CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Germania Club, built in 1889, looked old even then, when it housed the oldest German American organization in the city. (It looks even older now. The building is still there, added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976 and designated a Chicago Landmark in 2011.) The building has five stories, including a two-story lime base. Architect August Fiedler designed it in a combination of neoclassical and German Renaissance styles. Inside were a grand ballroom, a banquet room, and a bar and restaurant.
The boys rendezvoused across the street, waited until the meeting had started, and then walked in the front door like they owned the place. They sat in the back and tried to look like they knew what was going on, despite the fact they didn’t speak German. Most of them knew some Yiddish, and the languages are similar. They didn’t catch every word, but they got the gist.
Sitting near the front was Herb Brin, who was undercover and thus could not participate in the disruption.
The featured speaker was Bund PR director Wilhelm “William” Kunze. It was during Kunze’s speech that trouble began, and it had nothing to do with the gangsters and boxers at the back of the venue.
Kunze made his usual mischaracterizations of Bund activities: They were not a military organization, not seeking to change the American government, only emulating the good things about the German government, blah, blah, blah.
“Hitler put six million and five hundred thousand unemployed people back to work. If we can learn something from that, we should take advantage of it,” Kunze said.
Freeze frame.
It is important to note here that there were many German American organizations in America’s big cities, close to forty of them, that were anti-Nazi to the bone and therefore anti-Bund. In Chicago, some of those organizations consolidated into the Action Committee of German Progressive Organizations, which published a newspaper called Volksfront, that is, “People’s Front.” The ACGPO was dedicated to oppose by lawful means subversive propaganda against the Constitution of the United States of America. The leader of the group was fifty-year-old Eric von Schroetter, professor emeritus of romance languages at Northwestern University, who was sitting five seats in from the aisle in the fourth row as Kunze spoke. Von Schroetter was also the secretary of an organization called the German American League for Culture.
And. . . action.
Kunze had just made his comment about putting the unemployed back to work when von Schroetter stood and shouted, “Sure, they’re all in the German army!”
Two brown-shirted storm troopers moved in on von Schroetter, grabbed him, and began to drag him out.
Somewhat simultaneous to this, a group of Nazi bouncers had spotted the boys from the pool hall—Davey Miller, Sparky Rubenstein, Barney Ross with a handkerchief tied around his lower face like an outlaw in a Western movie. There was nothing Aryan about their appearance, and several Germans accosted the group. Feeling clever, they asked the boys to prove they weren’t interlopers by giving the Nazi “Sieg heil” salute. Sparky Rubenstein wasn’t impressed. He gave the Nazis a salute all right, a one-finger salute, and the fight was on.
Ross obediently used his leather blackjack and, with his combed hair flopping onto his forehead, sapped down three Nazis right away, without a single use of his lethal weapons. Sparky tried to grab a handful of one Nazi’s hair, but it was too short, thin, and sparse, so he worked the move into a headlock and waled away with his free hand while the Nazi flailed weakly, dropping harmless blows to Sparky’s back with the meat of his palms.
A photographer with the Associated Press tried to take photos of the melee when Emil Horitz, one of the guards who’d escorted Kunze to the hall, grabbed the camera, threw it to the ground, and stomped it into pieces. The photographer made a mental note of this guy, learned who he was, and later had the cops arrest him for “criminal mischief.”
When police arrived, there were five arrests. Nazis under arrest included thirty-year-old real-estate broker William Wernicke and Horitz, the camera smasher. Also arrested were von Schroetter, charged with disorderly conduct, and two Jewish teenagers from the boxing club. The remainder of the Kedzie Avenue crew made a clean getaway. The next morning, Municipal Judge Gibson German—that was his name—dismissed all of the charges and told the combatants to keep their hands to themselves.
The riot at the Germania Club coincided with the resignation of a German diplomat named Ernst Wilhelm Meyer, who said that he could no longer represent the “New Germany” as Hitler had “betrayed what I knew to be the lasting interest of the German fatherland. I can no longer conscientiously serve a government which I saw to be a foe of so many things I had been taught Germany stands for.” Meyer resigned during a speech he gave at a dinner held in his honor in New York City by the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America. “It is disgraceful for a ruling party of a state of seventy million inhabitants to drive a helpless minority of less than five hundred thousand to destruction.”
Brin supplied anti-Nazi intelligence for much of 1938 and 1939. Every time the Nazis scheduled a secret meeting or a surprise march, Chi-town’s Jewish gangsters knew in advance, and the Nazis were attacked and pummeled.
