We are republishing Nate’s article on Atomwaffen members Ryan Hatfield and William Stoetzer as it is no longer accessible on his website after his passing. We are honored to have worked with him on this research. RIP Nate.
An update for Ryan Hatfield and Atomwaffen Division can be found here.
Treasure trove of user data released by anti-fascist hackers lead to identities of scores of clandestine domestic terrorists
By Nate Thayer
December 5, 2019
The real identities of more than a dozen clandestine members of the Atomwaffen Division white supremacist domestic terror group have been uncovered after a month long investigation.
Long emboldened by their anonymity, using aliases from behind computer screens, their identities unknown to their communities, employers, law enforcement, and family and friends, the new revelations mean the true identities for many members of the Atomwaffen Division are now known, including the state cell leaders of Colorado, Virginia, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Alabama, Massachusetts, Ohio, Washington State, South Carolina, Arizona, Texas, and members from these and other states.
Atomwaffen Division is a white supremacist domestic terror group which has been active in at least 32 states and idolize Adolph Hitler, long-time American Nazi figure James Mason, and Charles Manson, hold armed live fire training “Hate Camps” in national forests and deserts, and seek societal collapse through ‘lone wolf’ school and church shootings and other random terror attacks to spark a race war and collapse of government. Many members are also practicing Satanists. The group is known to be responsible for at least 5 murders since 2017 as well as numerous aborted terror plots.
“It is just a collection of ‘lone wolves’ with very nihilistic views. I don’t think they have more than 40-50 people,” one former AWD cell leader told a reporter. “Their end game is pure and unadultered destruction. It is a death cult.”
The group targets young boys for recruitment over the internet and is comprised of mostly dissaffected middle-class white youth, many still in high school and rife with teenage angst, struggling with sexual and other identity issues, and hostility towards girls, parents, and authority.
“New recruits are not just sign up and boom you’re in. Vetting process is something that weeds out spooks,” wrote AWD founder and national leader, Brandon Russell in October 2015 on the online Iron March forum where many fascists congregated to organize. “Also very careful consideration is taken when recruits are above certain age.”
In May 2017, Russell was arrested after a double murder of two AWD members by a third AWD member at Russell’s Tampa Florida home.
It was then AWD leader Devon Arthurs, 18, murdered two other members, Andrew Oneschuk, 18, and Jeremy Himmelman, 22, both of Massachusetts, in the suburban Tampa, Florida, apartment they all shared with Russell, 21. Investigators found extensive bomb making materials, including radioactive isotopes, large amounts of bomb making chemicals, fuses, maps, and documents outlining plans to explode dirty radioactive bombs at a nuclear power reactor and electrical grid locations in Florida.
Russell was convicted on domestic terror charges and sentenced to 5 years in a federal prison and Arthurs was remanded to a mental health facility and is awaiting trial.
When 17-year old Ryan Hatfield of the Denver suburb of Thornton contacted Russell in October 2016, Hatfield was a high school student at the Jefferson County Colorado Virtual Academy, working at a Colorado Walgreen’s “stocking shelves, cleaning rest rooms, and running the cash register,” and living with his parents in suburban Denver.
“Is there, perchance, a Colorado Atomwaffen Division,” Hatfield wrote. “If so, I’d love to join.”
At the time, Hatfield had never met another Nazi in real life.
Soon, Hatfield became the Colorado cell leader and a key national figure of the armed white supremacist, Nazi domestic terror group. A few months after he joined, Hatfield met 67-year old James Mason, a largely forgotten 1970’s era Nazi leader and convicted pedophile, who was living in relative obscurity in government subsidized housing in Denver.
Mason is a long-time fascist who, at age 14, joined the American Nazi Party and later a militant offshoot, the National Socialist Liberation Front, and, in the 1980’s, became a priest in the Church of Satan. It was then he reached out to imprisoned murderer Charles Manson, who is another hero of young Atomwaffen members today, beginning a friendship and political alliance between the two.
