Ex-Neo-Nazi Leader Burns Off ‘Symbols of Hate’

Former neo-Nazi leader Gregory Withrow underwent successful surgery Thursday to remove two swastika tattoos between his shoulder blades after declaring: “I would rather have scars on my back than these symbols of hate.”

UC San Francisco Medical Center doctors said the 4-square-inch tattoos were burned off by laser beam and chemicals. Withrow left the hospital immediately after surgery and neither he nor his surgeon would comment, hospital spokeswoman Alice Trinkle said.

Withrow said Wednesday that the swastikas were symbols of a life he has now rejected.

“The surgery is the next step in my evolution away from the white supremacist movement,” said Withrow, 27, who was a founder of the White Students Union and the Aryan Youth Movement as well as a member of the White Aryan Resistance, the Ku Klux Klan, the Skinheads, the American Nazi Party and other racist groups.

“Once I get these tattoos off my back, I want nothing else to do with this stuff,” Withrow said. “The further I get away from it, the better I feel. I know it is going to hurt, and I don’t like pain at all, but I would rather have scars on my back than these symbols of hate.”

He said he had been raised by his father to support “Hitler, Nazism, racism, fascism,” but started to sever connections with ultraright groups when he fell in love with a young woman named Sylvia.

He does not know where she is now, but her name remains tattooed on his right biceps.

“Until I met her, I never experienced the emotion of love,” Withrow said.

His former comrades were not pleased with his new philosophic turn, he said.

In July, 1987, he was attacked with a baseball bat and suffered a broken jaw and nose and a concussion. A month later, a gang of Skinheads nailed Withrow’s hands to a board and slashed his throat with a razor.

After barely surviving that attack, he said, he quit drinking and taking drugs and “laid low in the mountains.”

He added that there was a second message to young people in his story. Besides rejecting Nazi philosophy, “People should not get tattoos, especially stupid tattoos,” he said.