Teen Twins Lamb and Lynx Gaede Deny Neo-Nazi Past, Say 'It Was A Job'

July 21, 2011 -- The twin sisters who were once members of an extremist pop group and darlings of the white supremacist movement said they were never Neo-Nazis and were "traumatized" by the years they spent controlled by their mother and manipulated by the media.

"We didn't choose the venues," Lynx Gaede told ABC News of the touring she and her twin sister, Lamb, did as 12-year-old aspiring pop stars who called themselves Prussian Blue. "It was a job."

Lynx and Lamb contacted ABC News Wednesday night in response to an earlier "Good Morning America" story that took viewers inside the twins' abandonment of their past lives as followers of the white power movement.

The twins, 19 and living in Montana, told ABC News that newspaper headlines holding them up as high-profile symbols of the hate movement have it wrong, and that they were never Neo-Nazis or skinheads, but white separatists.

They also said they were told by documentary crews and their mother to perform acts and mimic Neo-Nazi behavior, such as the Nazi salute they can be seen conducting in an image that aired on ABC News five years ago.

"I don't know what kind of authentic message a 12-year-old can send," Lamb told ABC News Wednesday. "I even authentically believed Santa Claus existed."

But the blonde, blue-eyed twins once served as the darlings of the white supremacist movement they now denounce.

Raised in a home environment where their grandfather branded his cattle with a swastika, the Gaede twins were freckle-faced, California twins who became established teen recording artists with lyrics not of love, but of white supremacist hate.

The pair told "Good Morning America" that today, five years later, they have changed their extremist ways.

"I'm grown up now. I was a little kid back then and said a lot of things I don't believe in now," Lynx told ABC News.

The girls credited moving to Montana -– and attending public school there -– for opening their eyes and giving them new perspectives on life.

"My sister and I were home-schooled. We were these country bumpkins. ... It makes me proud of humanity every day that we have so many different places and people," Lynx told the Daily Mail newspaper.

That's a far cry from the 14-year-old Lynx who shuddered at the thought of diversity.

"We don't want to, you know, just be a big puddle. We don't want to, we just want to preserve our race," she said in a 2006 interview on ABC News' "20/20."

Lamb and Lynx told ABC Wednesday that such statements were not their own beliefs, but a result of their mother's control and the grooming she started at birth.

The girls say they were nurtured on racist beliefs by their mother, April Gaede. She has defended her parenting and beliefs.

"If they were, we were Christians, they would be maybe singing Christian rock songs. But we're not. We're white nationalists. And so, of course, that's a part of our life and I share that part of my life with my children," she told ABC's "20/20" in the 2006 interview.

But the twins' mother believes her daughters' new outlook today is a result of peer pressure.

"They are saying what everyone wants to hear so they won't be harassed anymore. Let's face it, it's not popular to be a white separatist, and they want to be popular," she said.

Frank Meeink, a former Neo-Nazi, joined the movement when he was 13. Like the Gaede girls, many young children in the movement were taught to hate, he said.