Why America was an easy mark for Nazi ideas
What does American fascism look like? This weekend, it took the form of a group of men in white balaclavas, members of the white nationalist group Patriot Front, marching on the World Trade Center in Manhattan and struggling to pass the turnstiles. But it wasn’t always quite so inept.
Peter Yost’s PBS documentary Nazi Town, USA, airing Jan. 23, draws our attention to a period in the 1930s when American citizens, rocked by the Depression and primed by decades of racist policy and eugenic ideas, cozied up to fifth columns like the German American Bund. It starts with sensational images from Bund summer camps — located throughout the country — where families gathered to picnic, practice archery and raise the American flag alongside the banner of Nazi Germany.
Using archival footage and an array of talking heads, Yost guides us through the stages of the Nazi seduction of America from the Third Reich-developed Friends of New Germany through to Fritz Kuhn’s Bund, whose major innovation was convincing Americans that heiling Hitler and George Washington in the same breath was a natural synthesis.
“We are decidedly not preaching un-Americanism or anything basically new,” Kuhn, a German immigrant who claimed to have been involved in Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch, is heard saying in one speech. “We have an Asiatic exclusion act, Jim Crow laws and a complicated system of immigration quotas, differentiating even between the various white people, it has then always been very much American.”
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