German American Bund

Section III.  Dual Rejections and Intensified Americanization

A. Dual Rejections from America and Germany

 

Realizing that the “American” message of the Bund was resonating with neither the American public nor the government, the Bund sought to challenge America’s misperception.  By intensifying their anti-Communist platform they hoped to gain more “American” credibility and win more sympathy to their cause.  On July 3, 1937 the Bund held their annual convention at the Hotel Biltmore in New York.  Delegates from sixty three Bund units attended the convention.  Even more so than ever, the Bund presented a vehement anti-Communist platform. The Bund released numerous press reports which stressed the organization’s determination to continue to fight Jewish Communism in America.  Once again, they presented their usual arguments:  Germans and Americans were tied together in a mutual struggle against the evils and dangers of Communism and the Bund stood at the vanguard of this battle. 

            In July 1937 Kuhn sent a telegram to FDR insisting that members of the Bund were loyal American citizens entirely committed to the Constitution and democratic institutions of America.  Kuhn sent a personal telegram to Secretary of State Cordell Hull which emphasized Bund loyalty to America and protested anti-German propaganda and the Jewish boycott which was harming US-German relations.  A third telegram was sent to the U.S. Congress in the form of a resolution adopted by the Bund Convention of 1937.  Calling the Bund a “fighting organization” the Bund demanded the immediate passage of legislation which would outlaw subversive parties and organizations and require loyalty oaths to the Constitution from all individuals in public life.[1] Typical of the Bund’s dual allegiance, immediately after the 1937 convention, Kuhn also sent telegrams to Hitler and German Foreign Minister von Neurath proclaiming the Bund’s “undying union with the homeland” and he pledged to continue working for friendly relations between the United States and Germany. 

By mid-1937, the Bund increased the size of the English language section of the Deutschter Weckrf und Beobachter and dedicated more articles warning America of the communist specter. Articles in the Deutscher Weckruf und Beobachter warned Americans that communist activities all over the world threatened the security of the United States and therefore needed to be ferociously combated.[2]  Bund literature  continued to petition the German-American community to fulfill their Germanic/American obligation to fight communism by joining the German American Bund.  Messages implored,

You German Americans who as Americans realize that it is your duty to help outlaw Jewish international atheistic Communism…Join the German American Bund! An essential part of the movement of the 100 million Aryan, white, gentile Americans fighting to reconstitute our country into a free and sovereign, God-fearing, moral, socially-just and national United States.[3]

 

Despite the Bund’s efforts to sell its anti-Communist and pro-American message to the public, American audiences continued to denounce the Bund and all they stood for.  Because of the obvious foreign-inspired fascist trappings, the American public never bought into the Bund’s the message and it remained perhaps the most reviled organization in America. Violent clashes with opponents were common.  In Bergen County, N.J. at a Bund meeting at a private residence, members of the American Legion provoked a fistfight in their efforts to break up the meeting.[4] Similarly, a series of fistfights broke up a meeting of nearly seven hundred Bundists in Buffalo New York as the Bund attempted a membership drive.  Labor organizations, veteran groups, and “patriotic” clubs all fervently took to the streets and brought violence to the Bund.  In Newark, during a Bund rally at Schwabenhalle Hall, an all-out brawl ensued between Bundists and Jewish protesters.  Police dispatched one hundred and fifty officers to break up the fight and twenty persons were arrested.  On their way to a Bund meeting in Irvington, a group of New Jersey Bundists were attacked by antifascists.  Two people were hospitalized and thirty-five others were jailed.  At Trenton, New Jersey and Philadelphia Pennsylvania, near riot situations broke out when Wilhelm Kunze attempted to speak before Bund gatherings.  Hundreds of anti-Nazis booed Kunze off the stage and police had to protect his exit from the angry mobs gathering outside.  On April 20, 1938, a crowd of 3,500 people gathered at the Yorkville Casino to celebrate Hitler’s 49^th birthday.  Unbeknownst to the Bund, one hundred American Legion members infiltrated the celebration and an all-out brawl erupted between the Bund’s OD and the American Legionnaires.  The Yorkville Casino riot resulted in numerous badly beaten victims and aroused even more indignation against the Bund.  The Bund was becoming notorious and violence against the Bund was becoming an all-too common feature at Bund rallies and meeting. 

