Continued
Edith Cook
Miss Edith
(Dr. Edith Cook)
Published August 29, 2024. Editor’s headline: “Nazis in the United States.”
The dustcover of “Hitler in Los Angeles” shows young men in armbands beneath an American flag—yet the US flag, and the armbanded men, are flanked by imposing Nazi symbols: A gigantic swastika, a similarly commanding Teutonic eagle, and a portrait of Adolf Hitler.
The extent of Nazi (and Ku Klux Klan) sympathizers in California baffles the imagination; still, Author Steven Ross’s extensive research makes a compelling case: Once Hitler was ensconced as Germany’s chancellor in 1933, his vainglorious ambitions included plans to subvert the American government. To this end, Berlin recruited German Americans sympathetic to the Nazi cause and sent instructions and money via sealed letters through the Gestapo officer who accompanied every German vessel that docked in L.A. from 1933 until 1941. In contrast to New York City, the L.A. port was largely unguarded, lending itself perfectly to trafficking propaganda from Germany.
Leon Lewis recognized the Nazi threat long before the FBI or the FDR government caught on. A WWI veteran and a man of action, he organized and trained spies, Jews and Gentiles, who infiltrated the Nazi Friends of New Germany and sent him reports of the plans and ideas from Berlin. The spymaster and his group foiled a number of Nazi assassination and sabotage attempts.
Lewis knew German-American vets from his work with the Disabled American Veterans and appealed to his spies’ sense of patriotism. Many German Americans despised Hitler for the chaos and war he was bringing to their former country.
The American Silver Shirts, counterpart to the German Brown Shirts, had as its leader a man with presidential ambitions. William Dudley Pelley believed America was besieged by Communists and Jews. He saw his mission as eradicating the twin threats on his way to the White House.
Emboldened by Hitler’s building of an army contrary to the Treaty of Versailles, and his successes in invading country after country, Pelley, convinced that Jesus Christ had charged him with restoring America’s “Christian” character, turned to the Nazis for help. He supported the Friends of New Germany and the California Klan. He started the Silver Ranger, a weekly periodical, and, in 1934, moved his production to Los Angeles. There he published anti-Semitic articles, news of Germany’s conquest of European countries, and actions against Jews in Germany and abroad. He published his book, “More Hunger: The Compact Plan of the Christian Commonwealth” which seems reminiscent of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.” Pelley promised a “permanent solution to the Jewish Problem” by forcing Jews to cluster into select cities, one city per state, with its own Secretary of Jewry; any Jew who tried to leave the assigned area would be subject to execution.
Many of Pelley’s contemporaries dismissed him as a madman, but Lewis understood, no truly crazy person could create a national organization like the Silver Shirts, conduct national speaking tours, and attract the support of anti-Semitic members of Congress. As in Germany and Italy, many conservative business leaders endorsed fascism. In one of the least-known instances of traitorous actions, a group of wealthy industrial leaders plotted to overthrow President Roosevelt and replace him. Hitler sympathizers along with “800 fascist-minded groups in California” were growing in strength through the support of wealthy anti-Semitic supporters.
When Lewis informed the recently-established House Un-American Activity Committee (HUAC) of Pelley’s machinations, one HUAC investigator later remarked that Pelley was “the most rabid anti-Semite I have yet met.”
By 1938, anti-Nazi protests erupted in Los Angeles.
Then Lewis’s spies told him of Nazi plans to sabotage the nation's military installations, blow up defense plants, and seize munitions from National Guard armories along the Pacific Coast. He further learned that German submarines were hiding in Mexican waters just below the border. Their officers came ashore at night for secret meetings in Tijuana.
On May 7, 1941, the FBI received a report from its Los Angeles Field Office (who’d gotten the info from one of Lewis’s informers) of secret orders from Berlin detailing plans to sabotage aircraft factories along the Pacific Coast, to be implemented on Memorial Day. Employees would carry out the sabotage inside while a contingent using private planes would start from Mexico and work north.
