Anxious to find precedents for the frightening and ultimately deadly white nationalist, “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, some media outlets have likened the images of the recent mayhem in Virginia to the chilling ones of the German-American Bundrally that filled Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939, with 22,000 hate-spewing American Nazis. [...]
“I don’t see much of a difference, quite frankly, between the Bund and these groups, in their public presence,” said Arnie Bernstein, the author of “Swastika Nation,” a history of the German American Bund. “The Bund had its storefronts in New York, Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles — today’s groups are also hanging out in the public space, but in this case, they’re on the internet and anyone can access their ‘storefronts,’ or websites, and their philosophy, if you can call it that, is essentially the same.”
For the Bund, the unnerving 1939 Madison Square Garden rally was at once the organization’s high point and—as a result of the shock and revulsion it caused—its death knell. It’s too soon to know exactly what effect Charlottesville—which was smaller, but more violent than the Bund’s 1939 demonstration—will have on white nationalists or how the American public, which is still processing the horrific event, will ultimately respond to it. Will Charlottesville be the beginning of the end of this reborn generation of American Nazis? To foretell where we could be headed, you need to know how the Bund’s version of it all played out 78 years ago — and how this time is different. [...]
One year ahead of the outbreak of World War II, Berlin still hoped for good relations with Washington. The Reich refused to give Kuhn’s organization either financial or verbal support, lest it further alienate the Roosevelt administration, which had already made clear its extreme distaste for the Nazi ideology. Berlin went so far as to forbid German nationals in the United States from joining the German American Bund.
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