In the 1930s, thousands of American Nazis hailed George Washington as the ‘first fascist’
The history of Nazi summer camps and rallies in NYC
“Nazis Hail George Washington As First Fascist,” read a March 7, 1938 headline in Life magazine. The brief article reported on a boisterous group of pro-Nazi Americans who called themselves the German American Bund. The organization, whose antagonistic rallies and assemblies were rife with anti-Semitic and ethno-nationalist rhetoric, had begun to capture mainstream attention as the very politics they embraced were driving Europe toward war.
The German American Bund was established in Buffalo, New York, in 1936, with a man named Fritz Kuhn as its leader. An engineer by trade, Kuhn was a German-born U.S. citizen who fought for the Kaiser in the Great War. But he found a new calling stoking the political passions and frustrations of German-Americans still distressed by the struggles of the Great Depression.
Secretive and imperfect bookkeeping prevents us from knowing just how popular the Bund was at its peak. With his characteristic bluster, Kuhn claimed to have as many as 200,000 members at his side, but the Bund probably had between 5,000 to 10,000 official members (the FBI counted 6,600), with perhaps several thousand more casually interested people who attended or orbited around the organization’s events.
Like the Third Reich, the Bund took seriously the matter of indoctrinating the young. The organization ran Nazi camps across the country, with locations in Wisconsin, California, Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey, where children and adolescents could participate in the fanfare of fascism and proud heritage. These camps, like Camp Siegfried in Long Island and Camp Nordland in New Jersey—with their copious use of the swastika and other Nazi symbols, choruses of children singing “Deutschland, über alles,” streets named after Hitler and Goebbels, and military-inspired drills—did put neighbors on edge, even before the U.S. entered the war. Their eerie legacy even lives on today. As of last year, it was still illegal for residents of Yaphank, New York — the town that hosted Camp Siegfried — to sell their house to buyers of non-German descent.
Even more conspicuous and well-publicized than the summer camps were the German American Bund’s frequent assemblies, rallies, and parades. Their message more or less boiled down to something like this: Jews and Bolshevik communists were in control of everything, and they were screwing it all up, and it was the duty of white Christian people to wake up and resist. In packaging this Nazism, Kuhn believed it was necessary to reflect American ideals for it to properly catch on, and the group adopted George Washington as their heroic figure — a man of action and military might who they claimed knew deep down fascism was the way to go, and that this experiment in representative republicanism was doomed to fail.
But as soon as the Bund began to attract media attention, there was an outcry. A significant population of anti-Nazi German-Americans assembled to denounce Hitler and his partisans like the Bund at home. Veteran groups, like the American Legion, got into bloody fist fights with members of the German American Bund. And with even greater furor, Jewish mobsters and veterans of the Great War incited brawls with members of the Bund.
The Bund’s cultural apex struck on February 20, 1939, when the group held a rally in Madison Square Garden, with around 20,000 people in attendance. On the mezzanine edge hung a banner with the slogan “Stop Jewish Domination of Christian Americans.” An enormous, full-body portrait of George Washington dominated the background. The Bund used the moment to reiterate their support for American neutrality amid metastasizing tensions in Europe.
In his address to the packed stadium, Kuhn called the president “Frank D. Rosenfeld” and his seminal legislation, the “Jew Deal.” “American patriots,” he said through a heavy German accent, “I am sure I do not come before you tonight as a complete stranger … You all have heard of me. To the Jewish-controlled press: as a creature with horns, a cloven hoof, and a long tail.” The crowd erupted in laughter. Indeed, the media and overall public opinion were unfair to them: “Of course, no German American citizen can express an opinion that does not confirm to the standardized order,” he lamented to a sympathetic crowd. “We, I say, will not fail you when called upon to keep every lawful support in our power to fight the grip of Jewish communism in our schools, our universities, in our very homes.”
In the middle of the screed, a Jewish man named Isadore Greenbaum stormed the stage. He was pummeled and thrown around by the Bundsmen on stage before being handed to police offstage. It’s hard to say for sure, but it is possible tens of thousands of anti-Bund protesters and activists crowded around the stadium during their rally (the following day, the Chicago Tribune put the count at 50,000, with 1,700 police officers on duty to keep the peace).
The actual Nazis, however, found Kuhn and his group bothersome. As Hitler centralized power and protracted his ambitions, he aimed to preserve the neutral position of the United States, not disrupt it —which inflammatory opportunists like Kuhn seemed to be doing. In all, the Nazis and the Bund kept no formal line of communication or endorsement, and as international tensions grew in March 1938, the Nazis issued a decree which barred German nationals from joining the Bund and prohibited the organization from using the swastika and other Nazi insignia. But this unenforceable policy did little to change the Bund’s ceremonies, and was mostly enacted as a gesture to mitigate the growing angst over Nazism in Washington.
In the end, the Madison Square Garden rally would mark the denouement of the Bund’s trajectory. By the end of that summer, Europe was at war. Kuhn was arrested for the embezzlement of $14,000 from the Bund’s funds (the members themselves didn’t object; by definition it’s hard for a fascist leader to engage in misconduct) and was imprisoned. In December 1941, as the United States entered the war, Bund members were now criminal dissidents and could be convicted as such, and the ensuing crackdown and persecution gave the nascent House Un-American Activities Committee its first big assignment.
But Nazi apologists in the United States did not disappear with the dissolution of the Bund. Instead they went mainstream, and justified their stance in the name of prudence and neutrality. Charles Lindbergh was the most famous of these outspoken few, having flown to Germany in 1936 on U.S. assignment to report on the state of Luftwaffe aircraft, and two years later was inducted into the Order of the German Eagle by Hermann Goering, which was essentially the highest Nazi honor available to a foreigner.
In more palatable rhetoric that Kuhn’s, Lindbergh expressed his concern over Jewish influence, including their “ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government.” In a speech delivered June 15, 1940, Lindbergh warned of entering the war, making plainly visible his concerns for ethnic preservation. “Shall we continue this suicidal conflict between Western nations and white races?” he asked. “Or shall we learn from history as well as from modern Europe that a civilization cannot be preserved by conflict among its own peoples, regardless of how different their ideologies may be?”
Thankfully, the U.S. leadership didn’t listen, and ever since, white nationalists have remained a fringe element in this country.
This article is part of our White Terror U.S.A. collection, covering the shameful history of white supremacy in America.
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