Contemporary Authors

• Hollywood Spies - https://www.hollywoodsspies.com/

  THE AUTHOR

  Laura Rosenzweig is an American Jewish historian. She holds a PhD in U.S. History from the University of California/Santa Cruz, an MA in Education from Stanford and a BA in History from Union College. Laura has taught U.S. and American Jewish History at San Francisco State University and the University of California/Santa Cruz.

Hollywood's Spies: The Undercover Surveillance of Nazis in Los Angeles
Publishers Weekly.
264.24 (June 12, 2017): p51+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Hollywood's Spies: The Undercover Surveillance of Nazis in Los Angeles
Laura B. Rosenzweig. New York Univ., $29.95 (320p) ISBN 978-1-4798-5517-9
The product of over a decade of research, this book documents the work of the Los Angeles Jewish Community Committee in infiltrating and combating Nazi groups in Los Angeles between 1934 and 1941. Independent scholar Rosenzweig's archival detective work documents how the LAJCC, funded by Jewish film-industry figures and using primarily non-Jewish undercover agents, gathered extensive intelligence on the German-American Bund and other Nazi-infiltrated groups, such as the America First Committee. The LAJCC findings quoted here will surprise readers in showing how extensive and active pro-Nazi groups were in Southern California. The book chillingly recounts how their leaders planned for der Tag ("the day"), a nationwide putsch that would install a pro-Nazi regime in Washington and throughout the U.S. Rosenzweig elsewhere discusses how the LAJCC, in addition to passing along intelligence to local and federal government, engaged in effective counterpropaganda against pro-Nazi materials via radio programs and short films, thus gaining national influence; however, this activity sometimes brought its leadership into conflict with that of other Jewish defense organizations, such as the Anti-Defamation League. Rosenzweig has produced a fine, very-well-documented study. (Sept.)
Caption: A U.S. soldier found this certificate for a Nazi medal and made it out to an anti-Nazi activist profiled in Hollywood's Spies (reviewed on p. 54).
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Hollywood's Spies: The Undercover Surveillance of Nazis in Los Angeles." Publishers Weekly,
12 June 2017, p. 51+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc /A495720700/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=5b7fbd7c. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
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• The Jewish News of Northern California
  https://www.jweekly.com/2018/01/25/hollywoods-spies-finalist-jewish-book-awards/
  Word count: 182

  Books

  Palo Alto author’s ‘Hollywood’s Spies’ a finalist in Jewish Book Awards

  By J. Staff | January 25, 2018

  “Hollywood’s Spies: The Undercover Surveillance of Nazis in Los Angeles,” by Laura B. Rosenzweig of Palo Alto, was named a finalist in the 2017 National Jewish Book Awards. The Jewish Book Council announced the winners of the annual awards on Jan. 11.
  ASspies-zweig
  Laura B. Rosenzweig

  Published by New York University Press, “Hollywood’s Spies” tells the story of how the Los Angeles Jewish community, financed by Jewish moguls in Hollywood, sent undercover agents to infiltrate and investigate Nazi groups operating in Los Angeles in the 1930s. The nonfiction book was a finalist in the American Jewish Studies category.

  Rosenzweig earned an MA in education from Stanford University and a PhD in history from UC Santa Cruz. She taught U.S. history and American Jewish history at UC Santa Cruz and SF State University, and is currently a senior instructional designer for the UC Office of the President.
  J. Staff

• LA Weekly
  http://www.laweekly.com/news/how-hollywood-studios-helped-undercover-spies-surveil-los-angeles-nazis-8540468
  Word count: 3905

  This Undercover Spy Operation Helped Foil a Nazi Plot in 1930s L.A.
  Laura B. Rosenzweig | August 16, 2017 | 5:01am
  AA

  In the spring of 1933, a police report submitted to LAPD captain William "Red" Hynes noted "considerable quantities" of Nazi literature littering the streets of downtown Los Angeles. A new group in town, Friends of the New Germany (FNG), was thought to be the source of this sudden burst of Nazi propaganda. Over the next several weeks Hynes, captain of LAPD's "Red Squad" intelligence unit, assigned men to keep an eye on the new group. On Aug. 1, 1933, he sent detective R.A. Wellpott undercover to attend FNG's second public meeting.

  The meeting was held at 902 S. Alvarado St. in a mansion that had been converted into a German-American community center, of sorts. It housed an old-style German restaurant, the Alt Heidelberg; a new bookshop, the Aryan Bookstore; and a meeting hall. Approximately 100 people gathered in the hall for the meeting. Wellpott reported that a makeshift stage was set up in the hall, with a speaker's podium flanked by an American flag, the imperial German flag and the Nazi (swastika) flag. Fifteen young men dressed in brown shirts, "whose arms bulge with excess power," were scattered about the hall, "guarding" the meeting.

  The meeting began with a phonograph recording of a German march. The West Coast leader of Friends of the New Germany, Robert Pape, called the meeting to order. A keynote speaker spoke on "the German-Jewish conflict," explaining that Nazis wanted to prevent the "bastardization of Germany" by eliminating Jews from power. When several people in the audience jumped up in protest, they were swept out of the meeting by the brown-shirted attendants. The meeting resumed with recorded speeches by Hindenburg and Hitler played on the phonograph. At the end of the evening, the attendees rose and gave the Nazi salute while the new German national anthem was played.

