CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The year 1938 turned out to be the high point for Fritz Kuhn. Before the year was out, the news coverage of the Bund had shifted. Previously, the critical tone had to do with the political philosophy of the Bund and the distaste many had for its message. But during 1938, the morality of the Bund leaders themselves was now questioned. These were not just men of evil politics, they also were men of evil personal habits as well, perverts and thieves who did things that gave a good, God-fearing American the willies.
The reveal began when Kuhn’s chief of propaganda, thirty-four-year-old Severin Winterscheidt, was arrested—for the second time—for a sex crime involving a child.
Winterscheidt was a slender fellow with very little hair and the mild features of a hairdresser’s apprentice. He tended to walk with one hand, usually the left, thrust deeply into his pants pocket. He’d lived most of his life in Bonn, in the Rhineland, and only came to America in 1930. During the summer of 1938, he lived on Himrod Street in Bushwick, Brooklyn, a German neighborhood featuring the large Rheingold and Schaefer breweries.
His second arrest came when a ticket seller at the Empire Theater, at the corner of Ralph Avenue and Broadway not far from Winterscheidt’s home, reported to her manager that a girl and a man had just entered the movies and something was up.
The little girl, the ticket seller explained, moved with a precocious gait, had too much nervous energy, and she didn’t call the man Dad, or Papa, or anything like that.
“What did she call him?” asked the manager.
“Herr Tomate.”
“I’ll call the police.”
When patrolman Walter G. McCarthy entered the theater with his flashlight out, Winterscheidt had his Nazi pecker out. He bolted and had to be chased down Ralph Avenue by the policeman. “Mr. Tomato” was arrested and charged with molesting a ten-year-old girl.
During his capture, he ranted, “We need a Hitler in this country. The people here have too much freedom! Heil Hitler!”
Winterscheidt was convicted in special sessions court of indecent exposure and sentenced to six months to three years in the New York County Penitentiary. The New York Times, struggling for euphemisms, said that Winterscheidt had been caught “annoying a girl.” The paper also reported that witnesses against Winterscheidt, including the victim, received threatening phone calls from men with German accents before they were scheduled to testify.
Winterscheidt had made the news before, and never in a way that put Germans in a pleasant light. In November 1933, he was called before a New York grand jury to testify about the misuse of the US mail by disseminating anti-Semitic messages. Propaganda against a class or race of people, it was determined, constituted defamatory material.
In May 1935, Winterscheidt was the main speaker at a Friends of the New Germany meeting at the Yorkville Casino, and was quoted in the next day’s papers as ranting about the “immorality in the Jewish talmud.”
In March 1937, Winterscheidt was the editor of the Bund’s weekly newspaper, the Deutscher Weckruf und Beobachter, and his name came up in an investigation into the Nazi movement in America as an “alien military body” that intimidated US citizens and raised money for Hitler.
In July of that year, when US Congressman Samuel Dickstein announced seventeen names of top “Nazi agitators,” Winterscheidt was on the list. His first morals charge came in January 1938, when he was arrested in New York’s Penn Station. A twelve-year-old girl told police that Winterscheidt had flashed her. He was held on a thousand dollars bail, convicted, and served thirty days.
Only three months after his release, he was arrested the second time outside the Brooklyn movie theater.
In January 1940, Winterscheidt was secretly paroled when he turned state’s witness against other members of the Bund, eventually testifying in 1943 that Bund members had falsified applications for US citizenship. He became a regular at sedition trials throughout the war.
Winterscheidt was not the only Nazi perv. During the summer of 1939, evidence would emerge indicating that pedophilia and child molestation were pervasive among the ranks.
That summer, the House Un-American Activities Committee held a meeting in Washington, DC, about Camp Siegfried, the Nazi youth camp in Yaphank, Long Island.
As if teaching American youth to be Nazis wasn’t creepy enough, the committee unearthed another unexpectedly disturbing aspect of the camps. On that day, the committee’s witness was nineteen-year-old youth leader Helen Vooros. Described as dark-haired and pleasingly plump, she told the committee in detail about the teachings and beliefs at the camp, and that was all very troubling, but her primary beef with the camp wasn’t political but moral.
“The leaders wouldn’t leave me alone,” she said. “They were making plans to attack me.” Her voice faltered and became quiet until she was barely audible.
