CHAPTER THREE

Fritz Kuhn

The leader of the German-American Bund (i.e., the Bundesführer) was Fritz Julius Kuhn, a popinjay with a protruding jaw and a low brow. He maintained a grim countenance, like a general who dreaded slaughtering his enemy but, alas, it needed to be done. When he spoke in public, that jaw pointed upward, a picture of arrogance and defiance.

Kuhn was born in Munich in 1896 and fought in the First World War as a German infantry officer. He was a big man, well over six feet, 240 pounds. After the war, he earned a degree in chemical engineering at the Technical University of Munich.

Among Kuhn’s uncorroborated boasts were that he’d been a charter member of the Nazi party and had fought beside Hitler at the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. His Nazi heroics aside, he was a loner, a womanizer, an alcoholic, and a man of poor character whose foibles leaped up and bit him on a regular basis. As a young man, he’d been arrested repeatedly for petty theft and had probably left Germany to avoid jail time.

He came to the US in 1928, lived in Detroit, and worked on America’s first assembly line for America’s number one fascist, Henry Ford. There, he helped build Model A’s.

Kuhn became a naturalized citizen in 1934 for public relations purposes and worked at the Henry Ford Hospital—no Jews allowed. He was always in trouble, usually for attempting to dally with the nurses.

He was also a con artist, frequently passing himself off as a physician even though he was merely an x-ray technician. The last straw came when he annoyed coworkers by practicing his Hitler impression at the top of his lungs in the hospital’s darkroom.

Out of work, Kuhn joined the Friends of the New Germany and, because of his ambition, size, and booming voice, became a leader of its Midwestern division, headquartered in Detroit.

He put that Hitler impression to work and gave rousing speeches. He spoke of the necessity for unity between Germany and the United States. What German Americans needed, he ranted, was a new organization, one that would result in Hitler’s agenda working in the US.

Hitler’s movement, he explained, may have seemed un-American to the Jews and liberals who’d taken over the US, but it was actually parallel to American principles as expressed by the Founding Fathers.

“I am sick of Germans being treated as guests in America,” he railed. A new Nazi party, he insisted, could grow from within America. A ruling-class hero was something to be. All German Americans had to do was follow him.

In October 1936, Kuhn informed the Bund that it was to vote as a unit for Republican Alf M. Landon, as Landon was the presidential candidate “most sympathetic toward Chancellor Hitler’s Germany.” Kuhn wrote that FDR’s leadership and the government’s movement to the left distressed him. If FDR were allowed to remain in power, Kuhn argued, the United States would be led into a “united Communist front and subsequent chaos. We hope with the election of Landon to create a friendly understanding between our adopted country and Germany, our native land.” He added that he also hoped that one day a “member of our own race,” that is, a German, would sit in the White House.

There were not enough Bundists to affect the presidential election, and Landon finished a distant second to the wildly popular FDR. But Kuhn did get the Bund thinking in terms of voting as one, so when it came time to elect a Bundesführer, Kuhn ran for reelection unopposed and—in true fascist form—was elected unanimously.

Kuhn told his followers that he had recently returned from Germany, where he’d been granted an audience with the great Hitler, who emphasized to Kuhn that Bund membership must remain pure. That is, all members must be Christian Caucasians who were naturalized or native-born Americans and sympathized with the Nazi cause. As proof of the meeting, he offered up a photo of himself and Hitler standing side by side, although it might have been the thousandth photo of the day for Hitler.

The Roosevelt administration was wary of the Bund, and orders came down from the president’s home in Hyde Park, New York, to make the American Nazis uncomfortable whenever possible. If the Bund failed to file the proper paperwork before a gathering or if there was an undotted i or an uncrossed t, officials swooped in to deny the Bund of whatever it hoped to do. For example, a Bund rally in 1937 was repeatedly delayed because Kuhn had “failed to file a statement of the purposes of his organization with the Secretary of State.”

Despite the clerical harassment, the Bund grew larger and bolder, adept at making a show in places where it would be difficult for opponents to criticize or disrupt. In March 1937, a nine-year-old German American girl living in New York City, little Einer Sporrer, was murdered by sex maniac Salvatore Ossido, a barber by trade. At the poor victim’s funeral, an event that attracted more than five thousand spectators, as the tiny white casket was borne out of St. Barbara Church at the corner of Bleecker Street and Central Avenue in the largely German Bushwick section of Brooklyn, the Bund was there in full force, with a Bund band playing the dirge and spectators raising their arms in the Nazi salute.