  FNG's political activities in Los Angeles raised concern among Jewish and non-Jewish groups alike. The Jewish community newspaper B'nai B'rith Messenger (no relationship to the fraternal order of the same name) took notice of Nazi activity in the city in April. An article, "Hitlerites Organize Branch Here," claimed that Nazi propaganda agents had been sent to Los Angeles by Berlin. The paper even printed the alleged agents' names and addresses on the front page and called for their immediate deportation.

  The Jewish press, the secular press, the Red Squad and local Jewish groups were just some of the groups in Los Angeles that viewed Nazi activity in the city with concern. Another group also was watching with concern: the city's veterans organizations. In the spring and summer of 1933, Friends of the New Germany focused its recruitment efforts on local veterans. FNG leaders assumed that U.S. veterans would flock to join their group, presuming that the former military members felt just as betrayed by the American government over recent cuts in their veterans' benefits as the FNG themselves had felt with the Weimar government in Germany at the end of World War I.
  Herman Schwinn, West Coast leader of the German American Bund, 1934-1941
  Herman Schwinn, West Coast leader of the German American Bund, 1934-1941
  CRC Papers

  Among the first veterans to be approached by FNG officers was the former U.S. Army lieutenant John Schmidt. Schmidt was the perfect potential FNG recruit. Born in Germany in 1879, Schmidt was a career soldier. In his teens, he had served in the German imperial army. In 1900, Schmidt immigrated to the United States and enlisted in the U.S. Army after his naturalization was complete in 1908. Even though Schmidt was an American citizen, FNG leaders believed that loyalty was determined by blood, not by the artifice of naturalized citizenship. He was precisely the type of recruit FNG was hoping to win.

  However, FNG leaders were mistaken. Schmidt was neither disloyal nor angry. True, he had been born in Bavaria, and he was a U.S. veteran. Schmidt even had cause to be disillusioned with the U.S. government. Following the war, he had been hospitalized for six years with what today would be considered post-traumatic stress disorder. He suffered from chronic physical and emotional pain as a result of his military service and in 1930 had lost most of his disability pension when, in the wake of the stock market crash, Congress made sweeping budgetary cuts, which significantly reduced benefits to disabled veterans.

  Yes, Schmidt should have been the perfect recruit for FNG; but he wasn't. Schmidt was a loyal and patriotic American. He was a member of the Americanism Committee and one of the city's several veterans organizations, the Disabled American Veterans of the World War (DAV). Schmidt was committed to the nation's defense, even as he carried the emotional scars, physical disabilities and financial wounds from his World War I service.

  On Aug. 17, 1933, Schmidt went over to FNG headquarters on South Alvarado Street to check out the group. There he met FNG gauleiter Robert Pape, Herman Schwinn and bookstore co-owner Paul Themlitz. Schmidt then submitted his first written report on FNG to fellow Americanism Committee member Leon Lewis. Using code name "11," Schmidt described what he learned about Friends of the New Germany to Lewis. FNG's mission, Schmidt reported, was to fight communism. FNG leaders, he wrote, "show[ed] me plenty of literature proving without a doubt that Communism was part of the Jewish plan of things and that therefore we must all combine to show the Jew as the author of all our troubles in America and throughout the world." Pape told Schmidt that the purpose of FNG was to drive Jews and Catholics out of government in the United States and replace them with German-Americans. Pape told Schmidt that he was confident that, once in power, German-Americans would lead the movement to bring Hitlerism into America.
  German American Bund meeting, 1935
  German American Bund meeting, 1935
  CRC Papers

  Pape was concerned that veterans misunderstood Friends of the New Germany. He told Schmidt that recent resolutions passed by the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) and the American Legion denouncing Nazism were misguided and misinformed. FNG was committed to defending Americanism and fighting communists, Pape told Schmidt. FNG wanted to ally with American veterans against their common enemy. Pape encouraged Schmidt to bring some of his American Legion and VFW friends to FNG's next membership meeting to help forge new friendships, and he invited Schmidt to speak at the meeting. Schmidt agreed to both requests.

  Schmidt returned to 902 S. Alvarado St. a few days later with his wife, Alyce. They dined at the Alt Heidelberg restaurant. The ambience and the food, Schmidt wrote in his reports, were reminiscent of the old country. The Alt Heidelberg was decorated in the style of an old German beer hall. Dinner there was a Depression-era bargain: three courses for 60 cents and beer for a nickel. The restaurant attracted an older German-American crowd, but lately, a rowdier, younger crowd of pro-Nazi German nationals had also been frequenting the place.

  During the dinner, Alyce got up and left the table to find the powder room. Making her way up the stairs to the second floor, she was stopped by a woman who was agitated to find Alyce on the landing.

  "Verboten!" Alyce was told. Alyce turned around and went back downstairs to her table.

  Schmidt wrote that he had the distinct impression that there were secrets on the upper floors: "I am sure they have arms and equipment someplace. If it is in the house, I will know it soon."

  Schmidt's early visits to FNG convinced him that Friends of the New Germany was no friend of democracy. He related his early observations to the Disabled American Veterans post commander Captain Carl Sunderland and DAV state adjutant Major Bert Allen. Both men agreed to join Schmidt in his undercover investigation of L.A.'s Nazis.

