American Experience

Nazi Town, Usa

In February 1939, more than twenty thousand Americans filled Madison Square Garden for an event billed as a "Pro-American Rally." As images of George Washington hung next to swastikas, a series of speakers railed against the "Jewish controlled media" and called for a return to a racially "pure" America. The keynote speaker, a man named Fritz Kuhn, was the head of an organization known as the German American Bund. The rally was huge demanding the largest police presence to date for any event in New York City history but it was the culmination of a movement that had been brewing for years. Nazi Town USA will tell the largely unknown story of this organization that had chapters across the country and represented what experts believe was a "very real threat of fascist subversion in the United States." Organized into 70 different districts, the Bund held joint rallies with the Ku Klux Klan and ran dozens of summer camps for children centered around Nazi ideology and imagery. Life in some of the largest camps - including Camp Siegfried in Long Island, Camp Hindenburg in Wisconsin, and Camp Nordland in New Jersey -will be brought to life through extensive archival footage, photographs, and ruins that exist to this day. The Bund's embrace of "Americanism" raises thorny issues - from questions of free speech to declarations of "America First" - that we continue to wrestle with to this day.