Illustration

Only days after Einer’s Nazi funeral, a US House of Representatives Committee on Naturalization and Immigration discussed the American Nazi problem. The committee—chaired by Samuel Dickstein, a Democrat representing the Lower East Side of Manhattan—investigated the use of propaganda against democracy. Dickstein would go on to become a leader of the legitimate anti-Nazi movement. He was born in Lithuania in 1885, son of a rabbi and his wife. When he was two, he crossed the ocean with his parents and lived on New York’s Lower East Side. He attended City College and earned a law degree at New York University. His face seemed divided into two parts, a strong, wide forehead with keenly intelligent eyes at the top and below that, small, pursed lips and a chin that didn’t look like it could take much of a punch.

Dickstein told his committee that Kuhn ran the Bund and claimed two hundred thousand members (a greatly inflated but frightening number), all of whom had taken an oath of fidelity to “their leader,” Adolf Hitler. Dickstein referred to Kuhn as “enemy number-one on my list.”

According to Dickstein, the Bund oath read as follows (note that it came with its own legal disclaimer): “I solemnly swear fidelity to my leader, Adolf Hitler. I promise Adolf Hitler and everybody designated by him known to me or to be known to me, through his credentials, the respect and absolute obedience and give allegiance herewith to fulfill all orders without restrictions, and with my entire will, because I know my leader does not demand from me anything illegally.”

Dickstein told the committee that the best way to combat written Nazi propaganda was to close the mails to it. The dissemination of propaganda would be severely hindered if the Nazis could no longer simply put a stamp on their stuff and drop it in a mailbox. The modern equivalent would be getting kicked off social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Parler.

Even as Dickstein was busy in Washington, DC, Kuhn—whom the papers had taken to calling the “vest-pocket Hitler”—was in New York verbally blasting one of his favorite targets, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia of New York City. Kuhn called LaGuardia, Dickstein, and anti-fascist activist Samuel Untermyer a “three-horse team” of communists who were responsible for the “sit-down and handout system” of dealing with the workingman.

Kuhn was giving his remarks when he was informed of Dickstein’s statements regarding the Bund’s oath. He grinned and claimed that Dickstein’s “oath” was a fabrication. He pulled out a Bund application form and read aloud, “ ‘I hereby apply for admission in the German-American Bund, the purposes and aims of which are known to me, and I obligate myself to support them to the best of my ability. I recognize the leadership principle, in accordance with which the Bund is being directed. I am of Aryan origin, free from Jewish or colored blood.’ ” He slapped the paper against his hand. “That is a bona fide membership card.”

Kuhn said that he would not give up until he had Nazi-fied America, until the Bund was part of America’s fabric, a thing that would, like the Third Reich itself, live for a thousand years. He would create a “new generation” of Nazis, and to do that he would need to transform the minds of America’s children.

The war of words between Dickstein and Kuhn continued. Dickstein placed on the Congressional Record the names of forty-six people who were “Nazi propagandists, agents, stool pigeons, and spies.” He demanded that “Congress halt this smuggling in of arms, propaganda, and uniforms—and all of this goose stepping and parading with the swastika flag.”

Dickstein pointed out that Kuhn had placed several Nazi headquarters close to “the largest ammunition factories of this government.” The problem, he said, was getting worse every day.

Kuhn managed to deflect all of this frightening rhetoric by refusing to play the part of an enemy of the people. He was a savior, and Hitler the Savior. Kuhn told his people he was here to save America, not ruin it.

During the autumn of 1937, Kuhn allowed an American journalist into his inner sanctum in Manhattan. John C. Metcalfe, investigating reporter, sat and watched as Kuhn athletically worked over his correspondence, signing letters, sealing and stamping envelopes, all while letting loose with a steady stream of patter.

Metcalfe was fearless and an excellent actor, requisite skills to break a big story from the inside. He could flatter and cajole, agree and stroke, with the best of them. In a remarkably short time, Kuhn’s defenses dropped and he was sharing his secrets with Metcalfe. They became sort of confidants, which was why Metcalfe’s eventual series of exposés on the Bund were such game changers. Before Metcalfe, the Bund was thought to be composed of nostalgic German immigrants, homesick for the fatherland. After, everyone knew them as Nazis.

Metcalfe told Kuhn that he had just visited a Bund meeting in California. It wasn’t impressive.

