by Duffy, Peter
By 1935, Nazi Germany and its outspoken representatives were not particularly popular in the United States, even if many Americans believed, as FDR did, that most Germans were blameless victims of a pitiless tyranny. A call to boycott the Olympics scheduled there for 1936 was joined by organizations as varied as the National Council of the Methodist Church, the Catholic War Veterans, and the American Federation of Labor. A Gallup poll revealed 43 percent of the country felt strongly enough about the Nazi regime to support boycotting the games, which the US team wound up attending after a long and bitter debate. A respected elder of the US Senate, William King of Utah, proposed that a committee look into Nazi persecution of Jews and Catholics to determine whether the United States should sever diplomatic relations. Matters were compounded by the conviction of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a Reich citizen living illegally in the Bronx, for kidnapping and murdering Charles Lindbergh’s infant child after a lurid trial-of-the-century across the river in New Jersey. Vilified by the nation at large, the “former German machine gunner,” as the papers called him in reference to his World War I service, found succor within a German American community willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. The Bruno Hauptmann Defense Committee, which hosted rallies and raised funds, was headquartered on the block of East Eighty-Sixth Street between Second and Third Avenues, its geographical dead-center. “And Hauptmann is a hero/And Lindbergh is a swine/In Yorkville, in Yorkville/In Yorkville on the Rhine,” wrote Walter Winchell in his gossip column syndicated to two thousand newspapers. Joseph Goebbels’s grand plan to have millions of German Americans arise with one voice in compelling defense of the Fatherland was proving a failure, Nazi diplomats were telling its superiors back home.
The regime decided to make a public show of severing ties with the Friends of the New Germany, which had been so racked by internecine conflict that it failed to participate in German Day festivities in October 1935, in the hope that vehicles more palatable to the American commonweal could be used to spread the word, as Goebbels had put it, that “a lasting prosperity in the United States is dependent on a reorganization of Europe.” The connection with German America would be maintained under the cover of cultural organizations like the Verein für das Deutschtum im Ausland (League for Germans Abroad or VDA), the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle (Ethnic Germans’ Liaison Office or VOMI), and the Deutsche Ausland Institut (German Foreign Institute or DAI). Ever-greater funding would be given to the German consulate in downtown Manhattan to disseminate propaganda through new initiatives like the German Library of Information, which published English-language periodicals and books on the latest in Nazi thinking. So on December 27, 1935, Rudolf Hess released a statement to the Associated Press declaring that all German citizens (even those who had taken out “first papers” indicating their formal intention to become naturalized Americans) were forbidden from membership in groups with explicitly political aims. (The Friends of the New Germany was not named.) With about 60 percent of its estimated ten thousand members covered by the order (including senior leadership), the Bund der Freunde des Neuen Deutschlands was effectively shuttered. Or it would’ve been if the most politically committed element of German America hadn’t already dedicated itself to the toilsome advance of National Socialism in a style that looked a lot like the version back home. These ideologues were inherently suspicious of any statement from the Reich government that denied them the opportunity to carry out their sacred calling, especially one issued to an American news agency.
Clicking his heels to lead this community of souls was Fritz Kuhn, a chemical engineer from Munich who, as a fast-rising figure in the movement with his citizenship papers freshly stamped, was christened as the Friends’ new national director after word of Hess’s intentions reached America. Kuhn was a quintessential member of the front-fighter generation of German rightists, a lieutenant in the machine gun detachment of the Alps Corps who had earned an Iron Cross during his four years on the Western Front, one of the “princes of the trenches, with their hard-set faces, brave to madness, tough and agile to leap forward or back, with keen bloodthirsty nerves, whom no despatch ever mentions,” as author Ernst Jünger characterized those patriots ennobled by the experience of the war. Kuhn returned from the front to take up arms against Marxist insurrectionists during the short-lived German Revolution of 1918–19. “I fight the Communists there,” Kuhn later told Congress of the battle against the Bavarian Soviet Republic, which was overthrown after hundreds of German Communists were killed by right-wing forces that included many future Nazis. “I was in that revolution in Munich, active, of course, with officers of my old regiment.” He would later claim that he decided to emigrate in the early 1920s because of difficulties in finding employment. “There was not any work in Germany at all,” he explained. “Every second one was out of work. And if a man had a job he got a salary he could not live on. I had to go somewhere.” Unable to enter the United States because the quota for German refugees had been filled, he and his wife, Elsa, lived in Mexico for four years until they were permitted entry. In 1928, Kuhn arrived in Detroit, finding employment as a chemist first at the Henry Ford Hospital (where he was “laid off due to the fact that he was too familiar with the female employees,” according to a later FBI report) and then at the laboratory of the Ford Motor Company (where he was once caught practicing speeches in the darkroom). Soon after Kuhn joined the Detroit branch of the Friends in the summer of 1934, he was elevated to be its leader. Within a year and a half, he was running the nationwide organization, a “well-built, square-jawed aggressive Aryan, more than six feet tall and over two hundred pounds,” wrote an observer. “When he stands erect in his storm troop uniform with grey officer’s coat, his paunch is not so very noticeable. He is hard-faced and stern when reviewing his troops, issuing orders, or making a fighting speech; but he can relax, laugh, and drink beer with his fellows in Gemütlichkeit.”