While violent reaction to Nazi-inspired fascism was a common feature in America in the 1930s, Americans were not always consistent in their views of foreign or even home-grown variations of American fascism.  Americans were much more tolerant of Italian and Italian-American strains of fascism than they were of German Nazism.[5] In fact, Mussolini’s brand of fascism evoked an ambivalent, or even occasionally favorable impression by many Americans.  In 1932 Pennsylvania Senator David Reed announced, “I do not often envy other countries their governments, but I say that if this country ever needed a Mussolini it needs one now.”[6]  While Nazism and virtually all its offshoots was consistently demonized by the American public and the press, the Bund did, in fact,  manage to find a handful of very notable supporters in America.  Prominent Philadelphia figures like Lutheran clergyman Kurt E. Molzahn not only openly supported the Bund, but he distributed Bund propaganda supplied to him by the Auslands-Institut in Germany.[7] Sigmund von Bosse, a minister representing the Philadelphia General Conference of the Lutheran Church, also became a leading activist for the Bund.  Bosse became an open Nazi sympathizer and frequently spoke at Bund meetings.  Although not a keynote speaker at the Madison Square Garden rally in 1939, he denounced the “internationalists serpents of intrigue” and asserted that “if Washington were alive today, he would be a friend of Adolf Hitler, just as he was of Fredrick the Great.”[8] The presence of well-known community figures was invaluable for the Bund because it gave the appearance of a mainstream respectable group, despite the deluge of bad press they received.  

Other notable figures were willing to be openly associated with the Bund.  For example, Congressman Fritz Gartnew, a former attorney for the Bund paper, the Philadelphia Weckruf, served in the state House of Representatives in 1933-34.  The 1939 German Day celebration at Philadelphia’s Metropolitan Opera House was chaired by Sigmund von Bosse and the Bund even managed to secure U.S. Senator James J. Davis as chief speaker.  Nazi embelms were muted for the event, yet Davis’s speech was responded with “Heils” and Hitler salutes.  Also in attendance at the 1939 German Day celebration were two U.S. congressmen, James P. McGranery and Fritz Gartner.  State Senator Dolan of Sussex County not only attended the opening celebration at Camp Nordland with a crowd of eight to ten thousand, but he delivered an address of welcome.  Senator Dolan remarked that “it was a remarkably well-conducted affair.”  He added, “the members were all introduced to me as American citizens.  I had no reason to doubt it and do not doubt it now.  True, the Swastika flag was shown, but the American flag was strongly in evidence and the band played the Star Spangled Banner. The camp seemed to be all it was advertised to be- a camp for children of German descent and a recreation place for their parents.”[9]

As the Bund attempted to balance their political platform between the interests of the homeland and the interests of their adopted nation, in early 1938 they found themselves unequivocally rejected by both nations.  Attacks against the Bund in America were the norm.  Repeatedly, government agencies and private organizations accused the Bund of being nothing other than a subversive organization, an espionage ring in the service of Nazi Germany.  It was certainly true that numerous German agencies engaged in the dissemination of German propaganda in the United States.   The AO, DAI, VDA, the German Foreign Ministry,  Foreign Affairs Office and the Transocean News Service (a press organization designed by the German Foreign Office which operated through the  Propaganda Ministry), all transmitted a variety of National Socialist propaganda to a wide range of organizations, consulates, and private citizens around the world, including the United States. 

            However, by 1936, as the Third Reich became more ambitious in its European pursuits, the Nazi regime became very interested in creating a sense of security within the United States.  In an attempt to assuage the American disfavor towards Germany created by the activities of the German American Bund, in May 1937, Germany appointed Hans Dieckhoff as German Ambassador to the United States.  In October 1937, Prentiss B. Gilbert, the American Charge d’Affaires in Berlin, paid a visit to the Foreign Ministry at the behest of the U.S. State Department to express concern over the conduct of Germans in America and the state of German-American relations.  Gilbert recommended that the AO be informed of the disquiet created by the German American Bund.  As a result, the Foreign Office concluded that it would best serve German interest if the regime cut all ties with the Bund.  Senior Councilor Hans Freytag wrote in a memo dated October 11, 1937 that the NSDAP had nothing to do with German American clubs and that there was absolutely no connection between the German government and the German American Bund.  Nevertheless, Dieckhoff sent a dispatch the following month reporting that the activities of the Bund were suspected as being directed by Germany and rumors of a “fifth column” were widely circulated in America.  Comparisons of Nazi influence abroad were being made to the Communist Comitern.  He complained that “nothing has resulted in so much hostility towards us in the last few months as the stupid and noisy activities of a handful of German-Americans.”[10] Statements by the German Consul Generals of New York and Chicago corroborated such sentiments, emphasizing that German-American relations were being jeopardized by the activities of the Bund. 

