{"id":202332,"date":"2026-09-07T07:47:45","date_gmt":"2026-09-07T15:47:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=202332"},"modified":"2026-09-07T08:06:39","modified_gmt":"2026-09-07T16:06:39","slug":"the-carolyn-yeager-set","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=202332","title":{"rendered":"Carolyn Yeager’s Career in National Socialism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Carolyn Elizabeth Yeager came to National Socialism and Holocaust denial late in life. She has written<\/a> that she was born in June 1941 while Hitler was at the height of his power, and elsewhere identifies June 29 as her birthday. Her parents<\/a> were Stephen A. Yeager and Barbara J. Schillinger Yeager, both born in Illinois. All four grandparents came from German families originating in Sanktanna, then a German settlement in Hungary. Yeager eventually made this ancestry central to her identity. She has published genealogies taking the J\u00e4ger, Schmidt, Schillinger and Reck lines back into eighteenth-century German-speaking Central Europe.<\/p>\n

The ideological Carolyn Yeager<\/a> appears to have been largely a creation of her later adulthood. Her own retrospective says that she became increasingly interested in Germany, World War II and the Holocaust beginning around 2005. That date matters. She was already in her sixties. In a 2014 interview with Lana Lokteff<\/a>, she discussed an earlier life that included work as a professional artist, something listeners who had known her only through political broadcasting said they had not known. She also described family arguments about Hitler that she remembered from childhood. Her father and grandfather disagreed about him, which means she did not grow up inside a uniformly Nazi household.<\/p>\n

Her private life had also long since taken its course. Yeager says she was married to Larry Kahant<\/a> from September 1971 until April 1981. The marriage resurfaced decades later because Rodney Martin tried to portray Kahant\u2019s surname as evidence that he was Jewish. Yeager responded by publishing photographs and a defense of her former husband. <\/p>\n

The political break seems to have occurred during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Her surviving writings from 2007 are National Socialist<\/a>. In \u201cWomen and National Socialism,\u201d written that May, she argued that women should understand motherhood and racial reproduction as their highest social roles and defended National Socialism against feminist criticism. Another surviving essay from April 2007, \u201cBlood, Sweat and Soil,\u201d connects gardening, self-sufficiency, nature and ethnic rootedness. These early pieces show that her politics initially included a substantial cultural and sex-role component alongside race.<\/p>\n

Her first organizational home<\/a> appears to have been Bill White\u2019s American National Socialist Workers Party. Secondary accounts place her as the ANSWP\u2019s Texas state leader from April through August 2007 and as an assistant editor of its National Socialist magazine. Yeager\u2019s own 2014 retrospective confirms that her movement history began in January 2007 with \u201cBill White and his ANSWP and National Socialist magazine.\u201d She did not remain an organization woman for long. Her later career was overwhelmingly independent.<\/p>\n

The decisive turn came when German history replaced contemporary organizing as the center of her work. In 2008 she met Wilhelm Kriessmann<\/a> online. Kriessmann was an Austrian-born former Luftwaffe officer who had lived through the Third Reich and war. The two developed an unusually productive collaboration. Yeager edited his autobiographical writings and worked with him on translating sections of Hermann Giesler\u2019s memoir Ein Anderer Hitler<\/em>. Portions appeared in The Barnes Review between 2008 and 2011. She later created a permanent online Kriessmann archive from documents, photographs and writings he had sent her.<\/p>\n

A 2009 trip to Germany and Poland accelerated her movement toward Holocaust denial. In March 2010 The Barnes Review published her 48-page Auschwitz: The Underground Guided Tour. Yeager presented observations from Auschwitz-Birkenau as evidence against the established history of the camp. These claims place her squarely within Holocaust denial. \u201cRevisionism\u201d is her preferred term, but the distinction matters because her central assertions include rejection of the well-established mass murder of European Jews in homicidal gas chambers.<\/p>\n

