CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
When the Minutemen learned that the Nazis had the balls to plan another rally—this one at the German Cultural Center in Irvington and in celebration of recent successful efforts to keep Jewish candidates off New Jersey election ballots—preparations for disruption began immediately.
Irvington was a suburb of Newark that bordered Newark’s Third Ward. The German Cultural Center was on a triangularly shaped block near the confluence of Nineteenth Avenue and Springfield Avenue in Irvington.
Nat Arno figured it would be easier to get his boys to the scene without interference if they came empty-handed. After scouting out the German Cultural Center, he saw that dense shrubbery grew along the rear of the building, perfect for hiding stuff.
During the days before the meeting, Arno, Abie Bain, and Puddy Hinkes took turns walking to the location with weapons on their person—billy clubs, baseball bats, frying pans, wire cable bludgeons, even lead pipes strapped to their inner thighs. When they got to the location, they went to the shrubs and created a cache of weapons.
The meeting was to commence at 9:30 P.M. The New York branch of the Bund boarded several chartered buses in Yorkville and arrived in Irvington a half-hour early. The Nazis that came off the bus were all males, flush with zeal and in uniform—the very uniforms that Mayor LaGuardia had forbidden them to wear in public on the other side of the Hudson. They, too, carried weapons. If the Jews wanted to interfere in their business again, this time they were going to have a fight on their hands. Just to demonstrate their military strength, the Nazis had their buses parked a block away from the hall and the uniformed men goose-stepped their way to the meeting in crisp lines of four. They sought intimidation through similitude and bore identical smirks of superiority.
Those expressions, however, crumpled when they realized that some of them weren’t even going to make it inside. A pack of now-armed Minutemen came flying out from behind the building. Near simultaneously, cars carrying other Minutemen arrived on the scene with screeching tires. The street and sidewalk in front of the “cultural center” burst into instant violence.
Military historians have noted that the Third Ward Minutemen were reminiscent that night of their namesakes. In the American Revolution, British soldiers marched in formation and followed the strict rules of warfare, only to be decimated by guerilla tactics. The same action occurred here, and the fighting was savage.
The Nazis might have excelled at synchronicity, but the |Minutemen were an assemblage of pro pugilists and mob enforcers. Men who knew how to march were fighting men who knew how to hurt.
A Minuteman with a hammer in his right hand dug the claw into a Nazi’s upper arm and, just like pulling a nail, ripped away his swastika armband along with his muscle from the bone. The Nazi was Robert Michelis. He went down screaming.
Almost none of the Nazis escaped unscathed. Two brothers made it back to the bus and thought they were home free, only to be dragged out by a pair of pipe-wielding Jews, who left them unconscious in the gutter.
Police arrived and charged at the bloody scene with their guns out, but who to shoot? Instead of pulling their collective trigger, they formed a barricade in front of the cultural center so the melee couldn’t work its way inside.
All of the sirens in the distance caught the attention of Third Ward residents, and word spread. There was another riot, the grapevine said, even more exciting than the one up north. They flocked to the scene. Some men rolled up their sleeves and had grandiose ideas as they approached, but once there, they saw the carnage and settled into their roles as spectators.
Also grandiose were the crowd estimates, which said that the two hundred or so Jews who stopped by to observe were “in the thousands.” Of course, by the next day, there was no one in the Third Ward who would admit to missing the action, although the truth was that most had slept through it. The New York Times said that the riot had featured an “uncontrollable mass of humanity.”
Somehow order was restored outside the hall. The Nazis who were conscious and could still walk were allowed by police to enter the hall. The Minutemen were kept outside. Arno, used to performing in front of a crowd, gave a rabble-rousing speech that worked the Jewish spectators into a lather. Unlike Bain—who had been magnificent during the fight, cleaning house with his bare fists, unconcerned with their lethal nature—Arno could raise his voice above a tortured whisper.
The result was that several of the spectators went in search of suitable objects to throw—rocks and pieces of brick. Using their skills as baseball players, they threw the objects at the hall’s windows, and the sound of shattering glass mixed with muddled cries.
