When Nazis Filled Madison Square Garden
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 Bund rally that filled Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939, with 22,000 hate-spewing American Nazis.
That rally, the largest such conclave in U.S. history, shocked Americans at the time. They had seen the press accounts and newsreel footage of the Nazis’ massive Nuremburg rallies; they had read about Kristallnacht, the murderous, two-day anti-Semitic pogrom of November 1938, which the Bund—the fast-growing, American version of the German Nazi party, which trumpeted the Nazi philosophy, but with a stars-and-stripes twist—had unabashedly endorsed.
But that was in Europe. This was America. New York City. For Americans wondering whether it could happen here, the Bund rally provided the awful answer.
“22,000 Nazis Hold Rally In Garden,” blared a front-page headline in the New York Times. Inside, photos captured the restless throng of counterprotesters outside the arena and the Bund’s smiling uniformed leaders. “We need be in no doubt as to what the Bund would do to and in this country if it had the opportunity,” the Times opined in an editorial later that week. “It would set up an American Hitler.”
Some 78 years after the Bund rally at Madison Square Garden, a new generation of hectoring troglodytes descended on Charlottesville, Virginia. In 1939, Brown Shirts at Madison Square Garden felt emboldened to seize a Jewish protester who had rushed the podium where the Bund’s German-born leader, Fritz Kuhn, was speaking, and beat him near-senseless. In 2017, members of the so-called alt-right held a torchlight rally in Charlottesville, and the next day, one of those white nationalists went even further and allegedly used his car to mow down anti-Nazi protesters, killing a young woman, Heather Heyer.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/08/23/nazi-german-american-bund-rally-madison-square-garden-215522
