Fifty-two years ago this Halloween, a 28-year-old Queens native by the name of Danny Burros killed himself, firing .32-caliber bullets into his chest and head.
But this wasn’t just another tragic suicide. To those who knew of Burros’ hate-filled life — and the shocking secret that haunted him — his suicide was viewed as justice served.
In the 1960s, New York City had far more dangerous white-nationalist fanatics than those who marched in the deadly Charlottesville, Va., protests in August. These were extremists who had sworn to exterminate Jews, blacks and Puerto Ricans.
Danny Burros was one of them.
At one point, the printer by trade was one of the leaders of a band of American-born and -bred Hitlerites who were members of the racist and anti-Semitic National Renaissance Party. It was headquartered in a four-story apartment building at 10 W. 90th St.
To prove his anti-Semitic bona fides, Burros proudly carried a small bar of soap wrapped in paper printed with the German words, “Made from the finest Jewish fat,” and he had a portrait painted of himself in full Nazi regalia, with the smokestacks of Auschwitz in the background.
He often bragged about a torture machine he had concocted in his twisted mind: a piano with electrified wires that would deliver shocks to Jewish prisoners, causing them to jump and twitch as the instrument was played.
In Nazi get-up, he and his self-styled storm troopers picketed New York-area movie theaters where the film “Exodus” was showing. They marched in front of the Brooks Atkinson Theatre on West 47th Street to protest a play about the Holocaust.
Burros and his fellow extremists were watched closely by the NYPD’s antisubversive squad, which was on alert for terrorism and hate crimes in that 1960s era of the civil-rights movement.
“We have to watch they don’t go out and kill people,” a squad member said at the time.
Before he joined the NRP, Burros was a leader of his mentor George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party, headquartered in Arlington, Va.
Burros proudly held the title “extermination planner.”
He often picketed outside John F. Kennedy’s White House in full Nazi regalia, carrying signs demanding “Free Speech for Nazis,” denouncing “Jews and N- - - -rs,” and distributing pamphlets that declared, “Gas Communist Traitors.”
Obsessed with Nazi spectacle, he proposed to Rockwell parachuting over New Jersey with his fellow storm troopers, waving Nazi flags. Even Rockwell thought the idea was too off the wall.
Still, for years, Burros had one dream and one dream only for his future: He wanted to be America’s fuhrer.
But Burros also had a frightening secret, one he found so humiliating he would eventually kill himself over its disclosure.
The fanatical extremist who idolized Adolf Hitler and wanted to see all Jews exterminated was, in fact, Jewish himself.
Burros was the only child of lower middle-class religious Jews with Russian roots. His father, George, was a factory worker, his mother, Esther, a department-store clerk.
About a year after his parents married, Dan was born on March 5, 1937, the same day headlines blared that the Nazis in Berlin had called New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia a “lout and scoundrel” after he proposed building a “Hall of Horrors” at the city’s planned 1939 World’s Fair featuring der Fuhrer as a “brown-shirted fanatic.”
After Danny’s birth, the Burros family moved from a simple apartment in The Bronx to one in Richmond Hill, Queens, and were living what they considered the American dream near the end of the Great Depression — just as Hitler was beginning “The Final Solution,” the eradication of Jews.
Years later, when asked why he was so determined to see all the Jews murdered, Burros curiously replied, “We must make the world safe for blond-haired, blue-eyed children [from] the taint of nonwhite blood.”
A chubby, blond-haired, blue-eyed, bespectacled boy, Danny was extraordinarily bright with an IQ of over 150, remembered for earning A’s for his good conduct at PS 12 in Richmond Hill.
Dan avidly attended Hebrew school, was considered a star pupil, and at age 13, at the Orthodox Congregation Talmud Torah of Richmond Hill, had his bar mitzvah. The rabbis believed he would be a rabbi one day.
[Burros] was obsessed with military uniforms and insignia, which he often sketched, along with drawings of Nazi soldiers.
Under Jewish law, his bar mitzvah meant he had become a man accountable for his actions.
But Dan Burros’ actions would be motivated by pure hate. As he reached his later teens, Burros’ bedroom in his family’s small apartment was covered with pictures of German generals. By then, he was a student at John Adams HS in Ozone Park, Queens, home to such alumni as journalist Jimmy Breslin, and actors Jackie Gleason and Jack Lord.
