Double Agent (38 page)

, the Hitlerite marching anthem, and half the audience saluted,” he wrote. “When the band began the fourth and last verse of the song, every hand in the house (with one exception) was raised. And as the music mounted higher in the closing bars, Nazis besought a unanimous salute to Hitler. ‘Hoch mit den Haenden,’ they urged.” High with the hands. Three weeks later, and several blocks to the east over the Queens line, six thousand Germans jammed into the Ridgewood Grove arena for a similar evening of obloquy and song while a few thousand more gathered outside on Palmetto Street and St. Nicholas Avenue. To make the scene a near replica of what was happening in Germany, the Nazis engaged in “eighteen brawls,” according to the careful accounting of one reporter, with their political foes, in this case hundreds from the “Anti-Fascist League of Brooklyn, the Blue Shirt Minute Men of Brownsville, and the Jewish War Veterans League,” according to the papers. The Ordnungsdienst used billy clubs to attack those who stuck around after the cops left. Then on May 17, 1934, more than twenty thousand gathered at Madison Square Garden, which was decorated with swastikas, American flags, and English- and German-language banners, including one near the speaker’s rostrum that urged German Americans to “Erwache!” Awake! Protected by seven hundred and fifty officers of the NYPD outside and eight hundred Ordnungsdienst men inside, the speakers said that the DAWA was a “defensive measure against the reign of terror foisted upon the United States and especially the City of New York by certain professional Jews and their Bolshevist confederates,” according to a featured orator. “We give you warning today for the last time,” said another. “Stop the incitement. Stop the boycott and we too shall be silent and we too shall then devote ourselves to our special task. But if you continue the battle, you shall find us fully armed and then you will have to bear the consequences.”

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

.”

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, and 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

), magazines (a monthly youth publication called

), 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

, 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

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

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.”