Gordon F. Sander is a journalist and historian, and the son of two German-Jewish emigres. He is the author of The Frank Family That Survived and numerous other books.

Anxious to find precedents for the frightening and ultimately deadly white nationalist, “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, some media outlets have likened the images of the recent mayhem in Virginia to the chilling ones of the German-American Bund rally that filled Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939, with 22,000 hate-spewing American Nazis.

That rally, the largest such conclave in U.S. history, shocked Americans at the time. They had seen the press accounts and newsreel footage of the Nazis’ massive Nuremburg rallies; they had read about Kristallnacht, the murderous, two-day anti-Semitic pogrom of November 1938, which the Bund—the fast-growing, American version of the German Nazi party, which trumpeted the Nazi philosophy, but with a stars-and-stripes twist—had unabashedly endorsed.


But that was in Europe. This was America. New York City. For Americans wondering whether it could happen here, the Bund rally provided the awful answer.

“22,000 Nazis Hold Rally In Garden,” blared a front-page headline in the New York Times. Inside, photos captured the restless throng of counterprotesters outside the arena and the Bund’s smiling uniformed leaders. “We need be in no doubt as to what the Bund would do to and in this country if it had the opportunity,” the Times opined in an editorial later that week. “It would set up an American Hitler.”

Some 78 years after the Bund rally at Madison Square Garden, a new generation of hectoring troglodytes descended on Charlottesville, Virginia. In 1939, Brown Shirts at Madison Square Garden felt emboldened to seize a Jewish protester who had rushed the podium where the Bund’s German-born leader, Fritz Kuhn, was speaking, and beat him near-senseless. In 2017, members of the so-called alt-right held a torchlight rally in Charlottesville, and the next day, one of those white nationalists went even further and allegedly used his car to mow down anti-Nazi protesters, killing a young woman, Heather Heyer.

Those who have studied the Bund’s rise and fall are alarmed at the historical parallels. “When a large group of young men march through the streets of Charlottesville chanting, ‘Jews will not replace us,’ it’s only steps removed from chanting ‘death to the Jews’ in New York or anywhere else in the 1930s,” says David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee. “When those young men chant ‘blood and soil,’ it conveys the same meaning as those decades before who chanted ‘blut and boden,’ referring to the Nazi glorification of and link between race and land.”

“I don’t see much of a difference, quite frankly, between the Bund and these groups, in their public presence,” says Arnie Bernstein, the author of Swastika Nation, a history of the German American Bund. “The Bund had its storefronts in New York, Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles—today’s groups are also hanging out in the public space, but in this case, they’re on the internet and anyone can access their ‘storefronts,’ or websites, and their philosophy, if you can call it that, is essentially the same.”

For the Bund, the unnerving 1939 Madison Square Garden rally was at once the organization’s high point and—as a result of the shock and revulsion it caused—its death knell. It’s too soon to know exactly what effect Charlottesville—which was smaller, but more violent than the Bund’s 1939 demonstration—will have on white nationalists or how the American public, which is still processing the horrific event, will ultimately respond to it. Will Charlottesville be the beginning of the end of this reborn generation of American Nazis? To foretell where we could be headed, you need to know how the Bund’s version of it all played out 78 years ago—and how this time is different.



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The rise and fall of the German-American Bund in the late 1930s is essentially the story of the man behind it: Fritz Julius Kuhn.

A German-born veteran of the Bavarian infantry during World War I, Kuhn was an early devotee of Adolf Hitler who emigrated to the United States for economic reasons in 1928 and got a job as a factory worker for Ford. After a few years in the U.S., Kuhn began his political career by becoming an officer with the Friends of New Germany, a Chicago-based, nationwide pro-Nazi group founded in 1933 with the explicit blessing of German deputy führer Rudolf Hess.

