The German American Bund

 B.  German-American Fascist Movements to the German American Bund

The destructive effects of World War One on American Deutschtum made the United States seem distinctly infertile ground for a Nazi movement to bloom amongst the German-American population.   While many believed that any effort to superimpose a party structure analogous to the Nazi Party on the German-American community would be a futile endeavor, the Nazis, nevertheless, maintained a small Party branch in the U.S. for the dual purpose of creating an outpost of Nazism in America and fostering a positive image of the New Germany.  There was, after all, an enormous stock of German blood in the United States, much of which had only recently arrived on American shores.  Yet the German-American community was in no way unified in their views of the Nazi regime.  For the most part, the German-American community rejected the Nazi state and there were numerous German-American anti-fascist organizations operating within the U.S. 

There was, however, a small minority of Germans in America, who emphatically adhered to the Nazi ideas of the Volksgemeinshaft, the racial community.  Many were recent immigrants who came to America imbued with an intense Nazi sense of nationalism and mission.  Having experienced the economic successes of the Nazis and the resurgence of national pride, many viewed Nazism as a positive political force that could work wonders for an America still wallowing in the Depression.  Others came from a small contingent of German-Americans, who in defiance to the Germanophobia and rapid assimilation of the WWI era, sought to reclaim and assert their Deutschtum.  Many held to the notion of the supranational Heimat as espoused by the Nazis and the DAI in Germany.  It was this vocal minority of recent immigrants and die hard German-Americans who would become the embryo of the German American Bund. Donning uniforms indicative of the Third Reich, they became the National Socialist Teutonia Association  (Nationalsozialistische Vereinigung Teutonia or Teutonia Society), the National Socialist German Workers Party (or Gau USA), the Friends of the New Germany (Bund der Freunde des Neuen Deutschland), and ultimately, the German American Bund, (Amerikadeutscher Volksbund).  The German American Bund was born in 1935 from the merger of these three overtly National Socialist inspired, and quite often, German-directed organizations.  These earlier precursors of the Bund were as much a product of the historical treatment of German-Americans as they were the product of the extreme social and political change of the 1920s and 1930s. 

The earliest German-American fascist group in the United States was the National Socialist Teutonia Association.  Founded by Friedrich (Fritz) Gissibl in Detroit on October 12, 1924, Teutonia was one of thirty or so organizations with extreme right-wing leanings founded by émigrés between 1922 and 1933.[1]  The Teutonia Association was the first full-fledged National Socialist organization on American soil which attempted to actively proselytize Nazism to the German immigrant community.[2]  It was the most important pro-Nazi organization in America during the pre-Hitler years, even if its membership was relatively small and insignificant. 

Fritz Gissibl, founder of Teutonia, officially joined the Nazi party in Germany in 1926.  He, like many others, saw nothing inconsistent in an American belonging to a German political party.  He explained that Teutonia’s purpose was “…to speak to young German immigrants, to get them into our society; immigrants who belonged to the German nationalistic group in Germany before they came to the United States...We demand from our members the National Socialist way of thinking.”[3] However, while Teutonia’s mission was to transplant the “National Socialist idea” to America, they did not seek an audience with all of America, nor even with all German-America.  Their endeavors were directed solely at newly arrived German national elements living in the United States.[4]  Initially, Teutonia’s leaders did not envision a future for Nazism in the United States.  Nazism was to be merely a temporary home for new arrivals from Germany, or a refuge from the detested Weimar Republic.  Its members hoped to return home to Germany upon Hitler’s consolidation of power. 

The Teutonia Association had very modest beginnings.  While they claimed chapters in five major cities (Chicago, Detroit, Cincinnati, Milwaukee and Los Angeles) totaling 400 members, when they held their first convention in 1927, only fifteen people attended.[5]  In 1926 they renamed themselves the National Socialist Society and the following year after their convention, they renamed themselves the Friends of the Hitler Movement.  Speaking as Bundsfuehrer (leader of the organization) in 1929, Walter Kappe expressed Teutonia’s National Socialist Volkisch ideas and notions of Deutschtum: “To give America our souls, as so many of our countrymen have done, nobody can force that; to become German-American mongrels who do not know where they belong, nobody can ask of us.  We are and remain Germans. Germans in America.”[6]  The Teutonia Association clearly had no significant American character or American nationalist aspirations.  Its official aim echoed the Nazi interpretation of Deutschtum; that the primary obligation of Germans abroad was to the homeland.  To its members, America was simply another outpost of the German Volksgemeinshaft. America had been a hostile land for Germans and it was time for German-Americans to assert their Deutschtum for the greater glory of the worldwide German racial community.  As Gissibl declared, “Our League has adopted the task of liberating German racial comrades from class hatred and pride, of welding them together into a true German racial community, for as such will Germandom in America be preserved.”[7]

