Nazis in America During Hitler's Reign
Edith Cook
Miss Edith
(Dr. Edith Cook)
Column published August 20, 2024. Editor’s headline: “Nazis in America.”
Steven Ross’s “Hitler in Los Angeles” features an astounding assertion as subtitle: “How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America.” A spy cadre, trained and called into action by an astute and provident Jew, is the stuff of fantasy fiction, except it’s a true story.
Leon Lewis, a Jewish attorney from the Midwest, had seen communism take over Russia, fascism take over Italy, and Nazism take over Germany. Poverty was as bad in Los Angeles as in any city in 1930. As the Depression worsened, city agencies across Southern California proved incapable of aiding an unemployed population that grew to over 350,000. Lewis knew that, when mothers and fathers are unable to feed their families, they’ll accept help anywhere they can get it. He foresaw grave danger, not only for American Jewry, but for other oppressed groups: Black Americans, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and others.
In California and beyond, more than a hundred Nazi and fascist organizations existed who, like their counterparts in Italy and Germany, claimed the Jews caused the worldwide economic crisis. When Franklin D. Roosevelt in March 1933 spoke of his New Deal, the groups derided it as a “Jew Deal,” demanding the President remove all Jews from public office. Roosevelt ignored them; he was to his eyeballs in the nation’s problems.
Soon the front pages of the Los Angeles Record and the Los Angeles Examiner featured pictures of Brownshirts giving the Nazi salute to swastika flags. Los Angeles Nazis turned their basements into headquarters that housed and fed unemployed German Americans—in return for instructions on National Socialism. Because of Hollywood and its potential for propaganda, Hitler deemed Los Angeles more important than any other city to implement his schemes.
Adolf Hitler became Reich Chancellor in 1933, and the news out of Germany was filled with horror after horror. The führer was turning anti-Semitism into a national policy. Before long, Jews were barred from civil employment, from owning businesses, from teaching in or attending universities, and from participating in “teutonic” sports.
In the U.S., angry at governmental pension cuts, Veteran Marchers set out to recruit one million men into their “Khaki Shirt” movement. Since one-third of all disabled veterans lived in Southern California, the Nazis found fertile ground for conversion.
What the Nazis didn’t know: Leon Lewis was as familiar with Hitler’s strategies as they were. He enlisted discontented army veterans, trained them as spies, and funneled them into groups like Friends of New Germany and Deutsche Haus.
It’s a good thing he did, and a good thing he had help, for the fascist American National Party, closely tied to the Ku Klux Klan, developed strategies to turn Americans into National Socialists akin to home ground Germans. It was Lewis’s good fortune to get to know Nazi hunters Joe Roos and Julius Klein, who paved the way for Lewis to recruit Neil Ness, an engineer who had investigated Nazi activities in Chicago. Ness, experienced in espionage from serving in the American military in France in the First World War, turned Lewis’s undercover operation into a viable spy ring. He infiltrated the American National Party (ANP), where he moved up in the ranks and provided Lewis with valuable reports. Ness had experienced horrid treatment while in Berlin. Convinced that a Nazi Germany was inevitable, Ness returned to the U.S. determined to serve his country and his fellow Americans.
In early 1936, Lewis learned of plans to have 20 prominent Angeleno men, Jews, and the politicians who supported them, kidnapped and hanged in a grove selected by their leader, Ingram Hughes.
Lewis contacted friends at Naval Intelligence who owed him a favor and asked for help. They directed him to a Long Beach police captain who had been monitoring the Klan for years. When Lewis asked him for someone who could burrow inside Hughes’s operation, the captain directed him to Charles Slocombe, a Klan member who spurned his past beliefs but remained active in the Klan to maintain a front. Slocombe became Agent C9, a spy who rose in the ranks to become Hughes’s right-hand man.
During their respective spy missions, Ness and Slocombe remained unaware of their common goal, convinced that the other was a devoted Nazi.
The 1938 Kristallnacht, the “Night of the Broken Glass” in Europe, destroyed at least 7,000 Jewish businesses, left hundreds of synagogues in ruin, massacred a hundred or more Jews, and deported 30,000 to concentration camps. Further, Berlin expanded its operations on American soil, sending well-trained espionage agents to assess the nation’s readiness for war.
Eventually Lewis learned that saboteurs were sent to undermine the morale of the unemployed and the hungry. Agents arrived from abroad under cover of night, bearing instructions and money from Berlin. In vain he petitioned the FBI to take the Nazi threat seriously. J. Edgar Hoover was obsessed with tracking down communists and homosexuals; he paid scant attention to the Nazi menace.
Finally, Congress took an interest. Hearings followed but accomplished little beyond affirming that Nazis who arrived under false pretense could have their citizenship revoked and sent packing.
Lewis persuaded the Disabled American Veterans Country Board to pass a resolution condemning Nazism and demanding that Germans not organize any Nazi group “in these democratic United States.” Delegates to the California American Legion convention, at Lewis’s urging, passed a similar resolution, condemning groups “holding their primary allegiance to foreign governments.” He’d started a Community Committee as a local “civic protective group” with ties to—sometimes with help from—the Anti-Defamation League. Germany’s deadly violence against Jews led to increased calls by American Nazis to murder Jews in Los Angeles, including the most famous man in the world, Charlie Chaplin, and the most powerful studio head in Los Angeles, Louis B. Mayer. Alarmed, Hollywood activists formed the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. The reaction from Berlin was fast and furious, indignantly protesting allegations of mistreated Jews and threatening reprisals.
War was on the horizon. Slocombe’s contacts divulged that German submarines hid in Mexican waters just below the border. German agents came ashore at night for secret meetings with Ernst Ulrich von Bülow and his circle in Tijuana. Bülow was known to be a Nazi spymaster.
With the FBI still dragging its feet, Lewis realized it was up to his cadre to stop the Nazi assault on America. He and Roos expanded the undercover operations of the Community Committee. They brought in several new full-time spies and trusted informants, three of whom went undercover in Deutsche Haus.
A Gallup poll in August 1937 found 38 percent of respondents believed American anti-Jewish feeling was growing; less than two years later, as Hitler continued his march across Europe, the figure had risen to 45 percent.
Roos, frustrated by the lack of national attention to the Nazi menace, used his talents as former newspaperman and Hollywood story editor by publishing the News Letter. The paper turned his and Lewis’s spy operation into gripping tales and reached millions every week, thanks to columnists picking up and broadcasting his stories. Over the next three years, Roos sent copies to government agencies and influential newspapers.
“From the very beginning I pressed for a new policy, namely to publicize what the Nazis and their American sympathizers were doing,” he said to Lewis.
The Nazis responded by creating a network of cells, each with a membership of ten men, and by publishing Der Tag, a Nazi propaganda arm directed at German Americans, and Americans generally, who might become sympathetic to their cause.
Note: My next column adds information on Nazis sabotaging American weapons production at great cost to employees’ lives, the foiled plot to blow up airplanes bound for Canada, and the planned impeachment of President Franklin D. Roosevelt to replace him with a president sympathetic to their cause.
sindyn...@juno.com
nancy S.
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