At the time, imitation Nazi parties were sprouting up throughout the world, and, at least initially, Hess and Hitler hoped to use them to incorporate new areas, particularly in Europe, into the Greater Reich. But soon, FONG’s low-grade thuggery—coercing American German-language newspapers into running Nazi-sympathetic articles, infiltrating patriotic German-American organizations, and the like—became a nuisance to Berlin, which was still trying to maintain good relations with Washington. In 1935, Hess ordered all German citizens to resign from FONG, and he recalled its leaders to Germany, effectively putting the kibosh to it.

Kuhn, who had just become a U.S. citizen, saw this as his chance to create a more Americanized version of FONG, and he seized it. With his new German-American Bund, Kuhn had a vision of a homegrown Nazi Party that was more than simply a political group, but a way of life—a “Swastika Nation,” as Bernstein calls it.

Although Kuhn dressed his vision in American phraseology and icons—he approvingly called George Washington “the first American fascist”—the Bund was, in fact, a clone of its Teutonic forebear, transposed to U.S. soil. In deference to his Berlin Kamerad, Kuhn gave himself the title of Bundesführer, the national leader. Just as Hitler had his own elite guard, the SS, Kuhn had his, the Ordnungsdienst or OD, who were charged with both protecting him and keeping order at Bund events. Although the OD were forbidden to carry firearms, they did carry blackjacks and truncheons, which they had no compunctions about using on non-fascist heads, as they did at an April 1938 Bund meeting in the Yorkville neighborhood of Manhattan, when seven protesters were injured by members of the OD.

Like the German Nazi Party, the Bund was divided into different districts for the eastern, western and midwestern sections of the country. The Bund also had its own propaganda branch, which published a newspaper as well as the copies of Mein Kampf, Hitler’s testament, which all Bund members were required to buy. Kuhn also oversaw the establishment of a score of gated training and summer camps with Teutonic-sounding names like Camp Siegfried and Camp Nordland in rural areas around the northeast, where his card-carrying volk could be indoctrinated in the American Nazi way, while their dutiful fraulein polished their German cooking skills and their brassard-wearing kinder could engage in singalongs while practicing their fraternal Seig Heils. Every so often, Kuhn would pull up in his motorcade, bless the proceedings and deliver himself of a sulfurous Hitler-style harangue—in English.

At a German-American Bund camp in Andover, New Jersey, young campers stand at attention as the American flag and the German-American Youth Movement flag are lowered at sundown, July 21, 1937. | AP

In effect, the Bund was its own ethnostate, as today’s neo-Nazis would call it. And it worked: By 1938, two years after its “rebirth,” the group had become a political force to be reckoned with. Its meetings each drew up to several thousand visitors, and its activities were closely followed by the FBI. With the anti-Semitic radio broadcaster the Rev. Charles Coughlin having faded from the national scene following FDR’s landslide second-term win, Kuhn was now the country’s most vocal and best-known ultra-right leader and anti-Semite.

It was just as the führer would have wished. Except that the führer didn’t wish.

One year ahead of the outbreak of World War II, Berlin still hoped for good relations with Washington. The Reich refused to give Kuhn’s organization either financial or verbal support, lest it further alienate the Roosevelt administration, which had already made clear its extreme distaste for the Nazi ideology. Berlin went so far as to forbid German nationals in the United States from joining the German American Bund.

The führer’s brush-off didn’t deter Kuhn and his volk, who continued to sing the Reich’s praises.

Nor did they mind the Kristallnacht of November 1938, the nationwide German pogrom set off by the assassination of a German diplomat by a Jew in Paris, which led to nearly 100 deaths, scores more injuries and the decimation of what remained of German-Jewish life. Comparing the assassination to the attacks on Bund meetings by anti-Nazis—the spiritual predecessors of today’s so-called antifa—its propagandists claimed the Kristallnacht massacre was a justifiable act of retribution. The Bund’s endorsement of the horrific event increased the American public’s hostility toward it, while causing the most prestigious German-American organization, the Steuben Society, to repudiate it.