March 2010 also transformed Yeager from a writer into a broadcaster. She launched The Heretics\u2019 Hour on the Voice of Reason Network on March 1. By March 2013<\/a> she was celebrating its 150th episode. The show evolved from a recorded one-hour program into a live two-hour broadcast. For several months in 2011 she simultaneously hosted a daily program, The Revisionist Report, on Republic Broadcasting Network. Radio gave her something print had not. It made her a node through which a remarkable collection of white nationalists, National Socialists, Holocaust deniers and eccentric revisionist researchers encountered one another.<\/p>\n

Bradley Smith became another important relationship<\/a>. In July 2010, with assistance from Smith and the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust, Yeager established Elie Wiesel Cons the World. Over the next six years she says she wrote nearly 130 articles scrutinizing Wiesel\u2019s biography, memoirs, photographs and Auschwitz identification. Her thesis that Wiesel had fabricated his concentration-camp history is unsupported by the historical record, but the project became one of the largest sustained bodies of her work. She eventually closed the dedicated site at the end of 2021.<\/p>\n

The White Network was the high point of her institutional ambition. Yeager says she conceived it in early 2012 after becoming dissatisfied with Voice of Reason. She wanted a broadcasting network restricted to whites. TANSTAAFL, the pseudonymous programmer behind Age of Treason, possessed the technical skills she lacked. They created The White Network<\/a> and launched it in May 2012. Its slogan was \u201cWhites talking to Whites about White interests.\u201d Yeager transferred The Heretics\u2019 Hour there and added other programming while TANSTAAFL built and maintained the technical infrastructure.<\/p>\n

Their partnership lasted less than two years. In April 2014 TANSTAAFL concluded that Yeager had moved away from the white-nationalist mission they had agreed upon and shut down new programming without consulting her. Yeager believed the opposite. She argued that TANSTAAFL<\/a> had become rigidly attached to an American white-nationalist abstraction while she was moving toward a more explicitly German and ethnonational conception of identity. The breakup became extraordinarily bitter. Each accused the other of betraying the project. Yeager created a permanent site devoted partly to documenting her version of the collapse.<\/p>\n

By the mid-2010s Yeager was increasingly uncomfortable with generic \u201cwhite nationalism.\u201d She cared more about ethnicity, nations and Germans in particular. In 2014 she devoted a two-hour program to the differences among race, ethnicity and ideology<\/a>. In 2017 she attacked the alt-right<\/a> because it accepted Jews as participants and generally accepted the historical reality of the Holocaust. She criticized Richard Spencer, Greg Johnson, Jared Taylor, Kevin MacDonald, Red Ice and others from a position considerably more uncompromising on Jews and Hitler.<\/p>\n

Her relationship to Hitler also became less ambiguous. By 2019 she was openly calling him \u201cthe greatest German,\u201d describing him as a source of continuing inspiration and writing that she had been born into a world he was \u201cpowerfully influencing.\u201d Whatever ambiguity the word \u201crevisionist\u201d might create disappears here. Yeager became an explicit admirer of Adolf Hitler and defender of National Socialism.<\/p>\n

The other unusual feature of her career is the sheer number of relationships that turned into public feuds. Rodney Martin went from guest and movement colleague to the subject of lengthy investigations<\/a> into his education, employment and biography<\/a>. TANSTAAFL went from trusted partner to \u201ccoward and cur.\u201d Wayne Prante went from someone who approved of her attack on Martin to the subject of a Yeager expos\u00e9. Giacomo Vallone, later known as Jack Sen<\/a>, sought an alliance with her before she decided she wanted nothing to do with him. Deanna Spingola provided Yeager with airtime before Yeager concluded that Spingola\u2019s judgment had become so poor that she should leave broadcasting.<\/p>\n

