From
Reading Room/7:
New
York and the Nazis
—Mike Wallace
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A Fifth Column?
Anschluss—Hitler’s annexation of Austria in March 1938—played
well in German Gotham. The Ridders’ Staats-Zeitung applauded it, convinced
that the peoples of both countries favored the merger. A Ridgewood newspaper
reported that the community “glowed with pride at the annexation of Austria.” The
Bund was of course ecstatic and, in April, 3,500 supporters packed the Yorkville
Casino to hail the seizure as a “birthday gift by Chancellor Hitler [it
was his 49th] to Greater Germany.”
Suddenly, New York Nazism took on a whole new complexion.
Fascism in Europe had now stormed across an established frontier and its triumph
had been facilitated by complaisant compatriots inside the conquered country.
Could that happen here? Kuhn’s proclamation that summer, before 50,000 cheering Bundists,
that Camp Siegfried was “part of Germany in America,” seemed freshly
menacing.
The term “Fifth Column” came into new currency, having languished
since its coinage in 1936, during the Spanish Civil War, when a Franco general
had boasted that not only were four of his columns advancing on Madrid, the
besieged capital of Republican Loyalists, but a Fifth Column of fascists, inside
the city itself, stood ready to assail the defenders from behind their own
lines.
Now, in 1938, the Nazis were once again relying on behind-the-lines
ethnic allies, using Sudeten Germans to make impossible demands on Czechoslovakia’s
government, giving Hitler an excuse to intervene on behalf of an “oppressed
minority.” On September 29,1938, at Munich, England and France acquiesced
in another annexation. On October 1, German troops marched across the frontier.
And on October 2, in New York, Fritz Kuhn sponsored a series of extravagant
Bund rallies around the metropolitan area—at Prospect Hall in Brooklyn,
at Turnhallen in Astoria and Yorkville, at Camp Nordland in Andover, New Jersey—at
which thousands cheered Hitler for “liberating the Sudetens from a Bolshevist-controlled
Czechoslovakia.”
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