  Sunderland accompanied Schmidt to lunch at the Alt Heidelberg a week after Schmidt's first visit, in early September, to meet with bookstore owners Themlitz and Hans Winterhalder. At the end of the meeting, Sunderland was convinced that the Nazis were smart, systematic and dangerous: "You know, Schmidt, when you first brought me down here, I thought you were playing a joke on me, and when I first met these guys, I thought it was all kid's play. Now I'm convinced that if they ever find you out, they are going to massacre you so that your own mother wouldn't know you. These fellows are covering up an awful lot and I surely would like to get to the bottom of this matter."

  Sunderland went on: "Such a mob has no place in the United States. These men are not only out to drive the Jews from their public positions and destroy their properties but also they would not stop at starting any kind of trouble in this country which would serve their purpose. ... The[se] Nazis are not just against Jews. ... [They are] out to overthrow the United States."
  Anti-Hollywood handbill, 1938
  Anti-Hollywood handbill, 1938
  CRC Papers

  Socializing with FNG officers proved as informative as attending FNG meetings. Alcohol loosened them up. They shared more with their new American friends than they probably should have concerning the secret political objectives of their organization. One evening in late September 1933, the DAV volunteers learned about FNG's plans for der tag, "the day" when the Nazi revolution would begin in the United States. Sunderland, the Schmidts, and the Allens, with their wives, went out with Winterhalder and two FNG officers for an evening of drinking, dancing and political conversation to the Loralei Restaurant, a German-American beer hall patronized by Nazis. According to reports filed by all three DAV informants, FNG was training a private militia to foment a Nazi-led insurrection in the United States. The plan called for FNG to incite unrest among American workers to hasten a communist insurrection, whereupon FNG and veteran allies would come to the rescue, "consolidat[ing] and march[ing] in military phalanxes to take the government."

  "The kikes ... run this country," stormtroop commander Diederich Gefken told his new DAV friends. Jews, Gefken asserted, were responsible for the rotten deal vets were getting, and he was confident that American veterans were ready to vindicate themselves just as German veterans had done. He told Sunderland, "Thousands of stormtroopers in the U.S. were ready to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with U.S. veterans when the time came ... to help them take back the government from Communists and Jews." The uprising would start in cities where FNG was most active, like St. Louis, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, and then spread across the country. Within two weeks of the insurrection, Protestant churches in the United States, led by the Lutheran Church, would launch a boycott of Jewish businesses. "That will take care of the 'Goddamn jews [sic].'"

  Gefken, Pape and Schwinn also were eager to infiltrate the Los Angeles National Guard as part of their preparation for der tag. They peppered Schmidt with questions: How many Jews were in the U.S. armed forces? How many men were in the local National Guard? Would the National Guard be loyal in an uprising that targeted only Jews? Gefken and his friend Zimmerman were particularly eager to infiltrate the machine-gun company of the California National Guard to learn the American system of military training firsthand. Pape wanted to get into the National Guard to learn telegraphy. Could Schmidt get FNG men into key National Guard units in Southern California so that they could propagandize from within?

  FNG had orders to secure the blueprints for the National Guard armories in San Diego and San Francisco. Gefken asked Sunderland if he could get the floor plans of the Southern California armory and of the National Guard aircraft unit in San Diego. Several FNG members had already joined the National Guard in San Francisco, Gefken reported, and had acquired the floor plan of the Northern California armory, which showed the precise storage location of munitions, supplies and weapons in the building.

  Sunderland asked Gefken how FNG planned to acquire more arms. Gefken replied, "Well, it is difficult to smuggle them into the United States on ships. Ships have to go through the [Panama] Canal, where their cargo is checked. Guns can be smuggled in from Mexico and Canada. All stormtroops have personal weapons, but we've been instructed not to carry them in public because that would violate resident alien laws. When the zero hour comes, we will not hesitate to bring them out." In reporting this conversation, Sunderland reminded fellow Americanism Committee member Lewis that the movie studios had explosives. He recommended that background checks be conducted on German studio workers and that the studios take steps to secure their explosives.

  Schmidt, with Lewis' assistance, proved his worth to FNG officers. Informing the National Guard's commander about the new recruits, Schmidt arranged positions for Gefken and Zimmerman in the machine gun company of the Southern California National Guard. Unfortunately, neither Gefken nor Zimmerman was admitted: Gefken because he had false teeth and Zimmerman because he could not promise to be punctual to drills because of his day job.
  Nazi salute in court, Los Angeles Times, January 1934
  Nazi salute in court, Los Angeles Times, January 1934
  Los Angeles Times

  FNG's Aryan Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles also was critical to the political preparation for "der tag." To passersby, the store was just a shop that specialized in books on National Socialism. In reality, the shop was a front for Nazi headquarters in Los Angeles. Many of the books, magazines and newspapers sold at the shop were published in Germany by the Ministry of Propaganda and exported to America to cultivate Nazism in the United States. The anti-Semitic content in this literature ran the gamut from rabid Jew-bashing to more subtle analyses of both contemporary events and world history that disguised their anti-Semitic agenda in the cloak of "academic scholarship." Schmidt found orders to Pape from New York on managing the shop: Bookshop personnel were all to be educated in National Socialism and were required to have read Mein Kampf. All bookstore personnel were to be American, and women were to do all the selling.

