PART SIX
Hollywood and the Third Reich must have Zusammenarbeit [collaboration].”
—ADOLF HITLER
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The relationship between Nazis, Jews, gangsters, and the police was far more complex in Los Angeles than in other American cities, so a little explanation is necessary. First off, nowhere in America did the Nazis try to disrupt and take over like they did in L.A.
Nazi Germany’s Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels had his eye on L.A. from the earliest days of the Nazis’ rise to power. He told Hitler that Hollywood was the world’s greatest propaganda machine. Hollywood movies, Goebbels explained, were shown not only across the United States but everywhere in Europe as well. To control the message coming out of Tinseltown was to, dare he say it, rule the world.
The Nazi infiltration into La-La Land began in 1933. Pamphlets were published, recruiting meetings held. The trouble was, as Hitler eyed Los Angeles hungrily, he couldn’t conceive of just how new and without tradition the city was.
New York was a tourist town and drew hundreds of thousands of visitors a year, even during the Depression. Visitors oohed and ahhed, partied a little, and went home. It was different in L.A. They had thousands of visitors a year, too, but the great majority of them had no intention of leaving.
They were dreamers who came to become movie stars but soon found themselves struggling to afford food and shelter yet still desperate to get a foot in the show-biz door. The migration was magnified by the Depression and the dust bowl that uprooted Americans and pointing them west.
Then, like now, L.A. was a city with a conspicuous homeless problem. In 1935, the state senate proposed a bill that would “prohibit all paupers, vagabonds, and indigent persons” from entering the city. The bill, had it passed, would have allowed authorities to kick out anyone who was likely to one day need public assistance. The bill didn’t pass, so the corrupt-through-and-through LAPD took charge of keeping the number of bums in the city to a minimum. If you wanted to sleep under a bridge, a cop would give you “the bum’s rush.”
As our story takes place, fully half of L.A.’s residents had been in the city for fewer than five years, and 90 percent had been in town for fewer than fifteen years. Second-generation Angelinos were few and far between.
From Hitler’s point of view, that made L.A. seem like easy pickings. But when his operatives goose-stepped into town, they found that there was no sizeable German American community. There was no Yorkville in L.A. Whereas New York City was a place where the space between things had been removed, L.A. was the opposite. Space seemed infinite, and the city sprawled in the baking heat, gobbling up the valleys and canyons and hillsides.
And then there were the police. Corruption was assumed. Not that New York and Newark and Minneapolis and Chicago weren’t corrupt, but Los Angeles took it to a new level. Organized crime and law enforcement were hopelessly blended. Politicians were bought and sold. Police officers paid for appointments. Madams and bookies paid weekly juice to the vice squads.
In 1938, even as Judge Perlman’s campaign against Nazis was underway, a private detective named Harry Raymond tried to investigate Mayor Frank Shaw for election fraud, only to have his car blown up with him in it. Raymond took 150 pieces of shrapnel throughout his body, but after a series of operations, he survived. However, he got the message and wisely discontinued the investigation.
The Silver Legion, separate from Hitler’s efforts but equally fascistic and anti-Semitic, was active in the area. William Pelley ordered a camp to be built just outside of Los Angeles, a fortress really, in Rustic Canyon in what is today part of Will Rogers State Historic Park, just west of the Getty Museum. At the time they called it Murphy Park, and it was dedicated as the headquarters for Silver Legion operations in the United States. Today, all that remains of the camp are a cluster of derelict buildings, covered and then covered again with Jackson Pollock–like graffiti.
In Depression-era L.A., there were about seventy thousand Jews, the great majority of whom lived in a neighborhood called Boyle Heights, tucked in between downtown Los Angeles and East L.A. (The neighborhood stopped being heavily Jewish during the mid-twentieth century, when several freeways were built through it, including the East L.A. Interchange, which is at one point twenty-seven lanes wide. The construction helped cars get around but changed the neighborhood for the worse, tearing down houses, obliterating main drags, and vivisecting what was left.) Only a relatively few L.A. Jews, the movie moguls and a smattering of stars, lived in the new, posh neighborhood known as Beverly Hills.
It might seem puzzling that Nazis would hope to gain a foothold in a city in which Jews ran the movie business, until you realize the Jews only represented the new money. There was already plenty of money in L.A. before the movie studios moved from Brooklyn and Queens during the late 1910s. Oil money. There had been a boom starting in 1892. The La Brea Tar Pits were the first indication that “black gold, Texas tea” was bubbling up from beneath the City of Angels. Edward L. Doheny sank the first well in 1892 at the corner of Patton and Colton, and—boom, gusher. Within a year, there was drilling going everywhere, more than a thousand oil wells. Those wells clustered most dramatically in two spots, just south of downtown and around La Brea and Wilshire. People with modest homes drilled for oil in their backyards. If you lived in L.A. during the 1930s, there were constant reminders of this, oil fields with dozens of genuflecting derricks pumped new money to put on top of the old for the lucky landowners. And all of that oil money was purely gentile.