“The Germans in California are more spread out than here in New York, harder to organize, but they have money,” Kuhn said.

“When I was there, they were complaining that their Bund uniforms still hadn’t showed up,” Metcalfe replied.

Kuhn exploded with fury. “I told them many times, send money first, then I send uniforms.”

Metcalfe looked around the office. Both the Nazi and American flags were prominently displayed. The Nazi flag was mounted on the wall, considerably higher, the dominant flag.

“I will have to go to California and speak with the troops,” Kuhn said, calmer but suddenly dejected.

“You do not like California?” Metcalfe asked.

“Not that. Last time, I drove by myself and took a tour of all the outposts. I drove seventeen thousand miles in three weeks. Once I woke up with my car hanging over the edge of a bridge. Another time I woke up in a ditch. If I go back to California, I’m going to have to bring a relief driver.”

Metcalfe learned that Kuhn’s staff worried about him. In addition to being a driver who drank daily and sometimes fell asleep at the wheel, he was a loner to a peculiar degree, with no sense of personal security. He didn’t realize that he had enemies and that it wasn’t a good idea to, alone and unannounced, drop in on places all over the country. It was dangerous, an unbelievable opportunity for a “Jew communist fanatic” to take him out. But Kuhn wasn’t worried. He was on a mission. He needed the world to understand the Jewish conspiracy and how Jews were using communism to achieve their goals.

One of the most sensational parts of Metcalfe’s exposés was that many Bund members were German citizens and had no intention of becoming American citizens. In public, they would always say that the Bund was primarily an American organization, but that was balderdash. In private, they said they could never have allegiance to two countries. They were Germans.

In 1938, the year during which the great bulk of our story takes place, Metcalfe became an investigator for the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), a body founded by Representative Martin Dies Jr., a Texas Democrat who was first elected to the US House of Representatives in 1931. Dies was blond-haired and blue-eyed with a wide, friendly mouth that smiled easily and a cleft chin. He was tall and had a firm handshake, attributes that were obligatory if one wanted to be elected to public office in the Lone Star State.

His committee was designed to root out subversives in and out of the federal government. It was designed to expose both communism and fascism, and Dies was its chairman from 1938 until 1944.

Metcalfe reported to the HUAC that the Bund was anything but a grassroots organization. In fact, he’d found evidence that Kuhn’s army was funded largely by a handful of “high American industrialists.” Kuhn had told him that Hans Luther, the longtime German ambassador to the United States, had been fired because he had failed to cooperate completely with Bund activities.

“I have secret relations with Germany whereby I can get anything I want,” Kuhn told Metcalfe.

Talking about the Bund’s funding, Metcalfe said that, should his investigation be given more time and money, “We would be able to get definite and tangible proof that something of this sort exists and who these people are. The evidence I have gathered so far shows them to be very influential and powerful fascist-minded industrialists.”

Metcalfe reported that the Bund had laid the groundwork in the US for a “sabotage machine and spy ring” staffed with Bund storm troopers who would go into action should the US and Germany go to war.

Most of these storm troopers were in New York, Los Angeles, and Milwaukee. American Nazis had worked their way into the system, sleeper agents, ready to go into action should there be war, including some who were working in the US Navy yards, in positions privy to secret plans for building state-of-the-art US Navy battleships.

Metcalfe testified that, in addition to his Bund investigation, he’d investigated the Silver Legion as well. He had been invited to and attended a meeting of the Chicago Silver Lodge. There, Field Marshal Roy Zachary had urged members to “get guns and ammunition to crush the coming communist revolution.”

Chairman Dies asked Metcalfe how many supporters or sympathizers Hitler had here in the US. The witness said he thought it was somewhere in the neighborhood of half a million. There was a gasp in the room.

Following Metcalfe’s testimony, the committee called to the witness stand his brother, James J. Metcalfe, who was also an investigator, in this case working for the Department of Justice. James’s claim to fame was that he had been among the feds to trail the bank robber John Dillinger, before Dillinger was shot down by trigger-happy G-men outside Chicago’s Biograph Theater while accompanied by a mysterious “lady in red.”

James said that the Bund was already building youth camps across the nation to indoctrinate the young and that there were plans to build rifle ranges and to train young men in the operation of military-grade weapons. There was even talk of purchasing aircraft and training pilots to form a Nazi air force inside the US. They wanted to take over, and they were willing to do it by force.

