Speaking of Interesting !! 😳
German American Bund: the 1939 Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden
It may sound like I’m being a little unfair to someone who is broadly speaking on the right side of history, and you might not be far off the mark. One need only take a look at both sides of the Atlantic and see that in this moment, people really don’t have much of a problem with the rise of fascism. While it’s a low bar to clear, speaking out against the evils being committed by governments against their people is one that a worrying number of people are failing to do.
Yet the people handwringing about this “not being the country they recognise” are naive at best and ignorant at worst. Especially in America, this is nothing new, and I’m not just talking about the ‘Make America Great Again’ slogan being a repurposed Ronald Reagan catchphrase.
No, America as it currently is, with a dictator in the White House and a Gestapo on the streets murdering with impunity as a way of keeping the public too terrified to act against them, is one that a much larger contingent of Americans have always wanted.
This goes back a lot further than the 1980s, as well, and back to a time when most Americans considered their country to have been at its peak. After all, the tide of the Second World War was turned by the USA joining the war (fucking eventually) and fighting for freedom against tyranny, right? We’d all be speaking German if it wasn’t for Uncle Sam socking Hitler right in his stupid fucking moustache, right? Everyone agreed that what was happening in Europe was a bad thing…right?
Nope, and there were a lot more of these fascists around than you’d think.
( Dangerous Minds / U.S. Military – Department of Defense)
So, who organised the Nazi rally in New York City?
The truth is that there was a small, yet incredibly vocal minority of people who weren’t just opposed to joining the Second World War because of an aversion to joining foreign wars, but because they believed in what Hitler was doing.
The most vocal group with these beliefs were the German American Bund, an organisation dedicated to spreading the word of Nazism in the United States. They spent years trying to get their tendrils into all facets of German-American society.
They strong-armed German-American news outlets into publishing pro-Hitler news articles. They pressured elected representatives against the 1933 anti-German boycott. After electing the German-born American Fritz Julius Kuhn as their leader, they began expanding their membership until the peak of their powers came in 1939, when they were able to fill Madison Square Garden with 20,000 people for their “Pro-America Rally”. A vehemently antisemitic rally that saw a stage set consisting of an enormous portrait of George Washington flanked by two swastikas.
The German American Bund fell apart quickly after that. It was disbanded officially when the US joined the war, but years before that, Kuhn was found to be embezzling funds from the organisation for himself. Which goes to show just how much the whole crusade really meant to him. However, just because that specific organisation fell apart and the US fought against the Nazis in World War II doesn’t mean that one terrifying fact isn’t true today.
They would love the direction their country is going in today.
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