Inside the hall, the Nazis were not celebrating as they had planned. They were trying to figure out how they were going to get the hell out of Irvington. The decision to park the buses a block away seemed incredibly stupid at this point. It would seem even stupider when they tried to leave and discovered the buses gone. Arno and his men had threatened the bus drivers into fleeing.
Arno and several others called for the rock throwing to stop, temporarily at least.
“I want to talk to the police,” Arno said.
He found the lieutenant in charge. The copper was busy ducking thrown objects and falling glass.
Arno said, “Lieutenant, no one wants to see what will happen if those Nazis try to get away. It will be unthinkably awful.”
The officer, used to suburban problems and nothing like this, agreed.
“Here’s the deal. If you promise a permanent ban on these Bund idiots in your town, we will disperse.”
There were legal problems with the request. The Nazis were not breaking the law. There was no such thing as illegal “hate speech” back then. They had a right to say whatever they wanted short of yelling “Fire,” and their right to assemble was protected by the Constitution. Besides, after the Schwabbenhalle riot, the Germans had made the Newark police promise that they would be protected during future meetings. To broker a deal between Nazis and Jews at this point would be breaking that promise, and even if it were possible, a mere lieutenant couldn’t make it stick.
“Can’t do it,” the lieutenant replied.
Now one of the problems of working a crowd into a mob is that you can’t automatically flick the off switch. Just as the lieutenant rejected the peace offer from Arno, someone in the crowd threw a brick that hit a cop in the face.
That turned the tide against the Jews. The cop went down hard. His comrades, including the lieutenant who’d been talking to Arno, pulled their nightsticks and began bopping members of the Third Ward gallery.
A fleet of paddy wagons arrived from Newark. Just as had happened in East Newark, tear gas was propelled into the crowd. Lots of it this time. So much that the entire neighborhood was affected. Irvington residents up and down the street spent a sleepless night trying to wash the fumes from their crimson eyes.
The police, themselves having trouble breathing, now concentrated on getting the Nazis to safety. The Nazis were told that those who had come by bus would have to come with them to the police station because they had been abandoned. Once in the precinct house, they would have the opportunity to make other arrangements to get back to New York.
This was done, but the angry mob that had been dispersed by the gas now reformed outside the police station, threatening to attack both the police and their Nazi guests.
The Minutemen were not among that crowd, but had instead followed a handful of Nazis who were locals and had not come to the rally by bus. That tail job led them to a café miles away. They raided the joint, smashing windows and tables and plates. Innocent diners hid under tables, and there was surprisingly little collateral damage. All of the rearranged faces belonged to the Nazis.
In the papers the next day, Irvington’s police chief apologized for all of that tear gas, which had hurt many innocent people. He admitted it was an overreaction and begged forgiveness.
“Sorry we made you cry,” he reportedly said to the innocent Irvington neighbors.
The scorecard after the riot showed that seven Nazis and three Jews had been arrested and jailed.
Of the Nazis, the oldest was thirty-one, the youngest twenty-two; all but one from Manhattan, the other from Yonkers. They had all been on the bus of Nazis that came from Manhattan. The men were arraigned the following Friday in an Irvington courthouse before a police recorder.
Of the Jews in jail, most seriously charged was anti-Nazi Jerome Rodberg, who had to pay five-hundred-dollar bail to get out after he was caught smashing a photographer’s camera during the riot.
The jail was nowhere near as busy as the doctors. There were hundreds injured, sixty required hospitalizations.
In the Third Ward, there were stories of strange figures at the Irvington riot, men who didn’t seem to represent either side but were somehow involved. One spooky figure in particular became the subject of much gossip—and rightfully so. While the wounded were still lying on the ground moaning, this man in a trench coat grabbed a reporter by the elbow and pulled him into a driveway. “I want you to print this, see? Tell them the federal Secret Service has begun an investigation into the cause of this disturbance.” The spooky guy then disappeared like a shadow.
