Before the U.S. entered World War II, the German American Bund was the organizational home of a small community of Nazi sympathizers. A good number of them were in Wisconsin, where the Bund held meetings in Milwaukee and established a camp near Grafton.
Its leader was Fritz Kun, subject of the new book, “Swastika Nation: Fritz Kuhn and the Rise and Fall of the German American Bund.”
The book’s author, Arnie Bernstein of Skokie, Ill., came to Milwaukee on Jan. 14 to speak and sign books at the Boswell Book Company, under the joint sponsorship of the store, the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center, the Nathan & Esther Pelz Holocaust Education Resource Center of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Sam and Helen Stahn Center for Jewish Studies.
The presentiaton took the form of a conversation between the author and his publisher, Sharon Woodhouse. About 50 people attended.
According to Bernstein, Kuhn served in World War I and joined the Freikorps, a paramilitary organization of disaffected soldiers of the losing German army. A self-important adulterer and petty thief who embarrassed Hitler, Kuhn claimed to have participated in the Munich Putsch of 1923.
Kuhn “eventually immigrated to the United States, but ‘immigrated’ is a kind word for it,” Bernstein said. “He was basically run from Germany because he was caught stealing, first from his fellow students at the University of Munich and then from his employer, a Jewish manufacturer who took pity on him and raised money to get him to Mexico.”
Kuhn then moved to Detroit, worked for Henry Ford and joined the Friends of New Germany. He became head of the German American Bund in 1936.
At the organization’s height, it held a rally on Washington’s Birthday in 1939 in Madison Square Garden in New York City, attended by 20,000 people. “But outside there were 100,000 people waiting to kill them,” Bernstein said.
“Though [the Bund] was small, it was noisy and they made a certain kind of impact,” Bernstein said. “People were concerned about them.”
(The Bund’s Wisconsin presence was one impetus for the formation in 1938 of the Milwaukee Jewish Council, the ancestor of today’s Jewish Community Relations Council of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation.)
As for Kuhn, he was “the most unlikely character you can imagine: heavyset, thick glasses, heavy jowls, thick German accent, sort of a popinjay, and an incredible womanizer,” Bernstein said.
Nevertheless, “For all his ugliness, he’s really a fascinating character and fun to write about,” Bernstein said. “You couldn’t make him up. He was a joke, but many people were afraid of him.”
Ultimately, Kuhn was arrested for forgery and embezzlement. He was found guilty, imprisoned and later deported to Germany.
Bernstein recounted laughing out loud in the New York Public Library as he read transcripts of the trial and Walter Winchell’s coverage, which “made vicious fun of him.”
He also describedthe widespread opposition to Kuhn’s activities and the “wild and wonderful confederation” of people who sought to quash him.
They included the Wisconsin Federation of German-American Societies, Rabbi Stephen Wise, New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, New York District Attorney Thomas Dewey, the House Un-American Activities Committee and several Hollywood personalities.
Enthusiastic assistance also came from assorted Jewish mobsters: Meyer Lansky, “Bugsy” Siegel, “Mickey” Cohen, Abner Zwillman and Jacob Rubenstein, a minor crook from Chicago who eventually moved to Dallas and changed his name to Jack Ruby.
Bernstein called them “the best cast of characters I ever had as a writer.”
Milwaukeean Susan Ellman, MLIS, has taught history and English composition at the high school level and is a freelance writer at work on a historical novel.
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