  The back rooms of the Aryan Bookstore in Los Angeles housed the headquarters for Friends of the New Germany. Schmidt's pencil drawing of the store's layout showed the shop's small retail space in the front, with a door that led to the back workroom and several private offices for FNG leaders. Schmidt's daily reports indicated that the back rooms often were busier than the retail space. FNG leaders used the offices to conduct daily business, responding to correspondence from New York, planning their next public rally, and receiving a parade of local allies including German vice consul Georg Gyssling and leaders of domestic right-wing groups the FNG was courting. Schmidt noted that the doors to the offices were padlocked when they were not in use. Alyce Schmidt, who did most of her work for Pape in the reading room, listened in on backroom conversations and reported what she heard to Lewis of the Americanism Committee.

  A few weeks after John Schmidt submitted his first report to Lewis on Friends of the New Germany, Lewis called Red Squad captain William "Red" Hynes and asked to meet him. Hynes was in a hurry when Lewis called but told Lewis to meet him in front of the captain's office at the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce building, and Lewis could walk with him to his appointment at police headquarters. Lewis walked the few blocks from his office to the Chamber of Commerce building to meet Hynes. This was not the first time the two men had met. For several months, Lewis and Hynes had been sharing notes on Nazi activity in the city — literally. Hynes shared police reports with Lewis and allowed him to copy them. Lewis, on the other hand, had secured private funding to pay for Hynes' undercover man. As the two men walked briskly toward police headquarters, Hynes told Lewis that he did not have the funds to continue paying agent "M" anymore. "It will cost us $150 per month in salary plus expenses to maintain this operation," Hynes told Lewis, "and we just don't have the money right now."

  Lewis told Hynes that he had discussed the matter with Irving Lipsitch, president of the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles. Lipsitch and Lewis had decided that Lewis, along with an unnamed local merchant and two other Jewish attorneys, would get Hynes the money he needed. "But, I'd rather that 'M' stay on your payroll," Lewis told Hynes. "I do not wish to have any direct dealings with a private detective."

  "I don't blame you," Hynes replied. "And, of course," Lewis assured him, "there would be a piece of change in it for you, too." "That would be fine," Hynes said.

  Was the "piece of change" that Lewis promised Hynes a bribe? Possibly. The LAPD was notoriously corrupt. It is possible that Lewis' offer of "a piece of change" was simply Lewis playing politics the way politics was played with the Red Squad. There is no further mention of payoffs to Hynes after this meeting. Hynes remained helpful to Lewis until the reform-minded mayor Fletcher Bowron disbanded the Red Squad in 1938.
  Gastube Restaurant, Deutsches Haus, Los Angeles
  Gastube Restaurant, Deutsches Haus, Los Angeles
  CRC Papers

  On March 13, 1934, a parade of cars carrying studio heads, directors, producers, screenwriters and actors rolled past Hillcrest's unmarked stone gates at 10000 W. Pico Blvd. on the edge of Beverly Hills. The minutes of the meeting, found in the Los Angeles archive, list the attendees, which included top studio executives and filmmakers from MGM, Columbia Pictures, Paramount Studios, RKO, Universal Pictures and United Artists.

  The dinner guests took their seats around the banquet table, where they found copies of the anti-Semitic Silver Shirt newspapers, Liberation and The Silver Ranger. Both papers viciously attacked the Jews of Hollywood as enemies of Christian America. The Silver Ranger was published right in Los Angeles, and both were distributed nationally.

  After dinner, the group adjourned to a meeting room, where Leon Lewis reported on the behind-the-headlines details of the recent local court case that Lewis and his DAV colleagues had engineered to exposed Nazi activity in Los Angeles. Lewis told his audience that the veterans who had testified at the trial had infiltrated FNG under his guidance.

  "We knew that the evidence regarding Nazi activity was not properly admissible," Lewis told his guests, but the judge had allowed evidence into the record anyway for the sake of the publicity the trial would attract.

  Lewis went on to explain that the undercover operation had cost him $7,000. Lewis told the moguls that in order to maintain this "anti-defamation work," their financial support was required. Lewis proposed that a full-time publicity man be hired to work in the tradition of the Anti-Defamation League to fight Nazism in the city. This would relieve Lewis of the task and allow him to return to his law practice, which "had been shot to hell" in the previous six months because of the investigation.

  His dinner guests were attentive. The Jewish executives of the motion picture industry did not need a primer on the implications of Nazis in Los Angeles or on the implications of anti-Semitism for themselves. They had been in the crosshairs of anti-Semitic attacks for more than a decade from Protestant and Catholic groups concerned that motion pictures, in the hands of "former pants-pressers and button-holers," presented a direct threat to American virtue. In fact, just six months earlier, Catholic Church leaders had organized a nationwide protest against the industry and threatened a national boycott of motion pictures if the Jews of Hollywood did not capitulate to a production code written by, and monitored by, the church's chosen representatives. At a meeting with the archbishop of Los Angeles in 1933, the church's lay representative, attorney Joseph Scott, warned the moguls that "the dirty motion pictures they were making, along with other invidious activities on the part of the Jews, were serving to build up an enormous case against the Jews in the eyes of the American people." Scott reminded them that certain groups in America were sympathetic to the Nazi purpose and were organizing to attack Jews in America, and that "what was going on in Germany could happen here."

