The 1937 Fourth of July celebration in Yaphank, Long Island, had many elements of a typical Independence Day gala. It was a warm day and families sat at picnic tables under the leafy trees while the adults swigged beer and sang traditional songs. As the day wore on and the alcohol took effect, there was dancing and more carousing before a fireworks display concluded the evening.
Yet this was far from a typical patriotic celebration of American history. Many of the thousands in attendance were in uniform, but not the olive-green uniform of the US Army. There were speeches by local dignitaries, but these were focused less on a celebration of the Declaration of Independence than a series of homages to prominent foreign leaders. “Heil Hitler” and “Heil Mussolini” were the standard greetings of the day. A huge swastika adorned the stage, which one speaker told the crowd represented “Aryan groups in all countries,” including the United States. More than three hundred men in silver-gray shirts with black ties and Sam Browne belts that passed over their right shoulders, and others in black shirts, goose-stepped past the stage and saluted their leaders with extended right arms. These storm troopers “are not a military organization,” the crowd was assured by one of the afternoon’s keynote speakers. He continued by predicting dark days ahead: “It would be ridiculous to believe they are drilling to take over America.… Trouble is coming to America soon and these men will be ready to fight for real American ideals against the homeless, Godless minority that is seeking to take us away from true Americanism.”1
This was the Fourth of the July celebrated in the style of the German American Bund, the country’s leading organization for German sympathizers and Nazi imitators. Over the course of the 1930s, the Bund would go from being the butt of jokes nationwide to one of the government’s top domestic security threats. At the same time, the outrageous behavior of the Bund’s leadership would lead the German government itself to disavow it and eventually even ban German citizens from joining its ranks. By the outbreak of World War II, the Bund had largely been broken under the weight of its own corruption and a string of government prosecutions. While the Bund was home to Hitler’s most visible American friends, they were in many ways his least effective allies in the country.
The downfall of the Bund would be largely brought about by one of the men attending the 1937 Fourth of July celebration. He was wearing the uniform of the German American Bund—a Hitler-style shirt and tie with the Sam Browne belt—with his hair and moustache shaped to imitate the Führer’s personal styling.2 For all appearances he would have cut the profile of an avid Hitler admirer and, to his comrades in the Bund, he was exactly this. Over the course of the past few months, Hellmut Oberwinder had managed to gain the trust of the Bund’s leadership and has even been dispatched on a series of secret missions to make contact with Bund cells across the country.
In reality, there was no Hellmut Oberwinder, at least as his fellow Bund members knew him. The man going by that name in 1937 was actually John C. Metcalfe, a German-born reporter for the Chicago Daily Times who had painstakingly established a false identity over the course of months to infiltrate the Bund and gain the trust of its leadership. (Hellmut Oberwinder was in fact his German birth name, which he changed after moving to the United States in 1914).3 By late 1937, just months after traveling twenty thousand miles on a series of fact-finding trips on behalf of the Bund’s leadership, Metcalfe and two other reporters—one of whom was his brother, a former FBI agent who simultaneously infiltrated a Chicago-based Nazi group—published a series of articles that blew the lid off the Bund’s operation and revealed the extent of its intentions to the American people. Congress would subsequently appoint Metcalfe as a special investigator for Martin Dies’s House Committee on Un-American Activities. In the course of the coming years he would personally expose a range of plots by Hitler’s American friends across the country. Metcalfe quickly accomplished more than any other single individual working to unravel the threat posed by Nazi sympathizers to US national security.
Metcalfe’s dramatic successes infiltrating the Bund and the wider American Nazi movement partially stemmed from the fact that, as a relatively recent German immigrant to the country, he was part of the exact demographic from which many of these organizations were seeking to recruit. In 1910, the United States had more than 8.2 million residents who had either been born in Germany or had German-born parents. Many spoke German as their primary language. In a country of just 92 million people, this made the German-American bloc a major demographic force. Before World War I there were numerous German-language newspapers across the country and a wide range of German cultural and heritage organizations that catered to the growing German-speaking community.4
America’s 1917 entry in the war changed all this quickly. Though the overwhelming majority of German Americans were demonstrably loyal to the United States, the wider community quickly found itself on the receiving end of xenophobic abuse fanned by press accounts of German atrocities in Europe and on the high seas. The most aggressive attempts to counter this narrative and support the German cause (by propaganda agents including George Sylvester Viereck, discussed later) backfired and led to more prejudice. Alarmist reports about German espionage attempts in the United States led to further outrage, and in 1917 President Woodrow Wilson ordered all German noncitizens over the age of fourteen to register with the government as a preemptive measure. This helped foster a febrile atmosphere. On April 5, 1918, a German coal miner in Illinois was lynched by an angry mob and, in the ensuing trial, none of the accused killers were actually convicted. While this death was the only one immediately attributable to the national panic, its effect on the wider German-American community was profound.5 German-language newspapers began to disappear, and many German-American families decided that rapid integration into American society and the English language was the surest way to protect themselves from another outbreak of violence.
The arrival of peace in 1919 had another profound effect on this dynamic. Between 1919 and 1933, more than four hundred thousand German immigrants would arrive on American shores, in large part because postwar Germany was in the midst of economic collapse. Unlike the German Americans who had come before and now mostly decided to adopt an American identity, a portion of these new migrants saw themselves as temporary expatriates fleeing economic and political turmoil. Many did not expect to stay in the United States for long and some even saw themselves as right-wing political refugees fleeing the vagaries of the newly established and liberal Weimar Republic. The German American Bund’s membership would largely be drawn from these more recent immigrants.6
German politics was changing rapidly in the 1930s, and German Americans took a keen interest in the events taking place there. In 1933, Hitler was appointed chancellor by President Paul von Hindenburg following an indecisive parliamentary election. Hitler had been a controversial political figure for more than a decade. In 1923 he had led an unsuccessful coup called the Beer Hall Putsch against the government of Bavaria. The uprising ended in bloodshed and Hitler was sent to prison for his role in the plot. While there, he penned the autobiographical Mein Kampf, an account of his past political activities that contained a strong dose of anti-Semitism. After being released from prison in late 1924, Hitler returned to the political fray as leader of the nascent National Socialist Party. The party’s vote share would never be massive, and under his leadership it won just 37 percent of the national vote in July 1932. This was nowhere near a majority, but it positioned Hitler to take on a key role in the next government. Conservative politicians believed they could control the Austrian former soldier who, for all his impressive rhetorical skills, lacked many of the social graces that were expected of traditional politicians. Hitler quickly took advantage of events, accepted their support, and outwitted them.
