Hitler's Long Island Legion

This is a really long article, but what an interesting piece of history!! I've been doing some internet scouring about Germans in New York during World War II, and got kind of soundtracked into the whole German-American Bund / Friends of the New Germany movement.

Click on the link above for the whole article. Here's some excerpts:

In the summer of 1936, the still-distant threat of Nazism cast an unexpected shadow across the hinterlands of Long Island.

That spring, Adolf Hitler had been preparing for war. His newly mobilized troops rolled into the Rhineland, unopposed by the Allies. It was the first of a series of Nazi military adventures setting the stage for World War II.

On Long Island, Nazism invaded Yaphank in the form of a summer retreat called Camp Siegfreid.

Located on a wooded lakefront near the mid-Suffolk village, the camp was ostensibly a summer place for youngsters and a weekend campground for adults. In reality it was more dangerous -- a project sponsored by the German-American Bund, which had been established to promote Hitlerism in this country.
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Carrying flags emblazoned with swastikas, the emblem of the Nazi movement, older bundists and young campers paraded in uniform -- showing off stiff-armed salutes and singing the ``Horst Wessel Song,'' a Nazi anthem. Later, it was discovered that plans to commit espionage and sabotage in the future were also discussed covertly. ``We remain oblivious to the Nazi prototype that existed in our own backyard,'' Marvin Miller wrote in ``Wunderlich's Salute,'' the first history of the bundist movement on Long Island, published in 1983. Now 63, Miller was a Long Island high school teacher. He decided to begin the project in the 1970s, he said, when he discovered that no history of the camp existed in book form.

Miller recounted the experience of Murray Cohen, a Brooklyn high school student who rode the ``Camp Siegfried Special'' to Yaphank in 1937. Photographs Cohen secretly took at the camp were later published by PM, New York's liberal afternoon daily in the 1940s. On the train, Cohen chatted with Mueller while, in the background, uniformed bundists sang Nazi anthems.
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At the camp, Fritz Kuhn, a U.S. citizen who headed the bund, predicted that someday he would be ``America's Fuhrer,'' Miller wrote. Activities included more than sports and sunbathing. There were recorded operas by Richard Wagner, Hitler's favorite composer, and anti-Semitic lectures by Walter Kappe, the camp's propaganda chief. Kappe argued that Jews were the founders of international communism. The Friends of the New Germany in America would become ``what the Storm Troopers were in Germany,'' he promised.

By 1937, up to 40,000 bundists would arrive on Sundays to celebrate Nazism in America, while young Siegfrieders lined up to greet them as the train pulled into Yaphank. A large contingent of Nazis also marched through the village of Lindenhurst that year. Some threats of violence came from members of American Legion posts, who threatened to break up the camp but were dissuaded by Suffolk District Attorney Robert Vunk.

Soon after, Miller wrote, Kappe was ordered to return to Germany to work on plans to land spies on the coast of Long Island. In the early days of the war, four would-be saboteurs were captured after landing near Amagansett -- three turned out to be former Siegfrieders.
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