The movie people, with their sunglasses and hangovers, lived in Beaux Arts mansions off Wilshire Boulevard, not a fascist among them. They made left-leaning films, explored themselves, coupled and tripled regardless of gender, drank an insane amount, and took drugs—all to the chagrin of the oil folk, who looked down their noses at the ever-growing Hollywood cesspool of sin. There seemed to be no end to it. Invading show-biz wannabes, profligate and vulgar, were pouring into L.A. at a rate of three thousand per year.
It was the puritanical oil snobs—with their riches, already anti-Semitic to the bone—that Hitler wanted on his side. Only with their help could he overthrow Hollywood and transform it into a Nazi propaganda machine.
The moguls, and most of the stars, had kept their heads above water during the Depression. In fact, in 1938, Hollywood was approaching its greatest year, with Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz simultaneously in production. Hollywood was aware of the Nazi menace, of course, but hesitant to react. There was money to be made in Germany, and the studio heads didn’t want to turn off that cash faucet until it was absolutely necessary.
The oil millionaires weren’t the only anti-Semitic forces at play. The Ku Klux Klan was active and had among its ranks top cops from both the Los Angeles Police Department and the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department.
To further complicate matters, there had been a seamless blend of L.A. law enforcement and organized crime since the 1920s, when most cops were under the thumb of saloonkeeper and racketeer Charlie “Gray Wolf” Crawford. Goodtime Charlie’s reign ended in the usual fashion on May 20, 1931, when he was shot in the stomach, liver, and kidney in his Sunset Boulevard office just as his bodyguard slipped away for a snack. There were L.A. citizens who had busy schedules, being that they were gangsters, cops, and KKK riders. There was the vein for Hitler to tap into.
Soon after Hitler’s scouts moved to Southern California, a Jewish attorney with the alliterative name Leon Lawrence Lewis put together a squad of spies to combat the Nazi menace. Lewis was in touch with the foreign press and knew that Hitler was encouraging Germans in America to form “active cells.”
Lewis was like Herb Brin in Chicago in one important sense. He was a six-foot-one Jew and no one to mess with. Born in Wisconsin in 1888 and the son of Jewish German immigrants, he went on to earn degrees at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Chicago Law School. His first years as a lawyer were spent representing Jews who were down on their luck. During the Great War, he enlisted and fought in France and was discharged as a captain. After the war, he moved to Chicago and became the Anti-Defamation League’s executive secretary.
Some of Lewis’s spies were gentiles because the physical type for infiltration was so limiting. And not all of them were men. Years later, it came out that a Navy widow named Grace Comfort and her daughter Sylvia, an unwed secretary, infiltrated the Bund and took photos at marches and demonstrations. Sylvia took a job inside the Bund, working as a stenographer. Her primary target was schoolteacher William Williams, who taught at North Hollywood High School in the daytime and distributed vicious anti-Semitic propaganda at night. (Williams eventually went off the deep end, shooting his wife and then himself in a murder-suicide after World War II.) The women reported back to not just Lewis but also the FBI and the Office of Naval Intelligence. The FBI worked its way into the loop only after Grace Comfort was arrested and explained with proof that she had been working undercover.
The ladies turned over pamphlets they’d snuck out, propaganda that read, “Buy Gentile. Employ Gentile. Vote Gentile. Boycott the movies. Hollywood is the Sodom and Gomorrah where Jewry controls vice, dope, and gambling.”
Grace and Sylvia worked their way up the ranks, became members of executive committees, and were assigned to check ID at the door of meetings to keep Jews out. They even listened in on Nazi phone calls that exposed plans for several hate crimes.
Lewis’s spies learned that the Nazis were thinking big. They’d had secret meetings in which they discussed just how they were going to overthrow Hollywood. They were going to lynch twenty top Hollywood stars and moguls—an all-Jewish roster including Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, and Charlie Chaplin—and leave the bodies hanging in public places to maximize the terror.
There were plans to use gas grenade launchers to put cyanide into Jewish homes, to throw a beer hall putsch just like Hitler’s that would coincide with the mass robbery of munitions from a National Guard armory, and to blow up a munitions plant in San Diego.
The plots were so frightening that they cast a new light on the rallies and parades. In L.A., anyway, the Brown Shirts and the Silver Shirts seemed like a show, a glitzy distraction from the insidious matters being discussed in private.
The Nazis held their first public meeting in L.A. at the packed Turnverein Hall on West Washington Boulevard, at a location that is now in the middle of the Santa Monica Freeway. On the industrial gray walls were mounted electric fans, noisier than they were effective, blowing the hot air harmlessly around.
The main speaker was Robert Pape, who was the Ober-gauführer of Nazi Germany’s L.A. operation, a World War veteran and charter member of the Nazi party. He had his HQ set up at the Alt Heidelberg on Alvarado Street. Nearby, he opened the Aryan Bookstore, which was the place to go for all of your pro-Hitler propaganda. Actually, it was a place-to-go in general, as Pape built a little entertainment and business complex around the store. There was a beer garden, a restaurant, and an upstairs space for administration offices. They called it the “Brown House” because that was the name of Hitler’s HQ in Munich. Like any good proprietor, Pape worked the guests, making sure every glass was full, talking all the time in his thickly accented English. To anyone who would listen, Pape warned of the Jewish-communist conspiracy and predicted that the Jews would try to take over but would fail because the Nazis would rise up as one and “save America.” Pape regularly sent “progress reports” to Hitler and Goebbels.
