THE RECORD
Friday June 3, 1994
Note: This article was given to me from my neighbor who brought this whole incident to my attention around July of 2008. I have recopied it for clarity March 10, 2013.
First battles against Hitler were on the home front in N.J.
By Michael S. James
BY THE time Allied forces stormed Nazi-occupied France from the beaches at Normandy, many North Jersey residents already were grizzled veterans of battles against Hitler sympathizers in their hometowns. Many had fought the German-American Bund; a nationwide amalgamation of pro-Nazi groups that reached its peak in the late 1930’s
when it claimed tens of thousands of adherents in America.
Led by Fritz Kuhn, a New York-based German immigrant known as
“the American Fuhrer,” the bund swore allegiance to both Adolph Hitler and the
United States and held frequent rallies decrying Jews and other minorities, including one event in New Milford that resulted in a near-riot in 1938.
“They were a rowdy – oh, nasty – obnoxious bunch of bastards,” said
Arthur Abrams, a former Maywood police officer assigned to patrol the New Milford rally, who said he eventually wound up removing his shirt, gun, and badge, and punching a bund leader in the chin.
The bund was particularly active in North Jersey, where rallies patrolled by uniformed bund storm troopers were fairly common. The bund had a 100-acre camp called Camp Nordland in Sussex County. Bundists also trained and met on Federal Hill in Bloomingdale. They marched down Main Street in Hackensack. They demonstrated in Scheutzen Park in North Bergen.
Frequently, counterdemonstrators were on hand attempting to shout down hundreds of bundists yelling “heil” in front of swastikas and American flags. Stanley J. Wides of Englewood, who today is executive director of the Jewish War Veterans of New Jersey, remembers the outrage in his community when the bund met in a building known as the Italian-American Meeting Hall, which is now an apartment building on Brookway Avenue in Englewood.
“The people of the community – not only Jewish men and women, but blacks and Hispanics and whatever we had in Englewood at that time -- gathered outside there,” Wides said. “The fire engines came with fire hoses just in case things got out of hand.” Wides remembers that a group of young fighters led by future state Sen. Matthew Feldman – a frequent antagonist to the bund in North Jersey – came up from Jersey City. The result of the demonstration “was a couple of scraps; it wasn’t a riot,” Wides said, adding his side won.Soon, the bund faced legal confrontations, as well. A Jersey City unit of the Veterans of Foreign Wars asked President Franklin D. Roosevelt and other officials to investigate “those citizens who took part in pledging allegiance to the swastika” and urged that “their citizenship be revoked and they be deported.”
In Bergen County Naturalization Court in Hackensack, Judge J. Wallace Leyden sparked the ire of the bund in 1937 by refusing citizenship to German immigrants unless they swore an oath that they were not bundists. Leyden soon was publicly backed by local Communists, American Legion posts, police chiefs, and other judges and officials. Kuhn responded to Leyden’s stand by saying that he was “not fit to be a judge” because of his unconstitutional position, and added that Leyden was influenced by a Jewish-Communist conspiracy threatening to undermine the United States. He said the bundists were among the most patriotic Americans.
But hundreds of demonstrators at the New Milford rally saw things differently, and hurled stones, apples, and a huge flower pot through the windows of a bund meeting hall, smashing the audio system. Scuffles reportedly broke out inside the hall. A front-page newspaper account the day after the rally said the only beating reported to police was that of Adam Kunze, a bundist “who slipped or was thrown in {Hirschfeld Pond} when he was chased by a group of demonstrators.” The pond reportedly contained treated sewage.But Abrams, a Maywood resident who later served 11 years as Bergen County police chief, said he’ll never forget who he punched that day outside the mansion of Caroline Meade, a bundist, on the Boulevard in New Milford.
“That was Fritz Kuhn, in his uniform, with a Nazi armband, a swastika on his arm,” Abrams said. “So I took the {police} badge and gun off, and the hat, and I put a sweater on. And when I went back to the back of the house, the language was absolutely out of this world…. He was berating everybody. He was berating Jews, Blacks, Catholics ----‘Comes the Fuhrer, they’ll all be hung.'"
I walked up, hesitated, stood there, and I told him to shut up. Then he looked and he spat at me. “Then I hit him,” Abrams said. “Right on the chin. It couldn’t have been better. He tumbled brass-over-tea-kettle” into the pond.
The person struck may or may not have been Kuhn – the newspaper story makes no reference to his presence at the rally – but the tumble was indicative of where the bund was headed. Kuhn was imprisoned in November 1939 and eventually deported to Germany, where he was convicted after the war of having close ties with Hitler and trying to import Nazism to the United States.
The final blow came when Kuhn’s successor, Wilhelm Kunze, disappeared in the summer of 1941. By December, America was embroiled in the war, and when Kunze resurfaced he was sent to jail in 1943 for spying.