            It was between 1930 and 1932 when Americans at last began to take notice of American Nazis.  Because Teutonia’s obvious foreign loyalties were creating considerable disquiet among Americans, the Nazis decided to make a strategic break with the group.  In 1932, on the brink of obtaining power in Germany, the Nazis decided to sever any complicated foreign entanglements which might jeopardize their acquisition of power.  They decreed that only German citizens could become members of the Nazi Party.  American nationals could no longer obtain membership in the German political party.  All German citizens in Teutonia were expected to leave that organization and become exclusively Nazi Party members.  In 1932, Karl Ludecke, a Nazi from Germany sent to investigate the state of National Socialism in America, composed a report to Alfred Rosenberg, the chief of the Bureau of Foreign Policy in Germany.  He reported that Nazism in America was a mess with “eighty to one hundred paying members all of whom want to be Fuehrer.”[8]  He advised dissolution of the Teutonia Association which was executed by Deputy Fuehrer Rudolf Hess.  Dr. H. Neidland, director of the Auslanderorganization in Germany, placed all unofficial New York Nazi cells under the control of the Foreign Section of NSDAP and designated them the Nationalsozialistiche Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, Ostgruppe New York.  Members were henceforth referred to as Gauleitung- USA or simply, Gau-USA. Gau-USA was the official Berlin-directed outpost of National Socialism in the United States and New York became the center of American Nazi activity.

The year 1932 was of pivotal importance because the German government now began to consider Gau-USA as a permanent group.  Many began to stop considering America as a temporary home for Nazism.  In January 1932, Teutonia dissolved itself with part of its members going into the Nazi party, or Gau-USA, and others (primarily American-Germans who could not join the Nazi party because they were American citizens) reforming themselves into the Friends of the Hitler Movement.  The Friends of the Hitler Movement quickly renamed themselves into the more innocuous sounding Bund der Freunde des Neuen Deutschland, the Friends of the New Germany.  The Friends are often referred to as the “first Bund.” 

The disbanding of Teutonia and the creation of the Friends led to a power scramble among American Nazis, particularly between the Detroit-Chicago groups under Gissibl and the New York chapter under the charismatic Heinz Spanknöbel.  Spanknöbel sought to consolidate all the Nazi affiliated groups in the United States under his own leadership.  To gain Berlin’s favor, he went to Germany in 1932 and campaigned for Hitler, speaking at sixty different campaign operations.  As a result, Deputy Fuehrer Rudolf Hess gave the authorization for Spanknöbel to take over all Nazi movements in America.  Thus the German government gave formal approval for operations of American Nazi groups and even gave them direct orders.  On September 30, 1932, Dr. H. Nieland issued the “Foundation Decree of the National Group U.S.A.” which decreed that Spanknöbel was the National Authorized Representative in the U.S. and that he employed the Fuehrerprincip and needed to answer only to the Auslanderorganization in Berlin.[9]  

The recruits to these early National Socialist groups were “mainly recent immigrants, ill educated, lower class people susceptible to the message of triumph and revenge coming from Berlin.”[10]  Germans who left the homeland for America in the early 1930s left a “phoenix rising,” a Germany “rising from the ashes of war and depression.”[11] The Nazi government’s enormous success in reviving the German economy bolstered German confidence and revived German pride which was so humiliated by the war and the failure of the Weimar government.  Consequently, many Germans took this new pride to the United States where, in some contrast to Germany, the Depression still lingered.  Some even began to speculate, “If Hitler’s methods could transform Germany, what could they do in the United States?”[12]

In 1932, the combined membership of Friends and the Nazi Gau in America was a paltry 400 or less.[13]  However, membership boomed with Hitler’s acquisition of power.  According to an article entitled Hitlerism Invades America appearing in the March 1934 periodical Today: A Personal Journal of Public Affairs, the highest estimates for membership in the Friends or Nazi party in America was 6,000 with sympathizers totaling many times that number.[14]   The newly formed Friends, like Teutonia, were comprised largely of the same immigrants from Germany who clung to National Socialist racial notions of Deutschtum.  Membership was available to “anyone of German descent free of Jewish or Negro blood.”[15]  All members all had to take an oath declaring their knowledge of the goals of the organization, their resolve to support such goals and their acknowledgement of the group’s leadership principle.  The program of the Friends of the New Germany differed little, if any, from that of Teutonia.  It still remained largely as an outpost of Nazism in America, comprised of recent German immigrants who adhered to the Nazi concept of racial community and Deutschtum. 