Also walking around shaking hands was Hans Winterhalder, Pape’s propaganda chief. Winterhalder also spoke at the Turnverein Hall meeting, telling his audience that there were fifty German American organizations in Southern California. What good was that? If they could just unify, they would be more than one hundred thousand strong and Hitlerism in America would become a reality. The message played very well with the audience.
The Nazi movement was recruiting in other troubling ways. The large basement of the Aryan Bookstore complex was being used to feed and bed German Americans. Many of them were dust bowl migrants. All of them were on the skids.
Such men, the Nazis knew, were mentally malleable. Consensus among Lewis’s spies was that the Nazis were building an army. But what to do about it?
Lewis tried telling the LAPD about the plotted espionage and didn’t get the response he’d hoped for. The policemen said that Lewis was only interested because he was Jewish and that Jews had made it hard for Germans to compete economically, that the actions of Germany seemed like they were all for the good. They were sure that the Nazis in America would only do good as well.
Lewis left the LAPD encounter horrified. Desperate to find the good guys, he tried the US government. Surely, it would be interested in what amounted to a plot to overthrow it. He met with Joseph Dunn, then the Southern California chief of the Justice Department’s Secret Service. Dunn didn’t criticize Jews the way the L.A. cops had, but he didn’t help, either.
“My hands are tied,” Dunn said. “I’d like to help you, but I can’t start an investigation until there is an overt act.”
Lewis realized that to save L.A. from the Nazi threat, he would have to do it himself. Still, he’d need backing. He took his case to Tinseltown, where he knew he’d find a few sympathetic ears and perhaps a deep pocket or two.
He held a secret meeting of his own, at the toney Hillcrest Country Club on Pico Boulevard—also the golf course where the Three Stooges had filmed Three Little Beers in 1935. Hillcrest was a Jewish country club, as the other L.A. clubs had restricted memberships. Wealthy Jews had opened their own club, and Hollywood bigs like Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, Al Jolson, and the Marx Brothers were members. Still, to have moguls from all of the studios there at once brought attention. Club personnel said they hadn’t seen this many limos lined up since the last big premiere at the Chinese.
These guys weren’t tall, but they had trouble moving in mysterious ways. Lewis drew an impressive crowd: Louis B. Mayer, Joe Schenck, Ernst Lubitsch, Jack Warner, Irving Thalberg. Also in attendance was entertainment attorney Mendel Silberberg. He was on board right away.
The others impatiently waited for Lewis’s pitch, blustering through cigar smoke about the inconvenience of the emergency meeting and the bother of keeping it secret. They gave Lewis their best this-better-be-good look.
Then Lewis started talking Nazis, and the men paid attention. Lewis told them he wanted to “create a war chest” for his already-trained-and-in-place spies within the California Nazi scene. Thalberg, the MGM wunderkind who didn’t have long to live because of a perforated pump, volunteered to help out with the fundraising. He’d been squeezing money out of people for years and supposed he could do it to fight Nazis.
“I had a fucking heart attack in Bad Nauheim last year,” Thalberg told the others. “I have witnessed the Nazi repression.” Then he volunteered to be the liaison between Lewis and the studio heads. Some of those moguls were in the room.
The decision to combat Nazism was not easy for the moguls because there were just so damn many movie theaters in Germany, and Germans loved Hollywood movies. If they contributed money to combat the Nazi groups in L.A., it would have to be a secret. No problem, Lewis said. Eventually the studios kicked over with money—MGM, Paramount, Warner Brothers, Universal, RKO, Twentieth-Century Fox, United Artists, and Columbia.
The money helped pay for Lewis’s ops but came with strings attached. Not only was the source of the cash to remain secret but Lewis also had to promise that his spies would help keep the fascists out of the studios.
And so Lewis’s spies were given a new assignment. They would strike at what Lewis perceived to be the Nazis’ weakest point, the fact that the three leaders, Pape, Winterhalder, and Herman Max Schwinn, all seemed to be self-centered egoists who saw each other as competition rather than as allies.
Now, in addition to gathering intelligence, Lewis’s spies were to carefully spread disinformation, little snarky comments that would sow trouble into the Nazi hierarchy. Lewis’s clandestine crew sparked dissension among the Nazi leaders and then poured gasoline on it. As trust in leadership rusted away, operations broke down in the planning stage and infiltration of Hollywood never happened.
The plan worked like a charm. Pretty soon, the leaders all thought the others were double-crossing them, the fighting turned inward, and plans to conquer California stalled.
Even after Pearl Harbor, Lewis’s efforts came in handy. When the US government was looking to round up Nazi sympathizers, Lewis had a list that made the job easy.
So one bullet had already been dodged when Judge Perlman picked up the phone to officially make his gangsters versus Nazis war coast-to-coast.