Skip to content
Search

The New York Nazis Who Loved Hitler, Hated Jews, and Packed MSG

The New York Nazis Who Loved Hitler, Hated Jews, and Packed MSG

On Feb. 20, 1939, more than 20,000 yelling, cheering people packed New York City’s Madison Square Garden. They weren’t there for a basketball game or a concert. They were supporters of the German American Bund, a pro-Nazi organization that was ready for an alternative to democracy. They waved Swastika flags and raised quite a ruckus. And they were hardly alone in their mission, as the new PBS American Experience documentary Nazi Town, USA makes abundantly clear.

While most Americans identified fascism and the Third Reich as existential threats to civilization, many saw an opportunity to ride the hate toward their vision of a purified white Christian country, free of all those Blacks and Jews and foreign languages (except German, of course). Remember, this was a country that had millions of Ku Klux Klan members in the Twenties, and which considered raging antisemites Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh national heroes. Father Charles Coughlin regularly thundered against Jewishness on his popular radio broadcast. Into this milieu stormed a German immigrant named Fritz Julius Kuhn, who saw the U.S. as an ideal place to plant the Nazi flag. The Bund, based in the Upper East Side neighborhood of Yorkville, started summer camps for their aspiring Aryan offspring, including Camp Siegfried, on Long Island, where little towheaded kids frolicked and learned the ways of the so-called “master race,” and where visitors could march down Adolf Hitler Street. It can’t happen here, you say? In a sense, it already did.


American Experience puts a stable of eminent historians on the case, as it is wont to do, including Beverly Gage, William Hitchcock and Sarah Churchwell, who lay out cold, hard, and hard-to-believe facts that, upon reflection, are actually all-too-believable. Is it really that big a jump from embracing eugenics, as too much of the American scientific community did, to throwing up a Nazi salute? Nazi Town, USA argues that the U.S. was fertile ground for such social experiments, and, if you read between the lines, suggests it could be again. As Churchwell puts it, “Fascism is always homegrown.” In other words, even if Kuhn and his cohorts used Nazi ideology and symbolism to further the cause, many natives were already primed to sign up.

The black-and-white footage can be both terrifying and hilarious. You have American Nazis marching through American streets, and American flags proudly displayed alongside Swastikas (the Bund loved to wrap itself in patriotism). You also have pathetic little men in their paintbrush mustaches trying to emulate their ideological daddy, the Fuhrer. Fiction has tackled such circumstances in the past, including The Plot Against America, Philip Roth’s novel that imagines a Lindbergh presidency, and The Man in the High Castle, the Philip K. Dick novel (which became a TV series) about what happened when the Axis powers won World War II and ruled over a partitioned America. But in many ways the truth is more jarring, largely because it’s more mundane. FBI head J. Edgar Hoover, for instance, was no fan of the Bund and its ilk. But he was in no hurry to crush them; he found their staunch anti-communist crusade rather useful. Strategery! (Gage, it should be noted, is the author of a superb Hoover biography, G-Man, published in 2022).

The German American Bund march in New York City on February 20, 1939.

Of course not everyone rolled over for the American Nazis. Dorothy Thompson, the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany in 1934, sounded the alarm early, and was on hand at Madison Square Garden as a heckler, as thousands more protested outside. New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia worked up an investigation of the Bund’s finances, District Attorney Thomas Dewey got an indictment, and Kuhn was convicted of forgery and larceny, which landed him in Sing Sing. He was eventually deported. World War II over, the head of the snake exiled, the snake itself withered.

But it never really dies. Aside from capturing an overlooked chapter of 20th century American history, Nazi Town, USA is a bracing reminder to never take democracy for granted. There will always be those who see it as a threat and stand ready to uproot it, preferring the bullying rhetoric of strongman leaders. Hopefully they will never again sully the Garden.  

More Stories

Marketer Behind Fake Quotes in ‘Megalopolis’ Trailer Dropped by Lionsgate

Marketer Behind Fake Quotes in ‘Megalopolis’ Trailer Dropped by Lionsgate

Eddie Egan, a very real marketing consultant, lost his gig with Lionsgate this week after the studio discovered that quotes he used in a trailer for Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis were fabricated, according to Variety.

