The German American Bund, or German American Federation (German: Amerikadeutscher Bund; Amerikadeutscher Volksbund, AV), was a German-American pro-Nazi organization established in 1936 to succeed Friends of New Germany (FONG), the new name being chosen to emphasize the group's American credentials after press criticism that the organization was unpatriotic. The Bund was to consist only of American citizens of German descent. Its main goal was to promote a favorable view of Nazi Germany.
Video German American Bund
Friends of New Germany
In May 1933, Nazi Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess gave German immigrant and German Nazi Party member Heinz Spanknöbel authority to form an American Nazi organization. Shortly thereafter, with help from the German consul in New York City, Spanknöbel created the Friends of New Germany by merging two older organizations in the United States, Gau-USA and the Free Society of Teutonia, which were both small groups with only a few hundred members each. The FONG was based in New York City but had a strong presence in Chicago. Members wore a uniform, a white shirt and black trousers for men with a black hat festooned with a red symbol. Women members wore a white blouse and a black skirt.
The organization led by Spanknöbel was openly pro-Nazi, and engaged in activities such as storming the German language New Yorker Staats-Zeitung with the demand that Nazi-sympathetic articles be published, and the infiltration of other non-political German-American organizations. One of the Friends early initiatives was to counter, with propaganda, the Jewish boycott of German goods, which started in March 1933 to protest Nazi anti-Semitism.
In an internal battle for control of the Friends, Spanknöbel was ousted as leader and subsequently deported in October 1933 because he had failed to register as a foreign agent.
At the same time, Congressman Samuel Dickstein, Chairman of the Committee on Naturalization and Immigration, became aware of the substantial number of foreigners legally and illegally entering and residing in the country, and the growing anti-Semitism along with vast amounts of anti-Semitic literature being distributed in the country. This led him to investigate independently the activities of Nazi and other fascist groups, leading to the formation of the Special Committee on Un-American Activities Authorized to Investigate Nazi Propaganda and Certain Other Propaganda Activities. Throughout the rest of 1934, the Committee conducted hearings, bringing before it most of the major figures in the American fascist movement. Dickstein's investigation concluded that the Friends represented a branch of German dictator Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party in the United States.
The organization existed into the mid-1930s, although it always remained small, with a membership of between 5,000 and 10,000, consisting mostly of German citizens living in the United States and German emigrants who only recently had become citizens. In December 1935, Rudolf Hess ordered all German citizens to leave the FONG and recalled all of its leaders to Germany.
Maps German American Bund
Bund activities
In March 1936, the German American Bund was established as a follow-up organization for the Friends of New Germany in Buffalo, New York. The Bund elected a German-born American citizen Fritz Julius Kuhn as its leader (Bundesführer). Kuhn was a veteran of the Bavarian infantry during World War I and an Alter Kämpfer (old fighter) of the Nazi Party who, in 1934, was granted American citizenship. Kuhn was initially effective as a leader and was able to unite the organization and expand its membership but came to be seen simply as an incompetent swindler and liar.
The administrative structure of the Bund mimicked the regional administrative subdivision of the Nazi Party. The German American Bund divided the United States into three Gaue: Gau Ost (East), Gau West and Gau Midwest. Together the three Gaue comprised 69 Ortsgruppen (local groups): 40 in Gau Ost (17 in New York), 10 in Gau West and 19 in Gau Midwest. Each Gau had its own Gauleiter and staff to direct the Bund operations in the region in accordance with the Führerprinzip. The Bund's national headquarters was located at 178 East 85th Street in the New York City borough of Manhattan.
The Bund established a number of training camps, including Camp Nordland in Sussex County, New Jersey, Camp Siegfried in Yaphank, New York, Camp Hindenburg in Grafton, Wisconsin, Deutschhorst Country Club in Sellersville, Pennsylvania, Camp Bergwald in Bloomingdale, New Jersey, and Camp Highland in New York state. The Bund held rallies with Nazi insignia and procedures such as the Hitler salute and attacked the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jewish-American groups, Communism, "Moscow-directed" trade unions and American boycotts of German goods. The organization claimed to show its loyalty to America by displaying the flag of the United States alongside the flag of Nazi Germany at Bund meetings, and declared that George Washington was "the first Fascist" who did not believe democracy would work.
Kuhn and a few other Bundmen traveled to Berlin to attend the 1936 Summer Olympics. During the trip, he visited the Reich Chancellery, where his picture was taken with Hitler. This act did not constitute an official Nazi approval for Kuhn's organization: German Ambassador to the United States Hans-Heinrich Dieckhoff expressed his disapproval and concern over the group to Berlin, causing distrust between the Bund and the Nazi regime. The organization received no financial or verbal support from Germany. In response to the outrage of Jewish war veterans, Congress in 1938 passed the Foreign Agents Registration Act requiring foreign agents to register with the State Department. On March 1, 1938, the Nazi government decreed that no Reichsdeutsche [German nationals] could be a member of the Bund, and that no Nazi emblems were to be used by the organization. This was done both to appease the U.S. and to distance Germany from the Bund, which was increasingly a cause of embarrassment with its rhetoric and actions.
