Hundreds of thousands of people is “quite a bit”, in my opinion. You may believe otherwise.
“Hundreds of thousands”?
The ISVG estimates that the Aryan Nations has around 500 members with between 6,000 and 15,000 “supporters.”
Adding in the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas (est. 2,000 members plus a similar number of associated non-member women), and the Aryan Circle (est. 1,500 members), (both prison gangs rather than actual social movements), we barely get to 20,000 people associated with those movements with no more than 6,000 actual members, even if we include all the dead members killed in gang violence.
Your wild guesses about the size of such groups is unrelated to reality.
Considering 20,000 was the entire seating capacity of old Madison Square Garden plus some standing room, the figure indicates that support was high enough to sell out an arena. In New York, just to people willing to identify themselves in public as Nazi sympathizers. Estimating a hundred supporters for each one of those people when you take into account the entire country and the people who kept it to themselves or their own community seems reasonable.
To deny that German-Americans had lots of sympathy for Hitler up to and in some cases through the war is pretty naive.
With that said, i think Der Trihs’s timeline is off regarding Communism – general concern with it prior to the end of the war was more on par with the Red Scare of the 20s; people were concerned with immediate “anarchist” style bombings, not with ideological warfare or the threat of a military takeover. The country was more generally anti-Hitler, and America First was not a majority movement, but rather an attempt to resist the average person’s acceptance of FDR’s wink-wink nudge-nudge “neutrality” towards Europe. The U.S. was preparing for an inevitable war with the Axis, and arming its allies, from almost as soon as Hitler came to power, and the majority of people supported this.
tomndebb covered this well enough, and after I stopped laughing I notice that yet again you have yet to provide any evidence whatsoever, not even the high school history class anecdote this time.
The German American Bund itself never claimed it had membership anywhere near 2,000,000 as you would suggest. This wasn’t a local New York weekend outing for them, this was a planned mass rally of all members nationwide who could attend, the figure of “some 20,000” is preceded by “some” for a reason, it’s a crowd size estimate which are notoriously unreliable. Actual membership figures for the German American Bund are not known with certainty, but reliable estimates place membership at 25,000 dues-paying members, including some 8,000 uniformed Sturmabteilungen (SA), more commonly known as Storm Troopers. This Nazi apologist website (“It was also the least understood, most maligned and scape-goated by distorted media coverage.”) gives the bloated figure of
And again, this was the zenith of the German American Bund, support such as it was dropped off precipitously seven months later when Hitler invaded Poland and started World War II. I should also note that the Nazis themselves viewed the Bund with a mixture of distrust and embarrassment:
No, it’s not naive, it’s an utter falsehood. There was no sympathy for Hitler up to and in some cases through the war by German-Americans as a whole or even by any meaningful minority. The Bund was outlawed when the US entered the war, and pre-war membership (actual pre-war, not just prior to American entry into the war) was 25,000 out of over 6,000,000 German-Americans who had been born in Germany and immigrated and their children to say nothing of those who’s German heritage was through grandparents or further. Hell, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force was named Eisenhower.
It’s not his timeline that’s off, it’s his thinking that is off. Look again at what he said
There wasn’t quite a bit of support for the Nazis in America, such support as there was wasn’t because the Nazis were Christians, opposition to communism wasn’t because it was atheist, and I’ve yet to hear a single Christian state that it’s better to murder in the name of religion than to saves lives and be an atheist.
But given that the arena had a normal capacity of just under 18,500, it’s pretty reliable to say it either was or was not full; thus, the 20,000 number seems to be based on an easily verifiable status.
The idea that every single Nazi sympathizer in the U.S. was willing and able to travel to New York and show his face in public entering the rally seems about as likely as the idea that every single Nazi in Germany was a secret dissident who was “just following orders” at constant gunpoint from above.
Please note that the '18,496" max capacity was for boxing, where the seating filled up almost every square foot on the field area except for the ring itself. For any other type of event the max capacity would be quite a bit less.
I heard something very similar, throughout much of the Cold War. “Better Dead than Red.” They were perfectly willing to unleash total nuclear war rather than live under Communism.
It isn’t exactly the same, but it is (and was) a haunting declaration. If an individual Patriot declares, “Live Free or Die,” at least he’s talking about his personal choice, and isn’t including me in his death pact. The Cold War’s nuclear showdown definitely was.