“His actions have been mightier, his ideas loftier, his eloquence greater, his philosophy superior and his impact ten thousand times that of anything the Movement can offer as its closest runner-up,” Mason writes of Charles Manson in his book Siege, the political bible of Atomwaffen Division and required reading for all members. “The day will never come when this man will cease to be The Leader as long as he is alive. He is aware of all this himself and is in total humility about it, just as was Hitler … He is Charles Manson.”
Mason advocates for leaderless terror cells launching lone wolf violent attacks on schools and houses of worship to accelerate the collapse of government and society.
“I was the original school shooter,” Mason said in one of a series of five interviews earlier this year.
Largely through the efforts of Hatfield, Atomwaffen Division has since resurrected James Mason into a contemporary social media fascist icon.
“What we are creating here is something that James Mason attempted to put into form himself, but due to circumstance, he never implemented it. This changed in the year of 2017, when the Atomwaffen Division discovered and met James Mason. Ryan and Vincent Snyder both came to the assistance of Mason, helping him publish his works,” Atomwaffen Division wrote on their official website Siegeculture. “The evolution of the website led to the development of a new course of action for SIEGE – too long has the movement trapped people into a mindset of chasing their own tail. Those of you who are reading this and are with us, will perhaps create history. That is our intention.”
Mason does not own a computer or a smart phone, and Hatfield, who controls many of Atomwaffen Division’s social media platforms, serves as his link to the modern world, assuming the role of archiving Mason’s writing, correspondence, photographs and other Nazi paraphernalia, uploading his audio recordings and writings to Atomwaffen Division websites and their other social media platforms, and promoting and disseminating his works online.
Atomwaffen Division members from across the country make regular pilgramages to the 65-year old Mason’s government subsidized Denver apartment to have their photographs taken with the aging Nazi leader and have him autograph his book, ‘Siege’, the ideological manifesto of AWD.
Siege is required reading for new AWD initiates before they are interviewed and vetted for potential membership.
Siege is an apocalyptic manual advocating the use of mass terror tactics and indiscriminate violence to fast track sparking a race war and the total collapse of the institutions of society. Mason and Atomwaffen Division members fully support church and school shootings like the New Zealand mosque shooting, the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, and the South Carolina church shooting carried out by Dylan Roof, and promote the use of violent ‘leaderless resistance’, random murder, “lone wolf” terror attacks, and an all-out war against government and society.
Hatfield, like all Atomwaffen Division members, are cult-like followers of Mason, who Hatfield calls “a friend/hero of mine.”
James Mason is also a convicted pedophile, having been charged in both Ohio and Colorado with sexual crimes against underage girls.
In 1992, Mason plead guilty in Ohio to a reduced charge of “illegal use of a minor in nudity-oriented material” after a cache of pornographic photographs of a naked 15-year old girl taken by Mason were seized by Ross County, Ohio police. Mason was sentenced to 6 months in the county jail, fined, and ordered to “not return to the state of Ohio without written authority of the court.”
Mason moved that same year to Colorado where he was soon arrested again by Las Animas Colorado police in 1994 on nearly the exact same charges of taking pornographic photographs of a 15-year old girl. He was charged with two counts of sexual exploitation of a child and two counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor for supplying underage girls with alcohol. Investigators seized hundreds of videotapes, photos, and magazines–“all with a child pornography theme”–from Mason’s home.
He plead guilty to later threatening the Hispanic boyfriend of the girl with a gun and sentenced to three years in a Colorado state prison.
In a December 2019 interview with Ohio attorney James T. Boulger, who represented Mason on the criminal charges, Boulger “distinctly remember(s) that the photographs submitted as evidence to the court were filled with Nazi memorabilia, swastikas. Red and black banners and flags with swastikas across her nude torso and in the background. That sort of thing.”
Atomwaffen Division’s cadre of mostly teenage boys like Hatfield revel in Mason’s anti-social persona.
“Mason took nude photos of 14, 15, and 16 year old girls” and “is disgusted by his old photos,” Hatfield said in an AWD chat room in January 2018. “He told me ‘Why the hell did I take photos of such MILFs?!’”
“James Mason lists his favorite types of porn and recommends the best types of beastiality,” wrote Atomwaffen Division Texas cell leader John Cameron Denton, who uses the alias “RAPE”. “He even gives tips on how to fuck certain animals, like he says in this article ‘If you want to fuck a sheep, you gotta make sure its near a cliff so itll push back harder on your cock’.”