That same shadowy fellow was later spotted whispering into Director of Public Safety Edward Ballantyne’s ear, and the boys from the press would have loved to have known what that was all about. The smell was that the fix was in. It was subsequently reported that the Secret Service was looking at the American Nazis in many of the places they gathered because they were considered a threat to national security, an arm of Hitler’s “studied policy.”
The New Jersey government, which leaned to the right, started to make noise. The Irvington riot was a big deal. Irvington Mayor Percy Miller gave a speech condemning the “attempts to incite riots in this city by means of mob violence and gangster methods.”
Ballantyne said “strict measures” were going to be used to dish out justice on those (the Jews) who were arrested during “the trouble.” Of course, Ballantyne was the man who would then be contacted by the Secret Service and change his tune.
The Jewish papers referred to the “Nazi invasion of Newark” and portrayed the gangsters who fought back as heroes. Jersey Jews idolized Longie, Arno, and the crew more than ever.
From the Minutemen’s point of view, the “trouble” was a huge success. The victory over the Nazis, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, was achieved “despite the protection offered by police.”
Ballantyne took twenty-four hours to rethink his statements about using strict measures to jail the Jews, and he issued a press release saying that in the future, no Nazi or anti-Nazi meetings would be allowed in Irvington. He added that any future altercations between the two groups would be halted “with a fire hose.” Folks who came out to watch any riot would be treated the same as the rioters themselves, he added.
“We cannot pick the wheat from the chaff,” Ballantyne concluded.
The Jewish press said this was a considerable blow to the Bund, which had successfully built up Irvington as a hotbed of Nazi activity.
But in reality, it was more of an inconvenience. Many of the Nazis who had come to Irvington had already been displaced. So what if they had to move to the next town over?
One paper wrote, much to Arno’s delight, that the resistance to the Nazi invasion was part of an obviously well-organized group.
Ballantyne didn’t have the power to tell the local Nazis that they couldn’t live in Irvington. They just couldn’t have meetings there. Judging by the Nazis who were nabbed by the local police at the riot, many attendees were visiting from New York, anyway.
Before the Germans were banned from meeting in Newark, there was a hearing, and a lawyer named Hayes spoke on behalf of the Nazis. He was smart enough to skip the nature of the groups’ beliefs, although he acknowledged that their message “nourished Old World quarrels” and even smarter to ignore usage of the phrase “freedom of speech.” What he did was argue that it was better for the Nazis to have their meetings out in the open rather than move them underground, where they would fester like a carbuncle and emerge volcanically.
Not all Jersey Jews were on the side of the gangsters. The upper crust folk among them were embarrassed that “hooligans were defending their honor,” an argument that would seem ridiculous only a few years later when the full extent of the Nazi horror became public knowledge. Known Jewish criminals committing acts of violence, some Jews believed, would fuel anti-Semitism rather than squelch it. The German Embassy in Washington, DC, complained about the injuries suffered by Germans in Irvington.
Arno heard about this and boasted to a reporter that his Minutemen had caused an “international incident.” He added, “I would prefer peaceful means, of course, but we are fighters. We can be provoked. My boys are good boys, but they become aroused by anything anti-Semitic or un-American.”
Unlike in other American cities, there was gunfire during the Newark war, and it was reportedly a Nazi pulling the trigger. Twenty-six-year-old Max Feilshus, the Minutemen’s chaplain, was standing one late afternoon with Nat Arno out in front of his house. The men were on the sidewalk at the corner of South Orange Avenue and Richmond Street watching children setting off firecrackers when a black sedan pulled up to the curb. Arno and Feilshus had their backs to the car.
Witnesses saw two men in the front seat. The one on the passenger side had a .38 in his hand as he called out, “Dirty Jew!”
When the chaplain angrily whirled around to see who it was, the gunman stuck his heater out the window and fired twice.
One shot missed, ricocheting off a stoop. The other hit Feilshus in the right leg.
The car screamed away, barely missing a couple of the kids, and was gone before anyone could get the license plate number.
Arno helped Feilshus into his home, and an ambulance took him to Beth Israel Hospital, where his condition was listed as “not serious.”
