CHAPTER NINETEEN
Fritz Kuhn and his traveling Nazi show last came to New Jersey during the fall of 1938 with a rally held in the German American Bund Hall at the corner of Thirty-eighth Street and Palisade Avenue in Union City, New Jersey. That was just on the other side of the Lincoln Tunnel from Manhattan, easy access for both New York and New Jersey’s tough Jews.
In preparation, Nat Arno ordered Harry Green, still a teenager, to sneak onto the golf course at a Newark country club.
“Take this sack and fill it with golf balls,” Arno said.
“Huh?”
“Rich gentiles are too good to go into the woods and look for their errant shots,” Arno said. “Go there and search by the thick trees and come back when the sack is full.”
“Sure thing, Boss,” Green said, and off he went. He climbed a fence and searched as he was told, without ever asking why the golf balls were needed. When he got back, Arno told him he was a good boy and explained that the balls were easy to throw, traveled more accurately than irregularly shaped rocks, and raised a nice lump when they found their target.
“Some of them are cut up. They have smiles in them,” Green said.
“All the better,” Arno said.
The police were aware that trouble was brewing and at the last second moved the time of Kuhn’s speech up an hour, from 8:00 P.M. to 7:00 P.M., in hopes of getting the event over with before the combatants were fully assembled.
It didn’t work.
The Bund event was advertised as a victory fete celebrating the German army’s acquisition of the Sudetenland, a portion of Czechoslovakia. When the Minutemen arrived at the scene, they found they had unexpected allies—about three thousand of them.
The other protesting groups consisted of Czechoslovakian sympathizers who didn’t seem as interested in physical violence as they were in creating memorable photo ops that would guarantee newspaper coverage.
The Czechs chanted and carried signs. One memorable sign read “HITLER WANTS PEACE—PIECE BY PIECE.” They burned Nazi flags and a Hitler dummy in effigy outside the Bund Hall.
One group of protesters didn’t have to travel very far to get to the Bund meeting. Their own hall, where Czech societies met, was catty-corner at the same intersection.
On a third corner was the city hall and police headquarters building. The police could have moved the time of Kuhn’s speech up by twelve hours and all of the players would still have been on the scene in time. There were a couple of hook-and-ladder trucks from the fire department as well, just in case.
When Kuhn arrived, emboldened by drink, he had to duck thrown golf balls to get inside. Luckily for the Bundesführer, he arrived with hundreds of his best friends, storm troopers who surrounded him and tried to shield him from attack. The arriving Nazis were also protected as much as possible by the sixty local police officers on the scene. Some of the protesters had the front door blocked, however, and chaos threatened to reign until police moved Kuhn along the building toward the side entrance.
When the golf balls were gone, the Minutemen charged the building in an effort to get inside. Police barriers quickly collapsed. The front doors were pulled open, and Arno’s troops invaded.
The problem at that point was not resistance but the layout for the building. The invasion rapidly bottlenecked, and the Minutemen made it only as far as the bar in the slender lobby before gridlock took over. At the side of the building, Kuhn called out to the police to do a better job of getting him inside. It was 5:45 in the afternoon, and he was scheduled to speak at 7:00 P.M. Kuhn was more or less shoved through the side entrance, where there was another separate small bar and restaurant. Kuhn arrogantly took a seat at a table and called out for schnapps. Before his drink arrived, a group of protesters burst in, one man swinging a belt.
A press photographer—how the heck did he get in there?—stood on a table and snapped a photo that ran in every paper in America the next day. It showed both the man with the belt and the back of Kuhn’s head.
Outside, the crowd that couldn’t get at Kuhn turned its attention to Kuhn’s car and smashed every window.
Also pushing his way through the side door was Union City’s Director of Public Safety Harry Little. Avoiding haymakers, Little came upon a startlingly unfazed Kuhn, who was scolding his guards for allowing the “animals” inside.
Kuhn seemed to be experiencing a strange spell of denial. How dare these hoodlums interrupt his peace? He always enjoyed a couple of shots of schnapps before he gave a speech, it was good for his throat, and these lowlifes were making an awful ruckus.
“You can’t stay,” Little said. “You are disturbing the peace.”
“Me?” Kuhn said, highly indignant. “But these Jews . . .”
“Yes, you! You are causing this riot. We don’t want any blood-shed here. I am hereby ordering you to leave town immediately.”
“All right, I’ll go,” Kuhn said. He glanced around in hopes that he might be served a shot or two of liqueur first, but none of the service staff chose to make eye contact. Glass broke over Kuhn’s head as a projectile, looked to be about half of a brick, flew into the room.