The conceit behind the teaser, which Lionsgate recalled on Wednesday, was that critics had trashed Coppola’s masterpieces throughout the decades, so why trust them? Except that the critics quoted didn’t actually write any of the pith. A quote attributed to Pauline Kael that was said to have run in The New Yorker, claiming The Godfather was “diminished by its artsiness,” never ran.

Keep ReadingShow less
Fact Checkers Try to Shield Trump From Project 2025’s Abortion Madness

Fact Checkers Try to Shield Trump From Project 2025’s Abortion Madness

One of the odder features of American journalism is that the columnists who hold themselves out as “fact checkers” and review claims made by politicians — calling balls, strikes, and “pinocchios” — are unusually terrible at it.

Fact checkers offered up several botched reviews of content from the Democratic National Convention, but nothing has broken their brains like Democrats’ sustained attacks on Donald Trump over Republicans’ anti-abortion agenda, which is laid out in gory detail in conservatives’ Project 2025 policy roadmap. 

Keep ReadingShow less
Cops Who Falsified Warrant Used in Breonna Taylor Raid Didn’t Cause Her Death, Judge Rules

Cops Who Falsified Warrant Used in Breonna Taylor Raid Didn’t Cause Her Death, Judge Rules

A federal judge in Kentucky ruled that two police officers accused of falsifying a warrant ahead of the deadly raid that killed Breonna Taylor were not responsible for her death, The Associated Press reports. And rather than the phony warrant, U.S. District Judge Charles Simpson said Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, was responsible for her death because he fired upon the police officers first — even though he had no idea they were police officers.

The ruling was handed down earlier this week in the civil rights violation case against former Louisville Police Detective Joshua Jaynes and former Sgt. Kyle Meany. The two were not present at the March 2020 raid when Taylor was killed. Instead, in 2022, Attorney General Merrick Garland accused the pair (along with another detective, Kelly Goodlett) of submitting a false affidavit to search Taylor’s home before the raid and then conspiring to create a “false cover story… to escape responsibility” for preparing the phony warrant. 

Keep ReadingShow less
Queens of the Stone Age Cancel Remaining 2024 Shows After Josh Homme Surgery

Queens of the Stone Age Cancel Remaining 2024 Shows After Josh Homme Surgery

Queens of the Stone Age have canceled the remainder of their 2024 tour dates — including a string of North American shows and festival gigs scheduled for the fall — as Josh Homme continues his recovery from an unspecified surgery he underwent in July.

“QOTSA regret to announce the cancellation and/or postponement of all remaining 2024 shows. Josh has been given no choice but to prioritize his health and to receive essential medical care through the remainder of the year,” the band wrote on social media.

Keep ReadingShow less
Sabrina Carpenter Is Viscously Clever and Done With Love Triangles on ‘Short N’ Sweet’: 5 Takeaways

Sabrina Carpenter Is Viscously Clever and Done With Love Triangles on ‘Short N’ Sweet’: 5 Takeaways

After Sabrina Carpenter’s summer takeover with “Espresso” and “Please Please Please,” the anticipation for Short n’ Sweet was at an all-time high. On her sixth album, the pop singer keeps the surprises coming as she delivers a masterclass in clever songwriting and hops between R&B and folk-pop with ease. Carpenter writes about the frustration of modern-day romance, all the while cementing herself as a pop classic. Here’s everything we gathered from the new project.

Please Please Please Don’t Underestimate Her Humor

Carpenter gave us a glimpse of her humor on singles “Espresso” and “Please Please Please” — she’s working late because she’s a singer; ceiling fans are a pretty great invention! But no one could have guessed how downright hilarious she is on Short n’ Sweet, delivering sugary quips like “The Lord forgot my gay awakenin’” (“Slim Pickins”) and “How’s the weather in your mother’s basement?” (“Needless to Say”). She’s also adorably nerdy, fretting about grammar (“This boy doesn’t even know/The difference between ‘there,’ ‘their’ and ‘they are!’”) and getting Shakespearian (“Where art thou? Why not uponeth me?”). On “Juno,” she even takes a subject as serious as pregnancy and twists it into a charming pop culture reference for the ages: “If you love me right, then who knows?/I might let you make me Juno.” It’s official: Do not underestimate Ms. Carpenter’s pen. — A.M.

Keep ReadingShow less