A Night at
The Garden is a 2017 short documentary film about a 1939 Nazi rally that filled
Madison Square Garden in New York City. The film was directed by Marshall Curry
and was produced by Laura Poitras and Charlotte Cook with Field of Vision. The
seven-minute film is composed entirely of archival footage and features a
speech from Fritz Julius Kuhn, the leader of the German American Bund, in which
anti-Semitic and pro white-Christian sentiments are espoused.
The
documentary premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2018 and was nominated
for the 91st Academy Awards for Best Documentary Short.
The film uses footage from Monday, February 20, 1939, and
opens outside Madison Square Garden with shots of the New York City Police
Department reining in anti-Nazi counter-protesters along with a marquee that
lists a "pro-American rally" scheduled on that night, above a
National Hockey League match and an NCAA Division I college basketball game
later in the week. After a procession of flag bearers to a stage decorated with
swastika-adorned pennants, U.S. flags, and a portrait of George Washington, a
German-accented man leads the audience in the Pledge of Allegiance. Kuhn steps
up to the podium and casually remarks about how he is depicted as a
"creature with horns, a cloven hoof, and long tail" by "the
Jewish-controlled press." As he begins to outline a program calling for a
"socially-just, white, Gentile-controlled United States" and
"Gentile-controlled labor unions, free from Jewish Moscow-directed
domination," a counter-protester rushes on stage in an attempt to attack
Kuhn. He is beaten onstage by the Bund's paramilitaries, and as he is hauled
away by the police the footage is slowed to focus on him. The footage ends with
a rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner" by a German-accented woman,
before cutting to a title card noting that the rally occurred when Adolf Hitler
was overseeing construction of Nazi Germany's sixth concentration camp and
seven months before the German invasion of Poland and the beginning of World
War II.
The documentary was produced using footage of the rally
originally intended for newsreels that had never been widely issued due to its
controversial content. Many film exhibitors avoided footage of Hitler and
Nazism due to strongly negative reactions and even disorderly conduct from
audiences. News of the Day never released its footage, while RKO-Pathé News
quickly withdrew a newsreel incorporating the footage after deeming it
"too inflammatory." As a result, the rally was widely forgotten after
the end of World War II. After viewing the footage and expressing surprise at the
event's obscurity, Curry was inspired to produce the documentary by the rise of
the alt-right in the United States and the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in
Charlottesville, Virginia. The footage was retrieved and edited from the
National Archives, the Grinberg Film Library, Streamline Films, and the UCLA
Film and Television Archive.
HISTORY
DEPT.
When Nazis Filled Madison Square Garden
In 1939, a Bund rally in New York turned violent—and
ultimately doomed that era’s American Nazi movement. Could Charlottesville do
the same for a new generation of white nationalists?
By GORDON
F. SANDER August 23, 2017
Gordon F.
Sander is a journalist and historian, and the son of two German-Jewish emigres.
He is the author of The Frank Family That Survived and numerous other books.
Anxious to
find precedents for the frightening and ultimately deadly white nationalist,
“Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, some media outlets have likened the
images of the recent mayhem in Virginia to the chilling ones of the
German-American Bund rally that filled Madison Square Garden on February 20,
1939, with 22,000 hate-spewing American Nazis.
That rally,
the largest such conclave in U.S. history, shocked Americans at the time. They
had seen the press accounts and newsreel footage of the Nazis’ massive
Nuremburg rallies; they had read about Kristallnacht, the murderous, two-day
anti-Semitic pogrom of November 1938, which the Bund—the fast-growing, American
version of the German Nazi party, which trumpeted the Nazi philosophy, but with
a stars-and-stripes twist—had unabashedly endorsed.
But that
was in Europe. This was America. New York City. For Americans wondering whether
it could happen here, the Bund rally provided the awful answer.
“22,000
Nazis Hold Rally In Garden,” blared a front-page headline in the New York
Times. Inside, photos captured the restless throng of counterprotesters outside
the arena and the Bund’s smiling uniformed leaders. “We need be in no doubt as
to what the Bund would do to and in this country if it had the opportunity,”
the Times opined in an editorial later that week. “It would set up an American
Hitler.”
Some 78
years after the Bund rally at Madison Square Garden, a new generation of
hectoring troglodytes descended on Charlottesville, Virginia. In 1939, Brown
Shirts at Madison Square Garden felt emboldened to seize a Jewish protester who
had rushed the podium where the Bund’s German-born leader, Fritz Kuhn, was
speaking, and beat him near-senseless. In 2017, members of the so-called
alt-right held a torchlight rally in Charlottesville, and the next day, one of
those white nationalists went even further and allegedly used his car to mow
down anti-Nazi protesters, killing a young woman, Heather Heyer.