“I’ve got to go,” Kuhn shouted out, rising to his feet as he spoke to no one in particular, sticking his jaw in the air. “It is not because I am afraid but because the police fear trouble. I promise I will be back in Union City soon.”
He and his guards reversed course and quickly returned to Kuhn’s wrecked 1937 Plymouth coupe with its fat running board and whitewall tires, which—though pocked, battered, and covered with broken glass—still ran.
Kuhn got off one infuriating Nazi salute before climbing in, being careful not to cut himself. A fresh barrage—more bricks and a couple of recycled golf balls the size of hailstones—showered onto the car as it pulled away.
With Kuhn gone, police worked their way into the arena, where they informed the assembly that their leader would not be speaking. They also advised those in uniform to change into civilian clothes before going outside or else they couldn’t assure their safety.
The next morning, newspapers across the country ran items invariably stating that Kuhn had been “stoned out of town.”
The next New Jersey Bund meeting was held in the private mansion of Miss Caroline Meade on the Boulevard (house number 225)—the actual generic name of the main drag—in the borough of New Milford in Bergen County, about twenty-five miles north of Newark. The house stood between Milford Avenue and Main Street, where a street named Kastler Court is today. The toney house was set back from the Boulevard about forty-five feet and fronted by a finely manicured lawn.
The public knew the time and place because there had been a three-column notice in the Bergen Evening Record advertising the event, explaining that the meeting was open to everyone and intended to explain “the purposes of the Bund and the principles of free speech.”
It was some house. The meeting was held in the home’s “ballroom,” a feature that many homes lacked. This room was about forty feet wide and one hundred feet long. There were neat rows of folding chairs and a large portrait of Hitler on the wall.
The gangsters had been instructed to kill no one, but they were smart enough to know the other side had taken no such vow. To enter a private home and fight up close would constitute a criminal trespass that could result in gunfire. This attack would have to take place from a distance.
Because the public had been invited, not everyone in the ballroom was pro-Nazi, and there was heckling during the preliminary speeches.
Kuhn interrupted an early speaker and took the podium himself prematurely. He was dressed in his usual gray and black paramilitary uniform, a well-tailored costume that angered some attendees.
“What army do you belong to?” shouted a man near the back.
“What war did you fight in?” cried out another.
“I was born in the United States, and my father and my grandfather were born in this country,” the German-born Kuhn lied. “If I can’t fight for my own ideas, there is certainly something rotten somewhere. This heckling and yelling is the last resort of men who can’t answer any arguments.”
“May we debate them?” a new voice called out from the ballroom.
“Order. I must have order,” Kuhn said. “Nobody objects to our activities except the bosses of Jewish communism.”
Six men rose to their feet and shouted as one: “You dirty rat! You leave the Jews out of this.”
The meeting was proceeding in this disorderly manner when the first signs of trouble were heard from outside, the chanting of protesters.
The hostess, Miss Meade, suggested that the protesters be allowed into the meeting. “We’re all Americans,” she said.
She was quickly persuaded that that was not a good idea, and the first rock came in through a window only seconds later.
Again the hostess spoke up: “Let them break windows. Let the people in this room see what is wrong with democracy. The Jews are a menace, and you can’t have a democracy with them around.”
Kuhn and his storm troopers held a quick sidebar away from the podium, after which Kuhn suggested that the women in the room should be evacuated so they wouldn’t be cut by broken glass.
Eighty members of the county and municipal police, bolstered by local firemen, tried to cordon off the area, but the Minutemen arrived in numbers and fought their way through the wall of the Law. The town’s ambulance, which started out the evening “shiny and new,” was the worse for wear and tear by the time the evening was through.
The cops responded with nightsticks and tear gas. There were an estimated five hundred protesters, and about fifty of them made it through the cordon and broke the house’s windows with rocks. Minutemen pelted the house with rotten vegetables and rocks. No golf balls this time.
When a fellow named Adam Kunze emerged from the house to shout at the protesters, he was nabbed, dragged to nearby Hirschfield Brook, and tossed into the water.
When the police were informed, erroneously, as it turned out, that the meeting was breaking up, they cleared the front of the mansion, no easy chore. Curious bystanders had joined the protesters. The Boulevard was a bustling thoroughfare. Rubbernecking gummed up the works.
Once the entranceway was clear, the police, accompanied by a soggy Adam Kunze, politely entered the home and told the Nazis that it was now safe for them to leave.
Miss Meade said that would be impossible, as she had just begun to serve refreshments. And so, while tensions outside slowly diffused, Miss Meade’s guests had ice cream.
The next day, Arno was savaged in the north Jersey press, called “un-American” and “quick to resort to violence.”