Following the burning of the Reichstag in a terrorist arson attack a month after he took office, Hitler began to consolidate power for the Nazi Party. An Enabling Act was passed allowing Hitler to effectively govern without parliamentary oversight. Civil liberties swiftly disappeared and all opposition parties were banned. Opponents of the Nazi Party found themselves in concentration camps. In August 1934 Hindenburg died, leaving the presidency vacant. Rather than take on the role himself, Hitler simply assumed Hindenburg’s power and created a new position for himself: Führer (leader). Most semblances of German democracy ceased to exist in under two years.
Hitler’s rapid rise was watched closely around the world. “He [Hitler] has a blank check from nearly twenty million Germans to rule the Fatherland however he wills,” Hungarian-American journalist Emil Lengyel wrote in April 1933. “Hitler is thus Germany’s dictator by the right of the electorate. The bad boy of Germany, the boy the neighbors fear, is on his own.”7 German Americans were split over these developments. In Brooklyn, one of the largest German-American organizations issued a strong denunciation of Hitler’s anti-Semitism in June 1933.8 Others were more eager to support Hitler’s new government. In December 1933, a crowd of twenty thousand cheered Hitler’s name at a Madison Square Garden meeting of the Steuben Society, a prominent German heritage organization. German ambassador to the United States Hans Luther encouraged the crowd to “study the truth about Germany and not be satisfied with incomplete reports whose correctness is so often contradicted and inherently questionable.”9 As in Germany, there was clearly substantial, though far from unanimous, support for the country’s new leader among the expat community.
The first group with clear affinities for Nazism to emerge in the German-American community was called the National Socialist Teutonia Association. Founded in Detroit in 1924, the association was openly supportive of the nascent National Socialist movement. Some members had even been part of the Nazi Party before the Beer Hall Putsch and had fled to America to avoid prison time. Association members sent much-needed funds to the struggling Nazi Party in addition to publishing a local newspaper. Its leaders were all young men who had recently immigrated to the United States and shared aspects of Hitler’s anti-Semitic outlook. Some would eventually return to Germany and receive rewards for their financial contributions to the Nazi Party at this critical phase in its existence. However, the goal of the Teutonia Association was not to build a branch of the Nazi Party in the United States but to provide a temporary home for exiled Nazis. Most expected to eventually return to Germany and continue their struggle there. If they could gain new recruits among their fellow recent immigrants, all the better, but the notion of trying to build a mass movement among the wider German-American community was far from the primary aim.10
The biggest problem for Teutonia was that it was far from the only Nazi show in town. While it remained a powerful force in the Detroit area, there were other Nazi Party members living in exile elsewhere, most notably New York City. In 1931, an organization of these members wrote to the Nazi Party’s foreign section in Hamburg and suggested that they be commissioned to form an official Nazi branch in New York City. The leader of the foreign section agreed to the proposal, effectively cutting Teutonia out of the official party apparatus and creating a new “official” Nazi organization called Gauleitung-USA (District Headquarters USA, or Gau-USA for short). For the next several years, rival Nazi groups verbally sniped at one another claiming to be the most authentic, with the press giving increasing column space to the conflict as Hitler’s profile grew. Teutonia’s leadership eventually declared the organization defunct and joined Gau-USA, but this proved to be only a temporary solution.11 Following Hitler’s ascent to power in 1933, the German Nazi Party decided that its public image in the United States needed improvement and founded a completely new organization, the Friends of Germany, to spread propaganda and build support for the new government.
Farcically, the leaders of Gau-USA refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the new organization and still claimed themselves to be the true embodiment of American Nazism. At the same time, dissenters within the group broke away to found their own organizations. The American press had a field day as a ridiculous internecine conflict unfolded, hardly giving the German embassy the propaganda coup for which it had hoped. Fed up with the entire situation, the Nazi Party’s leaders in Berlin eventually threw up their hands and ordered everyone to shut down their groups immediately. The American branch of National Socialism was causing far more problems than it was solving.
The solution was clearly to be found in applying more discipline and structure to the American Nazi movement’s many disparate pieces. In mid-1933, a former member of Teutonia, Heinz Spanknöbel, obtained party permission to form a new organization that would include both German Americans and German nationals living in the United States under one umbrella group called Friends of the New Germany. Unlike Gau-USA, this new group would include all factions of the American Nazi movement and avoid the infighting that had plagued its previous incarnations. More menacingly, Spanknöbel took a page from Hitler’s own playbook and set up an armed wing of the organization—called the Ordnungsdienst or OD—which had previously been part of Teutonia and was modeled on the Nazi Party’s violent brown-shirted Sturmabteilung (SA). In the event of a threat to Spanknöbel’s leadership or the wider organization, the OD was trained to respond with force.12
Between 1933 and 1935, Friends of the New Germany recruited a membership of about five thousand. This made it a small but potent force—similar to the six thousand members the American Communist Party had in 1932. The group published two newspapers in the New York area and soon opened branches in five other cities including Detroit and Chicago.13 Despite these successes, Spanknöbel himself quickly turned out to be exactly the loose cannon that the Nazi Party had tried to prevent from tarnishing its name in the United States. In 1933, he attempted to intimidate the owners of a major German-language daily paper in New York City into accepting him as the legitimate voice of the German government, only to be thrown out of their offices. Later that year the OD painted swastikas on the doors of Manhattan synagogues. A subsequent anti-Semitic rally in New Jersey ended in a brawl between the OD and protestors in the audience. The press once again had a field day, and dark memories of the hysteria over German espionage and subversion in World War I began to resurface in the German-American community.