As for Brin, he didn’t just spy. He later told historian Robert A. Rockaway that he participated in some of the later fights as well.
“I marched with the Nazis,” Brin said. “But I came back later with Jewish gangs, and we beat them up good.”
Many of the dates and locations of these beatings are lost to time. Brin had promised not to write about his efforts and was good to his word, not discussing the Nazi fights until many years later, but a few of the scuffles did make the newspapers.
During November of 1938, several meetings in a row were busted up at a variety of meeting halls in the heart of the German district—three of them in one week.
The first meeting occurred on the same date as the Syracuse, New York, riot that we’ll be discussing in chapter 24. The second was invaded during a speech by Dr. Homer Maerz, president of the brand new German American Alliance. Maerz was speaking on the topic of what had happened at the previous meeting and how to prevent it in the future. He should have been more concerned with the present. Several Chicago cops and Bund guards were posted at the front door, but they did no good as the invaders broke through and entered the hall screaming, “Down with Hitler!” and “Down with fascism!” By this time, the Associated Press reporter knew who was doing the busting up, but he protected Davey, Sparky, Barney, and the others, identifying them only as “anti-Nazi protesters.” There were eight arrests, six men and two women. The women had started brawling outside the hall when one shouted “Hooray for Hitler!” The other proclaimed herself a Czech sympathizer. All eight were briefly jailed at the Sheffield Avenue police station.
The third of that week’s riots took place at a Silver Legion meeting held at the Loyal Order of Moose hall on Irving Park Road, with the guest speaker fifty-one-year-old Field Marshall Roy Zachary. (For more about the Silver Shirts and their founder William Dudley Pelley, see chapter 21.) The guest speaker didn’t look like much. He was small, bespectacled, and gave off a timid vibe. But when he spoke, he shook the rafters.
A United Press reporter was on hand to describe the action. Soon after the meeting began at 8:00 P.M., a parade of cars pulled up out front, and from each car three to five angry Jewish men emerged. At 8:35, just as Zachary was beginning his anti-Semitic remarks, a “shouting mass of men charged in” and a “general melee” followed.
In just about all of the other riots, the top Nazis managed to sneak out of the building and allowed the minions to take their lumps. But on this night, with approximately one hundred Silver Shirts in attendance, the boys went straight for the podium, and Zachary was later hauled out with “head injuries.”
This riot, which occurred on the Monday after Thanksgiving, was also the occasion when Judge Perlman’s anti-Nazis came closest to defying the “no killing” rule. In the midst of what the reporter called “fierce hand-to-hand combat,” Aaron Ragins of the Kedzie Avenue crew punched a forty-four-year-old man named Clarence Sutherland right on the button, causing Sutherland to fall and crack the back of his Nazi skull on the hardwood floor. Sutherland was taken out on a stretcher, and it was touch-and-go at the hospital, but he eventually recovered.
Zachary’s injury was the headline, however, and the field marshal’s photo appeared in many newspapers with a sad piece of gauze held to his forehead by a clumsy cross of adhesive tape.
The police arrived and peace was restored. There were many injuries, mostly bruises and lumps. The reporter referred to the Jewish gangsters as a “nameless organization formed to oppose both the German-American Bund and the Silver Shirts in the manner of vigilantes.”
The organization might have been nameless, but the Chicago Daily Tribune published the names of those who’d been arrested for busting up the meeting, and most were Davey Miller’s boxing students, ranging in age from seventeen to twenty-one.
A reporter and a photographer from the Jewish Press were also busted, leading us to believe that they were doing more during the fight than taking notes and pictures. “Greasy Thumb” Guzik hastily sent lawyers to the jail to bail them all out.
The final Chicago riot of 1938 took place at a hall where Bund members were watching a German movie. Eleven Jews were arrested and scolded, this time by Judge Charles S. Dougherty, who said he “appreciated the motive” behind the attacks but suggested the best way to make the Nazis go away was to ignore them.
There was one last incident in Chicago during the spring of 1939. The Kedzie Avenue crew targeted a large meeting featuring Fritz Kuhn himself. The police, however, had their own spies in place and went to work before the meeting began outside the hall, detaining dozens of Jewish men who, when asked to explain their presence, mumbled something about liking liberty. Only one was arrested, however, and that was because he was found to be carrying a gun.
Sparky Rubenstein, Herb Brin, Barney Ross, and the other Chicago vigilantes had done their job. The number of meetings they disrupted was impressive. It’s safe to say that by 1939 every Nazi in the Windy City knew how tough Jews could be.