Northern League (neo-Nazi)

The Northern League is a neo-Nazi organization most active in Britain in the latter half of the 20th century.

Roger Pearson formed the Northern League in collaboration with Peter Huxley-Blythe, who was active in a variety of neo-Nazi groups with connections in Germany and North America (Tauber, 1967, Vol. II, n. 142, 207).

The stated purpose was to save the Nordic race from "annihilation of our kind" and to "fight for survival against forces which would mongrelize our race and civilization" (Pearson, 1959, 2-3). Northern League merged newsletters with Britons Publishing Company, an anti-Semitic publisher and major distributor of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion".

Leading members of the Northern League included the premier Nazi race scientist Hans F. K. Günther, who continued his work in the postwar period under a pseudonym. Other active members included "Mankind Quarterly" founder Robert Gayre and editors Robert E. Kuttner and Donald A. Swan; ex-Waffen SS officer and postwar neo-Nazi leader Arthur Ehrhardt, and a number of postwar British fascists, though even among fascists, the Northern League was considered extremist (Billig, 1979).

Northern League literature was written in the style of scientific racism (e.g., the work of Pearson collaborator Raymond B. Cattell), and their Statement of Aims reflect 19th century conceptions of "Rasse and Volk". Andrew S. Winston of University of Guelph writes in an analysis of this group:

According to the "Aims," Northern Europeans are the "purest survival of the great Indo-European family of nations, sometimes described as the Caucasian race and at other times as the Aryan race." Almost all the "classic civilisations of the past were the product of these Indo-European peoples." Intermarriage with conquered peoples was said to produce the decay of these civilizations, particularly through interbreeding with slaves. "The rising tide of Color" threatens to overwhelm European society, and would result in the "biological annihilation of the sub-species," according to the Northern League. [http://www.ferris.edu/isar/bios/cattell/HPPB/visions.htm]

References

*Billig, M. (1979). "Psychology, Racism, and Fascism." Birmingham: A. F. & R./Searchlight.
*Pearson, R. (1959). 'Editorial: Our third birthday'. "Northern World", 4, 1-4. (copy available in Herbert C. Sanborn Papers, Special Collections, Vanderbilt University)
*Tauber, K. (1967). "Beyond Eagle and Swastika: German Nationalism since 1945" (2 Vols.). Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.