The German government ordered Spanknöbel to stop attracting attention to himself. He simply ignored the instructions coming from Berlin and the controversy continued. Alarmed by the group’s growing profile and violent tendencies, the chairman of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization requested Spanknöbel’s deportation on the grounds that he had failed to properly register as an agent operating on behalf of a foreign government. Spanknöbel skipped town and left the country before he could be apprehended by federal authorities.14 Congressional hearings soon resulted and, in 1935, the German government once again threw up its hands and ordered all German nationals to resign their membership in the organization or face having their German citizenship revoked. Friends of the New Germany had not only failed to improve Nazism’s reputation in the United States but had in fact become a major liability for the German government. The Friends were only the precursor of what was to come, however. In late March 1936, Friends of the New Germany was officially declared defunct, and was absorbed into a new group: German American Bund (Amerikadeutscher Volksbund in German, which appeared above its English name on its official letterhead) at a national convention in Buffalo, New York. The new organization would be partially headquartered on East Eighty-Fifth Street in in the Yorkville Section of New York City, not far from Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The German American Bund’s leader was Fritz Julius Kuhn, the group’s former Midwest division leader. Kuhn’s background was typical for those who were attracted to the German-American far right of the 1930s. Born in Munich in 1896, Kuhn served in the First World War as a machine gunner and won the Iron Cross. After the war he joined a right-wing militia and brawled with communists on the streets of Munich. In 1921 he joined the National Socialist Party and enrolled at the University of Munich to study chemical engineering. In 1923 he left Germany to take a job in Mexico. He would later claim to have been present for the Beer Hall Putsch and said he was forced to flee in its aftermath to avoid criminal changes, but there is no evidence that this was actually the case. More likely, Kuhn moved for the same economic reasons that compelled many young men to leave Germany in the 1920s, when the country was in financial turmoil.15
Kuhn moved to the United States at the age of thirty-one and settled in the Detroit area, putting him at the hotbed of pro-Nazi sentiment in the United States. One of his first employers included the Ford Motor Company, from which he was reportedly fired for practicing speeches on company time. (After Kuhn became nationally notorious, Ford officials denied any long-term connection to him and allegedly changed his employee card to suggest that he had quit at an earlier date).16 From there he worked a variety of jobs while gradually pursing his political career. Kuhn had not rushed to join the Teutonia organization after arriving in Detroit, but, perhaps inspired by Hitler’s recent rise to power, he joined Friends of the New Germany in mid-1933. His past experience in the Nazi Party and fanatical loyalty to Hitler ensured a swift rise, along with his powerful oratorical skills—at least when speaking German—and organizational prowess. By 1935 he had risen to the position of midwestern Gauleiter (district leader) in the organization. Simultaneously embracing his new American identity, at least on paper, he was naturalized as an American citizen in 1934.17
Kuhn’s personal appearance and speaking style would become the source of much mockery in the years to come. He spoke English with a thick German accent and tried to imitate Hitler’s erratic hand gestures and passionate body language when addressing a crowd. Lacking the Führer’s charisma, he merely looked ridiculous and tripped over his English words. On the other hand, it is possible to detect some of the appeal that charmed many in the Bund. He was five feet, eleven inches tall and weighed more than 200 pounds, making him an easy figure to spot onstage. He wore glasses, giving him a somewhat scholarly appearance similar that of SS head Heinrich Himmler. His military background gave him the gait of a warrior. He was often photographed in Bund uniform wearing his Iron Cross and military decorations, consciously evoking the humiliation that many German Americans felt the fatherland had suffered at the end of World War I.18 Despite his rather bumbling image as a public orator to non-German-speaking Americans, Kuhn managed to cut a larger-than-life, playboy profile in the press. He was often seen at New York City nightclubs listening to jazz (despite his frequent denunciations of the music as “Negroid”) with a progression of beautiful mistresses, including a former Miss America.19 Like many demagogues throughout history, Kuhn realized that his image as a glamorous celebrity was just as important, if not more so, than his image as the putative American Führer.
Most dangerously, Kuhn would soon try to combine this memorable persona with a new ideological concoction of Nazism and loyalty to the United States. Bund rallies would see the American flag carried side by side with the new German national flag bearing the swastika. All the standard imagery of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy—goose-stepping troops in jackboots, straight-armed salutes, and swastikas—were now being associated with symbols of the United States and Americanism itself. The Bund’s slogan, often repeated in its proclamations and on its letterhead, was “Free America,” by which it would increasingly mean an America free from Jewish influence.20
The Bund’s most well-publicized events were similarly inundated with the language of Americanism. Its most infamous event—a 1939 mass rally at Madison Square Garden that would be steeped in violence—was officially termed a “Pro American Rally” with “George Washington Birthday Exercises.” A description of the event proclaimed that “The Bund is opposed to all isms in American public life, INCUDING NAZISM AND FASCISM, regarding these political systems as affairs of the people who live under them (supported, as they are, by upeard [sic] of 95 per cent of the electors in nationwide plebiscites), but impracticable and inexpedient innovations in the American system of government.” At the same time, the Bund left little question as to what it did stand for, and it had some remarkable similarities to Nazism: “The Bund opposes Zionism as an infectious disease gnawing at the core of American political, social and economic life, covering an ever-widening field of activities, which have already developed a power of American life which cannot be shaken off as long as Jews controll [sic] the press, the radio, the screen and the stage.”21 Rather than importing Nazism to the United States directly, Kuhn’s entire strategy was to combine the essence of Americanism with a new and insidious version of National Socialism.
Organizationally, the Bund modeled itself on the structures that underpinned its predecessors. Kuhn retained the OD as the organization’s uniformed security force. Its members carried nightsticks and other legal weapons that could easily be used with lethal effect. OD members underwent extensive training at Bund camps and marched in formation down American streets across the country in their distinctive uniforms, giving the stiff-armed salute. This training was not just for show, and there is little doubt that its members prevented Kuhn from being harmed or even assassinated on a number of occasions when Bund events ended in violence (often precipitated by the OD itself). It is difficult to know how many men were in the OD in the course of its existence, but Kuhn estimated that it had about five thousand uniformed members at any given time—certainly not a huge military force, but enough trained and armed fighters to cause serious local unrest. Membership was open to all Bund men over the age of eighteen.22
The most significant organizational principle of the Bund was the Führerprinzip (Führer principle). Derived from the structure of the Nazi Party, this principle stated that the will of the Führer (Hitler, or in this case, Kuhn) could never be questioned and should be seen as overriding all other considerations, including the law. In Germany, this meant that Hitler’s personal whims were seen as more important than precedent, law, or the opinion of others. The Führer could, by definition, never be incorrect in his views or pronouncements and they should therefore be followed without question. The ultimate responsibility of the Nazi Party or Bund member was to demonstrate absolute loyalty to the dictates of the leader. As will be seen, Kuhn would eventually abuse this principle to subsidize his larger-than-life image.
