The Last White House Comms Director To Resign This Quickly Was A Nazi Youth
Jungvolk was a Nazi youth party that featured outdoor activities to indoctrinate young boys. Image by Wikimedia Commons
After 10 days, Anthony Scaramucci is out as White House communications director — but he’s not the only one who graced the West Wing for less than two weeks.
John Koehler served as Ronald Reagan’s communications director from March 1 to March 13, 1987. He also belonged as a child to Jungvolk, a Nazi youth party.
Koehler, who died in 2012, insisted he resigned to let the newly appointed chief of staff choose his team members, and not because it had become known that he had once belonged to Jungvolk, according to his Associated Press obituary. He admitted that he belonged as a 10-year-old to what he called “the Boy Scouts run by the Nazi Party.”
Koehler was involved with the party for six months, according to United Press International, and Reagan hadn’t initially known about his membership before he appointed him. Koehler volunteered as an air raid police runner to avoid the Hitler Youth, later volunteering to serve as an American interpreter, according to another obituary. After World War II, he worked in U.S. counterintelligence then and immigrated to the States in 1954, eventually gaining citizenship and enlisting in the Army.
Koehler, a former Associated Press executive from Germany, said if he was denied the White House position because of his past, it would be “a black day in journalism.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