“It is of the utmost importance that we establish ways to finance and execute this endeavor before they start using their tools at hand to put us away for what we think which appears to be a more and more likely scenario as the tension and violence plaguing the system escalates,” Mason says on an official Atomwaffen Division video released in September 2019. The video depicts Mason, dressed in a Nazi unform surrounded by 12 young men in military uniforms with Atomwaffen Division patches and wearing skull masks to obscure their identity. Standing immediately behind Mason is Ryan Hatfield.
“And YOUTH is the name to be applied to the group of people among whom you will find a majority of those who DEMAND RESULTS, not Right Wing bullshit,” writes James Mason in his book ‘Siege’. “Manson explains that the older a person becomes, the more frozen they are in the programmed ways the System has inculcated them with.”
“The most adept social and political movers of all times have known that, in order to have a successful movement, you must get ’em [sic] while they are YOUNG!” Mason writes in Siege. “It is Youth that has the most to lose, that has traditionally been the most idealistic and action-minded. Charles Manson exerts a fascination over Youth today, in the entire West, more so by far than anyone else even remotely attuned to what we’re trying to do.”
In a series of 5 interviews with Mason conducted over several months in 2019, the Atomwaffen Division ideological leader described himself as the “original school shooter.”
“My parents were typical racist types from Ohio–pretty open with the use of the word nigger, he recalled of his youth in Chilloctte, Ohio. He said in high school he was “6 feet and close to 300 pounds” and people made fun of him. “Since my father had a large collection of weapons, I was going to take a revolver, a six shooter, and I was going to shoot the principal and shoot up the school–the principal, one teacher, two guidance counselors, and then myself.” But instead he saw a poster for the American Nazi Party and called the number and, at age 14, got on a Greyhound bus and went to their Arlington, Virginia headquarters and joined their youth division.
In August 2018, Hatfield told other AWD members over their Discord members-only chat room that he comes “from a stable two-parent home” adding “yes, my parents are very aware” of his Nazi, white supremacist beliefs and activities. “They don’t care.”
“I’ve got a big Hitler poster on my door. It feels good to have parents who don’t give a fuck,” he added.
“My dad is incredibly racist, he’d never date a non-white if (for some reason) he and my mom got divorced,” Ryan told fellow AWD members in December 2017.
In a November 2019 telephone interview with Hatfield’s father, the elder Hatfield acknowledged he was aware of his son’s involvement with Atomwaffen Division but declined to comment further.
But Ryan Hatfield is not correct that his father would “never date a non-white.” Hatfield himself comes from a Mexican-American heritage, records show. His father’s wife and Ryan’s mother, whose maiden name is Maria Theresa Arciga, was born to a Mexican-American family in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1977, and refers to herself as “Latina” in her social media posts.
Ryan Hatfield contends otherwise.
Like many white supremacists and fascists, Hatfield claims he submitted a DNA sample to the private DNA company 23andMe for genetic testing to ascertain his ethnic heritage. “Via DNA I am 56% Med,” he wrote other AWD member in December 2017. “My full results:\n43.1% Iberian\n23.7% British and Irish\n12.11% Italian\n7.3% French and German\n6.74% Scandinavian\n3.2% Finnish\n2.5% Broadly Southern European\n1.35% American Indian.”
He added “according to multiple people, IRL (in real life) I look Irish.”
In an August 2019 email interview in the wake of a white supremacist mass shooting where the shooter specifically targeted ethnic Mexicans at an El Paso, Texas Walmart , Hatfield supported the terrorist attack that killed 22 and injured 24. He advocated targeting a “Mexican community center, i.e. a Church, Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, etc.” as “much better targets” than a Walmart.
“I applaud anything that could increase tension in this country. The El Paso guy was a white nationalist Trump Lover, and I believe that the shooting was meant to show his anger with Mexicans, though he only shot 6 Mexicans in total, apparently,” Hatfield said of the mass shooting. “He should’ve chosen a much better target. Shooting up a random Wal-Mart to show anger at Mexicans is nonsensical. If he was gonna do something like that, he should’ve done what Roof did, and picked a Mexican community center, i.e. a Church, Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, etc.” Hatfield was referring to white supremacist Dylan Roof, the convicted terrorist who murdered nine black parishioners in a Charleston, South Carolina church in June 2015.
