Bruder Schweigen

IN SEPTEMBER 1983, the Bruder Schweigen (also known as the Silent Brotherhood or The Order) was formed by Robert “Robbie” J. Matthews in Washington state. Matthews had been born in Marfa, Texas, but his family had been forced to move to Phoenix, Arizona, when the dry goods business owned by his father, John, collapsed. As a youth, Matthews became concerned with the threat of communism to the United States, especially in 1964 when conservative icon Senator Barry Goldwater from Arizona ran for the presidency on the Republican Party ticket. Matthews fell under the influence of the John Birch Society, founded in 1958. The society was named for U.S. Captain John Birch, who was shot by the Chinese communists while on a mission in Suchow, China, in August 1945. American far-right conservatives consider Birch to be the first casualty of the new Cold War.

As he matured, Matthews also came under the influence of Richard Butler and his Aryan Nations movement, with its headquarters in Hayden Lake, Idaho. By 1980, the movement, with its philosophy rooted in the Christian Identity faith, had become the magnet for many of those who felt their affairs were no longer controlled by a loyal administration in Washington, D.C., but by the Zionist Occupation Government (ZOG), a conspiratorial group that served as a thinly disguised front for what they considered to be world Jewry. Matthews attracted the attention of the leadership of the Aryan Nations and kindred groups when he vocally confronted opposing demonstrators at an Aryan Nations rally in Spokane, Washington, in 1983.

Matthews was an avid reader of The Turner Diaries, a novel by William Pierce that described the making of a white resistance movement against what he perceived to be the mixing of white blood with that of “inferior” races and against the increasingly anti-American government in Washington, D.C. An excerpt from The Turner Diaries shows the flavor of the book: “It is now a dark and dismal time in the history of our race. All about us lie the green graves of our sires, yet, in a land once ours, we have become a people dispossessed.” Inspired by the group in The Turner Diaries called The Order, formed by a fictional man called Earl Turner, Matthews decided in 1983 to form his own. The name Bruder Schweigen came from a history of the Nazi German SS of Heinrich Himmler, a group modeled after the Jesuits, the Society of Jesus, which has had a great influence on America's far right. The full title of the book, When Alle Bruder Schweigen (When All the Brothers Are Silent) came from a line in a poem by German soldier Max von Schenckendorf, who had fought in the 1813 German war of liberation against Napoleon. The full line, according to Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhart, reads (translated): “When all our brothers keep silent, and worship false Gods, we will keep our faith.” The influence of the first of the Old Testament Ten Commandments, something intrinsic to the Christian Identity faith, is also evident: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” in the King James version of the Holy Bible. Matthews translated Bruder Schweigen as “the Silent Brotherhood.” Among its more prominent members would be David Lane, Richard Scutari, Richard Kemp, and Gary Yarborough. As of December 2003, all were believed to be in prison.

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