CHAPTER FOUR
In Suffolk County, Long Island, in the township of Brookhaven, there is the bucolic village of Yaphank, home of the US Army’s Camp Upton, where eighteen thousand soldiers at a time were housed in box-like barracks and trained over 1,600 acres. The camp was used in 1918 as a point of embarkation for soldiers who’d completed training and were ready for the trenches. Among the units sent eastward to finish up the First World War were the 325th and the 327th Infantry Regiments and the 27th Infantry Division’s 53rd Brigade.
One of the most famous soldiers trained at Camp Upton was composer Irving Berlin (born Israel Baline and composer of “God Bless America” and “White Christmas”), who wrote the musical revue Yip Yip Yaphank (featuring the classic soldier’s song “Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning”) while stationed in Yaphank.
Immediately after the war, the camp was transformed into a school where enlistees—immigrants and country boys, most of them—were taught to read and write in English. But by the Great Depression, the US Army had abandoned the camp and the German American Bund had moved in.
The camp shared a border with a 3,700-acre haven for wildlife, where more than two thousand quail and two hundred pheasant and grouse were theoretically safe. The rest of the area had its share of fowl as well, being made up of “duck ranches” where millions of ducks blanketed the lush landscape in an innocent white.
The Bund changed the camp’s name to Camp Siegfried, and the facility was transformed into a youth camp where youngsters of German heritage could breathe the clean country air, swim and play, and learn to love Hitler.
The main drag down the center of the camp was now called Adolf Hitler Strasse (Adolf Hitler Street). Boys and girls from ages six through ten were trained at the site, at a cost to parents of four dollars a week.
The camp’s appearance and the uniforms worn by the children greatly resembled those of the Hitler youth camps back in the fatherland. As they laughed and played volleyball, the kids wore swastika armbands and Sam Brown belts, which were part belt, part suspenders, with a strap that went from the front of the belt to the rear diagonally across the chest and over the right shoulder.
The children rose in military fashion to a bugle at 6:30 A.M., spent the day both playing and engaging in military drills. They were read evening bedtime stories taken from German history (and American history in which Germans played a part).
On Sundays after church, German Americans of all ages in the New York City area would don their traditional garb and hop on the Long Island Rail Road aboard the “Yaphank Special” express: next stop, Nazi-land—for the weekly Bund festivities.
Siegfried was the first of many Nazi youth camps in the United States. There were eventually twenty-one of them stretching from coast to coast, in locations chosen strategically to take advantage of nearby clusters of fascist activity. Camp Siegfried, for example, was convenient to Lindenhurst, a Suffolk County community that had its own Nazi group, known as the Black Shirts. They attended all of the Sunday rallies in Yaphank and lent hard-edged pro-Hitler zeal to the festivities.
The great bulk of the people in Suffolk County, even among the German Americans, were not Nazis, and those people expressed concerns about impressionable minds being exposed to hate talk. Although, to be fair, they complained equally about the traffic problems the camp caused and how the rally-goers’ excessive drinking caused Sunday-night car accidents.
The Sunday events were drunken, all right, but also purposeful, and no one got away without listening to a few speeches about rising up and fighting the enemy, namely Jewish communists. Speakers railed against the powers that be in New York City and New York State, in particular Mayor LaGuardia and the German-born Governor Herbert H. Lehman. These men, the theme went, hated Germans and should be stripped of power. One speaker bragged of the number of young German Americans who had attended the camp and been indoctrinated to the cause: “We are training these beautiful young people to fight the Jews because the Jews are the originators of communism.”
But the words were seemingly secondary to the pageantry. There was a marching band that blasted out martial tunes as a thousand people—men, women, and children—goose-stepped past a reviewing stand where German American dignitaries, including Bund Secretary Walter Happe, nodded their approval and offered up hardy applause. The parade continued with the elders, who rode in cars and waved royally to the spectators, the cars emblazoned with slogans such as “GENTILES, AWAKE!”
The scene was repeated in the other Nazi camps. For residents of the Bronx, the only one of New York’s five boroughs that was on the mainland, the Bund built a camp in Windham, New York, in the Catskill Mountains, and called it Camp Highland.