“They planned to what?”
She took a deep breath. “To attack me!” she said.
She didn’t need to say “gang rape.” Everyone understood what she meant.
For a moment, no one said anything, then Representative Joseph Starnes spoke up. Starnes was a Democrat from Alabama, a former schoolteacher and a World War I veteran. Haltingly, he began a question: “The immorality of the entire movement appalled you so—”
“It disgusted me,” Miss Vooros replied. She went on to explain that the boys and girls sections of the camp were only thirty feet apart and that this caused a lot of trouble. Parents had complained, and boys and girls were frequently seen together.
She testified that the camp leader, Theodore Dinkelacker, had told the boys that trying to have sex with the girls (all underage) was a “noble endeavor.”
Although he didn’t say “have sex,” he said ficken. That made the girls fair game. It was terrifying.
Dinkelacker himself partook in the noble endeavor and was once caught in bed with an underage girl from the Bronx. When a youth leader named Mrs. Klapprott—who was married to August, the camp director—was told about Dinkelacker’s dalliance, she advised that no one should say anything about it.
In what was considered the boring part of her testimony, Miss Vooros described the brainwashing that went on. The kids were told that Hitler’s National Socialist party was the only thing that could save America, that German Americans got the short end of the stick in the US, and that it was high time for that to change.
Studying Hitler’s biography in detail was part of the teaching curriculum. She said that Camp Siegfried girls were bussed into the city, dressed to look as cute as a button and display as much cleavage as they could muster as they distributed anti-Semitic pamphlets. She had done this herself, assigned a street corner in South Brooklyn.
Miss Vooros said a friend, who didn’t discuss the politics of the place in her sales pitch, had recruited her to the camp. The witness didn’t learn the camp was pro-Nazi until she got there.
When the Bund abandoned Camp Siegfried, gone in the night, only hours after Pearl Harbor, it again became known as Camp Upton. The US Army reclaimed the site and used it for an internment camp for Japanese Americans. After World War II, the camp became the home of the Brookhaven National Laboratory, under the auspices of the United States Atomic Energy Commission.
In 1939, New York District Attorney Thomas Dewey was chomping at the bit to prosecute Nazis. During that year, Bund leaders were charged with filing fraudulent tax returns, failing to file sales tax returns, failing to register as vendors, failing to keep records to compute sales tax, and failure to file both personal and business tax returns.
By March of 1939, not long after the Garden Party at Madison Square Garden, there were indications that Fritz Kuhn himself was coming apart at the seams. Feds were calling his bank and talking to his friends. He was a nervous wreck, drinking schnapps for breakfast and behaving peculiarly. One night, he followed influential radio broadcaster Walter Winchell, a staunch anti-fascist and close friend of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, into New York’s Stork Club, took a seat facing Winchell, and stared at him menacingly for about an hour before leaving, staying long enough for Winchell to mention him in his next day’s column.
In 1939, Kuhn was arrested and charged with embezzlement. During mid-May, NYPD Commissioner of Investigations William B. Herlands concluded an enquiry into the Bund and the way they handled money. He gave his forty-two-page report to Mayor LaGuardia, who in short order called for the arrest “within twenty-four hours” of Kuhn and several associates on charges of city tax frauds and “other violations.”
In addition to Kuhn, the others on the arrest warrant were the Bund’s national secretary, the treasurer and secretary of the German American Business League, the manufacturer of Bund uniforms, a vice president of a company that imported swastika emblems, and the company that printed the Bund’s propaganda.
Kuhn fled the city when he heard the cops were after him, but the Law caught up with him in Krunsville, Pennsylvania, speeding westward in a Mercedes-Benz. Kuhn was taken in handcuffs to the nearest justice of the peace, who happened to be in West Reading.
“I’m ready to face the charges, and I’m confident I’ll be exonerated,” Kuhn said—and his sorry ass was dragged back to New York, where in addition to the tax charges, he was charged with embezzling almost fifteen thousand dollars from the Bund he ran. The additional charge was brought by a New York County grand jury.
“The latest charge shows that Kuhn is no more than a common thief,” Dewey said, adding that if Kuhn were convicted of all charges, he could face spending the rest of his life in prison.