Burros would later say that as a boy he was “disgusted” by his liberal New York Jewish classmates. A conservative high-school history teacher, he would claim, “crystalized” his extreme beliefs.
Today, hate groups recruit on the Internet. In the 1950s, there was the postal system, and the teen Burros began corresponding with German right-wingers and studying the extremist material sent to him by “unreconstructed Nazis.”
At John Adams, Burros studied German, winning a proficiency pin. He was at the top of his class but was kicked out of an honor society because he attacked a student he felt was “inferior.”
He noted in his school yearbook, the Clipper, that he hoped to go to the US Military Academy. He was obsessed with military uniforms and insignia, which he often sketched, along with drawings of Nazi soldiers.
But instead of applying to West Point, he enlisted in the Army and became a gung-ho paratrooper in the crack 82nd Airborne, where he would claim he was radicalized.
Deployed to Little Rock, Ark., during the school-integration crises, he saw troopers with bayonets pointed at whites, and was sickened, believing America was “becoming a left-wing police state.”
Fellow soldiers dubbed him “Der Fuhrer.”
He was eventually discharged for his extremist pronouncements, his “instability,” and faking suicide by taking aspirins.
In the early 1960s, after working as an office-machine operator in the Queens Public Library, Burros moved to Arlington and joined Rockwell’s Nazis. He even lived with Rockwell in party headquarters, a storefront on a main street. Bizarrely, he would bring a Jewish treat — knishes — to party meetings. Despite this, no one ever suspected he was anything but a true Aryan.
Rockwell, who founded the American Nazi Party in the late 1950s, was born near the end of World War I, the son of vaudeville comics whose circle included such radio and TV icons as Jack Benny, Groucho Marx, Benny Goodman and the New York gossip columnist Walter Winchell — all prominent Jews.
To support himself when he wasn’t goose-stepping and denouncing Jews and blacks, Burros worked a menial job at the US Chamber of Commerce in Washington, DC. He was fired for “disciplinary infractions.” Furious, he picketed the government building with fellow Nazi party members.
He was often arrested and fined, and even jailed for a time. But his secret remained well hidden.
More extreme activity came when he pasted swastikas on the DC headquarters of B’nai B’rith, an Israel and human-rights advocacy group.
By then, Burros had risen to national secretary of the American Nazi Party, second in command to Rockwell. But he and the commander feuded. Burros grew “tired of being little more than assistant fuhrer,” said an official of the Anti-Nazi League.
Back in New York, he joined the National Renaissance Party.
In July 1964, he was sentenced to two years in prison for violence during an NRP protest against members of the Congress of Racial Equality who were demonstrating outside a Bronx White Castle restaurant. After his release — he was only in for a few days — he published a hate sheet, “The Battle Organ of Racial Fascism.”
But Burros was about to be toppled from his fascist pedestal.
On Oct. 20, 1965, the House Committee on Un-American Activities named him as a grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan who recently had been appointed chief organizer for the hate group’s New York branch.
A government agent aware of his Jewish birth leaked the explosive intelligence to The New York Times, and on Halloween 1965, the paper published a front-page exposé: “State Klan Leader Hides Secret of Jewish Origin.”
The day the story hit newsstands, Burros was staying in the Reading, Pa., apartment of Roy E. Frankhouser Jr., the 25-year-old grand dragon of the Pennsylvania Klan. Also there were Frankhouser’s girlfriend and another Klansman, Frank W. Rotella, Jr., the king kleagle of the New Jersey KKK, police said.
Rotella told police that Burros went out to get the paper and returned to the apartment agitated. “This will destroy me!” Burros yelled, then ran upstairs and shot himself.
Frankhouser said, “If Burros was really Jewish, it was the best-kept secret since the atom bomb.”
Burros’ elderly Jewish parents identified his body and had it cremated.
His saddened mother, Esther, who knew little about his extremist life, told a reporter, “He was such a good boy.”
Jerry Oppenheimer is a best-selling author and Post contributor whose latest book, “The Kardashians: An American Drama,” was just published. He is working on a book about Nazis in America.