That didn’t discourage Kuhn either. Now, he decided, as the sea of opprobrium rose around him, was the moment to step into the spotlight and show just how strong the Bund was.

That’s what the Madison Square Garden rally was about. On the surface, the conclave, billed as a “Mass Demonstration for True Americanism,” was supposed to honor George Washington on the occasion of his 207th birthday. But the unprecedented event was really intended to be the German-American Bund’s apotheosis, proof positive to America and the world—as well as Berlin—that the American Nazis were here to stay. “The rally was to be Kuhn’s shining moment, an elaborate pageant and vivid showcase of all he had built in three years,” Bernstein wrote in his 2013 book. “Kuhn’s dream of a Swastika Nation would be on display for the whole world, right in the heart of what the Berlin press called the ‘Semitized metropolis of New York.’”

Although the mass demonstration was intended for Bund members, walk-ins from sympathetic Nazi-minded American citizens also were welcome. Kuhn had big dreams: One of the posters that adorned the hall optimistically declared, “ONE MILLION BUND MEMBERS BY 1940.”

Skeptics wondered whether the bundesführer would be able to fill the massive arena. Any doubts on that score were quickly allayed, as the 20,000 Nazi faithful who had driven or flown in from every corner of Swastika Nation filed into the great hall. Meanwhile, an even larger crowd of counterdemonstrators, eventually estimated at close to 100,000, filled the surrounding midtown Manhattan streets.

New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and Police Commissioner Lewis Valentine were prepared for both the Nazis and their adversaries, wrapping the Garden with a security cordon of 1,700 policemen—the largest police presence in the city’s history—including a large contingent of mounted officers to keep the two sides apart. LaGuardia, an Episcopalian whose mother was a Jew, loathed the Bund, but he was determined to see to it that the Bundists’ right to freedom of speech would be respected. Americans could judge the poisonous result for themselves.

Mounted NYPD officers form a line outside to hold back a crowd of protesters outside the German American Bund’s Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden. | AP

Inside the Garden, things went pretty much according to Kuhn’s faux-Nuremberg script. As drums rolled, an honor guard of young American Nazis marched in bearing the flags of the U.S. and the Bund, as well as the two fascist powers, Nazi Germany and Italy. One by one, the various officers of the Bund stepped forth to extol America (or their version of it) and condemn the “racial amalgamation” that had putatively taken place since the good old unmongrelized days of George Washington. Anti-Semitism, naturally, was a major theme of the venomous rhetoric that issued forth as the newsreel cameras rolled.

Finally, after being introduced as “the man we love for the enemies he has made,” the jackbooted bundesführer himself stepped up to the microphone to deliver one of his trademark jeremiads, scoring the “slimy conspirators who would change this glorious republic into the inferno of a Bolshevik Paradise” and “the grip of the palsied hand of Communism in our schools, our universities, our very homes.” When he paused, he would be greeted with shouts of “Free America!”—the new Bund greeting that had replaced "Seig Heil!" but with the same intonation and raised arm salute.

According to Kuhn, both the federal government and New York City government were Jewish agents. Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose antipathy for Nazism was a matter of record—“Nazism is a cancer,” he said—was actually “Frank D. Rosenfeld.” "Free America!" District Attorney Thomas Dewey was “Thomas Jewey.” "Free America!" Mayor LaGuardia was “Fiorello Lumpen LaGuardia.” "Free America!" And so on.

Of course, Kuhn’s followers had heard it all before. Now it was time for the world to listen. The people would rise up, and as Kuhn’s role model, Joseph Goebbels, the Third Reich’s minister of propaganda put it, the storm would break loose.

The storm was certainly rising, both inside and outside the Garden.

The only alteration to the script took place when, halfway through Kuhn’s speech, a young Jewish counterprotester by the name of Isadore Greenbaum decided that he couldn’t bear Kuhn’s diatribe anymore and spontaneously rushed the podium and attempted to tackle him.