The embezzlement charge stemmed from money raised at the Garden Party, money that was supposed to go to the defense fund for Bund members who’d been arrested and instead went into Kuhn’s wallet.
Kuhn made bail easily enough, but trouble followed him like a shadow. He was in Webster, Massachusetts, over the weekend of July 15–16, 1939, accompanied by Count Anastase A. Vonsaitsky, leader of the fascistic White Russians in America. The count, it should be noted, was married to the heiress to a fifty-million-dollar fortune. The men had been drinking in a Webster bar and were entering the count’s large luxury car when policeman Henry Plasse noticed their inebriated gait and decided neither was in any condition to drive.
The officer had a short conversation with the men and decided that Kuhn was the more sober of the two and that he should drive. The men got into the car, and as Kuhn pulled away, he stuck his head out the window and said, “Fuck you, mutterficker.”
Officer Plasse leaped into action, literally, landing on the running board of the car. He reached in the driver’s side window, grabbed a handful of Kuhn, and forced him to stop the car. The men were held at the police station until a court clerk could arrive and fix bail at fifty-nine dollars for the pair, which they scraped together from what they had in their pockets.
Kuhn and Vonsaitsky were given a date to come back for their trial. Sober by now, they didn’t look like they intended to come back. As soon as they were gone, Webster Police Chief John G. Templeman couldn’t hide his distaste for Kuhn.
“He was just another wise guy who thought this was a hick town and he could stage one of them beer hall putsch things and be the dictator in it. We don’t let people go swearing at police in this town, drunk or sober.”
Things got so bad for Kuhn that he couldn’t even testify before a congressional subcommittee without worrying about someone taking a poke at him.
On August 12, 1938, the Dies Committee called to their witness stand Peter Gissible, who testified that he had been a former official in the German American Bund but had left the organization because of fundamental disagreements he’d had with Kuhn.
“I had been in charge of the Chicago branch of the Bund, but became increasingly disenchanted because of Kuhn’s relentless anti-Semitism and his commitment to an evil youth movement in which he enjoyed dressing up children in uniforms similar to those of the Nazi army,” Gissible testified.
Gissible said that there was a strong link between the Bund and Hitler himself and that several former Bund officials had returned to Germany, where they formed the Foreign Institute of Nazi Germany, which tried to boost the Nazi movement in other places, but mostly the United States.
Next up at the Capitol Hill hearings was Kuhn himself. His questioning did not go smoothly. Trouble started when Representative Starnes asked Kuhn if the purpose of the Bund was not to establish in the United States a government such as that now in power in Germany.
“That’s an absolute lie—a flat lie,” Kuhn said, his voice sounding as if he’d recently gargled with rocks.
With that, Starnes turned a scary shade of red, sprung to his feet, and shoved photographers and reporters aside as he headed for the witness. A vein at his temple visibly pounded.
“Don’t call me a liar,” the congressman spat.
Kuhn poured sweat but didn’t flinch. He sat in his chair wet but impassive. Perhaps he could tell Starnes wasn’t going to make it all the way. A policeman strode into Starnes’s path and stopped him eight feet shy of the witness table.
Chairman Dies worked his gavel hard, and order was restored. Representative Noah Morgan Mason, a Republican from Illinois, took over the questioning. He asked Kuhn if it wasn’t true that his Bund was composed of con men, that it was “a money-making racket based on the credulity of the American people.”
“That is not true,” Kuhn replied. “The goal of the Bund is three-fold. We seek to unite the German-American element, to fight communism wherever we find it, and to teach, to give the German element knowledge, a political background.”
Mason said, “Hatred of the Jews, it seems to me, is one of the cardinal principles of your organization.”
“All we want from the Jews is to be left alone,” Kuhn said.
“Isn’t it true that your members have pledged to defend by all means the good name of their mother country—Germany?”
“It is,” Kuhn agreed.
“You recently destroyed a lot of Bund official paperwork, is that correct?”
“It is. The documents were shredded because of prospective investigations.”
“What is the connection between the German-American Bund and the German government?”
“Nothing official. Familial, yes. I have a brother who is a Supreme Court Justice in Berlin under the Nazi regime.”
“Getting back to the destroyed documents. What was it about them that you didn’t want investigators to know?”
“I have to protect my members. I destroyed the membership lists.”
“But why? Aren’t all of your members American citizens?”