In late March 1936, Kuhn brought together the leading activists from across the country at the Hotel Statler in Buffalo. It was a heady time for Nazi Germany, just a few weeks after the Wehrmacht marched into the demilitarized Rhineland in blatant violation of the terms of Versailles, fortifying the country’s borders with France and Belgium and bringing a surge of pride to nationalists everywhere. After being reelected as Bundesführer, Kuhn announced he was changing the name of the organization to the Amerikadeutscher Volksbund or German American Bund, part of a stepped-up plan to advertise the Americanism of the “new” group with frequent calls to “uphold and defend the Constitution and the law of the United States,” as the first item of the new Bund charter had it. Realizing he had to defy Hess’s decree in order to keep the group viable, Kuhn determined that German nationals could remain in the new Bund if they began the naturalization process and joined its “Prospective Citizens’ League,” which meant that less than 10 percent of the membership actually departed (some back to Germany) and the Friends’ institutions could remain in place. He ensured that his subtle defiance of Berlin’s will wouldn’t be challenged when he assumed the mantle of tyranny: “The Amerikadeutscher Volksbund is conducted upon the führer principle,” he wrote. “Consequently there are no elections or majority decisions.”
Setting up his national offices on the second floor of a three-story building hard by the rattling Third Avenue El at 178 East Eighty-Fifth Street in Yorkville—it also included a beauty parlor, dress shop, dental supply company, and insurance office—he moved quickly to quell dissension within the ranks and bring order to the Friends’ disparate holdings. But Kuhn had ambitious plans to create a multi-institutional entity that could contain the whole of the German American community, his own mini-Reich at the center of the American republic. He spent the spring and early summer of 1936 speaking at German American meeting halls in and around New York, announcing plans to train orators, expand the would-be shock troops of the Ordnungsdienst, enhance Hitler Youth–style indoctrination for boys and girls, involve the women’s auxiliary in social-service projects, an
d leap unapologetically into American politics. He turned the DAWA, the boycott subsidiary that had been so successful in marking territory with its storefront stickers, into the German-American Business League or DKV, which continued boycott efforts while also hosting exhibits of German goods and participating in local trade conferences. He established the AV Publishing Company, which churned out the Bund’s newspapers (including its flagship, the Deutscher Weckruf und Beobachter), magazines (a monthly youth publication called Junges Volk), and pamphlets (“Communism with the Mask Off,” “The Riddle of the Jew’s Success,” etc.). He incorporated the German-American Settlement League, which purchased a picnic grounds along the banks of the Mill River in Yaphank, Long Island, a bucolic spot of forty-two acres renamed Camp Siegfried where Hitlerite families could “leave the pavements, the crowded thoroughfares, the dust, the noise of the city behind,” and enjoy fellowship with “people that think as you do . . . cheerful people, honest and sincere, law-abiding!” The highlight of that summer was a festival of marching, singing, and drinking that attracted at least fifteen thousand German Americans, many of them delivered out from the city via a “Camp Siegfried Special” provided by the Long Island Rail Road. The remembered sight of uniformed Nazis in garrison caps, jackboots, and Sam Browne belts marching through the rural burgs of eastern Long Island would become an indelible part of local folklore.
