The German American Bund

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 22 February 2017

⏱️ 9 minutes

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Summary

In the 1930s, a group of German-American Nazi sympathisers known as the German American Bund held rallies and summer camps across the US. In Feburary 1939, they held a meeting for 20,000 people at Madison Square Garden in New York.

Lucy Burns speaks to Skip Eernisse, who remembers the Bund summer camp Camp Hindenburg in his home town of Grafton, Wisconsin. We also hear from Arnie Bernstein, author of Swastika Nation: Fritz Kuhn and the Rise and Fall of the German American Bund.

(Photo: German-American Nazi sympathisers rally in the US. Credit: Library of Congress)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and thank you for downloading Witness, the History Program from the BBC World Service,
0:04.8	the stories of our times told by the people who were there.
0:08.2	Today we're going back to a forgotten corner of American history from the 1930s, the German-American Nazi sympathizers
0:16.2	who organised camps and rallies with swastika flags all over the US.
0:21.1	I'm Lucy Burns and I've been looking back at the history of the German
0:24.7	American Bund. They came marching down the street and they had their German uniforms on and they had their
0:36.9	German swashtika flags flying and it didn't take very long and
0:42.1	kids looked around and we were wondering
0:43.3	worded all these policemen come from. This is skip Arinesse. He grew up in Grafton,
0:48.5	Wisconsin, about half an hour north of Milwaukee. Grafton's a small town and usually they only had one
0:55.1	policeman but that day more had come in from the city because there was a march
0:59.5	by the German-American bt. Bund means Federation.
1:03.7	They were a diaspora organization
1:05.6	for Americans of German heritage
1:07.8	with strong ties to the Nazi party.
1:10.5	And the police were worried.
1:12.1	They made a march back up the 12th Avenue and of course all these kids we followed
1:17.0	them because this was really something to see you know and they threw the American flag down and they put their German flags up and they sang
1:23.9	Deutschland, Leverallis, the rest of the way down to their park.
1:26.9	Grafton was home to a summer camp run by the German-American bunt.
1:31.0	It was called Camp Hindenburg.
1:33.0	Wisconsin has a big German population
	...

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