“That doesn’t make any difference.” Kuhn paused to light a cigarette, which he then held between his thumb and forefinger. “So long as you belong to the Bund, you would lose your job, and you know it.”
“Can this investigation have a list of the cities in which local Bunds exist?”
“Sure. We have locations in San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa Barbara, Santa Monica, San Bernardino, Portland, Spokane, and Carson City, Nevada.”
As this questioning took place, on the other side of the Atlantic, Hitler was celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of his entry into the German Army as a World War volunteer.
Kuhn’s embezzlement trial began on November 10, 1939, the day after the sixteenth anniversary of a sacred Nazi occasion, the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. The defendant entered court with a ridiculously large smile—see how happy and not worried I am?
There was reason for optimism. General Sessions Judge James Garrett Wallace had already informed the prosecution that the nature of Kuhn’s politics was not to be mentioned in front of the blue-ribbon jury, as it was bound to be prejudicial.
The judge got a big laugh from the gallery when he said, “Mr. Kuhn is not on trial for snatching Czechoslovakia, blitz-krieging Poland, or sinking the Athenia, but merely for pilfering money from the organization of which he is supreme dictator.”
During voir dire, one fidgeting prospective juror said he could not abide that Hitler guy, to which Judge Wallace said, “Hitler’s got nothing to do with it.” The man from the jury pool said he wasn’t sure of that and was excused. Eventually, twelve men were found, and security was doubled in court.
Handling the prosecution was Assistant District Attorney Herman McCarthy, while Kuhn was defended by Peter L. Sabbatino. In his opening statement, McCarthy said he would show that Kuhn stole the money from the Bund because of a “keenly sentimental” interest he had in a Mrs. Florence Camp. A second girlfriend, the seven-times-married Mrs. Virginia Cogswell, also surfaced during the trial. Kuhn, with a wife and two kids at home, was revealed to be a busy man.
Sabbatino countered that his client was the victim of persecution and was being tried for political reasons: “Since Mr. Kuhn was the absolute boss of the money under discussion here, no crime was committed. He could use that money as he saw fit.”
On Tuesday, November 21, Kuhn took the witness stand in his own defense and, literally pounding his chest as he spoke in his thickly accented English, said that it was not he who stole the Bund money from the till, but rather officers from the D.A.’s office, who snatched the dough during a raid on Bund headquarters on East Eighty-fifth Street on May 2, 1939.
He had to sit on the witness stand and listen quietly as his love letters to Mrs. Camp were read aloud.
“I was very, very friendly with Mrs. Camp, but nothing more,” Kuhn protested vehemently.
McCarthy glanced at the jury box and saw all twelve panelists waxing skeptical. An Associated Press reporter noted that Kuhn’s “shy little wife” was not in the courtroom for her husband’s ordeal.
Three days later, Mrs. Camp took the stand, her hair as platinum as Jean Harlow’s, as ladylike as could be, and proclaimed the defendant a “philandering prevaricator” but probably not an embezzler.
Headlines screamed, “Der Romance Is Over.”
On November 28, the assistant D.A. and the defense attorney gave their final arguments, Judge Wallace charged the jury, and deliberations commenced. On December 2, 1939, the jury found Kuhn guilty, and Judge Wallace sentenced him to two-and-a-half to five years in Sing Sing, eligible for parole after a minimum of twenty months served. Kuhn ended up serving forty-three months in prison. During that stretch, his US citizenship was revoked.
By this time, Germany and the United States were at war. Kuhn was rearrested on June 21, 1943, as an “enemy agent” and interned by the federal government. Now, instead of boldly goose-stepping American streets, Bund members had to worry about their homes being raided by feds, such as happened in Syracuse, where agents busted into two German Americans’ homes, making arrests and seizing guns, ammunition, walkie-talkies, and cameras.
On September 15, 1945, the war over, Kuhn was deported to Germany. He sailed across the Atlantic aboard the SS Winchester Victory and worked as a free man for a small chemical factory in Munich before being arrested again under Germany’s de-Nazification laws. He was again caged and released only shortly before his death on December 15, 1951.
One of his last acts was to write a letter to Walter Winchell: “Herr Winchell, I will lift to piss on your grafe.”
But he didn’t. Winchell outlived him by twenty years.