Those who
have studied the Bund’s rise and fall are alarmed at the historical parallels.
“When a large group of young men march through the streets of Charlottesville
chanting, ‘Jews will not replace us,’ it’s only steps removed from chanting
‘death to the Jews’ in New York or anywhere else in the 1930s,” says David
Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee. “When those young
men chant ‘blood and soil,’ it conveys the same meaning as those decades before
who chanted ‘blut and boden,’ referring to the Nazi glorification of and link
between race and land.”
“I don’t
see much of a difference, quite frankly, between the Bund and these groups, in
their public presence,” says Arnie Bernstein, the author of Swastika Nation, a
history of the German American Bund. “The Bund had its storefronts in New York,
Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles—today’s groups are also hanging out in the
public space, but in this case, they’re on the internet and anyone can access
their ‘storefronts,’ or websites, and their philosophy, if you can call it
that, is essentially the same.”
For the
Bund, the unnerving 1939 Madison Square Garden rally was at once the
organization’s high point and—as a result of the shock and revulsion it
caused—its death knell. It’s too soon to know exactly what effect
Charlottesville—which was smaller, but more violent than the Bund’s 1939
demonstration—will have on white nationalists or how the American public, which
is still processing the horrific event, will ultimately respond to it. Will
Charlottesville be the beginning of the end of this reborn generation of
American Nazis? To foretell where we could be headed, you need to know how the
Bund’s version of it all played out 78 years ago—and how this time is
different.
***
The rise
and fall of the German-American Bund in the late 1930s is essentially the story
of the man behind it: Fritz Julius Kuhn.
A
German-born veteran of the Bavarian infantry during World War I, Kuhn was an
early devotee of Adolf Hitler who emigrated to the United States for economic
reasons in 1928 and got a job as a factory worker for Ford. After a few years
in the U.S., Kuhn began his political career by becoming an officer with the
Friends of New Germany, a Chicago-based, nationwide pro-Nazi group founded in
1933 with the explicit blessing of German deputy führer Rudolf Hess.
At the time,
imitation Nazi parties were sprouting up throughout the world, and, at least
initially, Hess and Hitler hoped to use them to incorporate new areas,
particularly in Europe, into the Greater Reich. But soon, FONG’s low-grade
thuggery—coercing American German-language newspapers into running
Nazi-sympathetic articles, infiltrating patriotic German-American
organizations, and the like—became a nuisance to Berlin, which was still trying
to maintain good relations with Washington. In 1935, Hess ordered all German
citizens to resign from FONG, and he recalled its leaders to Germany,
effectively putting the kibosh to it.
Kuhn, who
had just become a U.S. citizen, saw this as his chance to create a more
Americanized version of FONG, and he seized it. With his new German-American
Bund, Kuhn had a vision of a homegrown Nazi Party that was more than simply a
political group, but a way of life—a “Swastika Nation,” as Bernstein calls it.
Although
Kuhn dressed his vision in American phraseology and icons—he approvingly called
George Washington “the first American fascist”—the Bund was, in fact, a clone
of its Teutonic forebear, transposed to U.S. soil. In deference to his Berlin
Kamerad, Kuhn gave himself the title of Bundesführer, the national leader. Just
as Hitler had his own elite guard, the SS, Kuhn had his, the Ordnungsdienst or
OD, who were charged with both protecting him and keeping order at Bund events.
Although the OD were forbidden to carry firearms, they did carry blackjacks and
truncheons, which they had no compunctions about using on non-fascist heads, as
they did at an April 1938 Bund meeting in the Yorkville neighborhood of
Manhattan, when seven protesters were injured by members of the OD.
Like the
German Nazi Party, the Bund was divided into different districts for the
eastern, western and midwestern sections of the country. The Bund also had its
own propaganda branch, which published a newspaper as well as the copies of
Mein Kampf, Hitler’s testament, which all Bund members were required to buy.
Kuhn also oversaw the establishment of a score of gated training and summer
camps with Teutonic-sounding names like Camp Siegfried and Camp Nordland in
rural areas around the northeast, where his card-carrying volk could be
indoctrinated in the American Nazi way, while their dutiful fraulein polished
their German cooking skills and their brassard-wearing kinder could engage in
singalongs while practicing their fraternal Seig Heils. Every so often, Kuhn
would pull up in his motorcade, bless the proceedings and deliver himself of a
sulfurous Hitler-style harangue—in English.
