Karl Hand
Karl Hand (born November 26, 1950) of Buffalo, New York was a leader of the National Socialist Liberation Front and David Duke's Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
Rebel with a Cause
The second of three children born to Karl E. Hand Sr. and Eleanor Leocadia Reszel, Hand is of German, Irish, and Polish descent. Though born in Buffalo the family moved to a town near Ripley, Pennsylvania in his early years. He participated in Boy Scouts, played basketball and football, and partook in debate team. Raised a Roman Catholic, he attended parochial school for a time, and it was there that he first challenged the powers that be, arguing contra a politically correct nun that the Holocaust was logistically impossible. The youth's family life fractured with a divorce and a move back to Buffalo. He became involved in a gang, leading his own unit for a time but was ultimately repelled by the drug scene and left.
Hand had always been suspected the communist sympathies of the New Left, but credits his political transformation to Frank Britton's Behind Communism, which he acquired via a National Socialist White People's Party bookstore. Later devouring George Lincoln Rockwell's White Power, Cox's White America, and Mein Kampf, Hand joined the party and became an aggressive activist in the National Socialist Liberation Front, its youth wing, often clashing with communists during leafleting and other work. Later he left the NSWPP and joined the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, where he would serve as National Director, the second in command to David Duke. He edited the KKK newspaper The Crusader and the internal periodical KKK Action. In 1980 he was married, with the former KKK Grand Dragon Robert E. Miles presiding and Tom Metzger as his best man, in a ceremony faithful to SS rubrics.
In 1986 Hand shot a Negro who had been harassing his wife, and went to prison. Despite his chivalry his marriage fell apart during the sentence. Destitute, during his incarceration he conceived the idea for the Racial Nationalist Party of America, and upon his release founded the group, which he currently heads.