But this was their peak effort. This was the American Nazis trying to produce as many supporters as possible in order to show their strength. So the fact they were only able to come up with twenty thousand butts in the seats shows how small their support was in the general population.
Keep in mind that most of the moderate support for Hitler in Germany was due to unhappiness over the 1918 surrender and the Versailles Treaty and the fear caused by the economic collapses in 1924 and 1929. German-Americans hadn’t experienced any of these traumas.
Frank Burns eats worms.
I demand that you retract this slur upon pork producers.
Hog farmers are far more influential than the Bund ever dreamed of being.
Obviously, sir, you have never had a really good pulled pork sandwich. :mad:
There were a lot more Communists and fellow travellers in America during the 30s than Nazis. Lots more. Loads more. There were so many communists in the 30s that there was a big media spectacle over it in the 50s, when the Russians were our enemies. You may have heard about it, it was in the news. There was never a big spectacle about rooting out Nazis, because there never were any Nazis.
Sure, there were people who admired Hitler. You could scrape up people in America today who admire Vladimir Putin or other random authoritarian leaders, because they like the idea of kicking the fags and the jews and the liberals, or whoever their personal bogey-men are.
(They’re at FreeRepublic)
But anyway, I think you’re getting at something here – just as people today like to look back on the 50s and cast everything as “McCarthyist” paranoia, ignoring the fact that there really was an active effort by the USSR to recruit spies and lots of espionage and conspiracy to overthrow democracy going on, it’s easy to forget how much open fascism there was in this country before entry into WW2 made people have convenient changes of heart. Coughlin was a problem precisely because he had millions of followers. The same HUAC that later went after Communism was originally constituted to deal with Nazi subversion. It really was there, and the fact that no one’s grandpa remembers being one has more to do with what happened to Nazism and its reputation as the 40s continued than with any absence in the first place.
Exactly. You’ll also note that reliable estimates of membership in the Bund was only 25,000, and high end figures given by a pro-Bund website of extremely dubious reliability only claim 100,000. This is less than one half of one percent of 6,000,000 German immigrants and their children, or a little over one and one half percent if the claim of 100,000 is to be believed. Condescending Robot, your suggestion that there were 2,000,000 members or supporters (100 who didn’t attend for everyone that did) is simply beyond absurd. The German American Bund itself never claimed to have anywhere remotely near that level of support and you are suggesting that fully 1/3 of German-Americans were pro-Nazi or had pro-Nazi leanings.
Show me the dissent against America going to war against Germany from all of these pro-Nazi German-Americans you claim existed. Surely there must have been public demonstrations against the war, resistance to the draft, acts of sabotage, spy rings reporting to the Nazis, a fifth column working to subvert the war effort, something, anything.
Showing what the level of connection to the Bund or to the German population was is the only challenge here; everything you listed certainly did go on at some level.
C’mon, get serious. If the National Pork Producers Council was secretly running the country, we’d see the evidence. They’d be doing things to promote pork sales. Like staging terrorist attacks to turn the American people against the biggest world religion that speaks out against pork.
So in other words, it happened and its common knowledge but you are unable to find the tiniest shred of evidence of it. Somehow this sounds very familiar, are you channeling aNewLeaf? How about providing some evidence that any of the things I listed did go on? Here, I’ll list them for you again, find me one example of each:
- Public demonstrations against the war by pro-Nazi German-Americans.
- Resistance to the draft by pro-Nazi German-Americans.
- Acts of sabotage by pro-Nazi German-Americans.
- Spy rings of pro-Nazi German-Americans reporting to the Nazis
- A fifth column of pro-Nazi German-Americans working to subvert the war effort.
Since you are trying to dodge the actual question asked of you by claiming “Showing what the level of connection to the Bund or to the German population was is the only challenge here”, I’ll even take examples where there’s no certainty of a connection to the Bund or the German-American population as you claim everything I listed certainly did go on. I’d wish you good luck in finding them, but you won’t be able to.
For one, Walter Kappe, the organizer of the Nazi saboteur ring that landed on Long Island in 1942 and was captured and executed, was a longtime American resident and leader of the Bund. Check on Google Books or the web for any number of citations.
“Public demonstrations against the war” by the disproportionately German America First and the exclusively German Bund is the only thing those groups did or were constituted to do, so unless you are denying that they existed, it’s hard to avoid noticing their activities.
They’d be planting memes on the Internet about how good bacon is.
So Walter Kappe was a Bund member? Well, that certainly proves the Bund had millions of members. I apologize for my doubts.