In effect,
the Bund was its own ethnostate, as today’s neo-Nazis would call it. And it
worked: By 1938, two years after its “rebirth,” the group had become a
political force to be reckoned with. Its meetings each drew up to several
thousand visitors, and its activities were closely followed by the FBI. With
the anti-Semitic radio broadcaster the Rev. Charles Coughlin having faded from
the national scene following FDR’s landslide second-term win, Kuhn was now the
country’s most vocal and best-known ultra-right leader and anti-Semite.
It was just
as the führer would have wished. Except that the führer didn’t wish.
One year
ahead of the outbreak of World War II, Berlin still hoped for good relations
with Washington. The Reich refused to give Kuhn’s organization either financial
or verbal support, lest it further alienate the Roosevelt administration, which
had already made clear its extreme distaste for the Nazi ideology. Berlin went
so far as to forbid German nationals in the United States from joining the
German American Bund.
The
führer’s brush-off didn’t deter Kuhn and his volk, who continued to sing the
Reich’s praises.
Nor did
they mind the Kristallnacht of November 1938, the nationwide German pogrom set
off by the assassination of a German diplomat by a Jew in Paris, which led to
nearly 100 deaths, scores more injuries and the decimation of what remained of
German-Jewish life. Comparing the assassination to the attacks on Bund meetings
by anti-Nazis—the spiritual predecessors of today’s so-called antifa—its
propagandists claimed the Kristallnacht massacre was a justifiable act of
retribution. The Bund’s endorsement of the horrific event increased the
American public’s hostility toward it, while causing the most prestigious
German-American organization, the Steuben Society, to repudiate it.
That didn’t
discourage Kuhn either. Now, he decided, as the sea of opprobrium rose around
him, was the moment to step into the spotlight and show just how strong the
Bund was.
That’s what
the Madison Square Garden rally was about. On the surface, the conclave, billed
as a “Mass Demonstration for True Americanism,” was supposed to honor George
Washington on the occasion of his 207th birthday. But the unprecedented event
was really intended to be the German-American Bund’s apotheosis, proof positive
to America and the world—as well as Berlin—that the American Nazis were here to
stay. “The rally was to be Kuhn’s shining moment, an elaborate pageant and
vivid showcase of all he had built in three years,” Bernstein wrote in his 2013
book. “Kuhn’s dream of a Swastika Nation would be on display for the whole
world, right in the heart of what the Berlin press called the ‘Semitized
metropolis of New York.’”
Although
the mass demonstration was intended for Bund members, walk-ins from sympathetic
Nazi-minded American citizens also were welcome. Kuhn had big dreams: One of
the posters that adorned the hall optimistically declared, “ONE MILLION BUND
MEMBERS BY 1940.”
Skeptics
wondered whether the bundesführer would be able to fill the massive arena. Any
doubts on that score were quickly allayed, as the 20,000 Nazi faithful who had
driven or flown in from every corner of Swastika Nation filed into the great
hall. Meanwhile, an even larger crowd of counterdemonstrators, eventually
estimated at close to 100,000, filled the surrounding midtown Manhattan
streets.
New York
City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and Police Commissioner Lewis Valentine were
prepared for both the Nazis and their adversaries, wrapping the Garden with a
security cordon of 1,700 policemen—the largest police presence in the city’s
history—including a large contingent of mounted officers to keep the two sides
apart. LaGuardia, an Episcopalian whose mother was a Jew, loathed the Bund, but
he was determined to see to it that the Bundists’ right to freedom of speech
would be respected. Americans could judge the poisonous result for themselves.
Inside the
Garden, things went pretty much according to Kuhn’s faux-Nuremberg script. As
drums rolled, an honor guard of young American Nazis marched in bearing the
flags of the U.S. and the Bund, as well as the two fascist powers, Nazi Germany
and Italy. One by one, the various officers of the Bund stepped forth to extol
America (or their version of it) and condemn the “racial amalgamation” that had
putatively taken place since the good old unmongrelized days of George
Washington. Anti-Semitism, naturally, was a major theme of the venomous
rhetoric that issued forth as the newsreel cameras rolled.
Finally, after
being introduced as “the man we love for the enemies he has made,” the
jackbooted bundesführer himself stepped up to the microphone to deliver one of
his trademark jeremiads, scoring the “slimy conspirators who would change this
glorious republic into the inferno of a Bolshevik Paradise” and “the grip of
the palsied hand of Communism in our schools, our universities, our very
homes.” When he paused, he would be greeted with shouts of “Free America!”—the
new Bund greeting that had replaced "Seig Heil!" but with the same
intonation and raised arm salute.
According
to Kuhn, both the federal government and New York City government were Jewish
agents. Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose antipathy for Nazism was a matter of
record—“Nazism is a cancer,” he said—was actually “Frank D. Rosenfeld.”
