With the rise of the MAGA movement, authors, journalists, and Hollywood are reexamining the roots of totalitarian-leaning causes, parties, and leaders. Philip Roth’s prescient 2005 novel The Plot Against America, inspired by the 1930s and early 1940s “America First” isolationists, may have preceded the rise of Donald Trump, but the miniseries adaptation appeared on HBO during 2020’s presidential race. Books such as Timothy Snyder’s 2017 On Tyranny and Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s 2020 Strongmen; Mussolini to the Present analyze the threat of despotism at home and abroad. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow sheds light on this Hitlerian strain in U.S. politics in her 2022 podcast Ultra and 2023 book Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism.
Now, PBS’s award-winning “American Experience” history series kicks off its winter-spring 2024 season with two-time Emmy nominee Peter Yost and Edna Alburquerque’s Nazi Town, USA. The documentary exposes this country’s fascistic fringe by unearthing the pre-World War II, pro-Nazi organization the German American Bund. The Bund, founded in 1936, was, as historian William Hitchcock notes in the film, “the largest fascist group in the United States” in the 1930s.
The feature’s title refers to an actual pro-Nazi hamlet at Yaphank in Suffolk County, Long Island, located only about sixty miles east of New York City, which then had the largest Jewish population of any city in the United States. According to the documentary, the town was near Camp Siegfried—one of a national network of pro-Third Reich summer camps operated by the Bund, which, the film contends, were “indoctrinating centers . . . for protecting the purity and health of your superior breed.”
National Archives
Uniformed members of the German American Bund at Camp Siegfried in Yaphank, Long Island, New York.
Through a front called the German American Settlement League, the Bund purchased land nearby at Yaphank, naming this community “German Gardens.” It was “designed around the idea of creating an idealized Nazi town,” says Arnie Bernstein, one of the film’s onscreen commentators and author of 2013’s Swastika Nation: Fritz Kuhn and the Rise and Fall of the German-American Bund.
German Gardens practiced restrictive zoning for occupants—Jewish residents were strictly verboten. (Until 2017, covenants limited residency to homeowners of German ancestry only.) The town’s streets were named after prominent Nazis, such as Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering. But the film’s section on German Gardens is just a brief sequence in Nazi Town, USA, which is really a far broader critical chronicle of the Bund, its leader, and its reach in the 1930s and early 1940s.
Intercut with archival black and white footage of mass protests, historian Beverly Gage explains, “In the 1930s lots of Americans thought the whole social system was collapsing. Capitalism, democracy, they were done for, and something else would have to come along to take its place.” For those on the left, that “something” would be socialism; for reformers backing the Roosevelt Administration, it would be the New Deal. “And a lot of people thought that was going to be fascism,” Gage points out.
In the 1930s, millions of Americans were of German and Italian heritage, and some fell under the sway of “the fatherland’s” National Socialist (Nazi) spell or Mussolini’s fascist promise of a new Roman Empire. Historian Bradley Hart points out: “Fascist ideology tapped into some deep, dark historical realities in America. So, the United States was fertile ground for the German American Bund to emerge.”
Belying the American democratic mythos of equality and liberty, as black and white images stress segregation with signs for “colored” waiting rooms or entrances, Gage recalls America’s history of legal racial segregation and antisemitism: “In the 1920s, one of the largest organizations in the United States was the Ku Klux Klan, which was . . . anti-Black, anti-Jewish, and anti-immigrant.” Hitchcock adds: “In 1924, five million people were in the Ku Klux Klan, including a couple dozen Senators and Congressmen.”
So, while Americans may flatter themselves by believing fascism is something exported stateside from Europe, Nazi Town, USA reminds us of the grim legacy of homegrown white supremacy that already existed in a land where slavery first took root in 1619—three-plus centuries before Benito Mussolini’s blackshirts marched on Rome or Hitler’s brownshirts goose stepped across Germany and central Europe.
Fascism requires a charismatic leader, and the Bund had Fritz Julius Kuhn, who stepped into the void of Depression-era America to spew a star-spangled version of the fascist gospel. A naturalized U.S. citizen, Kuhn emigrated from Weimar Germany in 1928, five years before Hitler rose to power. Through a series of deft and Machiavellian maneuvers, Kuhn consolidated his hegemony over the Bund, which emulated the Nazis and curried favor with the Third Reich.
While Americans may flatter themselves by believing fascism is something exported stateside from Europe, Nazi Town, USA reminds us of the grim legacy of homegrown white supremacy.
The high point of Kuhn’s leadership and the Bund’s public profile arguably took place on February 2, 1939, when about 22,000 Bund members filled Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden. During the mass rally, speakers held forth from a stage with a decidedly “patriotic” backdrop—a gigantic thirty-foot portrait of George Washington and American flags.
The rally drew substantial resistance against the Bundists, who clashed with thousands of counter-demonstrators reportedly organized by the Socialist Workers Party in the streets outside of the Garden. During Kuhn’s antisemitic speech, Isadore Greenbaum rushed the stage, disrupting the diatribe, as newsreel footage documents. Greenbaum—a proletarian Jewish Brooklynite, who today would perhaps be dubbed “antifa”—was severely beaten by the Bund’s self-styled “stormtroopers.”
Another opponent of the Bund, heroic journalist Dorothy Thompson—to whom Nazi Town, USA pays homage as the first American journalist expelled from Germany after the Nazi takeover—was in Madison Square Garden’s press section covering the rally for the New York Evening Journal. Thompson was ejected from the Garden for laughing at the Bundists’ anti-Jewish onstage ravings. Undercover reporter John Metcalfe infiltrated the Bund and later exposed them in a scathing Chicago Daily Times series.
Government officials also took note of the Bund and its activities including Texas Congressmember Martin Dies, who chaired what came to be known as the House Committee on Un-American Activities (known as “HUAC”), which investigated the Bund. The FBI investigated them as well, although Nazi Town, USA contends that the Bureau’s director, J. Edgar Hoover, was soft on the Bund because they shared his rabid anti-communism. (In the clip used in the documentary, Hoover is heard insisting: “The Communist Party of the United States is not a political party. It is a . . . malignant, evil way of life,” which is similar to a speech he made before HUAC in March 1947 as the Hollywood Blacklist was brewing.)
It was, however, New York’s liberal Republican Mayor Fiorello La Guardia who led to Kuhn’s downfall. In 1939, La Guardia, who had been the American Labor Party’s nominee for mayor in 1937, ordered a probe of the Bund’s taxes, and District Attorney Thomas Dewey indicted Kuhn on embezzlement charges.
By depicting the cultish Bund’s appeal for racial purity and a Christian Nationalist America, and its penchant for violence and strongman rule, Nazi Town, USA offers historical analogs to today’s domestic MAGA menace.
Nazi Town, USA premieres January 23, 2024, on PBS and streams on PBS.org and the PBS video app.