Frank Collin

Upon his release from prison, Collin "reinvented himself under the pseudonym of Frank Joseph, a New Age writer and pagan worshiper." His time in the Pontiac Correctional Facility in Illinois had coincided with the period when Russell E. Burrows worked there as a prison guard. He subsequently wrote many books and articles in support of Burrows Cave, an alleged cache of ancient treasure in an unrevealed location, supposedly discovered by Russell Burrows in southern Illinois." In 1987, he had his first New Age book published, The Destruction of Atlantis: Compelling Evidence of the Sudden Fall of the Legendary Civilization.

During this time, according to Jeffrey Kaplan, Covington found pictures in Frank Collin's desk that linked Collin to the sexual abuse of young boys. In what Kaplan described as a play for power in the organization, Covington and the other NSPA members turned the evidence on Collin over to the police. After Collin was arrested, Covington took over leadership of the NSPA and moved the headquarters from Chicago to North Carolina. A 1980 article in The New York Times reported that "Frank Collin was expelled from the American Nazi Party for illicit intercourse with minors and the use of Nazi headquarters in Chicago for purposes of sodomy with children. The report indicates that the Nazis "tipped" the police who arrested Collin. Collin was convicted of child molestation and sentenced to seven years in prison at the Pontiac Correctional Center in 1979. He served three years.

Also in 1977, Koehl's NSWPP began a campaign in their paper White Power about Collin's father being Jewish, including publications of what they stated were Max Simon Cohn's . papes. Collin and the NSPA leadership continued to deny the claim and said the images were fakes.

In 1970, Collin formed another organization, the National Socialist Party of America (NSPA), later known as the American Nazi Party. It attracted other disaffected members of the NSWPP, as well as Michael Allen, Gary Lauck and Harold Covington. Covington helped buy a building for the group which they called Rockwell Hall, where Collin and some other members lived in a barracks in upper floor. Collin ran for alderman of Chicago in 1975 and pulled 16% of the vote.

As a young man, Collin in the 1960s joined George Lincoln Rockwell's National Socialist White People's Party. He became the Midwest coordinator. He broke with the NSWPP due to a disagreement with Rockwell's successor, Matt Koehl, who was elected as the party leader by popular vote after Rockwell was assassinated on August 25, 1967. The falling out stemmed in part from published accounts by Max Collin, Frank's father, who said that he was a Jewish Holocaust survivor and had changed his name from Cohen (or Cohn) to Collin. Frank Collin denied having Jewish roots and maintained that his father was not telling the truth.

Francis Joseph Collin (born November 3, 1944) is an American former political activist and Midwest coordinator with the American Nazi Party, later known as the National Socialist White People's Party. After being ousted for being partly Jewish (which he denied), in 1970, Collin founded the National Socialist Party of America. (N.S.P.A.) In the late 1970s, his planned march in the predominantly Jewish suburb of Skokie, Illinois was challenged; however, the American Civil Liberties Union defended Collin's group's freedom of speech and assembly in a case that reached the United States Supreme Court to correct procedural deficiencies. Afterwards, the Illinois Supreme Court held that the party had a right to march and to display swastikas, despite local opposition, based on the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Collin then offered a compromise, offering to march in Chicago's Marquette Park (where Martin Luther King had been attacked in 1966) instead of Skokie. After Collin was convicted and sentenced in 1979 for child molestation, he lost his position in the party.

Collin was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, where he attended local schools. His father, Max Frank Collin, was born Max Simon Cohn in Munich, Germany, on August 23, 1913, the son of Jewish parents who were murdered in The Holocaust, and was a survivor of Dachau concentration camp. Frank's mother, Virginia Gertrude née Hardyman, was born in Chicago on August 18, 1920, and was Catholic.