49°
“We were quite badly roughed-up,” Jacques Pluss said. “[A]nd our apartment was not searched, it was ransacked.
“My wife was, in fact, put in the hospital (Hackensack Univ. Med. Center) and still suffers from PTSD over it all,” Pluss wrote in an email exchange with CLIFFVIEW PILOT last year. “She was also falsely arrested; she had nothing whatsoever to do with the matter that law enforcement was interested in — that is, a seizure of my computer and an arrest warrant for me.”
Police, expecting to find a cache of weapons, turned up “an old hunting rifle stored in the back of a closet,” Pluss claimed.
Pluss — who once called Jews “the most insidious sub-human enemy of Western Civilization” and insisted Israel “be pushed into the sea” — pleaded guilty to a bias crime and was sentenced last July to three years’ probation after initially being charged with harassment, bias intimidation and weapons possession, records show.
He immediately began setting about to sue “various NJ State and Municipal law enforcement agencies,” he told CLIFFVIEW PILOT last summer.
His civil rights suit, filed last month in U.S. District Court in Newark, alleges that officers used excessive force during the raid on his home, violating his civil rights. Among other charges, he claims he was burned by a cigarette he was smoking when an officer threw him down.
Pluss, 59, made headlines after winning court challenge to his posting Third Reich flags outside his home, getting dismissed as an adjunct from FDU, and keeping a swastika in his window.
He’s been called “psychotic,” “a borderline personality” and worse for writing on his since-removed blog, among other things, that African Americans be “killed immediately or after performing forced labor without shelter or food.”
For years, Pluss riled up posters to Internet message boards with comments such as: “The ‘Holocaust’ is, by and large, a “myth-invention-of-fact” created, for the most part, by post-War Allied propaganda.”
“They are, by nature, dangerous sub-humans who have developed clever ways to cheat, lie and steal from others,” he said of Jews. “[T]hey represent the ultimate parasite.”
Some have been so angered by the constant hate speech that they have investigated his background — discovering, for instance, that Pluss was born in Zurich, Switzerland to a Swiss father (a physician) and an American mother (then a medical student).
One of those firestorms exploded after Pluss called the Holocaust a “Holohoax,” created by “Jewish Plutocrats, World-Wide, and their lackies[cq], to manipulate World psychology for Jewish economic and political gain” and identified himself as Reverend Dr. Jacques Anthony Reinhard Heydrich Pluss (Heydrich was head of the Gestapo).
Pluss claimed to be the American representative of Stille Hilfe (Silent Help), a German organization that aids old Nazis, which he claimed had secret representatives he referred to as “superiors.”
A former horse trainer, he created his own publishing company to issue a 1,077-page treatise, “Jumping Fences: An Artfully Crafted Madness,” a thinly-veiled autobiographical novel that got five stars on Amazon.com — from him. Amazon later removed the book from distribution.
Pluss has often dismissed critics as petty and jealous.
“I myself never have trouble sleeping,” he once posted, “for I have never doubted the rectitude of my views or actions. Complete moral freedom… is a wonderful thing.”
Yet one poster summed up several compatriots’ feelings when she wrote: “He continues to live as a Google clown….”
“Amusingly, he is reviled on neo-Nazi sites where he posts under the names of long-dead war criminals,” she added, “because other posters understand that he is too crazy even to be a Nazi.”
The New Jersey State Police Central Security Unit began investigating Pluss after the ADL turned over emailed threats to ADL official Abraham Foxman, then a Bergen County resident.
At 6:30 a.m. Jan. 26, 2011, the Troop B SWAT team — armed with a search warrant — descended on the Heights Road apartment, along with detectives from the CSU, cybercrimes and K9 units, investigators from the state Division of Criminal Justice, and Ridgewood police.
As Pluss was being arrested, a search turned up three rifles, State Police told CLIFFVIEW PILOT. His wife was taken into custody “for investigative purposes pertaining to possible weapons offenses,” they said.
Pluss had been prohibited from possessing weapons under a restraining order on file in Superior Court in Hackensack.
Fairleigh Dickinson University fired Pluss, who holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in medieval history, in March 2005 after his neo-Nazi ties were made public. This came after the student newspaper received a mysterious letter postmarked from a small village in Ireland. The letter alleged that Pluss was a member of a neo-Nazi group in America, as well as an IRA member under investigation in connection with a Belfast drive-by killing.
Pluss later admitting writing it himself.
For their part, FDU officials cited six absences in a 15-week semester.
However, Dean John Snyder also told reporters that Pluss‘s view were “not politics” but “hate mongering.”
“His position would be untenable on the basis of student welfare,” Snyder said. “It’s our job to see to it that students are treated with respect and security.”
Pluss, in turn, accused the school of “insane ‘political correctness’ and ersatz ‘social engineering’.”
A posting several years ago on a site called nukeisrael.com said that Pluss, as “a newcomer to the NSM, unleashed a fiery oratory reminiscent of Hitler’s speeches.”
However, the National Socialist Movement dismissed Pluss six months after he was fired by FDU. He countered that he had “infiltrated” the group to undermine it and described his true political views as “mainstream Republican.”
A short time later, NSM spokesman Bill White posted online that Pluss was “seriously depressed and taking psychiatric medication for emotional issues since his dismissal from Farleigh Dickinson University. Recently, I am told, he had his prescription and / or dosage changed, and began behaving bizarrely.”
Pluss was once said by Newark Star-Ledger columnist Paul Mulshine to be “a few Stukas short of a squadron.”
He “uses allusions such as dancing on a person’s grave or keeping someone under the radar that are indirect threats but that would require interpretation in a court,” said Stanley Wertheim, former English Department chairman at William Paterson University — and a frequent target for Pluss and other like-minded neo-Nazis. “He is also so apparently deranged that even other Nazis dismiss him as a bad joke rather than a threat.
“For American neo-Nazis, some of whom, unlike Pluss, are not seriously mentally ill, all of German history is encompassed in those 12 years of barbarism with which these moral morons want to be associated,” Wertheim wrote. “They are not interested in Goethe, Schiller, Thomas Mann, Heine, Einstein, and Freud.
“To them the epitome of German culture are murderers and psychotics like Heydrich and Hess.”
Click here to follow Daily Voice Hackensack and receive free news updates.