Beneath Kuhn and his fellow national officers, the Bund’s presence around the country was organized into three regions, each called a Gau (district)—the East, Midwest, and West. A Gauleiter (district leader) was placed in charge of each. Nearly every major city had a local branch that reported to their respective regional center and, ultimately, to Kuhn’s national headquarters. By 1939, Kuhn reported that every state in the country except Louisiana had at least some measure of Bund presence, with more than a hundred local units in total.23 These seemed like impressive numbers, but actual membership figures are more difficult to pin down. In line with its ideological orientation, applying for Bund membership meant an applicant had to state they were “of Aryan descent, free from Jewish or Colored Blood” and pay both registration fees and monthly dues, making the possible membership base small to begin with. There were also two levels of affiliation: full membership, which entitled the bearer to take part in all Bund activities; and sympathizer membership, which allowed the holder to attend meetings with the permission of their local unit leader only.24 Membership cost $9 a year (about $160 today) and was paid in monthly installments.25 People presumably floated between these statuses over the course of the Bund’s existence, while others joined for a period and then resigned as the political situation changed. In 1939 Kuhn estimated in an internal report that there were more than 8,000 full members in the Bund (an almost impossibly low figure if there were truly 100 functional local units). He later testified that the number was closer to 20,000 with about 100,000 sympathizers. The Justice Department believed the number to be smaller than either of Kuhn’s estimates, but one German government official would later outlandishly claim that Kuhn had 50,000 members at the peak of his popularity. Given how many Bund documents were later destroyed, and the fact that the membership application allowed for the use of pseudonyms, historians have barely done better determining numbers. Estimates have ranged from Kuhn’s figure of 10,000 or fewer to an upper end of 30,000 or so, with many more sympathizers.26
Given how many local units existed at the peak of the Bund’s power, it is likely that Kuhn himself did not know the true number of members and sympathizers. Extensive card catalogs of members were supposedly kept at the local level but it is unclear how regularly local leaders reported updates to the national organization. Taking the most generous estimates of 30,000 members and around 100,000 sympathizers, in a country of 132 million people this meant a mere 0.001 percent of the population was involved with the Bund. By way of comparison, Oswald Mosley’s similarly unsuccessful British Union of Fascists peaked at 40,000 members in a UK population of around 46 million. Given the volume of votes for Conservative members of Parliament who barely concealed their admiration for Hitler, British fascist sympathizers probably ran into the hundreds of thousands in a country that was much smaller than the United States.
Yet despite its seemingly limited support base, the Bund was punching well above its actual weight in the public eye. It was hardly comforting that in early 1921, a mere twelve years before taking power, the Nazi Party had just 2,000 members before exploding to ten times that number by the end of the following year in a country less than half the size of the United States.27 The Bund was arguably further along in building its membership base than the Nazis had been just a few years before Hitler became chancellor. Who was to say that under the right circumstances Kuhn could not pull off a similar feat? The fact that membership in the Bund required one to be of Aryan background was a major restriction on its potential as a mass party (particularly given an African American population of more than twelve million, along with millions of others with European backgrounds considered to be non-Aryan, such as the Irish). Yet it was conceivable that this difficulty might be overcome if the Bund could form alliances with similarly minded groups that appealed to Americans of different ethnic backgrounds and identities. The prospect of a broad far-right front forming was not beyond the realm of possibility, especially as Kuhn had moved beyond his predecessors’ obsession with spreading German propaganda at the expense of building an American version of Nazism. Indeed, there was some evidence that local Bund chapters were already seeking alliances with other far-right groups including the Ku Klux Klan and the Silver Legion, discussed later. A broad right-wing front, especially if it joined forces with Hitler’s other American friends and their money, might well be in a position to make a bid for power. Kuhn had become the first candidate for the potential position of American Führer.
The Bund’s aggressive use of youth camps did little to calm the growing concerns about Kuhn’s intentions. The use of such camps was adopted directly from the Nazi Party’s playbook. After Hitler’s rise to power, German young people of both genders were regularly indoctrinated through compulsory membership in the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls, in which they were taught both Nazi ideology and war-related skills. Similarly, the Bund’s Youth Division was established nationwide and held Nazi-themed summer camps in at least fifteen locations around the country—Kuhn himself purported to be unclear on the actual number—mostly in the New York area, upper Midwest, and California. According to the Youth Division’s leader, most of the parents who sent their children to Bund summer camp were German immigrants who had migrated to the country after the First World War.28 The Bund’s campers wore uniforms similar to those of the OD, including the iconic Sam Browne belts; marched in formation; learned German; and were tutored in the fundamental principles of National Socialism. As undercover reporter John C. Metcalfe would testify to the Dies Committee, the main orientation of the camps was instilling the four Hs: Health, Hitler, Heils, and Hatred. “American boys and girls sing hymns to Der Fuehrer and to the Vaterland they never have seen,” Metcalfe told the Committee. “Their youthful feet goose-step in a march of racial and religious hatred. The minds and souls of these ‘babes in the woods’ are a fertile field for the propaganda of the Bund.”29
The exact number of children who took part in the Bund summer camps remains unknown, but two camps for which records do exist appear to have had enrollments of 200 and 400, respectively, in the summer of 1937.30 Using these figures, and assuming an average enrollment of 300 children in a maximum of twenty-four camps, yields a figure of about 7,200 children nationwide who may have been in Bund camps each summer of their existence. This number would fit well with a total Bund membership of about four times that figure. The most promising young people from the camps were occasionally sent to Germany to continue their training in the Hitler Youth.31
Regardless of how many children were actually enrolled in the Bund’s camps, it was understandably worrying for many Americans to have an organization modeled on the Hitler Youth drilling children to goose-step and to salute Hitler. The ideology of the camps themselves was not the strangest outcome of the Bund’s activities on this front, however. Since housing hundreds of children for the summer required extensive facilities, Kuhn and his lieutenants created a series of puppet corporations that ostensibly owned the campgrounds and were responsible for the construction and maintenance of facilities. Kuhn himself was often the titular head of these corporations, but on paper they were separate entities—a legal issue that would soon be used in the government’s assault on the Bund.32
The most famous of these legal fictions was called the German American Settlement League and was formed to develop a facility called Camp Siegfried in Yaphank, Long Island. Joining the league required an applicant to be a member of the Bund, ensuring that all members had met Kuhn’s rigid racial requirements. Unlike most of the other entities that owned the Bund camps, however, the league was a membership corporation rather than a business, meaning that its two hundred or so members were effectively its owners.33 Because Siegfried was the closest facility for New York City Bund members, it developed into a showpiece that hosted major events and rallies. The camp soon included a small community of homes and other facilities. Adolf Hitler Street was a major thoroughfare, and other streets were similarly named for Nazi bigwigs. Guests from Germany were frequently hosted at Siegfried, and during the summer the OD trained there with rifles and other firearms. Promising members of the Youth Division from all over the country were also sent to Siegfried to further their education and training, making it effectively the center of Bund training operations nationwide.34 Major celebrations, such as the Fourth of July celebrations that began this chapter, could attract tens of thousands of people from New York City to Siegfried’s leafy surroundings.