  Scott's warning may have been ringing in their ears that night at Hillcrest as they discussed Lewis' proposal. Rabbi Magnin, Judge Roth, Marco Hellman and Irving Thalberg all spoke up in support of the proposed program. Louis B. Mayer was emphatic about continuing the operation: "There can be no doubt as to the necessity of carrying on, and I for one am not going to take it lying down. Two things are required, namely money and intelligent direction. It [is] the duty of the men present to help in both directions."
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  Following Mayer's comments, MGM producer Harry Rapf moved that a committee composed of one man from each studio be appointed. Each studio selected a representative, resulting in a studio subcommittee: Irving Thalberg (MGM), Harry Cohen (Columbia), Henry Henigson (Universal), Joseph Schenck (20th Century), Jack Warner (Warner Bros.), Emanuel Cohen (Paramount), Sol Wurtzel (Fox) and Pandro Berman (RKO). The members of the new Studio Committee publicly pledged to support the fact-finding work for one year. Thalberg committed MGM to $3,500. Emanuel Cohen committed Paramount to the same amount and promised to speak to Jack Warner about a similar pledge. Universal pledged $2,500, and Berman promised that RKO would contribute $1,500, pointing out that RKO had only eight Jewish executives. The smaller studios — Fox, 20th Century and United Artists — each pledged $1,500. Phil Goldstone and David Selznick were asked to raise $2,500 each from agents and independent producers. In less than an hour, Lewis had secured $22,000 in pledges. The studio committee itself met monthly to review the content of any production that might exacerbate the rising tide of anti-Jewish sentiment in the United States.

  The threat of Nazism catalyzed the wealthiest Jews of Los Angeles to political action. Beginning in March 1934 and continuing through the end of World War II, the Los Angeles Jewish Community Committee convened every Friday to hear reports from informants on escalating Nazi activity in the city and to deliberate on their response.

  It took Lewis six long months to secure the funding. In doing so, he bridged a social chasm between the city's Jewish community and an unlikely political partner, the city's veterans, and transformed those former soldiers into "Hollywood's spies."

  Excerpt adapted from Hollywood Spies: The Undercover Surveillance of Nazis in Los Angeles by Laura B. Rosenzweig (published September 2017), with permission from New York University Press. © 2017 by New York University.

• San Francisco Book Review
  https://sanfranciscobookreview.com/product/hollywoods-spies-the-undercover-surveillance-of-nazis-in-los-angeles/
  Word count: 241

  Hollywood’s Spies: The Undercover Surveillance of Nazis in Los Angeles
  We rated this book:

  $29.95

  For much of the twentieth century, bigots and paranoid idiots have claimed that a massive Jewish conspiracy lurks in the shadows, manipulating events and undermining all free societies. Although all of that is nonsense, there is one real Jewish conspiracy that deserves some attention. It wasn’t massive, but it was hugely important.

  It was the LAJCC’s efforts to track and expose the actions of Nazis in the United States during the 1930s.

  Hollywood’s Spies chronicles the work of brave, clever, and patriotic veterans and local Jewish residents who took it upon themselves to prevent German agents from recruiting Americans and pushing the Nazi agenda. The Los Angeles Jewish Community Committee conducted surveillance, gathered evidence, and pushed for greater government involvement in stopping this sinister, brutish threat.

  It’s a remarkably poignant and timely revision of pre-WWII history, given the racist undercurrents being mined for political gain these days. Hollywood’s Spies is a story of ingenuity, bravery, and, above all else, dedication to the idea that people can make a difference.

  Just beware of the title, since the book is about spies in Hollywood. It’s not like Eddie Cantor and Errol Flynn were conducting covert ops.
  Reviewed By: Glenn Dallas
  https://sanfranciscobookreview.com/product/hollywoods-spies-the-undercover-surveillance-of-nazis-in-los-angeles/

• Moving Image Archive News
  http://www.movingimagearchivenews.org/hollywoods-confrontations-with-nazism/
  Word count: 4620

  Hollywood’s Confrontations with Nazism

  posted December 16, 2017

  By Peter Monaghan

  What did Hollywood do, when Nazis came calling?

  Efforts by Nazis and their fellow travelers to influence Hollywood during the decade before World War II – in some regards successful — have long occupied historians of the period, resulting in numerous studies.

  Two new books have in recent months joined that parade, and have cast fresh light on an enormous controversy that arose in 2013 when two other books appeared that dealt with Hollywood’s confrontation with Nazism.

  Ross and Rosenzweig’s books both use this image, from the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles’s Community Relations Committee Collection. It shows a celebration of Adolf Hitler’s birthday in Los Angeles, 20 April, 1935, at the Deutsches Haus Auditorium.

  Issued since August 2017 have been Hollywood’s Spies: The Undercover Surveillance of Nazis in Los Angeles, by Laura B. Rosenzweig, an independent scholar (NYU Press, August), and Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America by Steven J. Ross (Bloomsbury Publishing, October).

  Both deal with little-known, brave efforts in 1930s Los Angeles to combat the rise of home-grown and imported Nazism in Hollywood, the city surrounding it, and the United States, generally.

  The two 2013 books had a related, but broader focus. Both The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler (Harvard University Press), by Ben Urwand, and Hollywood and Hitler: 1933-1939 (Columbia University Press), by Thomas Doherty, delved into the way Hollywood studios interacted with Nazi leaders in Germany, where the studios had substantial pre-War distribution investments, and also how they dealt with Nazi diplomatic officials and home-grown fascists in the United States.

  How, in short, did Hollywood portray Nazism and anti-Semitism, if it did?

