GERMAN NEWSREEL + Boy Scouts in Germany 1936 private footage, Europa Woche 83 9.1944

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Episode 264

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EUROPA WOCHE Nr. 83
26.09.1944

01:08 - Concert by a boys' choir in a church
02:32 - Hitler Youth in rural service
03:39 - Japanese youth in mass gymnastics and sports
04:22 - Training of air force helpers
05:53 - Rowing competition in Spain
06:51 - Swimming championships in Denmark
07:50 - Young German women doing gymnastics and dance
09:11 - Recovering German soldiers in a woodcarving school
10:11 - Germany: Working in a tire retreading factory
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11:49 - BONUS: Boy Scouts visiting Germany in 1936

he birth of American fascism is nearly impossible to identify within the context of history. The American fascist movement in the 1930s and early 1940s, until recently, was arguably the most organized attempt to bring Nazism to the forefront of American society. While not the earliest pro-Nazi American organization, the German-American Bund was one of the most successful. The Bund was founded in 1936 with a goal to empower German-American citizens to spread Nazi ideology in the United States and to create an American counterpart to the German Nazi Party. The culmination of the German American Bund’s work would be a February 20, 1939 rally at Madison Square Garden in Midtown Manhattan where 22,000 members gathered amidst a flurry of American and Nazi imagery.

Fritz Kuhn, a German veteran of World War I, was the leader (or Bundesfuher) of the German-American Bund. Following World War I, Kuhn immigrated first to Mexico then to the United States where he became a naturalized citizen in 1934. At its height, the Bund had organized 20 youth training camps. Promoted as family-friendly summer camps, Camp Siegfried in Long Island, Camp Hindenberg in Wisconsin, and Deutschhorst Country Club in Pennsylvania were some of the camps devoted to promoting favorable views of Nazi Germany and spreading Nazi ideology in the United States. The camps’ popularity grew rapidly. The New Jersey division of the Bund opened its 100-acre Camp Norland at Sussex Hills in 1937 and the annual German Day festivities at Camp Siegfried in Long Island attracted 40,000 people in 1938.

As the Pro-Nazi and American Fascist movement grew, so did the interest of the American Government. The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), later made famous by their Cold War Era investigations of suspected communist sympathizers in the United States, was formed in 1938 by Congressman Martin Dies, Jr. to address the German-American Bund, the Bund family summer camps, and pro-Nazi organizations and individuals in the United States. Fritz Kuhn was the first witness called by Dies’ committee. The HUAC did not have the ability to arrest any Bund members. In fact, its conclusions were that the German-American Bund was loud and racist, but fell under the protections of the first amendment. Both the Attorney General and the Federal Bureau of Investigation concluded that the Bund was not a threat to American security. During the hearings, the committee successfully painted the Bund as anti-American. False claims that Khun received orders directly from Adolf Hitler helped to discredit the German-American Bund in the press and in Congress. So much so, that The Washington Post presented Chairman Dies with the “Americanism Award of 1938.”

The height of the German-American Bund’s popularity was marked by the February 1939 rally at Madison Square Garden. Kuhn and other American Nazi leaders called the event a “mass demonstration for true Americanization” and used patriotic imagery alongside Nazi imagery and antisemitic rhetoric. Twenty-two thousand Bund members carried signs and banners with messages such as, “Wake up America! Smash Jewish Communism” and “Stop Jewish Domination of Christian Americans.” Speakers at the rally incorporated antisemitic messages and Nazi propaganda throughout their speeches. Messages which were openly praised by attendants who performed Nazi salutes toward three-story tall banners of George Washington flanked by Nazi swastikas. In Fritz Kuhn’s keynote address, he demanded that “…our government be returned to the American People who founded it.” The Bund’s definition of Americanism was actually a concrete manifestation of German racism and hatred based on racial and religious differences. Hermann Schwinn, the West Coast leader of the Bund, reinforced that idea when he labeled Jews as a threat to American identity and attacked New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia as “the Jew Lumpen LaGuardia.”