CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Schwabbenhalle on Spring Street in East Newark, New Jersey, sat snug against the Passaic River. The hall was named after Swabia, a former duchy of medieval Germany, which in the 1930s included portions of Switzerland and France.
The big room where the Nazis were having their meeting was on the second floor. There were 150 of them up there, all flush in the face and a little sweaty. It was half empty, as they were expecting late arrivals. The Nazis forced to cross the Hudson by New York’s Mayor LaGuardia had yet to arrive.
A dark alley ran along the side of the building. The only light came from the second-story windows above. Unlike most alleys, this one wasn’t a dead end. It led to an unkempt backyard. Arno and an accomplice tiptoed their way down the alley, each carrying one end of a ladder. Earlier, the men had darkened their faces and hands with burnt cork. Following the obligatory shvartzer jokes (Yiddish for a black person), they were ready to go.
After inadvertently smacking a metal garbage can with one end of the ladder, noisily knocking the lid off and sending a rat scurrying, they arrived at the rear of the building and set the ladder gingerly against the wall under a window that was opened just a crack.
The formal meeting had yet to begin, but the fun had started. It was somebody’s birthday, and Arno could hear the Germans’ drunken singing, robust and reckless. When “Happy Birthday” was through, they were having so much fun they sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
“Assholes,” Arno whispered. He waited until the bombs were bursting in air and climbed quietly up the ladder until he reached the window. “Okay, you go back to the front and wait for them to come running out,” Arno said.
He peeked inside at the half-full house, then lifted the window until it was open about eight inches. He was looking at the back of the head of a man at the podium and at the faces of everyone else. The man at the podium was Heinz Spanknöbel, a member of the National Socialist German Workers Party deputized by Hitler’s deputy führer Rudolf Hess to preach and recruit in America.
While Arno was behind the building, there was something happening out front that he and his crew had not anticipated: spectators were arriving in droves. None of the Minutemen had bothered to keep the planned attack a secret from their families, and their families had not bothered to keep it a secret from the butchers and shop owners, who in turn told their customers. By showtime, everyone in the Third Ward knew that that night’s Nazi meeting was getting busted and busted hard. Many, of course, decided to go and watch the fun—maybe join in.
A throng arrived by streetcar and bus. Some of the men, even those old and bearded, were rolling up their sleeves, eager for an opportunity to do their part for the cause.
Longie Zwillman himself was out there, wearing his finest three-piece suit, hooking his thumbs in his vest and strutting around like a proud father. A mob mentality bubbled up out of that cauldron to match the one inside the hall.
Arno would have preferred to wait until the hall was full, but he became impatient, as men are apt to do when atop a ladder. So, with athletic grace, Arno pulled a stink bomb out of his pocket and, like a second-baseman completing a double play, hurled it sidearm into the auditorium. Then another. And another.
The room soon smelled like a septic tank, and there was gagging, coughing, panic—then the anticipated mad rush for the exits.
“Help! Call the police!” a Nazi yelled, holding a handkerchief over his nose.
Another ran to the open window behind the podium for a breath of fresh air and found himself face-to-face with Arno, who broke his nose with a short right hand. Arno then, feeling vulnerable on his precarious perch, hurried down the ladder, abandoned it, and ran on quick feet to join the fray in front.
The sounds of coughing and gagging racked the air. Some coughed so hard that they vomited on the hall’s hardwood floor, causing others to slip and fall.
Those who made it out of the big room and into the stairwell ran into Hymie “the Weasel” Kugel, Puddy Hinkes, and a dozen others, with Louisville Sluggers, knucks, saps, and crowbars wrapped in the Star-Ledger’s sports page.
“Aim for their heads, boys,” said Hinkes.
Some aimed for the head, some for the swastikas on the enemy’s armbands. Bones were broken, scalps peeled back. The cries of pain sounded oddly like their singing only seconds before, although some of the baritones who’d been walloped low became sopranos. Nazis slipped on blood and tumbled down stairs.
The gauntlet of tough Jews stretched outside the front door and into the street. Some Germans tried to fight back, but they were drunk and the Jewish pugilists easily ducked their haymakers.
At 9:00 P.M., minutes before the first sirens of the police and the ambulance, two buses packed to the gills with the New York Nazis pulled up in front of the hall.
The Nazis retreated for a moment, and reorganized themselves into a flying wedge, a football play long outlawed because it was impossible to defend against and frequently resulted in a brutal trampling. They formed a single human chevron and pushed past the gangsters and into the hall, quickly barricading the doors behind them. It happened swiftly and efficiently, leaving the gangsters momentarily confused. Bats that had previously been held up to the sky were now lowered, blood dripping from them onto the sidewalk. (The flying wedge was outlawed in football in 1905 after its use resulted in nineteen deaths that year.)
Puddy later recalled that night with great nostalgia. He remembered the way the Nazis were stampeded expertly by the stink bombs, sent gagging into a bottleneck and then into the lobby, where the gangsters were waiting with bats and iron bars. He recalled that beautiful sound of the Nazis screaming “blue murder.” It was one of the happiest moments of his life, he said wistfully.
“It’s just too bad we couldn’t kill them all,” he concluded with a sigh.
Years later, Primo Weiner remembered a Nazi trying to shout out a “Heil” as he came down the stairs, only to be silenced by several Louisville Sluggers. While the melee was going on, a car full of Jews came down Spring Street, periodically stopping so someone could hop out with a freshly sharpened kitchen knife to slash the tires on the Nazis’ cars. Another with a hammer smashed headlights.
Also years later, Myron Sugerman recalled his dad telling him about the great brawls: “So the Jews went in and kicked the shit out of the Nazis. They didn’t fight back. They gave up. All of my father’s friends participated.”