In December 2017, the parents of a high school girl were shot to death by 17-year old Nicholas Giampa, an Atomwaffen Division associate who had been communicating with Ryan Hatfield online, after the girls’ parents objected to their daughter seeing the self avowed Nazi.
Giampa, then aged 17, came to the girl’s home and shot dead her parents on the morning of December 22, just days after his girlfriend’s mother reported Giampa’s anti-Semitic Twitter account, which hailed Adolf Hitler as a hero and advocated for white revolution, to the principal of the high school that her daughter and Giampa both attended. Giampa had posted on his Twitter account ““I’ve already talked 1 tranny into suicide and I’m working on another 2 😳” and “The jews are everyone’s enemy.” Two months before murdering his girlfriend’s parents, Giampa mowed a giant swastika into the grass of a community field in Lorton, Virginia, where he lived.
Before the murders, Giampa praised James Mason’ book Siege, retweeted Atomwaffen photos, and praised “Ryan Atomwaffen”–one of Hatfield’s social media user names–for his white supremacist book collection.
“It’s pretty funny how much of a boogeyman we’re actually turning out to be, when we make the news because a fan boy of ours killed some boomers,” Hatfield wrote to other Atomwaffen Division members in January 2018, referring to the double murder.
Shortly thereafter, Atomwaffen Division released a propaganda poster supporting the double murder using Giampa’s photograph and titled “Love Conquers All.”
“The Colorado chapter is superior,” Hatfield wrote under the alias Ryan AW on the AWD members only online discussion board Discord in January 2018. “All two of us.”
The other member of the AWD Colorado chapter is William H. Stoetzer, 33, of Cripple Creek, Colorado, who works as a millwright in a nearby Newmont gold mine and uses the online alias’s ‘PanzerViking’ and ‘Saor.’
Stoetzer joined AWD in the fall of 2016 and has participated in armed live fire training that the group calls “Hate Camps.”
Stoetzer attained a measure of notoriety in 2007 and 2008 when the then 22-year-old Stoetzer, who is originally from the Ozarks in Missouri, lived for nearly a year in a hammock strung between branches high up in a 300-foot, 1,500 years old Giant Redwood tree. At the time, Stoetzer was working with the radical environmental groups Earth First! and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF).
“Anyone looking for a job and willing to move?’ Non Jew owned gold mine is always hiring,” Stoetzer wrote under the alias ‘PanzerViking’ on an AWD members-only discussion board in September 2017. “Best part not one nigger.”
“One of my co workers has a himmler picture in his locker. So done (sic) cooler people are there,” Stoetzer added.
In an April 2017 conversation Stoetzer has with a high school girl who had expressed interest in joining the group, Stoetzer tells her that women are not allowed to be members. “Start a group of your own for wemon. Don’t compromise for wemon who don’t know their role and are sympathetic to degenerates/Jews . There aren’t many female groups or none at all that have a true fascist world view. Atomwaffen division is a male only group but I’m sure if you had the right ideology we could possibly work together on certain projects in Colorado (but don’t quote me on that. I’m just one leader of the Colorado chapter),” he wrote. “My wife helps me with projects and is on video chat from time to time but has no say in action. She has mentioned starting or being a part of a female group, but whatever you do stay away from American Vanguard or Aryan Underground. They comprise (sic) for faggotry and cucks who are into fetish porn as well as child porn. Good luck with everything. Keep reading when you can and check out Siege by James Mason. If you have any questions I can answer I’d be happy to. Don’t let society hold you down,” Stoetzer wrote, signing off with “14/88.”
’14/88′ stands for the “14 words” (“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”) of convicted terrorist and murderer David Lane of the white supremacist terror group ‘The Order’ who assassinated Denver radio talk show host Alan berg in the driveway of his Denver home in 1984. ’88’ stands for the eighth letter of the alphabet ‘H’, and denotes “Heil Hitler.”