Camp Siegfried would have an odd afterlife after the Bund’s official demise. Because it was legally a separate entity and a membership corporation, the German American Settlement League was able to retain possession of Yaphank after World War II. The land was held collectively, but the individual houses could be sold by their respective owners. Over the years, the original residents moved away or died. However, the corporation’s bylaws were never changed, meaning that anyone purchasing a home still had to meet Bund racial requirements and be of Aryan descent. A corporate board of existing homeowners was required to sign off that all new buyers met the racial qualifications to purchase the property. This strange state of affairs continued mostly unchallenged until 2015, when a couple hoping to sell their home sued the league for practicing discrimination and violating the Fair Housing Act. The following year, the Settlement League agreed to finally change its policies.35 Decades after its demise, one of the Bund’s final legacies had been erased.
By mid-1936 Kuhn had established the basic structures of the Bund and solidified his own power at the top of the pyramid. The only thing missing, the official endorsement of the German government, was obviously in question given the difficulties of its predecessor groups. Kuhn’s solution was clever. The Olympic Games were heading to Berlin in 1936, and Hitler would be making a large number of appearances with foreign delegations and other VIPs as part of the festivities. With the world’s press focused on the Reich and the Nazis eager to make a good impression on the international stage, it would be difficult for Hitler to refuse a meeting with a delegation of enthusiastic overseas Germans like the Bund. The gambit paid off. Hitler agreed to meet with a Bund delegation and accepted a book listing the names of Bund members who had contributed to the German Winter Relief program, a poverty relief charity the government was promoting as an easy way for Germans abroad to help the fatherland. Hitler shook hands with each of the Bund members present for the meeting and muttered a bromide to Kuhn along the lines of “Go back and carry on your fight.”36
Kuhn returned to the United States with the apparent endorsement of the Führer and photographs documenting their meeting. In reality, Hitler had given him no such approval and had only minimal interest in the Bund. Even the fact that Hitler had met the Bund members meant almost nothing: He had many such meetings, particularly during the Olympics, and they generally progressed in the same way with the usual receiving line of handshakes, photographs, and some vaguely supportive remarks being uttered by Hitler before he was shuttled away to his next engagement. In some cases, Hitler was apparently unaware of whom he was actually meeting until an aide whispered to him each person’s name as the hand-shaking began.37 In Kuhn’s instance he was probably aware of his guest’s identity, but it was hardly a striking endorsement for the Führer to effectively tell him to “keep up the good work.”38 Kuhn was aware that Hitler’s reception was less than a glowing endorsement. This fact did not dissuade him from trying to capitalize on it, however. He began to exaggerate the trip in speeches, describing personal meetings with grandees including Hermann Göring and propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. The German embassy in Washington began receiving questions from American politicians and the press about the depth of Kuhn’s connections to the Reich government, but had no idea how to answer. Berlin quickly assured its diplomats that Kuhn was simply lying, and that the Bund had no real link to the Nazi Party.39
Regardless, Kuhn had secured the domestic propaganda coup he sought. Accounts and photographs of the meeting were widely reproduced in Bund propaganda, and it seemed fully plausible that Kuhn had received the Führer’s endorsement to set up an American version of the Nazi Party. This perception would ultimately be part of the Bund’s downfall, but for now it suited Kuhn to be seen as Hitler’s closest American friend. He quickly put his plans into overdrive. In October 1936 Kuhn issued a “Bund Command” endorsing Republican candidate Alf Landon for president over Franklin Roosevelt because of the latter’s “preference for the Jewish element and his placing of many Jews in public office.” Landon, on the other hand, was desirable because “it can absolutely be assumed that under his administration more favorable commercial relations with Germany would be effected.… For if we want to help Germany there is no better way than in an economic way.”40
The following day, Kuhn issued a proclamation accepting German citizens into a branch of the Bund. This directly contravened the guidelines established by the German embassy toward Friends of the New Germany. Now the Bund would contain both American citizens and German nationals.41 In 1937, Kuhn established new uniform guidelines for the OD (“black long trousers without cuffs—black shoes. Steel gray shirt with breast pockets, long black tie. Shark gray uniform jacket … The present arm-band, black cap with the Bund insignia … black belt with shoulder strap”) and standards for public speaking (“The German American Bund is an American organization and has no official connection with Germany and receives no monies.… President Roosevelt is not to be attacked personally in any speech”). As was standard, most of these proclamations ended with a rousing “Sieg Heil!”42 Kuhn had rapidly solidified his power and now intended to turn the Bund into a well-functioning and disciplined organization.
For its part, the German government was becoming concerned that Kuhn’s larger-than-life persona and tendency to go rogue might prove more of a liability than a benefit. As the former press officer at the German embassy in Washington testified after the war, the German Foreign Office’s policy was to avoid any activity that might unnecessarily endanger relations with the United States or, at worst, provide a pretext for war. While the Bund had received some financial support from the foreign section of the Nazi Party in the past, the German ambassador recommended in 1938 that Kuhn be cut off completely. Embassy officials were subsequently banned from having any contact with Kuhn or the Bund, though this was violated by the German consul in New York City.43
The other worrying aspect of the Bund was its decentralized nature. In such a large country there was simply no way for Kuhn to be aware of what was taking place in local chapters in areas as far-flung as California or Texas. Several Bund commands were issued to demand that local leaders file reports with the national office about local opinion, membership numbers, and other issues, but these were often ignored.44 More significantly, this meant that Kuhn and the national leadership could not necessarily police the activities of local leaders. In 1938, for instance, four local groups failed to send Winter Relief funds in the proper manner, leading to a rebuke from Kuhn. Time and time again he had to insist that his orders be carried out precisely and without delay.45 John C. Metcalfe would soon discover that local Bund leaders simply found it easy to ignore the mandates coming out of New York. Some units failed to abide by Kuhn’s uniform regulations, while others failed to charge required membership fees (or simply skimmed the money away before it was reported to Kuhn’s office). Despite Kuhn’s thirst for power, controlling a far-flung network of local chapters would prove almost impossible.
By 1937, Kuhn’s high public profile and the publicity surrounding his visit to the Third Reich was attracting substantial public concern around the United States. Kuhn’s uniformed OD storm troopers and youth cohorts giving him stiff-armed salutes were obviously reminiscent of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. Rallies featuring the swastika next to the American flag understandably struck many Americans as an affront. Where would this all lead? Was Kuhn preparing to launch a coup? Would he unleash his storm troopers and youth followers in a rampage of anti-Semitic violence as had been seen in Germany? There had already been some low-level violence at Bund rallies, usually between members of the OD and protestors who exchanged harsh words and then used their fists to settle the matter.46 Plus, what exactly was going on in the Bund’s youth camps?