He almost made it. On the newsreel footage of the rally shown in movie theaters throughout the country the following weekend, viewers could see Kuhn’s shocked visage as the Jewish kamikaze shakes the podium. Next, they saw the hapless Greenbaum set upon by a gaggle of furious OD men, who covered him with blows before he was finally rescued by a squadron of New York policemen. It was all over in a moment—but it was a moment that horrified America: a bunch of Nazis beating up a Jew in the middle of Madison Square Garden.

The bundesführer took the interruption in stride. Kuhn proceeded with his speech.

And then it was over, and the thousands of Nazi faithful dutifully exited the arena. As far as the Bund was concerned, the rally was a success—a shining moment for America’s most prominent fascist. But the rally further angered Berlin, which was then preparing to go to war with the Allies—a war Germany still desperately hoped the U.S. would steer clear of.

LaGuardia was proud of the way his city and his police force had handled the Bund’s rally. At the same time, the orgy of hatred at the Garden sealed his determination, along with that of Thomas Dewey, to take down Kuhn, and the Bund along with him, by investigating his suspicious finances (the married Kuhn liked to party and kept a number of mistresses, evidently, at the Bund’s expense).

A subsequent inquiry determined that the free-spending Kuhn had embezzled $14,000 from the organization. The Bund did not wish to have Kuhn prosecuted, because of Führerprinzip, the principle that the leader had absolute power. Nevertheless, with the implicit blessing of the White House, Dewey decided to go ahead and prosecute.

On December 5, 1939, Kuhn was sentenced to two-and-a-half to five years in jail for tax evasion. On December 11, 1941, while he was locked away in Sing Sing prison, Germany declared war on the U.S. Kuhn’s support for a government now actively hostile to America gave the federal government the pretext to revoke his citizenship, which it did on June 1, 1943. Upon Kuhn’s release from prison three weeks later, he was immediately re-arrested as a dangerous enemy agent. While Kuhn was in U.S. custody in Texas, Nazi Germany was destroyed, its quest for global domination permanently halted, and Hitler was dead. Four months after V-E Day, the U.S. deported Kuhn to war-ravaged West Germany. His dreams of a Swastika Nation had been smashed to pieces. He died in Munich in 1951, a broken man, in exile from the country he had sought to “liberate.”



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To be sure, historical comparisons are, to an extent, folly. For all the similarities between the Bund’s 1939 rally and the white nationalists' Charlottesville demonstration, there are substantial differences.

Fortunately, no one with Fritz Kuhn’s particular demagogic skill set has emerged to lead his neo-Nazi descendants, though there are those attempting to play the part. “I am worried that a Kuhn figure could marshal the disparate alt-right groups,” says Arnie Bernstein, “be it a Richard Spencer, David Duke or someone of that ilk.”

Another difference is while the Bund’s rally and the violence that spilled from it was denounced forcefully by America’s top political leaders, President Donald Trump’s half-hearted condemnation and shocking defense of the Charlottesville mob as including “very fine people” has no antecedent, at least in modern American history. “We have a president blowing dog whistles loud and clear,” says Bernstein. “You never saw that with FDR.”

The Bund’s rally was at once the group’s apex and its death rattle. But it’s only in retrospect that one can make such pronouncements; nobody yet knows exactly what Charlottesville—and Trump’s response to it—will mean for the alt-right. “The striking ambivalence coming out of the White House” could help to galvanize Nazi sympathizers, says David Harris of the American Jewish Committee.

But much as the Bund-generated images of Nazi barbarism and violence drove everyday Americans from apathy 78 years ago, “Charlottesville will also mobilize anti-Nazis to stand up and be counted,” Harris says. Much as the Madison Square Garden rally did on the eve of World War II, says Harris, “I choose to believe the net effect will be to marginalize the ‘blut and boden’ fan base.”