            On January 7, 1938, Dieckhoff conducted an intensive study of the history of the German element in the United States and the effect of this history on German-American relations.  He concluded that because of its size, the German-American element in the U.S. was basically useless as a political vehicle for National Socialism.  Although there were twelve to fifteen million German Americans in the U.S., he found that no more than one third of them could read or speak German or be expected to have any feeling of Deutschtum.[11] He concluded that the Bund had failed to sway the American public and had only isolated itself to the detriment of German-U.S. relations.  Thus, Dieckhoff proposed the following: Germany should pursue no aims among the German element in America, political contact between Germany and the Bund must be stopped, German nationals must withdraw from the Bund, Reich authorities must not concern themselves with the internal affairs of the Bund, and the German government should openly disavow the Bund.[12]  

In response to Dieckhoff’s recommendations in January and February 1938, meetings were held in Germany between the Cultural-Political Section of the Foreign Ministry, the political and intelligence divisions of the Foreign Ministry, the VDM, the AO, and the Ministry of Propaganda.  As far as the German government was concerned, the fate of the Bund was sealed.  It was agreed that Kuhn would be told that Germany would not tolerate the presence of German nationals in the Bund, and the Bund was henceforth forbidden to use Party insignia, including the use of the German swastika flag.  Moreover, all German authorities should immediately sever their connections with the Bund and all German citizens must immediately terminate their membership in the Bund and/or any affiliated American organizations.  If Kuhn chose to visit Germany to argue against these decisions, he would be met only by a representative of the VDM, the agency delegated to monitor ethnic Germans abroad.  Moreover, Kuhn was forbidden to discuss the Bund publicly while in Germany. 

Aware of the considerable controversy and potential diplomatic crisis created by the actions of the Bund, Berlin decisively severed any and all connections with the organization.  Berlin pronounced,

The Volksbund…is a purely American organization that has frequently engaged in violent controversy with other organizations such as the American Legion, on both ideological and political issues.  For that reason, it is emphasized here, Reich German citizens have no business to belong to it, nor has the Volksbund the right to display the German flag.  Germany, it is said, has been charged with “Nazi propaganda” in the United States on both counts, and is determined to avoid everything that might lend support to that charge.[13]

 

On March 1, 1938, Berlin made a public announcement prohibiting German nationals from maintaining membership in either the German American Bund or the Prospective Citizens League.  The announcement read:

On account of numerous inquiries being received from German citizens living in the United States the German Government reiterates that German citizens must not belong to the Amerika-Deutsche Volksbund or to possible substitute organizations of that kind.  German citizens who in ignorance of this standing order have become members of the Amerika-Deutsche Volksbund or the Prospective Citizen’s League must resign from these organizations at once.[14] 

 

The announcement was unequivocal; German citizens were to resign their membership in the Bund and refrain from any and all involvement in American politics.  Thus, with one Alexandrian stroke the Nazi regime washed its hands of the whole German American Bund issue and decisively disentangled itself from any potential diplomatic crisis with the United States.  

In the winter of 1937, both the Auslandsorganization der NSDAP and the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle, the central party agency concerned with racial Germans aboard, promised to sever all connections with German-Americans.  Both organizations did not necessarily hold to the promise, but shortly after they were caught corresponding with the Bund, they too severed all ties. Despite these infractions, historian Joachim Remack contends that, “on the whole, the Germans did abide.”[15]

            Fritz Kuhn and the Bund were stunned by the Nazi Party’s decision.  After passionately devoting so much of his life to the Bund, it seemed to Kuhn that all his efforts were being crushed by the very government he so revered.  This made the rejection all the more painful.  Had not the Bund stood for everything that Germany would want them to?  Had not the Bund done everything to promote National Socialist notions of Deutschtum and worked tirelessly for the benefit of its beloved Heimat as well as for its fellow German-Americans?  To Kuhn, it appeared that Germany’s decision was “tantamount to the destruction of the Bund.”[16]  Kuhn sprang to action and raced to Germany to appeal the decision.  However, on this visit there was no fanfare and no special treatment.  In Germany, Kuhn received a rather cold reception and his contact was limited to Hitler’s adjutant Fritz Wiedemann who remained unmoved by Kuhn’s implorations.  Wiedemann informed Kuhn that the decision to remove all German nationals from the Bund was final and that his fumbling imitation of the Party had only damaged German-American relations.  To demonstrate even further the German government’s disconnect with the Bund, Wiedemann told Kuhn that he could give him no instructions because Kuhn was an American citizen. Wiedemann added that he intended to inform the American ambassador of his conversation with Kuhn.