When the police and ambulance did arrive, they found the wounded to be reluctant to talk. Many refused to give their names, for fear that the Star-Ledger would print them the next day.
One Nazi who did identify himself was Albert Schley, who was approached by a reporter from the Eagle and turned out to be downright chatty.
“Why are you and the others wearing Hitler uniforms with swastikas on them?” the reporter inquired.
“These are sports costumes. The swastikas are not mandatory. They are the wearer’s choice,” Schley replied, using an already bloody handkerchief to dab at a leaky nostril.
“Why were the men saluting in the Nazi fashion?”
“It is only a gesture. Nothing to be worried about.”
“And what is the purpose of this organization?”
“We exist only to promote friendly relations between the United States and Germany,” Schley said.
The gangsters had promised not to kill anyone, and they were good to their word—although it was touch and go. According to one eyewitness report, one beefy Nazi was being gang beaten to a pulp and might certainly have been killed if a tear gas bomb tossed by the Newark police hadn’t burst nearby, dispersing the Minutemen.
Tear gas is well known today as an anti-riot agent, but during the Depression, it was new and terrifying. The only thing most people knew about gas was that the Germans had used it in the World War and that it killed you. The explosion and tear gas panicked the crowd, causing another stampede.
The gangsters were game as hell, but in the heat of combat made a few regrettable mistakes. They were great fighters but not always perfect at distinguishing the good guys from the bad guys. There was no surefire way to separate the Nazis from the innocent bystanders. Sure, you could say folks in brown shirts and storm trooper uniforms only, but there was a lot of chaos in the riot and bad things happened. At one point, five reporters had begun shouting questions and taking photos. They were turned on by the gangsters and beaten to the pavement. Reporter Jack Aronowitz suffered a split skull and was in the hospital, listed in critical condition.
Unlike other cities’ journalists, the Newark reporters had no trouble identifying the crew who was smashing up the Nazis. They were “gangsters from the Third Ward of Newark.”
The Nazis had been eager for the police to arrive, but once on the scene, the cops turned out to be unhelpful. Longie Zwillman was a friend of the police and made sure they always had a little extra money in their pockets around the holidays.
Six of the Jewish contingent were arrested, among them Harry Schwartz and Louis Halper, and charged with using blackjacks in a fight. Minutemen Reuben Wilensky, Harry Green, Harry Sanders, and Skinny Markowitz were also hauled in.
As promised, Longie made sure a lawyer was on the scene right away, two lawyers, in fact, William Untermann and William Fogel, who quickly bailed the men out of jail at a price of twenty-five dollars per head.
Judge Ralph Villani of Newark’s Fourth Precinct Court, also a Zwillman friend, dismissed the charges the next day. The judge was far harsher with the Nazis, calling them an “alien menace” and denying them bail because they were a “flight risk.”
In the end, no one served any real time. Villani said from the bench, “These fights must be cut out. If there are any more disturbances here and they are brought before me, I shall deal severely with them, regardless of which side they represent.”
The next day, a reporter chased down Zwillman and asked for a comment regarding the riot.
“Wasn’t me. Wasn’t us,” Longie said.
“But I saw y—.”
“Not me. Us. Every fucking person in the Third Ward. Us.”
“But there is a photo—
“Look. I wasn’t even in East Newark last night. I was having dinner with a friend at Dinty Moore’s in Manhattan.”
“Okay, Longie. Whatever you say.”
“Here’s a tip. Talk to Nat Arno. He’ll give you a quote or two. And if you want to stay my friend don’t print my name.”
“Thanks, Longie.”
That reporter kept his promise, but there was another, from the New York Daily Mirror, who not only placed Longie at the scene but added embellishment, claiming that Zwillman was posted outside the hall in an armored truck and was directing the attack like a field general moving his troops. No one else remembered an armored truck. The story appeared only in the early bird edition of the paper and was retracted in later editions. The paper subsequently apologized for the story, saying an anonymous informant had misinformed their reporter.
The Jewish press didn’t exactly print the facts, either. They said that the attack on the meeting was spontaneous and that the Nazis were the only ones who used clubs and blackjacks.
Spanknöbel was not seriously injured in the melee, but there is an argument that he fared the worst. There were shadowy figures creeping around East Newark that night, the first indication of an FBI investigation.
Spanknöbel had bragged at the hall about his relationship with Rudolf Hess. A week later, the FBI issued a warrant for his arrest, accusing him of operating as an agent of a foreign government. He was never arrested, however, as he slipped quietly onto the next boat for Europe and returned to Germany. Spanknöbel spent the war in Germany and was arrested and imprisoned in “Special Camp #1” by the Russians when they marched into Germany. He died in 1947 of starvation.
The Nazis quickly learned to hold their meetings in secret, but the Minutemen continued to snipe at them if they caught them out and on the streets. After a while, the Minutemen busted up the secret meetings as well.
The Nazis couldn’t figure out how they knew when and where. The answer was: the cops. The Nazis always called the Newark cops to ask for additional security when they were getting together, and the Newark cops told Longie Zwillman, who told Nat Arno.
Then, boom, somebody got pummeled and the rest ran. If Arno had a piece of info that the Newark cops lacked regarding the anti-Semite animals, he passed that along. In those cases, the Newark cops made sure that any beat cop in the vicinity of the Bund meeting would be elsewhere and far, far, away when it came clobbering time.
The Bund-busting ops never lacked for money. Longie saw to that. If Arno needed a convoy of luxury cars to go to and from the scene of the riot, as had been the case when the crew traveled to Philadelphia, Longie made it so.
Sometimes, the Bund bustings didn’t even make the papers. There were no police reports. They stayed secret.
Maybe there was one emergency room nurse who figured it out: “You boys again. Here, put this icepack on that.”