Kuhn hoped all his good work would impress Reich officials, who would have no choice but to restore formal support to the most powerful expression of Nazism in the United States. With two hundred other Bundists, he set out for Germany aboard the Hamburg America liner New York, arriving in early July to a country seeking to remake itself for the Olympic games scheduled for the first two weeks of August. The Kuhnites traveled up and down the country, participating in Nazi functions and meeting with representatives of Reich agencies. But the highlight of the trip—and surely the highlight of Fritz Kuhn’s stormy life—happened on August 2, when Kuhn and four of his lieutenants were granted an audience with their Führer, who was meeting with a number of visiting delegations at the Reich chancellery. Kuhn presented Hitler with a donation for a German relief agency and a leather-bound Goldene Buch detailing the history of Nazism in America signed by six thousand supporters. According to one of Kuhn’s aides, “He asked us about our comrades of German blood across the sea, thanked us for our strong opposition to the immoral press and its infamous lies, and inquired in detail about the future plans of our Bund and our excursion through Germany.” As they were leaving, Hitler urged the men to “go over there and continue the fight.” Although Kuhn didn’t receive the official sanction he was hoping for, he arrived in New York Harbor with something perhaps as valuable: A photograph of himself standing in the presence of the mystical embodiment of the German people. It would be widely published as obvious proof that Fritz Kuhn was Hitler’s man in America.
On October 4, 1936, he made his triumphant return during the annual German Day celebration at Madison Square Garden, now back in the control of the Bundists and packed with more than twenty thousand men, women, and children. It certainly looked as if Kuhn was an official representative of the Reich: He shared the stage with Mayor Karl Stroehlin of Stuttgart and the German Ambassador to the United States, Hans Luther. The highlight of the evening was the address (in English) by Avery Brundage, chairman of the United States Olympic Committee, who was an example of a native-born American who got Nazi Germany. “We can learn much from Germany,” he said to thunderous applause. “We, too, if we wish to preserve our institutions, must stamp out Communism. We, too, must take steps to arrest the decline of patriotism.” A few days later, Kuhn made the strategic error of pledging the Bund’s purported fifty thousand nationwide members to Alf Landon’s run for the presidency, which forced the Republican candidate to endure embarrassing headlines about “Nazis to Get Out Votes for Landon” and “Vote for Landon, Nazis Here Told” and required the German embassy to deny that Hitler had made an endorsement in the presidential race. It couldn’t have helped the anti-Roosevelt cause. On November 2, President Roosevelt won a massive landslide on the back of the rejuvenated New Deal. In an editorial for his house organ, Kuhn muttered about FDR’s “mandate for dictatorship,” expressing his wish that the president “find the physical and spiritual strength to resist the onslaughts of the vermin that is undermining our American institutions and putting the axe to the very roots of our foundations.”
In September, the Chicago Daily: John C. Metcalfe, “I Am a U.S. Nazi Storm Trooper,” and numerous accompanying articles, Chicago Daily Times, beginning September 9, 1937, and running through September 24, 1937.
East Eighty-Sixth Street, the bustling: In those days, the neighborhood’s Germanic boundaries spread roughly east from Lexington Avenue to the East River and north from East Seventy-Ninth Street to East Ninety-Sixth Street, although it is impossible to draw precise lines in a metropolis as diverse and ever changing as New York. To the south was a Hungarian section, followed by a Czech quarter; to the north were the Italian and Puerto Rican divisions of East Harlem; to the west toward Central Park resided the wealthy denizens of Park, Madison, and Fifth Avenues, the “Silk Stocking” district. Scattered within were Irish and Jews, many of whom were enmeshed in the commercial, if not cultural, life of the community.
The story goes that the Germanization of Yorkville didn’t begin until 1904, when the steamship General Slocum caught fire and sank in the East River, killing a thousand German immigrants on their way to a church picnic on Long Island and casting a kind of curse on the old neighborhood, Kleindeutschland, in what is today the East Village/Lower East Side. But the flight to the rapidly urbanizing quadrant of northern Manhattan was in full progress by the 1880s, aided by the construction of the elevated subway lines above Second and Third Avenues that allowed the four-mile journey to be completed in minutes. Jobs could be had in the breweries founded by German immigrants that occupied a large swath of Yorkville’s northern section, including George Ehret’s Hell Gate Brewery, which was the country’s greatest producer of beer in 1877. Spiritual comfort was on offer in the Teutonic churches constructed in the final decades of the nineteenth century—Immanuel Evangelical Lutheran on East Eighty-Eighth Street at Lexington Avenue with its three bronze bells donated by Augusta, empress of Germany, the larger of two German Lutheran congregations in the neighborhood; St. Joseph’s on East Eighty-Seventh Street, a German national Catholic parish in a “handsome brick building with a steeple that could have been lifted right out of the Black Forest,” according to a church history; and, most spectacularly, the Episcopal Church of the Holy Trinity on East Eighty-Eighth Street near Second Avenue with a church, bell tower, rectory, and parish house built in French Gothic and Renaissance Revival styles to recall the ambience of the Loire Valley. Less architecturally striking were the rows of standard brownstones and brick tenements that were being thrown up to house the growing population.