Some, but not all, speculated that the shooting was in retaliation for the Irvington riot, an event at which both Arno and Feilshus had been spotted and identified. Most of the Newark cops investigating the shooting, however, thought it was a mob thing, not a Nazi thing.
Arno and Feilshus, on the other hand, had no doubts regarding who had fired the bullet. It was a Nazi bullet, and reporters who came to the hospital to cover the story were told as much in no uncertain terms.
The cops remained skeptical. Arno was a smart cookie. Maybe he was trying to kill two birds, burying his own mob connections—he’d been arrested for gambling only nine days earlier—while headlining the Nazi menace.
Arno was adamant. Doctors were still digging the bullet out of the chaplain’s thigh when Arno pledged to a scribe that the war against Hitler in Newark would continue even though “they use bullets against us.”
“What got you started against Nazis?” a reporter asked Arno.
Arno, enjoying his celebrity status, said, “I was doing my road work one morning around Weequahic Lake when I happened upon a dead Jewish boy hanging from a tree, a swastika carved into his chest,” Arno said.
The papers printed the story as fact. Trouble was, Arno just made it up.
The Nazis had plans bigger than bullets, too. One night, Newark firefighters reported to a blaze and inside the building found evidence of Nazi occupation. Investigating further, they found a Nazi party membership book with names and addresses.
Treasury Department agents were called in, and the house was thoroughly searched. The feds opened a trunk and found lab equipment, chemical formulas, and photos of the many bridges connecting New York City with Long Island and New Jersey.
Following the discovery, US Congressman Samuel Dickstein called Newark a “hotbed of Hitlerism.”
The Nazis defied the ban on meetings in the Newark area and held a rally—albeit small, maybe two hundred in attendance—in the Irvington YMCA gymnasium. What were they thinking?
By the time the meeting was to start, the Minutemen had the entire block surrounded, sitting in their cars waiting for a signal to attack. None of this was secret. The cops were there, too, on foot, guarding the front door of the YMCA.
As promised, the Newark fire department was on hand as well, plugged in to the nearest fireplug and ready to hose. Arno, as he had that night at the Schwabbenhalle, snuck around in back of the YMCA, this time in the company of a young beat cop who was in Longie Zwillman’s hip pocket.
No ladder would be necessary this time to disrupt the proceedings, as the gym was on the ground floor. Arno’s intention was to smash the gym’s back window with a brick and toss in both a stink bomb and the brick. There was a note attached to the brick that read “NAZIS KEEP OUT.”
But when he and the cop got back there, they realized that the gym’s windows, as is common with gymnasiums where projectiles fly around, were reinforced with wire to prevent shattering. Repeatedly hitting the same spot on one window with the brick, he managed only to open a small hole. When Arno tried to push the stink bomb through the hole, he dropped it and it landed at his feet. That sent Arno and the cop fleeing back toward the front of the building.
Now out in front of the building and on foot, Arno ran into a policeman who wasn’t in Longie’s pocket. The cop blew his whistle and shouted “Halt!” Arno thought he heard a slight German accent.
Uh-oh.
Arno, his legs still strong from his morning roadwork, took off, and the cop fired a bullet over his head. A second shot whizzed past his ear. Arno put on the brakes and held his hands up over his head.
He was arrested and jailed. The attack on the YMCA meeting never happened. At Arno’s arraignment, a judge offered him a deal. No jail time if he kept his ass out of Irvington from then on. Arno told the judge he was Nat “Fucking” Arno and he would go anywhere he wanted to.
“Mr. Arno,” the judge said. “You will go to jail. Thirty days and twenty-five dollars.”
Down came the gavel.
That was it for the Minutemen in Irvington. They’d been ordered to stand down by the Law. But that didn’t stop their activities entirely, and they still pounced on Nazis anytime they could find one alone or in a small group.
They raided restaurants where the Nazis ate, staked out homes where the Nazis lived, and always managed to vanish before police arrived. They beat Nazis in the street, sometimes with baseball bats.
