April 20, 1938: The Battle of Yorkville Casino

Nazis after the battle

April 20, 1938: It was organized crime vs. Nazis. No matter who the other team is, always root against the Nazis.

In his alternate history novel The Plot Against America, novelist Philip Roth, a native of Newark, New Jersey, wrote of Jewish gangsters resisting Nazi influence. But it was based on reality. Abner "Longy" Zwillman, the most powerful gangster in New Jersey at the time, and professional boxer Nat Arno organized the New Jersey Minutemen, who coordinated with the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League, to find out when the German-American Bund, and other pro-Nazi groups in America, would organize, and confront them. Sometimes, violence erupted. Every time it did, the Nazis lost.

Longy Zwillman

Eventually, Zwillman began working with New York City's top Jewish gangster, Meyer Lansky; a Jewish Congressman and former Judge, Nathan Perlman; and America's leading rabbi, Stephen Wise. Lansky said, "The main point was to teach them that Jews couldn't be kicked around." Lansky talked to Perlman, and asked, "You got some boys who might want to punch a Nazi?"

"I do, Judge," the mobster answered. "Respectfully, you understand we can do better than punch? I know just the crew, in Brownsville. The boys in the press call them Murder, Inc." But Perlman knew he couldn't go too far: "I want you to do anything but kill them." Lucky Luciano, Lansky's childhood friend who ran American crime's "Commission," offered help, but Lansky told him it was a Jewish problem, and it would have a Jewish solution.

The Yorkville section of the Upper East Side of Manhattan had long been home to German immigrants and their children, but some of them were Jewish. The Bund recruited heavily there, and on April 20, 1938, they were ready to march down East 86th Street, nicknamed Sauerkraut Boulevard, from Carl Schurz Park to the Yorkville Casino, for a birthday party for German Chancellor Adolf Hitler.

There were 3,000 of them. They were faced by 60 Jewish-American World War I vets fought the 1,000-strong German American Bund at a birthday party for Hitler. As historian Michael Benson wrote, "Men who knew how to march were fighting men who knew how to hurt."

The “Battle of Yorkville Casino” had the desired effect:. When the next Bund meeting was scheduled for White Plains, on October 16, only about 250 of an expected 1,000 Nazis showed up, many still bearing injuries from the Yorkville fight. A strong police presence kept Lansky’s crew from getting into the arena, but he bribed two local Jewish teenagers, for $1 each, to smuggle corked, glass bottles into the event.

The following year, the Nazis had a rally at Madison Square Garden, and the Minutemen and Murder, Inc. did not disrupt it. By the end of the year, Britain and France were at war with Nazi Germany, Fritz Kuhn was a convicted criminal, and support for the Bund had collapsed completely.

The Yorkville Casino was at 210 East 86th Street. With some appropriateness, medical offices are on the site today.

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April 20, 1938 was a Wednesday. Football was out of season. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. The NHL season had ended 8 days earlier, when the Chicago Black Hawks won the Stanley Cup. These baseball games were played:

* The New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox had a day off. They had played 3 games in the previous 2 days, and played again the next day, all at Fenway Park in Boston.

* The New York Giants lost to the Boston Bees, 6-4 at the Polo Grounds. The Bees -- as the Braves were known from 1936 to 1940 -- scored 4 runs in the top of the 8th inning, on a grand slam by Gene Moore. Mel Ott went 0-for-3 with a walk.

* The Brooklyn Dodgers lost to the Philadelphia Phillies, 6-5 at Baker Bowl in Philadelphia.

* The Washington Senators beat the Philadelphia Athletics, 3-0 at Griffith Stadium in Washington. Dutch Leonard pitched a 7-hit shutout.

* The Cleveland Indians beat the St. Louis Browns, 9-0 at League Park in Cleveland. Bob Feller allowed only 1 hit, a single to Billy Sullivan in the 6th inning. He did, however, walk 6 batters.

* The Chicago Cubs beat the Cincinnati Reds, 10-4 at Crosley Field in Cincinnati.

* The Chicago White Sox beat the Detroit Tigers, 5-4 at Comiskey Park in Chicago. Hank Greenberg went 0-for-3, but did draw 2 walks.

* The Pittsburgh Pirates beat the St. Louis Cardinals, 9-4 at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis. Paul Waner went 1-for-4, and his brother Lloyd Waner went 3-for-6.

February 20, 1939: The Nazis at Madison Square Garden

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.