These were all valid questions. On the other hand, though, there was little that could legally be done to stop Kuhn at this point. Germany and the United States were not at war. There was no law against displaying the swastika, wearing a uniform, and saying “Heil Hitler.” Officially, the OD was not an armed paramilitary group but a security detail that carried legal weapons and received firearms training. There was also no law against this, and Kuhn even denied that there were any guns involved despite extensive testimony to the contrary. The government had no direct evidence that the violence seen at Bund rallies had been planned. In some cases, the OD members involved might have even been able to argue they were acting in self-defense when they fought protestors. At the end of the day, it could be argued that Bund members were simply exercising their First and Second Amendment rights. Indeed, an FBI investigation in late 1937 concluded that there was no evidence Kuhn or the Bund had broken any federal laws and there were therefore no grounds upon which anyone could be indicted for criminal wrongdoing.47 Suspicion that Kuhn was up to no good was simply not enough to shut down the putative American Führer. Far more evidence would be needed.
The Bund had an important vulnerability on this front: It was remarkably easy to infiltrate. This was in part because obtaining membership was fairly straightforward. A prospective infiltrator had to simply agree to various political statements, meet the racial requirements of admission, have a plausible false identity that did not arouse suspicion, and possess some knowledge of the German language. This is certainly not to say that spying on the Bund was without significant risk. There was often bold talk at Bund chapter meetings about what should be done to newspaper reporters who wrote negative or incriminating stories about the organization. Without doubt, anyone caught in such a position would have been in serious peril. The most famous infiltrator—John C. Metcalfe—received numerous death threats after his subterfuge was revealed, and later had his car riddled with machine-gun bullets in an ambush. He narrowly managed to escape unharmed.48
The Los Angeles chapter of the Bund was among the first to find itself under pressure from infiltrators and informants. In 1936, a group of Hollywood bigwigs including screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart (writer of the Oscar-winning Philadelphia Story), German director Fritz Lang (Metropolis, M), and exiled German politician Prince Hubertus zu Löwenstein formed a group called the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. Their goal was to combat the growing influence of National Socialism and fascism in the movie industry. They were assisted in this effort by Otto Katz, a communist agent who had been raising money for anti-Nazi causes for a year, making the Anti-Nazi League essentially a communist front.49 Most of the league’s efforts were directed at building anti-Nazi sentiment through radio broadcasts and publications, but it also arranged protests at Bund rallies and other events. Loaded with cash from Katz and its rich patrons, the league opened its own intelligence network to keep tabs on the local far right. From 1936 until its dissolution in 1939, the league had investigators attending many of the Bund’s meetings and events to file detailed reports on everything that was said. Their colleagues sat outside and recorded the license plates of every car parked in the vicinity of the meeting, and then cross-referenced the plates to discover the name and address of their owners. The league was effectively building a database of every Bund member and sympathizer in the LA area.50
What the league’s investigators found was worrying. The LA chapter of the Bund—run out of a building called the Deutsches Haus on Fifteenth Street and headed by Herman Max Schwinn, the Bund’s West Coast Gauleiter—was loaded with anti-Semites who were unsparing in their hatred for both Jews and the league itself. One meeting attended by hundreds that was branded with the slogan “America First” quickly descended, in the words of one informant, into “the vilest Hitleristic attack on all American ideals that Los Angeles has ever seen or heard” and included a rabid attack on Jewish film and radio star Eddie Cantor. Bund threats against Cantor eventually became so extreme that the league considered taking legal action to protect him and his family.51 Allegations of Jewish control over the film industry were commonplace at these gatherings, and speakers “expressed the Bund’s determination to rid the picture industry of them.”52 Impressively, the league even managed to infiltrate local Bund youth meetings, which included the usual anti-Semitic rhetoric followed by “an obscure routine of clapping hands, heiling Hitler, and shooting an invisible enemy.” One such meeting was so heavy-handed in its rhetoric that the League’s informant reported that “At this point I became nauseated and was glad I had had a few beers to see me through.”53
The need for alcohol aside, the league’s investigators amassed a remarkable amount of information about the LA Bund’s activities. Yet the usefulness of these accounts to law enforcement was put in question because of the source reporting them. As it turned out, the league itself was under government investigation, and in August 1938 Congressman Martin Dies Jr. denounced it by name as a communist front in a national radio broadcast. Ironically, one of the telegrams of support Dies received afterward was from Gauleiter Schwinn, who offered to provide corroboration for the allegations about the league’s communist ties from the Bund’s own sources.54 The league was seen as simply too questionable to be taken seriously.
The evidence Dies needed to start exposing the Bund finally began to emerge thanks to “Hellmut Oberwinder.” Joining the Bund in March 1937, “Oberwinder” became a member of the OD and gained Kuhn’s trust remarkably quickly. After having been a member for just a few months and rising through the ranks, Kuhn selected him as his personal representative to visit Bund chapters around the country and report back on the state of their activities and membership. As we know, “Oberwinder” was really John C. Metcalfe, a Chicago newspaper reporter and a former FBI informant. Metcalfe’s plan was fraught with risk, and he was told that the bureau would disavow him in the event that he was discovered or harmed in the course of his subterfuge. In 1935 he had managed to secure an invitation to the Nazi Party’s annual Nuremberg Rally but was dissuaded from going by FBI contacts who told him they could not guarantee his safety.55 Now Metcalfe had embarked on an infiltration mission that was at least as dangerous.