Fredrick T\u00f6ben is the rare case where Yeager admitted her own role<\/a>. She met the Australian Holocaust denier in person in 2010 and remembered them as \u201cquite good friends.\u201d They later became estranged for more than three years before his death in 2020. Looking back, Yeager attributed the rupture partly to her \u201cown tendency toward intolerance.\u201d That may be the best single autobiographical sentence for understanding her movement history.<\/p>\n

The feuds were not random. Yeager\u2019s method demanded consistency. Once she decided that some proposition was true, compromise became evidence of weakness or dishonesty. Mark Weber\u2019s retreat from aggressive Holocaust denial became intolerable. Kevin MacDonald\u2019s unwillingness to make Holocaust denial central became a problem. White nationalists who admitted Jews, National Socialists who criticized Hitler, Hitler admirers who treated Table Talk as unreliable, and broadcasters who continued giving airtime to people Yeager considered frauds all became potential targets. Her archive reads partly as historical research and partly as an accumulating record of ideological boundary enforcement.<\/p>\n

At the same time, she did serious archival work by the standards of an independent amateur researcher. The conclusions were often driven by her ideological priors, but the work ethic was real. She collected documents, compared editions, traced genealogies, translated German material with collaborators, preserved private archives, interviewed elderly Germans and Austrians, and spent years organizing the papers of Kriessmann and the Wenger family. After Kriessmann\u2019s death in December 2012, she preserved his papers online. Willy Wenger later provided her with his brother Leopold\u2019s wartime diaries, photographs and letters, which she also organized and published.<\/p>\n

This culminated in The Artist Within the Warlord<\/em><\/a>, published in 2017 under the names Carolyn Yeager and Wilhelm Kriessmann. It assembled their translation and commentary on selections from Hermann Giesler\u2019s Ein Anderer Hitler. Giesler had been one of Hitler\u2019s favored architects. The project suited Yeager perfectly because it attempted to recover a private, cultured and aesthetically serious Hitler from a memoir written by someone who knew him personally.<\/p>\n

Yeager spent her later public years near Kerrville, Texas. By then the operation was increasingly a one-woman archive. The Southern Poverty Law Center listed carolynyeager.net as a white-nationalist entity<\/a> in Kerrville in its 2015 survey, although critics of the SPLC<\/a> later pointed out that calling a single-person website a \u201cgroup\u201d exaggerated what was there. That criticism is fair as a matter of organizational scale. Yeager\u2019s influence came from publishing and broadcasting.<\/p>\n

Her output gradually diminished. On January 1, 2024<\/a>, at eighty-two, Yeager announced that she was ending active work on the website. She wrote that she had been receiving signs that it was time to \u201cbow out.\u201d The site now describes her as \u201cNow Retired but Still Readable.\u201d Her archive remains online. A later retrospective from one of her long-term collaborators likewise described her as in her eighties and having stopped writing.<\/p>\n

Yeager lived most of her adult life outside extremist politics, married and divorced, pursued artistic interests, and only in her sixties entered the organized far right. From about 2005 through 2010 she moved rapidly from curiosity about German history to National Socialism and Holocaust denial. Between 2010 and 2015 she became a prolific Internet broadcaster and movement connector. After the destruction of The White Network, her work became more solitary, more German-centered, more openly Hitlerian and more concerned with policing the beliefs of people ostensibly on her own side.<\/p>\n

She created a small intellectual world around herself and then repeatedly expelled people from it when they failed her tests of historical or ideological consistency. Her career is a study in late-life radicalization followed by progressive purification. The coalition gets smaller as the doctrine becomes more exact. By the end, the website and archive were almost the perfect political institution for Carolyn Yeager because she could run them alone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Carolyn Elizabeth Yeager came to National Socialism and Holocaust denial late in life. She has written that she was born in June 1941 while Hitler was at the height of his power, and elsewhere identifies June 29 as her birthday. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[605,196,29615],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-202332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anti-semitism","category-holocaust","category-nationalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=202332"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202332\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":202340,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202332\/revisions\/202340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=202332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=202332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=202332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}