George does not look happy.
February 20, 1939: Madison Square Garden hosts a Nazi rally. No, this is not an "alternate history" story, although footage of it would be used for a 2004 episode of Star Trek: Enterprise that focused on aliens who traveled to Earth's past for their own benefit. This was real.
It had been 6 months since members of the German-American Bund, the country's leading pro-Nazi organization, got their heads handed to them by Jewish gangsters in what became known as the Battle of Yorkville Casino.
But it had also been 11 months since Adolf Hitler's Anschluss with Austria, 5 months since the Munich Pact gave the Nazis the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia, and it looked like the Fascists were about to win in Spain (which they did, 6 weeks later), after Benito Mussolini's Fascists had already taken Libya, Ethiopia and Somalia in Africa.
The Bund, led by Bundesfuhrer Fritz Kuhn, were feeling ready to try again, and in a better-controlled environment. They rented Madison Square Garden, whose owners didn't care where money came from as long as they got it.
They arranged protection from the New York Police Department, which, with its heavy Irish and therefore Roman Catholic preponderance, was as anti-Communist as they were -- and, if not as anti-Semitic as they were, then, at least willing to lean in that direction. Murder, Incorporated and the New Jersey Minutemen were not going to get into The Garden. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia didn't like it, but he also knew that having the big police presence would likely prevent a riot, so he allowed it.
A state was set up with lots of American and Nazi flags, and a giant portrait of George Washington, Der Vater des Vaterland. No sign of Abraham Lincoln, "the Great Emancipator." No, can't have the man who said, "Government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the Earth" on display.
The idea was to show that Nazis and Fascism were compatible with Americanism. At 8:00 PM sharp, Margarete Rittershaush sang "The Star-Spangled Banner." The 1st speaker was James Wheeler-Hill, the National Secretary of the Bund, who had the gall to say, "If George Washington were alive today, he would be friends with Adolf Hitler."
Next was George Froboese of the Midwestern Gau, blaming "Jewish world domination" for "the class warfare felt across the country. His West Coast counterpart, Hermann Schwinn, who blamed Jewish control of Hollywood, blaming them for the belief that "the menace of Anti-National, God-Hating Jewish Bolshevism is deliberately minimized." Apparently, he hadn't noticed that Jewish studio heads like Louis B. Mayer and Harry Cohn had routinely cave into the the Legion of Decency, a Catholic organization which imposed its own sense of morality on the industry through the Hays Code.
Kuhn was the headliner and the closer. He wasn't the first right-winger to suggest that President Franklin D. Roosevelt was Jewish, turning the Dutch name "Roosevelt," meaning "rose-field" into "Rosenfeld." But few public figures made a big deal of the fact that La Guardia, Italian on his father's side, was Jewish on his mother's side, and Kuhn called the man whose acquiescence made the night possible "Fiorello Jew Lumpen La Guardia."
In in the middle of Kuhn's speech, a man who was dressed in blue broke through the lines of the Bund's paramilitary, the Ordnungsdienst (OD), who were providing protection, and ran at him, shouting, "Down with Hitler!" The OD subdued him, in what a newspaper accounted called an "uncanny replication of Nazi thuggery" as "a pack of uniformed men blasted away with fists and boots on a lone Jewish victim." He was pulled away by police, and identified as Isadore Greenbaum, a 26-year-old plumbing assistant.
Kuhn closed by advocating the establishment of an America which would be ruled by White Gentiles, free from a Jewish Hollywood and news: "The Bund is open to you, provided you are sincere, of good character, of White Gentile Stock, and an American Citizen imbued with patriotic zeal. Therefore: Join!" The sellout crowd of 20,000 chanted "Free America! Free America! Free America!"
At 11:15, it was over. Members of the Bund buttoned up their overcoats, conveniently hiding their uniforms, and they were escorted through police lines amid the 100,000 of protesters -- outnumbering the crowd inside, 5 to 1 -- who could only get near The Garden. By midnight, everyone, including the protesters, had gone home.
The rally was the Bund's high point. But it was also their last gasp. Apparently having had it with Jews being blamed for things, the Hollywood studio Warner Brothers released the film Confessions of a Nazi Spy on May 6. It was produced by Jack Warner and Hal B. Wallis (both sons of Jewish immigrants from Poland), directed by Anatole Litvak (born in Ukraine, but whose very surname meant a Jew from Lithuania), and starring Edward G. Robinson (born Emmanuel Goldenberg, a son of Jewish immigrants from Romania), Francis Lederer (a Jewish immigrant from Hungary), Paul Lukas (same), and George Sanders (who lived most of his life in Britain, but born in Russia and capable of any European accent, including a Nazi German one).
The Bund also came under investigation. After its financial records were seized in a raid on the group's headquarters in the heavily German Yorkville neighborhood of Manhattan's Upper East Side, authorities discovered that $14,000 (about $278,000 in 2022) which were raised by the Bund during the rally were unaccounted for, Kuhn had spent them on his mistress and various personal expenses. Kuhn was convicted of embezzlement in 1939, and deported back to his native Munich in 1945. He served further prison time in post-war Germany before dying in 1951.
The aforementioned George Frobese was running the Bund when America entered World War II, and he received a subpoena from a federal grand jury. On June 16, 1942, he threw himself under a train in his native Milwaukee, killing himself rather than answer the subpoena.
And what became of Isadore Greenbaum? The veteran of the U.S. Navy -- after World War I, and World War II hadn't happened yet -- was prosecuted for his actions that night. He was sentenced to serve 10 days in jail, but was released after he paid a $25 fine -- about $526 in 1939 money.
After World War II, he, his wife, and his son moved to the Los Angeles suburb of Newport Beach, California, where he became a fisherman. Interviewed in 1989, for the 50th Anniversary of the event, he said, "I went down to the Garden without any intention of interrupting. But, being that they talked so much against my religion, and there was so much persecution, I lost my head, and I felt it was my duty to talk." He lived until 1997.
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February 20, 1939 was a Monday. Baseball and football were out of season. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. And no games were scheduled for the NHL. So there were no scores on this historic day.
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