"Free America!" District Attorney Thomas Dewey was “Thomas Jewey.”
"Free America!" Mayor LaGuardia was “Fiorello Lumpen LaGuardia.”
"Free America!" And so on.
Of course,
Kuhn’s followers had heard it all before. Now it was time for the world to
listen. The people would rise up, and as Kuhn’s role model, Joseph Goebbels,
the Third Reich’s minister of propaganda put it, the storm would break loose.
The storm
was certainly rising, both inside and outside the Garden.
The only
alteration to the script took place when, halfway through Kuhn’s speech, a
young Jewish counterprotester by the name of Isadore Greenbaum decided that he
couldn’t bear Kuhn’s diatribe anymore and spontaneously rushed the podium and
attempted to tackle him.
He almost
made it. On the newsreel footage of the rally shown in movie theaters
throughout the country the following weekend, viewers could see Kuhn’s shocked
visage as the Jewish kamikaze shakes the podium. Next, they saw the hapless
Greenbaum set upon by a gaggle of furious OD men, who covered him with blows
before he was finally rescued by a squadron of New York policemen. It was all
over in a moment—but it was a moment that horrified America: a bunch of Nazis
beating up a Jew in the middle of Madison Square Garden.
The
bundesführer took the interruption in stride. Kuhn proceeded with his speech.
And then it
was over, and the thousands of Nazi faithful dutifully exited the arena. As far
as the Bund was concerned, the rally was a success—a shining moment for
America’s most prominent fascist. But the rally further angered Berlin, which
was then preparing to go to war with the Allies—a war Germany still desperately
hoped the U.S. would steer clear of.
LaGuardia
was proud of the way his city and his police force had handled the Bund’s
rally. At the same time, the orgy of hatred at the Garden sealed his
determination, along with that of Thomas Dewey, to take down Kuhn, and the Bund
along with him, by investigating his suspicious finances (the married Kuhn
liked to party and kept a number of mistresses, evidently, at the Bund’s
expense).
A
subsequent inquiry determined that the free-spending Kuhn had embezzled $14,000
from the organization. The Bund did not wish to have Kuhn prosecuted, because
of Führerprinzip, the principle that the leader had absolute power.
Nevertheless, with the implicit blessing of the White House, Dewey decided to
go ahead and prosecute.
On December
5, 1939, Kuhn was sentenced to two-and-a-half to five years in jail for tax evasion.
On December 11, 1941, while he was locked away in Sing Sing prison, Germany
declared war on the U.S. Kuhn’s support for a government now actively hostile
to America gave the federal government the pretext to revoke his citizenship,
which it did on June 1, 1943. Upon Kuhn’s release from prison three weeks
later, he was immediately re-arrested as a dangerous enemy agent. While Kuhn
was in U.S. custody in Texas, Nazi Germany was destroyed, its quest for global
domination permanently halted, and Hitler was dead. Four months after V-E Day,
the U.S. deported Kuhn to war-ravaged West Germany. His dreams of a Swastika
Nation had been smashed to pieces. He died in Munich in 1951, a broken man, in
exile from the country he had sought to “liberate.”
***
To be sure,
historical comparisons are, to an extent, folly. For all the similarities
between the Bund’s 1939 rally and the white nationalists' Charlottesville
demonstration, there are substantial differences.
Fortunately,
no one with Fritz Kuhn’s particular demagogic skill set has emerged to lead his
neo-Nazi descendants, though there are those attempting to play the part. “I am
worried that a Kuhn figure could marshal the disparate alt-right groups,” says
Arnie Bernstein, “be it a Richard Spencer, David Duke or someone of that ilk.”
Another
difference is while the Bund’s rally and the violence that spilled from it was
denounced forcefully by America’s top political leaders, President Donald
Trump’s half-hearted condemnation and shocking defense of the Charlottesville
mob as including “very fine people” has no antecedent, at least in modern
American history. “We have a president blowing dog whistles loud and clear,”
says Bernstein. “You never saw that with FDR.”
The Bund’s
rally was at once the group’s apex and its death rattle. But it’s only in
retrospect that one can make such pronouncements; nobody yet knows exactly what
Charlottesville—and Trump’s response to it—will mean for the alt-right. “The
striking ambivalence coming out of the White House” could help to galvanize
Nazi sympathizers, says David Harris of the American Jewish Committee.
But much as
the Bund-generated images of Nazi barbarism and violence drove everyday
Americans from apathy 78 years ago, “Charlottesville will also mobilize
anti-Nazis to stand up and be counted,” Harris says. Much as the Madison Square
Garden rally did on the eve of World War II, says Harris, “I choose to believe
the net effect will be to marginalize the ‘blut and boden’ fan base.
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