Traveling around the country with Kuhn’s blessing, Metcalfe obtained access to the highest levels of the Bund and recorded his experiences in a series of compelling journal entries. Along the way he sent regular telegrams to his brother James, a fellow newspaper reporter, signed with the pseudonym “Henry Hayes.” What he uncovered was eye-opening. In Los Angeles, Metcalfe was told that Bund members had engaged in fistfights with communists on the streets of the city and won “moral victories” against overwhelming odds (perhaps suggesting that the physical outcome for the Bundists was less glorious). Industrialist Henry Ford was a local hero, “especially because of his anti-Semitic and anti-C.I.O. [anti-union] feelings.” In addition, the California branch of the Bund was in close touch with the local Ku Klux Klan and the fascist Gold Shirt movement in Mexico, which supposedly had a membership of one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand and was “getting set for a revolution.” (In fact the Gold Shirt movement had long since been all but wiped out by the Mexican government and its leader exiled to Texas, which understandably rankled many Americans. Remnants of the group would be responsible for a small uprising in 1938.)56
In contrast, Metcalfe discovered in Texas that the local Bund chapter disregarded nearly everything Kuhn commanded, including his uniform rules and the requirement to charge membership dues. While the local Bund chapter was essentially just a social club, he found the local residents held some worrying views: “People laugh at the Nazi threat in U.S. that they hear and read about.… However, their ears leap at the very mention of communism.… So, they laugh at the Nazis, they fear the communists and, without my mentioning it, despise the Jews. The anti-Semitic feeling is strong and they have a set idea that communism means Jewish dictatorship in America.”57
Metcalfe found similar circumstances across the Midwest and East. Some Bund chapters were barely active and had small numbers of members, while others were more militant in their views and disciplined in their logistics. Nearly all the Bund leaders and most of the members were openly anti-Semitic and hardly shy in their praise for Hitler. In St. Louis, Metcalfe was told the local police were the Bund’s “best friends” because many were of Irish and German descent and “they hate the Communists as much as we do.” In Washington, DC, he was told conspiratorially that someday “Washington will be our Deutscher capital,” though everyone he met assiduously denied that there was a local Bund chapter there. In Cleveland, he met a grizzled German war veteran who showed him the rubber hose he had used to beat Jews on the streets of his home country. Similarly shown a ten-inch knife the owner kept for protection against “Communists,” Metcalfe feared that the experienced brawler had discovered his true identity and made a swift break for the door. “I think you better find a good hideout for me (a good one) when the yarn breaks,” he told a collaborator. “I’d hate to meet that guy … after dark.”58
The frightening veteran had not uncovered Metcalfe’s plans, however. Returning to New York, he reported his findings directly to Kuhn. The would-be American Führer now began asking for Metcalfe’s advice on how to proceed with his plans to expand the Bund’s national appeal. He was particularly incensed by Metcalfe’s report that some units had not purchased uniforms and disregarded his authority.59 The man who saw himself as the American Hitler was not even in control of his own organization. The fact that Kuhn was having this conversation with an infiltrator hardly spoke to the strength and effectiveness of his leadership either.
The tables now turned abruptly on Kuhn. In early September 1937, Metcalfe and his collaborators published the first of a series of sensational articles in the Chicago Daily Times focusing on the OD and suggesting that it was a paramilitary force preparing to overthrow the government. The articles immediately sparked a national controversy. Kuhn was embarrassed by the revelations and tried to deny everything. The German embassy was outraged by the damage he had potentially done to relations with the United States. A German consul was forced to comment that “The idea that any one is attempting to form a Nazi army in America is ridiculous” and assured the New York Times that the revelations were greeted with “mixed amusement and irritation” in Berlin. One unnamed government official tried to poke fun at the claims, chortling to a reporter, “We would be flattered. Imagine Germany—already alleged to be preparing vast conquests in Europe—considered to be powerful enough by some people to be plotting quite incidentally to seize control also of the United States—perhaps in [its] spare time.”60
Berlin was not laughing behind the scenes. Kuhn had already exaggerated his connections with Hitler and been the source of embarrassment in the past. Now he had been exposed as a national security threat to the United States. What damage would he do next? Something had to be done, and quickly. The obvious solution was for the German government to deal with the Bund as it had dealt with its embarrassing predecessors: By threatening the German citizens who took part in its activities. In February 1938, a group of German government officials agreed on exactly this plan. The German ambassador duly informed the US secretary of state that German citizens would no longer be permitted to be members of the Bund, just as they had been forbidden to join Friends of the New Germany in its final days.
Kuhn was outraged and decided not to go down quietly. He sailed to Germany immediately to meet directly with Hitler. In a major affront, the Führer declined the invitation and sent his personal adjutant Fritz Wiedemann—a figure who would himself soon feature as one of Hitler’s key friends in the United States—to the meeting instead. Wiedemann told Kuhn that the decision was final and the German government expected him to abide by all US laws in the future. Kuhn slunk back to New York in disgrace. He had simply become too much of a liability for the Germans to tolerate any further. Behind the scenes, German consuls around the United States began quietly advising their citizens to get out of the Bund before there were more serious consequences for them. Membership numbers started to drop.61
Kuhn had one final trick up his sleeve—large-scale provocation. With the Bund’s coffers rapidly draining, Kuhn decided to seize the maximum platform for himself in a desperate attempt to change the narrative. He hired Madison Square Garden for a celebration of George Washington’s birthday in February 1939 and obtained the permits for a mass demonstration. This was an obvious provocation to New Yorkers of many backgrounds, and there were calls for the event to be banned. New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia was personally anti-Nazi and gambled that the Bund would make itself look ridiculous through its antics. The British Foreign Office reported that La Guardia had described the meeting as “an exhibition of ‘international cooties’” that he “believed in exposing … to the sunlight instead of keeping them bottled up.”62 Letting the Bund into the sunlight would prove to be a fateful decision, but the event was allowed to go forward.
The Bund swiftly sold a massive twenty-two thousand tickets for what would be its last major hurrah. The event was an outrageous spectacle from the start, with three thousand uniformed OD men marching into the venue carrying American flags next to German flags bearing swastikas. Nearly two thousand New York City police officers guarded the venue from an estimated hundred thousand angry protestors. A massive full-length portrait of Washington stood behind the stage, flanked by American and German flags. Fights broke out on the floor of the hall between protestors and Bund members. During Kuhn’s culminating speech, a Jewish hotel worker, Isadore Greenbaum, tried to rush the stage. Uniformed OD members tackled him and dragged him offstage, ripping off much of his clothing in the process. He had to be rescued by police officers who carried him out above their heads, and was later booked on disorderly conduct charges.63
The press went wild. “All the trappings of the spectacular mass assemblies familiar to Nazi Germany adorned the occasion,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “Storm troopers strode the aisles. Military bands blared martial airs and German folk songs.… Arms snapped out in the Nazi salute.”64 If anything, Kuhn was flattered by the comparison. The putative American Führer had gotten the publicity he sought and was back on the newspaper front pages. Ironically, however, it would be the Madison Square Garden rally that would rapidly doom the Bund.
Mayor La Guardia was outraged by the violence that had taken place in his city and ordered an investigation into the Bund’s financial records. In May 1939, the Bund’s headquarters in the Yorkville neighborhood of New York City was raided and its financial records seized. Investigators soon found what they were looking for. The Bund’s books revealed that more than $14,000 (about $250,000 in 2018) raised from the Madison Square Garden rally was effectively unaccounted for. Kuhn was arrested and accused of embezzlement. At nearly the same time, Kuhn was subpoenaed by the Dies Committee. He complied with the subpoena but gave away little in his testimony. The Bund’s fate would soon be sealed by outside forces, however. The Committee was outraged shortly after to hear the testimony of a nineteen-year-old former Youth Division member who testified she had been sent to Germany by the Bund to indoctrinate her with Nazi ideas. She went on to allege that that Kuhn’s youth camps were rife with homosexuality.65
Dies had other information to use against the Bund as well. Following his reporting coup, Metcalfe had been hired by the Dies Committee as its first full-time investigator. As he testified in 1938 (in his OD uniform, for maximum effect), in his view the “Nazi movement in the United States” had three main goals:
1. The establishment of a vast spy net
2. A powerful sabotage machine
3. A German minority with the present group [the German American Bund] as a nucleus and to encompass as many German Americans as possible66
The Bund was therefore at the center of Nazi plans for the United States. This prediction would prove to be prescient, and one that understandably worried the Dies Committee’s members.