Of all of the placements of the Nazi youth camps, Highland was the scariest, as the Catskills were known for their Jewish summer vacation resorts, the so-called Borscht Belt. It was a place in America where prosperous Jews went to have fun. To build a Nazi youth camp there seemed like an attack—which, of course, is exactly what it was.
At Camp Highland, the Nazis filmed a twenty-five-minute promotional movie that was shown in German-language theaters. It convinced parents to send their precious small fry to Nazi camp. The film began with a flag-raising ceremony. As children gave the Nazi salute, the American flag and the Nazi flag were raised side by side. The film boasted that the camp would teach kids how to use weapons. Precision drilling with wooden rifles was shown. The film showed kids having fun, getting muddy, boxing and wrestling, playing checkers, and learning about their glorious heritage.
As much as any other law enforcement agency, the New York Police Department was concerned about the camps. The camps themselves were not in their jurisdiction, but many among the clientele were. With varying amounts of cooperation from neighboring police forces, as well as state troopers, the NYPD organized a spy system to learn what was actually going on inside those camps. Sons of cops, as Irish as four-leafed clovers, infiltrated the camps and reported back to their dads what was going on. Some of the treatment was harsh. To “toughen up” the campers, they were sometimes awoken in the middle of the night and forced to go on twenty-mile hikes through woods and up mountains. When the children were fatigued to numbness, they were forced to build a campfire, sit around it, and sing “Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles”.
A list was made of the adults working at the camps, and it was a good thing. One camp supervisor, Gustav Wilhelm Kaercher, went on to work as a power plant designer for a utility company and was arrested by the feds in 1942 as a foreign spy.
We switch our sights now to the 150-acre Camp Nordland on Lake Iliff in the Sussex County hills of New Jersey. As was true at Camp Siegfried, to outsiders the camp appeared to be predominantly fun, traditional, and innocent. The wooden barracks were painted white.
There were many happy things going on: music, singing, beer. Beefy men and women swayed to oompah-pah bands, with the tuba playing the background ostinato: alternating root, fifth, root, fifth. The bands were usually a quartet, musicians dressed in old-world fashion with long-sleeved white shirts, lederhosen, patterned suspenders, knee-length white socks, and a jaunty Tyrolean hat garnished with an aggressive feather. A trombone, accordion, and clarinet accompanied the tuba.
Waitresses—beer wenches, they were called—demonstrated expert breast presentation with a corset-style blouse and apron with white stockings. The sausage sandwiches were out of this world. You could buy them there, but many families brought picnic baskets with them. This was the Depression, after all.
On one hot summer Sunday afternoon in 1937, spies kept an eye on Camp Nordland inside and out as the Sunday fest filled the air with laughter. Sure there was fun, but the Nazis were using that “fun” as a lure, drawing innocents into their mind-control program. Along with the oompah-pah and thigh-slap dancing, the camp’s focal point was a meeting hall, with a foyer that displayed a large black swastika mounted on the ceiling.
On this day, there was an exceptionally large crowd because Fritz Kuhn, America’s number one Nazi, was going to be there to address the crowd. Some families arrived in cars, others by chartered bus.
Many men brought their own steins—ornate, glazed, and fired receptacles. Like the size of a man’s car, you could tell a lot by his earthenware vessel. To keep the beer fresh and foamy, steins were capped with a bell-shaped silver-colored lid, opened by a handle that you hooked with your thumb. Made of pewter, there was usually a quaint painting on it, a small German village in the background and a busty beer wench in the foreground, seemingly serving beer und Titten simultaneously. You handed the stein to the man at the tap, often a fellow with a large foamy mustache. He filled it and handed it back.
Girls and women had to beware. Later in the day, there would be much Arsch kneifen.
A parade initiated the festivities with four hundred uniformed Bund soldiers goose-stepping, carrying swastika banners, and Sieg heil-ing. On this Sunday, one squad of marchers was made up of Italian fascists, there to demonstrate their unity with the Nazis. Among the honored guests sitting with Kuhn at a review stand was State Senator William A. Dolan of Sussex.
