Povl Riis-Knudsen

Expelled from the DNSB in 1992 for "race mixing" in an engagement to a Palestinian Christian whom Riis-Knudsen argued was a "white Arab", As a consequence the DNSB left the WUNS and switched its allegiance to the NSDAP/AO, a rival international network. Riis-Knudsen has since turned his attention to running his own publishing house, Nordland-Verlag, from Aalborg. This has courted controversy as it has published a series of books on the topic of Holocaust denial in the Danish language.

His seminal work was the 1987 article National Socialism - The Biological World View in which he argued that National Socialism had its basis in the laws of nature and was in effect the culmination of the search for truth as the founding principle of life. Much of what he has written is based on the mysticism of Savitri Devi.

He also published National Socialism - A Left Wing Movement (1984), which argued that the revolutionary nature of Nazism set it apart from the reactionary ways of the right and so Nazism was in fact a left wing ideology.

Riis-Knudsen caused further controversy in the late 1980s when he appeared on TV calling for Denmark to be purged of all immigrants, the death penalty for anyone caught transmitting AIDS, labour camps for his political opponents and sterilization of non-whites. The appearance caused outrage in Norway and Sweden and was banned from being screened in Denmark. He has also declared his support for Palestine against Israel and a sympathy with Islamic fundamentalism, albeit balanced against a desire to see Islam expelled from Europe.

Riis-Knudsen had come to look for more of an accommodation with communism, becoming part of a tendency in the European far right at the time to think this way. Alongside Jean-François Thiriart, he rejected abstract Marxism but was nonetheless attracted to the practice of communism. He even went as far as to visit the Soviet Union in 1978, a move which led to controversy in the Danish press who knew Riis-Knudsen as a neo-Nazi. He came to view Russia, rather than the United States, as the saviours of the Aryan race and made this break clear in A Left Wing Movement.

In Denmark itself Riis-Knudsen served as chairman of the Danmarks Nationalsocialistiske Bevægelse (National Socialist Movement of Denmark), an openly neo-Nazi organisation founded in 1970. The movement had around 1000 members by 1988. In this capacity Riis-Knudsen built up a network of contacts across Europe, working with German Michael Kühnen and Holocaust denier Thies Christophersen. He also wrote for CEDADE in a special edition of their bulletin which also featured Salvador Borrego, Wilfred von Oven and Richard Edmonds. In more recent years his international contacts have included Mark Cotterill and former New Order spokesman Martin Kerr.

Povl Heinrich Riis-Knudsen (born 1950) is a prominent Danish neo-Nazi. Riis-Knudsen is best known as the author of the articles National Socialism: A Left Wing Movement (1984) and National Socialism: The Biological World View (1987).