Neo-Nazi Twins Drop Racism for Love and Marijuana

Lynx and Lamb Gaede were twin pop sensations for all the wrong reasons. Their songs dealt with overt white nationalist themes, and even their band – Prussian Blue – was a reference to the distinctive color of Zyclon B residue in the Nazi gas chambers. In one of the most infamous photos from their childhood, the twins posed wearing white T-shirts with a smiley face adorned with Hitler’s toothbrush mustache and neatly parted, jet-black hair.

That’s all over, the girls say now. In an exclusive interview with The Daily, Lynx and Lamb – once described as the “new face of hate” – say they’ve abandoned the racism hoisted on them by their mother April Gaede and instead settled into “a place of love and light."

“I’m glad we were in the band,” Lynx said. “But I think we should have been pushed toward something a little more mainstream and easier for us to handle than being front-men for a belief system that we didn’t completely understand.” Lamb put their transformation more bluntly. “I’m not a white nationalist anymore.”

Given the backdrop of their upbringing, the comments reflect a radical sea change in ideology and, to a certain degree, a hopeful coming of age story that began in the company of the National Alliance (NA) – for decades the most dangerous and most organized neo-Nazi formation in America. In 2003, when Lynx and Lamb turned 9, their mother was a prominent member of the NA and began heavily promoting the twins as the young face of white nationalism.

Several years later, as they toured white power music festivals playing Aryan folk music, Gaede came clean with her reason for pushing Lynx and Lamb into the spotlight. “What young, red-blooded American boy isn’t going to find two blonde twins, 16-years-old, singing about white pride and pride in your race … very appealing?” Gaede asked.

That was only part of the disturbing path Gaede had for her children. Lynx and Lamb also were kept out of public school and spoon-fed a particularly myopic white nationalist curriculum – a fact Gaede would frequently brag about. “I’ve done it without an ‘approved’ curriculum,” Gaede said of their education in a 2005 interview published on the National Alliance website. “And what I’ve done is use a lot of books from the 1950s – from the years before ‘civil rights’ and feminism became so evident.”

For the girls, that was the problem. “I was just spouting a lot of knowledge that I had no idea what I was saying,” Lamb said in the interview published on Sunday. When The Daily contacted Gaede to discuss the girls’ comments, she dismissed it as the stuff of an ill-advised youth. “They’re 19,” she said. “When they have children of their own, they’ll come to the same conclusions I have.”

Despite a very public childhood, for the past five years Lynx and Lamb have been outside the limelight because of health problems. Lynx was diagnosed with cancer during her freshman year of high school, and doctors removed a large tumor from her shoulder, the newspaper reported. Now she suffers from a rare condition called cyclic vomiting syndrome (CVS). Lamb suffers from scoliosis and chronic back pain. They each carry state-issued medical marijuana cards in Montana, where they live with their mother. “I have to say, marijuana saved my life,” Lynx said. “I would probably be dead if I didn’t have it.”

“Pot has also helped the twins rekindle the creative impulses they once channeled into their music,” The Daily reported, adding that the girls hope to enroll in college and dedicate their lives to making medical marijuana legal in all 50 states. The revelation has prompted the blogosphere to erupt with harsh dismissals of the girls’ transformation. One tongue-in-cheek headline read, “Tween White Power Folks Singer Twins Now ‘Liberal’ Potheads.” Another proclaimed, “Neo-Nazi Girl Group Cured of their Hate with Marijuana.”

Lynx and Lamb, in the meantime, don’t seem concerned with what they were, or how they might be viewed now. “I think we’re meant to do something more – we’re healers,” Lamb said. “We just want to exert the most love and positivity we can.”