  All four authors have attempted to come to grips with a troubled and troubling period in which hate groups sought to gain an American foothold, in part by pressuring Hollywood. Home-grown agitators, as well as German consular officials in Los Angeles, were intent on scaring Hollywood away from adverse depictions of the Third Reich, whose grotesque persecutions of Jews and others were rising.

  In Germany, governmental efforts to suppress popular film’s disparagement of the gathering tide of fascism had begun after Lewis Milestone’s 1929 film version of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front. Its Berlin screening late in 1930 outraged Nazi Party sensitivities; at the behest of Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, brown-shirted thugs rioted against the film, charging that its portrayal of German soldiers was an affront. German censors quickly banned it. In 1932, the German government passed a law designed to suppress anything like it, anywhere in the world.

  In The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler (Harvard University Press), Ben Urwand, a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows, claimed that in the 1930s, Hollywood studio heads effectively collaborated with American Nazis and consular representatives of the German Nazi political movement. His claim was particularly contentious because many studio heads had been Jewish. In its heated critical reception, the key question became: What exactly was Urwand claiming the relationship was?

  He claimed that in sharp contrast to what he called “a common idea about Hollywood, one that has been recycled in dozens of books — namely that Hollywood was synonymous with anti-fascism during its golden age,” Hollywood studios had in fact been rather cozy with the German government, throughout the 1930s. “Like other American companies such as IBM and General Motors, the Hollywood studios put profit above principle in their decision to do business with the Nazis,” Urwand wrote.

  Urwand based his reading on extensive searches in numerous archives including German state archives in Berlin; there, he found letters from the German offices of the Hollywood studios to German authorities that, he wrote, “adopted a fawning tone; one even included the sign-off ‘Heil Hitler!’” The takeaway from German and American archival materials, for Urwand, was that a word studios and Nazi authorities used, “collaboration” – “Zusammenarbeit” — best characterized Hollywood-Nazi relations. “The studio heads,” he wrote, “who were mostly immigrant Jews, went to dramatic lengths to hold on to their investment in Germany. … These men followed the instructions of the German consul in Los Angeles, abandoning or changing a whole series of pictures that would have exposed the brutality of the Nazi regime.” In fact, he claimed, Hollywood produced no overtly anti-Nazi film until the likes of The Mortal Storm, released in 1940, about refugees from Nazi Germany. He noted that even in that film, those refugees are only vaguely identified as Jewish. That, he says, was an ellision that typified Hollywood’s muted response to Nazism, during the 1930s.

  Urwand’s conclusions, which included that studio bosses’ attempts to bring their profits out of Germany indirectly financed the German military build-up, have met with a good deal of criticism and correction.

  To understand why many film historians have challenged Urwand, it is well to consider the social conditions of the America of that time, and of Hollywood.

  In the economic imbalances that led up to the Great Depression of 1929, and in the social upheaval that ensued, a variety of American fascist groups attracted membership in Los Angeles as elsewhere in the country. Pro-Nazi groups such as Friends of New Germany (from 1936 called the German American Bund) attributed the Wall Street Crash of 1929 to the same concocted villains as European Nazis were targeting. Also spewing Nazi, fascist, and anti-Semitic invective were various other groups, of varying size and influence, such as William Dudley Pelley’s Silvershirts, Father Charles Coughlin’s Christian Front, the American Warriors, National Copperheads, the 100,000-strong readership of the monthly The Defender of “The Jayhawk Nazi” (Gerald Burton Winrod), and the longer-established Ku Klux Klan, as well as such cousins as The Militant Christian Patriots in Great Britain.

  In the American context, fascist hatred would find a target in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, which from 1933 to 1938 sought to correct the disruptions of the 1920s. Roosevelt tried to help the millions of struggling unemployed, farmers, youths, and elderly, and to regulate more closely the U.S. banking and monetary systems; but in the fevered minds of far-right ultranationalists, that translated to a global conspiracy headed by Jewish bankers and business moguls.

  While the membership of the Bund and similar groups may never have exceeded several thousand in the United States, their activities garnered attention. At the Bund’s headquarters in L.A., the Deutsches Haus, and at the city’s Hindenburg Park, named for the German president from 1925 to 1934 who had appointed Adolf Hitler as German chancellor, the Bund held numerous rallies and other events, including celebrations of Nazi invasions of European neighbors. The influence of Nazism was felt across the United States, and the infatuation was sufficient that, for example, swastikas could unabashedly be displayed on the streets of Los Angeles.

  Little wonder, then, that Nazis found some receptive listeners at “patriotic assemblies” for one of their claims: Jewish Hollywood was corrupting America’s young, not coincidentally by employing many Jewish immigrant directors who had fled Germany as Nazism rose, such as Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, and Max Orphuls.

  In the addled isolationist brains of American Nazis, the bizarre notion readily formed that Jewish movie executives, including the heads of six of the seven largest studios, were members of a conspiratorial “Jewocracy.”

  Propaganda-obsessed Nazi leaders in Germany believed that Hollywood provided key insights to American culture and society, and that controlling it was crucial to reception of their own actions. Hitler held nightly screenings of Hollywood films. He was, as Urwand relates, so smitten with the features that he could be inspired to proclaim new laws based on what he saw in them.