In public, the Bund leaders said that they were a wholesome American organization with no connection to Nazi Germany, but in private, they said the opposite, that the youth camps and the Bund were Hitler’s domain inside America. The distinction was legal as well as moral. The instant that the Bund admitted to representing a foreign power, it would lose the protections of the US Constitution.

“They say they are dissatisfied with the American form of government and want to replace it with the National Socialist system, under one leader, as much like Hitler as possible. Their entire loyalty is to Germany, and they openly professed this,” James Metcalfe told the committee

Kuhn and his Bund planned a national tour, holding rallies from New York to California. If there was pushback from a community, they screamed about their rights under the US Constitution. When a Polish American hall in Schenectady, New York, told the Bund they couldn’t hold a rally there, the president of the Schenectady branch of the Bund, Willi Latterman, protested. “Sooner or later, Fritz Kuhn will speak in this city,” he said. “They speak so proudly of freedom of speech, but where is ours?”

Much was written about Germany’s influence on German Americans, much less so about America’s influence on Hitler and the policies of the Nazi Party. Hitler, it seemed, was a student of US history, and he took note when reading about the New World and its centuries of race slavery. Slavery not only provided the Southern economy with free labor, but, it has been argued, it also kept White people from admitting the apparent inequalities among their own ranks. Before the Civil War, US Vice President John C. Calhoun said that keeping a racial minority down was the simplest way of guaranteeing equality among Whites. In the 1930s, the Southern states still maintained Jim Crow laws that kept Black people separate and unequal in the eyes of the law. Hitler disagreed with America’s insistence that “Jews were White” but otherwise liked the strategy.

Hitler also liked the idea that once they were united against a common enemy, Jews in this case, Americans would feel morally right, even if they committed acts that broke US laws. America, Hitler figured, was bound to understand the mistreatment of Jews in Germany because of America’s own history of lynching.

In 1934, there had been a meeting of Nazi Germany’s leading lawyers, a meeting that would result in anti-Jewish legislation. During the meeting, they discussed the race laws of the US in detail, as Hitler had urged them to do.

The other topic at that meeting that had been lifted from US history was the notion of manifest destiny, the unwritten law that allowed White men in good conscience to wipe out millions of Native Americans because of the belief that it was manifest destiny that the White man would control North America from coast to coast. Hitler told his followers that the “Americans had gunned down millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousands and now kept the modest remnant under observation in a cage.”

America’s actions emboldened Hitler, as he had genocide of his own in mind.

It is one of the most enduring, iconic images of the twentieth century. The crash of the German passenger airship LZ 129 Hindenberg in 1937, at the Front Gate Naval Air Engineering Station in Lakehurst, Manchester Township, New Jersey, about fifty miles south of New York City. That image even graced the cover of the first Led Zeppelin record.

Close your eyes and you can see the incredible rate at which the huge airship became enveloped in flames, listen and you can hear the stunned radio reporter Herbert Morrison crying out, “Oh, the humanity!”

It was not just a visual spectacle but a tremendous tragedy as well. Thirty-six passengers and crew, and another person on the ground, were killed in the accident. But what has largely been forgotten is that the Hindenberg was a Nazi aircraft.

Six days after the crash, twenty-eight of the dead, all Germans, were memorialized in a ceremony on the pier of the North German Lloyd steamship line at the Forty-second Street pier on the West Side of Manhattan, near the current site of the Intrepid Museum. The twenty-eight caskets were laid in state in a neat row on a black-draped, flower-banked gangplank stairway, each covered with the Swastika flag.

An estimated five thousand men in black ties and women dabbing at their eyes with lacy handkerchiefs filed past with heads bowed. Some mourners showed their respect by offering up the Nazi salute. After the ceremony, the caskets were to be loaded onto the ocean liner Hamburg for a midnight departure back to Germany.

During the ceremony, the US Navy sailed a blimp of its own (the G-1) overhead, its droning engines causing everyone below to speak a little louder than they wanted to. After the ceremony, the blimp flew a circle around Manhattan and dipped its nose over the Hudson as a farewell to all of that humanity.

At the head of each casket, Bund-leader Kuhn stationed a “soldier” in a full uniform designed and tailored to resemble as much as possible those of German storm troopers.

That was the sort of thing that was making the Jewish communities in New York and New Jersey very nervous. That, and the Nazis’ insistence that no German Americans were too young to be indoctrinated into the Bund’s anti-Semitic ways.

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