Dolan said he “welcomed” the members of the Bund “as representatives of a foreign government.” (New Jersey Governor Harold G. Hoffman was invited to the parade but sent his regrets.)
After the parade, there were speeches. Rudolph Markman, the Bund’s “leader of the Eastern District,” stood on the platform set at the base of a hill. He systematically accused US governmental leaders with being part of a vast communist plot.
Another preliminary speaker was Salvadore Caridi, the Union City, New Jersey, leader of Italian War Veterans. Caridi was billed in the program as Dr. Caridi, but it was unclear what his degree was in. He praised the swastika, Hitler, and Mussolini, and proclaimed Germany and Italy the two greatest countries in the world. He didn’t mention the United States.
The last speaker was Kuhn himself, who lauded the clean, fresh whiteness of his audience and reminded everyone that the reason there was no money was that schweinehund Jewish communists had taken it all.
He sought a world that was dreckjudenrein, cleansed of dirty Jews. That was the road to prosperity. So it was in Germany, and so it should be in America.
The horror of these words was lost on the sunburned and drunken audience.
Later, after many of the families had left, weaving their way home, men with Hitler haircuts and perfect posture sat in the Camp Nordland meeting hall and discussed insidious ways to better spread their hateful message.
The event drew eight thousand people. When the spies returned and reported what they’d seen, many were angered. But what to do about it? The Nazis had a right to assemble, a right to speak their minds. Still, it was just so disgusting. Men who’d fought the Germans in the First World War were particularly ticked off.
Commander Harry Striner of the General Joseph Wheeler Post of the Veterans of the Foreign Wars in Jersey City said that their motto was “One Flag, One Country, and One Language” and that the idea of Americans saluting a swastika was abhorrent. Striner said that his unit planned to attend future Bund meetings. Uh-oh.
“We want to observe and make sure only the American system of government is upheld,” the commander said.
When newspaper editorials criticized the camp and its activities, the camp’s director, August Klapprott, answered, “The assertion that American Nazis are preparing to seize control of the United States is a lot of hooey. We have nothing to fear, nothing to hide.”
The newspaper stories got the attention of US Representative Mary Norton, a Jersey Democrat, and she took up the cause, protesting that the youth camps were “fostering an alien allegiance.”
Norton said, “I would be interested in learning where the Bund gets its money.”
She noted that the camp was a brainwashing device, practically injecting Nazi allegiance into the veins of German Americans. She objected to the fact that there were times when the kids were required to speak “only German” while at the camp and condemned State Senator Dolan for being a part of the Nazi program.
By today’s standards, the Bund’s public relations campaign is laughably racist, but back then their message was intended to soothe the anti-Nazi anxiety many segments of society were feeling.
“We are not a Nazi camp. Everyone at the camp is an American citizen. Although we do sympathize with the Hitler national socialist government in Germany.” The man saying those words was the Bund’s PR director and a featured speaker at many Bund events, Wilhelm “William” Kunze of Philadelphia. Kunze was Kuhn’s second in command. When Kuhn spoke at the podium, Kunze took up a position to his left and rear, inevitably standing in front of the swastika banner so that photographs show him wearing the black symbol like an evil halo. Kunze reassured America that Camp Nordland was nothing to worry about, as it was a “white man’s camp.”
A New Jersey reporter chased down Dolan about his Camp Nordland visit. Dolan defended his presence.
“I thought it was a very well-conducted function, and I saw nothing whatever anti-American through the whole day. I saw nothing to criticize,” Dolan said.
Other Nazi camps included Camp Will and Might in Griggstown, Somerset County, New Jersey; Camp Hindenberg in Grafton, Wisconsin; Camp Deutsch Host in Sellersville, Pennsylvania; and Camp Sutter, near Los Angeles, California. There would have been more, but not every community welcomed them.
An attempt to build one in Southbury, Connecticut, was instantly and prohibitively controversial. Protesters took to the streets carrying signs that read “Old Glory Is Our Flag,” “Southbury Wants No Swastikas,” “United Americans Show the Way,” and “No Nazi Camps.”
For the most part, the Bund grew unimpeded. That was, until a judge in New York City came up with a brilliant plan.