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A Night at The Garden
80 years ago, New York hosted a chilling Nazi rally. N.J. director’s Oscar-nominated short film
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I thought it important to know the lone brave man who rushed the stage. Longer version of the short below includes interview of filmmaker Marshall Curry. Curry said the man's name was Isadore Greenbaum and his prophetic statement to a magistrate the next day.
Fritz Kuhn stepped up to the microphone. Kuhn was the leader, or Bundesführer, of the German American Bund. "This was his rally," said Arnie Bernstein, author of Swastika Nation. "He wanted to be the Hitler of America." The speeches were explicitly anti-Semitic, and tirades against "job-taking Jewish refugees" were met with thunderous applause. "They demanded a white gentile America. They denounced Roosevelt as 'Rosenfeld,' to say that Roosevelt was in the pocket of rich Jews," said Sarah Churchwell, author of Behold, America.
"Down with Hitler!" Immediately, Greenbaum was tackled by the Bund's security team. They brutally punched and kicked him, even ripped his pants off, to the delight of the crowd, before the NYPD wrestled Greenbaum to safety. "He had a black eye and a broken nose, but he said he would have done it again," Greenbaum's grandson, Brett Siciliano, told Radio Diaries. After the rally, Greenbaum was arrested for disorderly conduct and fined $25 for disrupting the rally.
One of the main speakers, Gerhard Wilhelm Kunze, the national public relations director of the Bund, pointed to the white supremacy present at America's founding as a nation. "The spirit which opened the West and built our country is the spirit of the militant white man," he preached. Kunze followed the thread of racism that runs through American history to bolster his vision for a whites-only America. He cited anti-miscegenation laws, the Chinese Exclusion Act, Jim Crow policies and immigration quotas. "It has then always been very much American to protect the Aryan character of this nation," Kunze told the audience.
This rally in 1939 was the high point for the German American Bund. Later that year, Kuhn was indicted on embezzlement charges. He was denaturalized and deported in 1945. More broadly, world events made it harder to be a Nazi in America.
"Down with Hitler!" Immediately, Greenbaum was tackled by the Bund's security team. They brutally punched and kicked him, even ripped his pants off, to the delight of the crowd, before the NYPD wrestled Greenbaum to safety. "He had a black eye and a broken nose, but he said he would have done it again," Greenbaum's grandson, Brett Siciliano, told Radio Diaries. After the rally, Greenbaum was arrested for disorderly conduct and fined $25 for disrupting the rally.
One of the main speakers, Gerhard Wilhelm Kunze, the national public relations director of the Bund, pointed to the white supremacy present at America's founding as a nation. "The spirit which opened the West and built our country is the spirit of the militant white man," he preached. Kunze followed the thread of racism that runs through American history to bolster his vision for a whites-only America. He cited anti-miscegenation laws, the Chinese Exclusion Act, Jim Crow policies and immigration quotas. "It has then always been very much American to protect the Aryan character of this nation," Kunze told the audience.
This rally in 1939 was the high point for the German American Bund. Later that year, Kuhn was indicted on embezzlement charges. He was denaturalized and deported in 1945. More broadly, world events made it harder to be a Nazi in America.
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/02/20/695941323/when-nazis-took-manhattan