Though these attacks were frequent, several per week by some accounts, none were large enough to warrant mention in the newspapers. Finding Nazis to whomp was easier than ever for the simple reason that there were more of them. German Americans were moving to Newark and taking over blocks that only months earlier had been exclusively Jewish.
The Minutemen’s activities became increasingly clandestine. As would be true in other parts of the country, Jewish men who could pass for gentiles were sent to infiltrate the Nazi ranks and return with details of their plans and samples of their propaganda. One spy came out of a meeting with a small swastika flag on a stick. He gave it to Arno, who summoned a reporter.
“I fear for the future of our Jewish community,” Arno said.
Although small attacks against the Nazis continued, Nazi rallies in New Jersey, in the state capital of Trenton and elsewhere, were allowed to go on without disruption. Arno’s arrest and the shooting of the chaplain had had an effect.
Weeks passed, and Arno, Hinkes, Bain, and a handful of others learned of a Nazi rally in Newark at Turnverein (Gymnastics) Hall, and they decided to attend the event. Their ban from Irvington didn’t apply there.
There were about two hundred Nazis in the gymnasium, including a couple dozen security guards who eyed the Minutemen suspiciously the instant they entered. They sat in the back.
While Arno and the others drew attention inside, another crew of Minutemen were at a nearby parking garage, bribing an attendant and doing some work under the hood of Wilhelm Kunze’s car. By the time they were done, Kunze’s car wouldn’t be able to make it off the block.
Inside the hall, Kunze noticed that they had guests and edited his usual comments. He spoke only of German American pride without the usual Jew-hating rhetoric. Kunze said that there were reporters in the room and that he hoped they had the courage to print what he had said accurately and not write their usual lies designed to make the Bund seem villainous.
Just before the meeting was over, Arno gave a signal and the Minutemen got up to leave. A disappointed reporter asked Arno why there had been no riot. Arno explained that he’d been waiting for the first hint of anti-Semitism to start trouble and that hint never came.
“But there were Nazi flags, Nazi salutes,” the reporter said.
“That’s all I’ve got to say,” Arno replied, but there was a twinkle in his eye. The reporter sensed that the evening was not yet done and rushed outside to see what would happen next.
Kunze and other Bund officials scuttled out the back door as those in attendance filed out toward the front. The plan, as it turned out, had too many moving parts. For one thing, the garage attendant told Kunze that his car had been tampered with, so the car’s hood went up and the problem was fixed.
“I overheard them talking,” the garage worker said. “They are waiting for you one block north with iron pipes.”
When Kunze left, his car fixed, he headed south. The Minutemen realized that they’d been crossed up and tried a U-turn but—and eyewitnesses swear this is true—a woman leaped onto the front of their car and screamed for them to stay.
The driver slammed on the brakes and an effort was made to peel the woman off the hood, but she screamed in protest and crawled onto the windshield, drawing the attention of police. The woman eventually got off the windshield and went on her way, by which time Kunze had safely escaped the ambush.
Days later, three younger members of the Minutemen—Minute-boys really, Al Fischer, Louie Small, and Louie Lieberman—ambushed two Nazi brothers, fully grown adults, who were on their way to the post office to mail propaganda.
The lads had taken boxing lessons from Arno and Puddy and outmatched the Nazi siblings despite their youth. In a flash of efficient fists, the brothers were down on the sidewalk, groggily calling for help.
Leiberman got away, but police arrested Small and Fischer, who spent the night sulking in a dank jail cell before a lawyer sent by Longie Zwillman came to bail them out.
The Minutemen next went into action at a Springfield Avenue movie theater, raiding and busting up a screening of a recruiting film aimed at getting German American parents to send their kids to Nazi camp.
No more complicated schemes. No more pussyfooting or jawboning. This time, the attack was direct and violent. The projectionist received a bloody nose, and the projector was smashed.
Following the movie theater incident, Arno’s friend Dr. S. William Kalb, now functioning as a spokesperson for the Minutemen, summoned a Newark reporter. “We expect to take the action necessary to eliminate the Nazi element. We do not stand for violence and force and hope it will not be necessary—but we are taking no chances,” Kalb said.