It was not long before the Friends’ openly pro-Nazi sentiments aroused the suspicions of the American public and the government, for along with communism, the far right created a “fascist hysteria” in America during the 1930s.  Roosevelt described Communism and fascism as “equally abhorrent” but considered the real issue in the United States to be the struggle between fascism and the democratic principles of the Founding Fathers.[16]  The first wave of fascist fear occurred between 1932 and 1934 during the direst years of the Great Depression when the McCormack-Dickstein Congressional Committee of 1934-35 began to investigate Un-American Activities including the “shirt movements” and the Friends of the New Germany.[17]  The McCormack-Dickstein Committee was headed by Congressman John McCormack of Massachusetts and co-chaired by Congressman Samuel Dickstein.[18]  Even before the HUAC investigation, many Americans viewed the Friends as nothing more than a Nazi “Fifth Column” operating in the United States.  Congressman Dickstein became the leading adversary of the Friends and, later the German American Bund.  His disdain for American Nazis was undisguised and he was in no doubt on a personal crusade to destroy Nazism in America.  Many began to question his motives and tactics and some in Congress went as far as to charge that the McCormack-Dickstein Committee violated witnesses’ constitutional rights.[19]

The committee’s findings, which were made public in February 1935, greatly added to the burgeoning fascist hysteria in America.  In fact, between 1935 and 1941, America was inundated with a deluge of books and periodicals dedicated to exposing the imminent danger posed by American fascists [20]  Books like It Can’t Happen Here, Under Cover, Forerunners of Fascism, Fifth Column in America, and Organized Anti-Semitism in America, all fed into the “Brown Scare,” the fear and the perception that a fascist revolution or a subversive “Fifth Column” was a realistic threat to America.[21]   Many Americans at the time, including a host of influential media figures, genuinely believed and feared that the establishment of a fascist regime in America was a realistic possibility. One of them was Raymond Swing, a newspaper correspondent with significant experience in Europe.  In 1935, Swing assessed the prospects of fascism in America.  He suggested four conditions needed for a successful fascist revolution in America: the impoverishment of the middle class, economic stagnation, paralysis of democratic government and the threat of a strong Communist government.  Swing concluded that the first two conditions were already present, and America was well on its way to meeting the other two conditions.[22]   Thus, if conditions in America did not dramatically change, the nation faced the realistic potential for a fascist takeover.     

Newspaper magnate, William Randolph Hearst, was another prominent America figure who seriously considered the reality of a fascist revolution in America.  His demagoguery was, however, fueled by his contempt for communism.  Hearst was impressed by Hitler’s claim to have saved Germany from communism.  After he visited Germany in September 1934, Hearst said of Hitler, “this is the great policy, the great achievement, which makes the Hitler regime popular with the German people, and which enables it to survive…”[23]  In 1934 Hearst embarked on a journalistic crusade to rouse America to the dangers of communism.[24]  His influence spread rapidly, especially to the members of the lower middle class whose naïve understanding of communism was that a communist was anyone who was a dissenter or a foreigner.[25] 

From his investigation, Dickstein produced a wealth of evidence which demonstrated the subversive nature of the Friends and other similar Nazi organizations in America.  All his evidence indicated that the Nazi government in Germany was providing financial aid and ideological support to the Friends of the New Germany and other similar organizations.  In response, the Nazi government in Berlin responded to the committee’s allegations by disclaiming any knowledge of the activities of its citizens in the U.S.  Moreover, to prevent any further diplomatic crisis, Deputy Fuehrer Rudolf Hess issued a decree in 1935 forbidding its nationals (including those who had taken out citizenship papers) from becoming members of the Friends of the New Germany or any like organizations.  Berlin hoped that this decision would precipitate the speedy collapse of the movement and avert any unwanted diplomatic tension with the United States.

Germany’s decision to cut ties with the Friends began shortly after Berlin’s recall of Heinz Spanknöbel in September 1933.[26]  On February 16, 1934, AO chief, Ernst-Wilhelm Bohle, ordered all Party members out of the Friends, but it was not an order that anyone expected to take seriously.[27]  It was not until the McCormack-Dickstein investigations that the government in Berlin decided all German nationals must definitely desist from belonging to any American political organization.  The decree was a devastating blow to Nazi-inspired organizations in America.  Many in the Friends felt that the Party had betrayed them.  Consequently, membership in the organization declined precipitously.  Many Bundists in America concluded that if they did not have the overt support from Berlin, they needed to disengage the group from Nazi German control and change its policies. 

The Friends of the New Germany disbanded and were reborn as the Amerikadeutscher Volksbund, the German American Bund.  No longer would the movement be principally concerned with the affairs of Germany.  Nor would the movement be comprised solely of German nationals or recent immigrants from Germany.  From this point on, it would be comprised not of Germans, but of German-Americans who would utilize the American political system to further both their German and American interests. No longer merely an outpost for Nazism, the German American Bund would become an American political movement with an emphasis on American politics and national interests. While the movement would maintain many of its original aims, historical pressures would dictate that the Bund compromise its original goals and rhetoric and incrementally “Americanize” to maintain its survival.  In fact, “Americanization” became the watchword for the new movement.   Freeing itself from its constrictive German Nazi mold, under the leadership of naturalized American Fritz Kuhn, the German American Bund would transform itself into a legitimate and legal American political organization with an unmistakably American agenda.