  It stood to reason, then, that Nazi leaders believed that Los Angeles was crucial to their propaganda agenda. And they could see that the city, as much as any in the United States, was fertile ground for their deceptions. In 1933, Hitler and Goebbels dispatched a diplomat, Georg Gyssling, to Los Angeles to serve as the regime’s overseer of the film industry. He became, in Urwand’s account, the man Hollywood film studios kowtowed to, doing his bidding throughout the buildup to war in Europe. Urwand argued that the Jewish studio chiefs, directors, and screenwriters, far from conspirators in some vast left-wing, New World scheme, as local Nazis claimed, were in fact collaborators with German Nazi Party plans to keep anti-Nazi messages from popular films. Urwand deduced from a search of many archives in the U.S. and Germany that the studios, along with compliant actors, were so intent on profits and market stability that they consistently acceded to cuts, edits, rewrites, and other alterations — this was not a novel historical finding, but one that greatly excited his speculation.

  A key issue, for detractors of Urwand’s reading of the history, has been whether Gyssling was effective in having studios do the Third Reich’s bidding, and how much of studios’ certainly muted portrayal of the rise and evil of European Nazism resulted from other forces. Those would have included the unprofitability of films with political messages, the wish to sustain profitable German distribution operations as Nazism took hold but with an uncertain outcome and longevity, and the need to safely manage eventual withdrawal of studio personnel from Germany once the Nazi conflagration became undeniable.

  One factor in Hollywood reality weighed more than any other, several critics of Urwand’s theories have argued: the enormous power of the industry’s own censorship arrangements.

  In 1930 the infamous Hays Office — the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America — promulgated a moral code for films, with a Production Code Seal of approval that Hollywood studios could not afford to snub.

  The infamous Joseph I. Breen

  Joseph I. Breen, the L.A. enforcer of the Hays Code, took to his role with a vengeance. Among the stipulations of the Code he particularly insisted on was a half-voiced ban on criticizing other countries: “The history, institutions, prominent people, and citizenry of all nations shall be represented fairly.”

  In Breen’s mind, this admonition took a bizarrely contorted form — but one that, again, was in keeping with currents of his day. In a 1936 memo, he issued a characteristic caution to a Hollywood producer, Sol Lesser: “Because of the large number of Jews active in the motion picture industry in this country, the charge is certain to be made that the Jews, as a class, are behind an anti-Hitler picture and using the entertainment screen for their own personal propaganda purposes. The entire industry, because of this, is likely to be indicted for the action of a mere handful.”

  Breen, a Catholic zealot who wielded his power so effectively that he became known as “the supreme pontiff of picture morals,” was certainly an anti-Semite bigot. He dressed that up in feigned concerns for how anti-Nazi films might provoke dire repercussions for Jews in Europe, and in the United States. But, describing Hollywood in a 1932 letter to Wilfrid Parsons, a friend and priest who was editor of the Jesuit weekly America, he wrote: “People whose daily morals would not be tolerated in the toilet of a pest house hold the good jobs out here and wax fat on it. The vilest kind of sin is a common indulgence hereabouts and the men and women who engage in this sort of business are the men and women who decide what the film fare of the nation is to be. You can’t escape it. They, and they alone, make the decision. Ninety-five per cent of these folks are Jews of an Eastern European lineage. They are, probably, the scum of the scum of the earth.”

  In 1933, Gyssling, the Nazi’s Hollywood envoy, approached Breen to object to the planned making of film agent Al Rosen’s independent The Mad Dog of Europe from Herman Mankiewicz’s script about the Nazi persecutions of Jews. Gyssling objected to whichever unfavorable projects he could. But how to view studios’ generally shying away from such projects was hotly debated, in the wake of Urwand’s charges that it stemmed from “collaboration” in the usual sense of that word. New Yorker film critic David Denby was so appalled by Urwand’s spin that he wrote two long articles claiming Urwand had indulged in “recklessly misleading“ “scholarly sensationalism,” abetted by Harvard University Press. He called on the press to issue a revised edition, believing the original needed comprehensive fact-checking and a good deal more perspective.

  Denby faulted Urwand for apparent unfamiliarity with much of the extensive previous research and writing on Hollywood’s encounter with Nazism. He said Urwand had mischaracterized the Hollywood studios’ actions in part from ignorance of “Hollywood history and manners,” of how things were done, and why, in the enclave.

  “I Was a Captive of Nazi Germany,” from 1936, was unusually overt among 1930s films in its reference to the Third Reich. It dramatized the imprisonment in Germany of Isobel Lillian Steele, on charges of espionage and treason. It was not a major-studio product, but rather was produced by a company created to produce the film, Malvina Pictures, which the Los Angeles German Consul, Georg Gyssling, tried to persuade the Hays office’s Joseph I. Breen to shut down. Gyssling also threatened repercussions to the film’s actors. Breen eventually granted the film a Code seal on the grounds of “technical conformity to the Production Code.”

  Like many of Urwand’s detractors, Denby faulted him for reading history from a later perspective — for failing to allow sufficiently, for example, that studios could hardly have known that Nazism was leading towards a new world war. He says Urwand, “writing in the shadow of the Holocaust, which few people in the mid-thirties could have imagined, recasts every act of evasion as the darkest complicity.”

  Then there was the Hays Office’s stipulation about criticizing other nations. Its ironic result, Denby wrote, was that “the more cruel and irrational the Nazis got, the safer they were from any Hollywood dramatization of their actions.”