Arguably, the zenith of the Bund's activities was the rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City on February 20, 1939. Some 20,000 people attended and heard Kuhn criticize President Roosevelt by repeatedly referring to him as "Frank D. Rosenfeld", calling his New Deal the "Jew Deal" and denouncing what he believed to be Bolshevik-Jewish American leadership. Most shocking to American sensibilities was the outbreak of violence between protesters and Bund storm troopers. The rally, which attracted 20,000 Nazi supporters, was the subject of the 2017 short documentary A Night at the Garden by Marshall Curry.
Decline
In 1939, a New York tax investigation determined that Kuhn had embezzled $14,000 from the Bund. The Bund did not seek to have Kuhn prosecuted, operating on the principle (Führerprinzip) that the leader had absolute power. However, New York City's district attorney prosecuted him in an attempt to cripple the Bund. On December 5, 1939, Kuhn was sentenced to two and a half to five years in prison for tax evasion and embezzlement.
New Bund leaders replaced Kuhn, most notably Gerhard Kunze, but only for brief periods. A year after the outbreak of World War II, Congress enacted a peacetime military draft in September 1940. The Bund counseled members of draft age to evade conscription, a criminal offense punishable by up to five years in jail and a $10,000 fine. Gerhard Kunze fled to Mexico in November 1941.
U.S. Congressman Martin Dies (D-Texas) and his House Committee on Un-American Activities were active in denying any Nazi-sympathetic organization the ability to operate freely during World War II. In the last week of December 1942, led by journalist Dorothy Thompson, fifty leading German-Americans (including baseball icon Babe Ruth) signed a "Christmas Declaration by men and women of German ancestry" condemning Nazism, which appeared in ten major American daily newspapers.
While Kuhn was in prison, his citizenship was canceled on June 1, 1943. Upon his release after 43 months in state prison, Kuhn was re-arrested on June 21, 1943, as an enemy alien and interned by the federal government at a camp in Crystal City, Texas. After the war, Kuhn was interned at Ellis Island and deported to Germany on September 15, 1945. He died on December 14, 1951, in Munich, Germany.
See also
- Fascist League of North America, a group similar to the German American Bund that supported (in case) Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime in Italy
- Free Society of Teutonia, one of the two predecessor societies alongside Friends of New Germany that formed the German American Bund
- Neo-Nazi groups of the United States, post-1945
- Silver Legion of America, another pro-Nazi, fascist group
- Camp Nordland, the largest German American Bund camp
- American Nazi Party, prominent pro-Nazi group formed in the 1950s
References
Notes
Further reading
- Allen, Joe, "'It Can't Happen Here?': Confronting the Fascist Threat in the US in the Late 1930s," International Socialist Review, Part One: whole no. 85 (Sept.-Oct. 2012), pp. 26-35; Part Two: whole no. 87 (Jan.-Feb. 2013), pp. 19-28.
- Bell, Leland V. In Hitler's Shadow; The Anatomy of American Nazism, 1973
- Canedy, Susan. Americas Nazis: A Democratic Dilemma a History of the German American Bund Markgraf Pubns Group, 1990
- Diamond, Sander. The Nazi Movement in the United States: 1924-1941. Ithaca: Cornell University, 1974.
- Jenkins, Philip. Hoods and Shirts: The Extreme Right in Pennsylvania, 1925-1950 University of North Carolina Press, 1997
- MacDonnell, Francis. Insidious Foes: The Axis Fifth Column and the American Home Front Oxford University Press, 1995
- Miller, Marvin D. Wunderlich's Salute: The Interrelationship of the German-American Bund, Camp Siegfried, Yaphank, Long Island, and the Young Siegfrieds and Their Relationship with American and Nazi Institutions Malamud-Rose Publishers, November 1983(1st Edition)
- Norwood, Stephen H. "Marauding Youth and the Christian Front: Antisemitic Violence in Boston and New York during World War II" American Jewish History, Vol. 91, 2003
- Schneider, James C. Should America Go to War? The Debate over Foreign Policy in Chicago, 1939-1941 University of North Carolina Press, 1989
- St. George, Maximiliam and Dennis, Lawrence. A Trial on Trial: The Great Sedition Trial of 1944 National Civil Rights Committee, 1946
- Strong, Donald S. Organized Anti-Semitism in America: The Rise of Group Prejudice during the Decade 1930-40 1941
- Van Ells, Mark D. (August 2007). Americans for Hitler - The Bund. America in WWII. 3. pp. 44-49. Retrieved May 13, 2016.
External links
- Collection of articles in the Mid-Island Mail related to Bund activity in Yaphank, New York (1935-1941) (Longwood Public Library)
- Mp3 of National Leader Fritz Julius Kuhn address at the 1939 Madison Square Garden rally (from Talking History: The Radio Archives)
- What Price the Federal Reserve? - Illustrated anti-Semitic pamphlet issued by the Bund
- Free America - A collection of the speeches from the infamous Madison Square Garden rally in February 1939
- Awake and Act - Pamphlet listing the purposes and aims of the German American Bund
- German-American Bund.org
- U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum article on German-American Bund
- American Bund, The Failure of American Nazism - Article by Jim Bredemus
- FBI Records: German American Federation/Bund
- Materials produced by the Bund are found in the Florence Mendheim Collection of Anti-Semitic Propaganda (#AR 25441); Leo Baeck Institute, New York.
- "A Night at the Garden". Field of Vision. 11 October 2017. Retrieved 6 December 2017.
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