Sea-Monkeys don’t actually play volleyball, not even a little, but Evan Hughes of the Awl has an excellent post about the Insta-Pet’s late creator Harold von Braunhut, a Jewish man who had surprising ties to Aryan supremacists. An excerpt:

“An Assistant U.S. Attorney, Thomas M. Bauer, told the Washington Post that in a 1985 weapons case against a member of the Ku Klux Klan, Grand Dragon Dale R. Reusch, von Braunhut was prepared to testify that he had lent Reusch about $12,000 so he could buy 83 firearms. Bauer told the reporter that von Braunhut was ‘very pleasant and cooperative’ and ‘brought some of his little toys along,’ including Sea-Monkeys.

The general Aryan Nations view holds that Jewish people are directly descended from the devil. It seems clear that von Braunhut, who owned Nazi memorabilia and once said Hitler ‘just got bad press,’ signed on to these beliefs. But one has to wonder what brought him to the point of nodding along when his friend Butler, for instance, described Jews as ‘the bacillus of the decomposition of our society.’ Aryan Nations members might have been dismayed to hear that von Braunhut engaged a law firm called Friedman and Goodman early in his career. They might also have been puzzled that his name was listed on early patents as Harold N. Braunhut. The middle initial stands for Nathan. Harold von Braunhut was born and raised Jewish.”

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