Still, it’s true that Yorkville didn’t become America’s Little Berlin until the early twentieth century, when secular shrines were erected to serve the innumerable benevolent associations, singing societies, home-region guilds, reading circles, women’s auxiliaries, shooting clubs, etc., that were an indelible part of the German immigrant experience. “The first thing that two Germans do when they meet abroad is to found three associations” went the quip. The Yorkville Casino, which would remain the anchor of the main block of Eighty-Sixth Street until the 1960s, opened during the same year as the Slocum disaster, 1904. Built by a musicians’ union, the six-story building had meeting rooms and performance spaces (including one of fifteen thousand square feet) that were used for political rallies, gala banquets, Bach recitals, theatrical performances, and, soon, first-run German-language motion pictures. The Casino was far from the only large gathering spot to welcome the Vereine. The multilevel Kreutzer Hall was opened just a few steps to the east to catch any overflow business. Two blocks south, the Labor Temple was established as a center for the
Socialist and trade-union crowd, but before long it became a “funny, musty” place where “everything in the world goes on”—including singing-canary competitions hosted by “strange, little old people” who gather “around like gnomes listening eagerly to the silvery liquid notes of their birds,” wrote a visitor. The New York Turnhalle at the corner of Eighty-Fifth and Lexington had a fourth-floor gymnasium among its assembly spaces, making it the natural headquarters for German sporting organizations, but it was better recognized around town for the ground-level restaurant, Adolph Suesskind’s, which became Hans Jaeger’s, which attracted sophisticated diners over from Park Avenue for its lamb chops and roast pork.
By the early 1920s, Yorkville was seen as “a quiet German colony, with German theaters, the occasional beer garden or two, an epidemic of delicatessen stores, pork stores and bird stores—active by day and wholly out of it by night,” which is only partially true. A strip of vaudeville and movie houses lined the block of Eighty-Sixth between Lexington and Third, establishing what a magazine writer called “an important amusement center” that surely functioned after dark. Yet it was the appearance of a theme bar called Maxl’s, which specialized in creatively flaunting the Prohibition laws, that inaugurated Yorkville as a nightlife hot spot listed in all the visitors’ guides. In 1925, Maxl Harder opened a restaurant/tavern on the bottom half of a brownstone on the north side of Eighty-Sixth Street near Second Avenue that was remodeled (both exterior and interior) to evoke a ye olde cottage right out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, perhaps the first act in the Disneyfication of Manhattan. The scene inside was raucous. “There is a stringy three-piece orchestra, which stops every other moment to drink and sing a toast to each newcomer,” according to one guidebook. The boozy highlight of the evening was the singing of “The Schnitzelbank Song,” a number traditionally used to teach children the German language. Hilarity ensued as the conductor pointed with a “schoolmarm’s rod” at “a huge poster bearing the words in German illustrated by quaint little drawings,” while the orchestra squawked along in accompaniment. The place grew so popular and spawned so many imitators that it was required to call itself The Original Maxl’s. Another guidebook described the genre: “A Brau Haus (86th Street version) is a place in which all the waiters wear short, corduroy pants, Alpine hats, socks that cover only the calves of their legs, and funny suspenders,” wrote Rian James in 1934. “The gentlemen are engaged (1) because they have grand German accents; (2) because, even if they can’t sing, at least they know all the words to the popular old-school German Bräustüberl ditties; and (3) because they have learned to transport successfully sixteen steins of beers in one hand, while they write out and incorrectly add a patron’s check with the other!” It was suggested that people avoid visiting during college football season, when “the teams and cheering sections are in town” from Syracuse, New Haven, or Pittsburgh, which makes it “a little bit strenuous for anyone who isn’t up on forward-passing a frankfurter.”