U.S. service members, Ohio National Guard Pfc. Shandon Simpson and Pvt. Ethan P. Melzer, were investigated for their affiliation with it.[78] RWD was organized via a channel on the encrypted messaging app Telegram and claims to be a splinter group of AWD. It is unclear when exactly RWD was founded or if it is a true splinter of AWD.
In late July 2020, members of AWD announced that the Atomwaffen Division had reorganized as the National Socialist Order (NSO). The group posted a message that listed key contributors to the group on American Futurist, a website that supports Mason’s SIEGE. Those listed included Mason and other AWD members.[79] The author(s) of the online post asserted that NSO had learned from the mistakes of AWD, most notably its internal ideological disagreements, such as those over Satanism.[80] Like AWD, NSO’s ideology draws on the principles of SIEGE, calls for the violent overthrow of political systems, and is virulently anti-Semitic.[81] With former AWD leader Denton imprisoned, it remains an open question whether the Satanic aspects of AWD’s ideology that he championed will remain salient.
An anonymous NSO leader interviewed by VICE News in August 2020 said that the group does not intend to commit violence in the near term. Rather, NSO will focus on propaganda and recruitment, exploiting the COVID-19 pandemic, high unemployment, and political polarization in the United States to cultivate a following.[82] NSO has announced measures to thwart counterterrorism efforts and prevent surveillance and infiltration by authorities, including encrypted communications and in-person interviews of new recruits.[83] While no evidence suggests that law enforcement successfully infiltrated AWD, members of the group have in the past posted messages about illegal activities on surveilled channels, which allowed the FBI to build criminal cases.[84]
In September 2020, a male wearing a skull mask was observed placing a sticker over a Black Lives Matter poster that hung in the window of a small business in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The sticker depicted, among other references to Nazism, Adolf Hitler. Authorities also discovered a recruitment email address for the National Socialist Order.[85]
On November 8, 2021, journalist Christopher Miller shared an announcement via Twitter suggesting a resurgence of AWD. The announcement was allegedly shared throughout accelerationist communities on Telegram. A leader of The Base also shared the announcement. The proclamation stated that AWD would be reactivated by its former members. Authors of the post referred to James Mason’s previous statement disbanding the organization as obsolete. The statement blatantly distinguishes AWD and the National Socialist Order as separate organizations. [86]
AWD’s announcement of reactivation was originally shared on the fascist website Das Paradies. A response post appeared on American Futurist. According to the post, James Mason and American Futurist had cut ties with Das Paradies. The post also stated that the new AWD was led by a former member. This member was an alleged associate of AWD founder Brandon Russell. On November 9, 2021, AWD renounced any affiliation with the National Socialist Order, Mason, Russell, and American Futurist. On November 12, a video of James Mason rejecting the new AWD was shared via American Futurist.[87]
In January 2022, Kaleb Cole was convicted on multiple federal charges for leading a plot to harass journalists. Cameron Shea, Johnny Roman Garza, and Taylor Ashley Parker-Dipeppe had previously received prison sentences for conspiring with Cole. Senior members of the FBI stated that they believed their efforts to stop Cole and his co-conspirators prevented them from carrying out violent acts toward their journalist targets.[88]
In June 2022, Canadian authorities in Quebec raided multiple properties suspected of being connected to AWD members. The raids followed a similar operation targeting a Canadian propagandist with connections to AWD in March 2022. In May 2022, a man named Sam Bertrand was charged with attempting to join AWD after he was arrested for defacing an LGBT support center in the Ontario province.[89]