Alarmed, the Los Angeles Bureau notified FBI agents in San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, and San Diego, along with Naval and Army intelligence. The Burau also alerted officials at aircraft and munitions plants along the Pacific Coast, asking them to suspend operations over the Memorial Day weekend, making sure no employees would be present. Forewarned, factory owners shut down production and increased security that weekend. No sabotage occurred.
The Friends of New Germany were furious, recognizing the Berlin plan had failed because someone inside Deutche Haus had “betrayed the führer.” “We have a spy among us who reports to Mr. Lewis.” The offender would be ferreted out and dealt with “according to Gestapo rules.”
Lewis knew that some FBA agents were sympathetic to the Nazi cause. Unwilling to put his agent’s life further at risk, Lewis sent his man to safety.
In October 1939, after foiling a plot to blow up airplanes bound for Canada, Lewis asked his network of informants to monitor aircraft factories and provide names of suspicious employees.
Lewis’s efforts assumed greater urgency when the Hercules power plant in Kenvil, New Jersey, blew up in September 1940, killing 52 employees and destroying 22 buildings and 123 pounds of explosives. FBI agents sent to the scene downplayed the possibility of sabotage, but the HUAC chair did not. Lewis’s spy had identified the Hercules plant in California as a Nazi target but were unaware of the East Coast plant’s existence.
On November 12, a few weeks after the Hercules inferno, a series of explosions destroyed three defense plants in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, killing 16 and wounding two dozen. No explosions occurred on the Pacific Coast because Lewis and his cadre closely monitored defense plants, but they also knew of Nazi agents in San Francisco’s Douglas Aircraft plant. Lewis feared what would happen if the Nazis were allowed to proceed; he warned plant security, the FBI, and naval intelligence. To prompt Hoover into action, he sent information regarding vulnerable defense plants to political columnists Drew Pearson and Robert Allen.
The action produced the desired results. The Washington Merry-Go-Round, the country’s most widely read column, published warnings of the nation’s biggest danger spot, Los Angeles, which “contains one of the largest concentrations of defense works in the country.” The columnists also had a list of 2,500 Angelenos loyal to the Nazis, and had determined that “800 of them worked in airplane plants, shipyards, auto factories, and other key defense industries.” The writers even knew the name of the employees’ Nazi leader.
On June 22, 1941, Hitler’s army invaded the Soviet Union, the largest German military operation of World War II.
In spite of the horrors of East Coast explosions, Lewis and his cadre were making progress: Several high-ranking Nazi spies were prosecuted in court. At last FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover, until then preoccupied by his war on communism, took the Nazi threat seriously. Lewis and his right-hand man were referred to as “Men in a position to know, Informants No 21 and 22.”
The threat to Roosevelt’s administration, however, continued with the impeachment proceedings in the House of Representatives. A Nazi sympathizer held a speech against the President. Upon taking office in 1933, FDR had promised to cut taxes and reduce unemployment, but it never happened, the Nazi speaker said, while in Germany, people went to work. Under Hitler, every adult was assured of a good job and decent pay while America was being pushed into a war to help Britain, and “great Americans like Charles Lindbergh” were prevented from speaking against it. The only way to prevent it was to remove Roosevelt from office.
The House returned its verdict: 16 votes for impeachment, one against. The audience was invited back for a mock trial in which a mock Senate would vote for impeachment.
On December 6, 1941, at 8 PM, an audience of a thousand gathered for the third impeachment hearing, where witnesses testified to Roosevelt’s supposed crimes. After several hours, in which the Nazi speaker repeatedly referred to the führer as “our brother, Adolf Hitler” and spoke admiringly of German—and Japanese—military might, the final vote was postponed to December 11, a Thursday.
The vote never happened. On December 7, Japanese forces attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor. In Los Angeles, state and federal agents began arresting suspected Nazi agents. How did they know whom to arrest? They went to Leon Lewis for information. Lewis and his right-hand man continued to work undercover until the end of the war.
Americans tend to think, large-scale fascism can’t happen here. But it did, and it does whenever citizens turn indifferent. Leon Lewis never chose indifference; he did what was right.
janetblack
It’s wonderful to see you embracing love and friendship and adventure and sunshine and joy and work!
Sincerely, Janet
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