Meanwhile, the noose of public opinion was also tightening quickly for Kuhn. In April 1939, just months after the Madison Square Garden rally, the Bund was subjected to mass ridicule on the silver screen when Warner Brothers released the sensationalist film Confessions of a Nazi Spy. The film was presented in the style of newsreels and focused on a dangerous German spy ring based in an organization of uniform-wearing, heiling Nazi sympathizers. The Bund comparisons were obvious. It ended with a Nazi character explaining how America could be conquered through a clever use of propaganda “ridiculing democracy” and increasing “racial prejudice.”67 It was a mediocre film, but a major turning point for Hollywood. As historian Francis MacDonnell has written, it was “the first film to specifically identify and attack Hitler’s regime” in a period when most studios were still trying to play nice with the German government for business purposes.68 Confessions was such a brutal repudiation of this practice that it prompted the German ambassador to file a formal complaint with the State Department.69
Making such a heavy-handed film was risky for Warner Brothers. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was worried the publicity surrounding its release would increase the public’s concern about German spying. He eventually filed a formal complaint about the studio’s use of FBI badges in the film without proper permission.70 The Bund sued for libel. More than a dozen countries banned its release, and during the war German troops confiscated prints they found in occupied Europe. Isolationist congressmen called for an investigation, and even President Roosevelt declined a private viewing from studio executives. The film made only modest profits in the United States and was widely considered to be a flop (though it did well overseas and seems to have ultimately pulled a profit). During congressional hearings about the film, Warner Brothers executives confirmed that Metcalfe’s reporting had been the partial inspiration for the film. The message studio executives took from the experience, however, was that in 1939 the American public was simply not interested in films about Nazis and wars.71
Kuhn’s eventual trial was even more of a spectacle than the Dies Committee hearings or the furor surrounding Confessions of a Nazi Spy. At least some of the missing money from the Madison Square Garden rally, it emerged, had been spent on his mistresses, including more than $700 (about $12,000 in 2018) in long-distance telephone charges and $66 on an unspecified “doctor’s bill” for the former Miss America. To Kuhn’s embarrassment, his love letters to one of the women were introduced into evidence. In several he referred to himself by the pet name “Fritzi.” The man who had once styled himself as America’s Hitler had been revealed to be an embezzling adulterer with a penchant for silly nicknames.72 Kuhn was convicted in December 1939 and was formally expelled from the Bund by his successor, Gerhard Wilhelm Kunze, the following day. The prospective American Führer now sat in Sing Sing prison.
The Bund quickly spiraled into the abyss. Local chapters disbanded or merged with other groups. A number of states, including its former stronghold of California, banned it as a subversive group. Kuhn’s legal battles were not over, however, and neither were those of the other Bund leaders. In November 1941, Kunze abruptly announced his resignation as Bund leader and secretly fled to Mexico. Evidently, he had been pursuing an extracurricular career as a spy for German military intelligence and, sensing that things were heating up, decided to make his exit while he still could. As will be seen, he was not the only Nazi spy to be found in the German American Bund’s ranks. Kunze’s successor, George Froboese, had been the leader of the Bund’s Milwaukee branch and was left with the unenviable task of being Bund national leader when Germany declared war on the United States.73 His end would be grim. In June 1942, Froboese was subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury investigating the Bund in New York. Leaving from Milwaukee, Froboese stepped off the train in the town of Waterloo, Indiana, and evidently decided he could go no further. He walked around the small railway station into the darkness in front of the train and lay down with his neck on the track. The disembarking locomotive decapitated him instantly. His headless body lay there for hours before being discovered by the conductor of a stopping train. FBI agents responding to the scene found a copy of the grand jury subpoena in his coat pocket. More salaciously, a local newspaper reported one of his hands was found “in a position that one official said looked almost like a ‘heil Hitler!” salute.”74 The Bund essentially died on the railway tracks with him that night.
The German American Bund was, without doubt, the most prominent organization of Hitler’s American friends before the outbreak of World War II. For Hitler, it was always like a cloying friend who seeks attention but with whom it is simply too embarrassing to be seen in public. The Nazis rightly realized the potential damage that Kuhn and his followers would inevitably do to relations with the US government. It was simply not worth risking a war to assuage his huge ego. “The Bund never made much headway in this country,” Deputy Attorney General Oetje John Rogge, the US government’s leading expert on Nazi subversion, later wrote. “Most Americans of German descent were not in sympathy with the Nazi regime, which was the source of considerable disappointment to the Nazis in Germany in the early years of the Third Reich.”75
Rogge was correct, but at the same time it is undeniable that thousands of Americans saw Kuhn as a major political leader and, potentially, a future Führer. Metcalfe’s surveillance diaries are replete with conversations with average Bund members and nonmembers alike who believed that the United States should seek closer relations with Germany, escalate its battle with communism, and adopt anti-Semitic legislation. Even an official membership of thirty thousand demonstrates the appeal that the symbols of National Socialism and fascism had for a sizable number of people. Some of them were willing to wear uniforms, “heil” their leaders, and send their children to Nazi-themed summer camps. The Bund was not so much an artificial creation of a charismatic demagogue and his inner circle but an organization that had intrinsic appeal for a substantial number of people. Kuhn was simply the voice that emerged to articulate the views many of them already held, as Metcalfe found in his travels.
In the end, the Bund was a miserable failure, destroyed by the vanity of its charismatic leader. Hitler and his government never placed much stock in Kuhn and ultimately disowned him. For the millions of Americans who saw newsreels of OD members marching in uniform and Kuhn delivering stemwinders to a crowd of heiling Bundists, it was the epitome of what a fascist regime might look like in the United States. It was not an image most Americans enjoyed seeing. For that reason, Kuhn and the German American Bund were ultimately Hitler’s most visible friends in the United States, but also the ones he liked the least. As J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and Congressman Martin Dies would soon discover, however, the Bund was by no means the most dangerous—or bizarre—group claiming Hitler’s mantle before the war. With Kuhn’s spectacular downfall, his rivals for the title of American Führer would only increase their efforts to claim the potential crown.