Even more conspicuous and well-publicized than the summer camps were the German American Bund’s frequent assemblies, rallies, and parades. Their message more or less boiled down to something like this: Jews and Bolshevik communists were in control of everything, and they were screwing it all up, and it was the duty of white Christian people to wake up and resist. In packaging this Nazism, Kuhn believed it was necessary to reflect American ideals for it to properly catch on, and the group adopted George Washington as their heroic figure — a man of action and military might who they claimed knew deep down fascism was the way to go, and that this experiment in representative republicanism was doomed to fail.

But as soon as the Bund began to attract media attention, there was an outcry. A significant population of anti-Nazi German-Americans assembled to denounce Hitler and his partisans like the Bund at home. Veteran groups, like the American Legion, got into bloody fist fights with members of the German American Bund. And with even greater furor, Jewish mobsters and veterans of the Great War incited brawls with members of the Bund.

Bund members at Fritz Kuhn’s ‘Pro-American celebration of George Washington’s birthday’ in 1939. (Bettmann/Getty)

The Bund’s cultural apex struck on February 20, 1939, when the group held a rally in Madison Square Garden, with around 20,000 people in attendance. On the mezzanine edge hung a banner with the slogan “Stop Jewish Domination of Christian Americans.” An enormous, full-body portrait of George Washington dominated the background. The Bund used the moment to reiterate their support for American neutrality amid metastasizing tensions in Europe.

In his address to the packed stadium, Kuhn called the president “Frank D. Rosenfeld” and his seminal legislation, the “Jew Deal.” “American patriots,” he said through a heavy German accent, “I am sure I do not come before you tonight as a complete stranger … You all have heard of me. To the Jewish-controlled press: as a creature with horns, a cloven hoof, and a long tail.” The crowd erupted in laughter. Indeed, the media and overall public opinion were unfair to them: “Of course, no German American citizen can express an opinion that does not confirm to the standardized order,” he lamented to a sympathetic crowd. “We, I say, will not fail you when called upon to keep every lawful support in our power to fight the grip of Jewish communism in our schools, our universities, in our very homes.”

In the middle of the screed, a Jewish man named Isadore Greenbaum stormed the stage. He was pummeled and thrown around by the Bundsmen on stage before being handed to police offstage. It’s hard to say for sure, but it is possible tens of thousands of anti-Bund protesters and activists crowded around the stadium during their rally (the following day, the Chicago Tribune put the count at 50,000, with 1,700 police officers on duty to keep the peace).

Fritz Kuhn (second from left) with fellow Bund leaders in Chicago, 1938. (AP Photo)

The actual Nazis, however, found Kuhn and his group bothersome. As Hitler centralized power and protracted his ambitions, he aimed to preserve the neutral position of the United States, not disrupt it —which inflammatory opportunists like Kuhn seemed to be doing. In all, the Nazis and the Bund kept no formal line of communication or endorsement, and as international tensions grew in March 1938, the Nazis issued a decree which barred German nationals from joining the Bund and prohibited the organization from using the swastika and other Nazi insignia. But this unenforceable policy did little to change the Bund’s ceremonies, and was mostly enacted as a gesture to mitigate the growing angst over Nazism in Washington.

In the end, the Madison Square Garden rally would mark the denouement of the Bund’s trajectory. By the end of that summer, Europe was at war. Kuhn was arrested for the embezzlement of $14,000 from the Bund’s funds (the members themselves didn’t object; by definition it’s hard for a fascist leader to engage in misconduct) and was imprisoned. In December 1941, as the United States entered the war, Bund members were now criminal dissidents and could be convicted as such, and the ensuing crackdown and persecution gave the nascent House Un-American Activities Committee its first big assignment.

But Nazi apologists in the United States did not disappear with the dissolution of the Bund. Instead they went mainstream, and justified their stance in the name of prudence and neutrality. Charles Lindbergh was the most famous of these outspoken few, having flown to Germany in 1936 on U.S. assignment to report on the state of Luftwaffe aircraft, and two years later was inducted into the Order of the German Eagle by Hermann Goering, which was essentially the highest Nazi honor available to a foreigner.