“Thanks for the suggestion. I understand women don’t have the same roles here but it would be nice to have our own way to help. It’s been hard for me to accept the roles of women in this view as I have been liberal until now,” wrote the Iron March user with the alias ‘EdelweißSS’. “I’m not sure how to get anything going as I honestly don’t know anyone to ‘recruit’ but I’ll stay open to the idea for sure. Thanks for the support! If your wife does form a female group or the likes, I’d love to know.”
‘EdelweißSS’ is an alias for Denver high school student Bella Oakley, who was a member of her high school Junior Reserve Officers Training Corp (JROTC) and scheduled to join the U.S. Army. Oakley was 15-years old at the time. In an April message online she wrote “I am almost 16. And my beliefs aren’t to be shared with someone I don’t trust especially not military personnel!”
In July, Ryan Hatfield contacted her over Iron March. “Hey, I just reread your intro post from a while back, and I saw that you also live in Denver. I was wondering if you’d like to meet up at all, as I relish any opportunity to meet a fellow NatSoc!”
Oakley replied “Hey, I’d love to meet up sometime. I tend to feel all alone in my little liberal community. Just so you’re aware I’m a 16 year old woman. If you still want to meet and talk despite that I’d be happy to get in touch with someone who shares my views.”
Hatfield replied: “Yeah, I didn’t know that you are a woman, but I’m about the same age, I’m 17. I’d definitely be able to meet up just about anytime, and I’m very happy to meet any NatSoc in real life, especially one from IM. When/where would you like to meet up?”
Oakley and Hatfield made arrangements to meet. Oakley asked “Do you know a lot of NatSocs in Denver?” to which Hatfield replied “I do know one, yes, though he is ~65” referring to James Mason. “By the way, do you have a skype or a discord or something? This isn’t a great way to communicate.”
“I don’t have skype or anything but my number is 720 988 XXXX.”
“Alright, mine is 720-324-XXXX” responded Hatfield.
Like teenagers everywhere, the two had just made it easy for online sleuths to find their real identities.
The following month, Hatfield wrote Stoeltzer aka PanzerViking “Interestingly enough Panzer, I actually found a gf on Iron March who lives 20 minutes away from me.”
“Oh good job man. I knew a good kid like you would find a nice girl,” Stoetzer wrote back.
When contacted, Oakley at first hung up on a reporter. Later she responded “There is one thing I would like to make clear, I am not a Satanist and would not be involved in a group who has been infiltrated by the negative forces that be. My Führers values don’t exist anywhere in this world.”
When Hatfield was contacted in November and asked the impact that the hacking of Nazi friendly online discussion platforms and the release of user data would have on Atomwaffen Division, he responded: “Not much to say- sucks that it got released, hopefully nobody had anything on there that connects to their IRL identities.” The November data dump of user names, IP addresses, email contacts and other details, and the messages of more than a thousand far-right wing extremists who communicated and organized over the Iron March internet platform, included Hatfield’s information and messages.
Hatfield first denied his involvement. “Whether you publish the info or not, I’d like to see how you prove that I am this person other than by using a phone number or an email, neither of which would stand up in a court, especially in a libel suit. And go on and write articles about the person you claim is me all you want, because I myself will not be dissuaded by your ridiculous scare tactics,” Hatfield responded to a reporter’s inquiry on the cell phone registered under his name and home address. “Maybe if you were a journalist of some level of credibility, I would indeed care. Then again, if you had any credibility, you wouldn’t have to stoop to publishing doxxes on people, which may just be the laziest form of ‘journalism’. And, you can just not call me, because you’d be wasting your time.”
But in following messages, Hatfield implicitly acknowledged he was the ‘Ryan’ who is the Colorado cell leader for Atomwaffen Division. “And Thayer, you have to be high to imply that I, or James Mason, are some kind of faggots. “I have never said or done anything that implied any sort of a sexual relationship between James N. Mason and myself (since both of us are straight).”
The Iron March data combined with earlier data releases by the independent media group, Unicorn Riot, of far right extremists who used the platform Discord, as well as thousands of still unreleased Attomwaffen Division messages obtained during this investigation, have provided a treasure trove for reporters, law enforcement, anti-fascist activists, and online sleuths.