  In a time of widespread anti-Semitism in America, Denby wrote, the studio heads took the many hints, subtle and not, and “acted as if all their power and their personal wealth could be taken away if they made a mistake.” In that America, “there was no room for the kind of Jewish characters and actors who had appeared in the silent and early-sound-period movies — the ghetto dwellers, the Yiddish dialogue comics, the Jewish boy in the first sound film (from 1927), The Jazz Singer, who turns his back on the Lower East Side and assimilates into American society.”

  Yes, Denby conceded, “the studio bosses fell into the trap that they had allowed men like Gyssling and Breen to set for them. Because they were Jews, they believed, they couldn’t make anti-Nazi movies or movies about Jews, for this would be seen as special pleading or warmongering.”

  The studio bosses, Denby concluded, “negotiated, they evaded, they censored their creative people, they hid, they schemed to preserve their business in the future. They behaved cravenly. But they did not collaborate.”

  In effect, Denby wrote, Urwand had reached “extreme conclusions” that missed the complexity of “the half-boldness, half-cowardice, and outright confusion that marked Hollywood’s response to Nazism and anti-Semitism.”

  Major academic disagreements sometimes arise due to revolutionary takes on existing evidence, or discoveries of new evidence; Urwand was convinced he had found plenty of the latter, and accomplished plenty of the former.

  But major academic disagreements just as often involve matters of faith — faith that one’s own perspective is not to be disbelieved. Conclusions far afield of accepted ones, especially when proclaimed loudly and aggressively — in the case of Urwand’s claims, with a public-relations campaign provided by Harvard University Press — typically attract not just close inspection but also a good deal of collegial disdain.

  Indeed, critics have lined up to question Urwand’s read, even when allowing that his scouring German and American archives turned up some new information.

  Doherty’s cover features “The Song of Songs” (1933) because its star, Marlene Dietrich, “the most famous German actress on the planet,” became “toxic to the Nazi system” when she left Germany for Hollywood. Doherty writes: “Though a picture of Aryan beauty, Dietrich was not a fair-haired model of Kinder, Küche, und Kirche, the Nazi motto relegating a women’s place to children, kitchen, and church.” An official statement rebuked her “scandalous behavior” in “The Song of Songs”: “With all severity, we must take exception against the fact that an actress of German origin … continues to play the role of a hussy in all her pictures.”

  Thomas Doherty, a professor of American studies at Brandeis University who earlier in 2013 had published Hollywood and Hitler: 1933-1939 (Columbia University Press), with his own take on the events Urwand covers, denounced Urwand’s slant, as Denby had. He told the New York Times: “The word ‘collaboration’ in this context is a slander. … You use that word to describe the Vichy government. [One studio boss] Louis B. Mayer was a greedhead, but he is not the moral equivalent of Vidkun Quisling.”

  In his own book, Doherty emphasized film makers and organizations that rallied to oppose Nazi infection of American life — groups like the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League for the Defence of Democracy — at the same time as he is careful not to praise too fully: “The motion picture industry,” he writes, “was no worse than the rest of American culture in its failure of nerve and imagination and often a good deal better in the exercise of both.”

  Doherty’s previous books had included Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930–1934; Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture; and Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration. Critical reception of Hollywood and Hitler held that it was balanced, nuanced, and written from a deeply researched sense of the period, as well as from a judicious reading of the trade papers he relied on most in the case of his latest book.

  Much praise related to Doherty’s account of how “commerce and censorship colluded” to dampen Hollywood responses to rising Nazism, so that Nazis are generally absent from Hollywood films of the period, as are Jews. Doherty shows, Rochelle Miller wrote in the academic journal Film & History, that Breen, far more than Gyssling or any Nazi agent, actively or effectively vetted Hollywood films — such was Breen’s enforcement of “all nations shall be represented fairly” that “American films were initially more inclined to pass the stringent, and often bizarre stipulations of Goebbels’ Reich Ministry of Popular Entertainment and Propaganda that issued certificates and import permits for release in Germany.”

  By contrast, many reviews have faulted Urwand for missing the trees for a forest of his own fertile conception. The authoritative blogger Self-Styled Siren, for example, cites numerous overtly or covertly anti-Nazi films of the 1930s that Urwand ignored. (What make that particularly ironic is that Urwand watched 400+ Hollywood films of the period, often four or five a day, to gauge their Nazi-related content.) Urwand has been found lacking in many regards, from accuracy on details, to substantiation of many claims, to overall thesis. (See, for example, Pogorelskin and Bennett.)

  Steven J. Ross, a professor of history at the University of Southern California, explains in Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America that Jewish-led studios, and in fact all American Jews during the 1930s, found themselves in a vise in the United States of that time. The country was so pervasively anti-Semitic that it is little wonder, as Doherty wrote in his book, that Jewish film moguls were hesitant to risk being branded as provocateurs if they made films that incited their fellow citizens to rush to war in Europe. Indeed, even in 1941, isolationism — like anti-Semitism — still was so pervasive that some members of the U.S. Senate felt empowered to launch an investigation into allegations of Hollywood warmongering.

  Ross, like Laura B. Rosenzweig in Hollywood’s Spies: The Undercover Surveillance of Nazis in Los Angeles, focuses on a specific aspect of American film’s encounter with domestic Nazism. Both show how Leon Lewis, an attorney, ran a spy operation in which military veterans and their wives, habituated to handling fear, were able to infiltrate many Nazi and fascist groups in Los Angeles, often rising to leadership positions.

  Lewis and his colleagues brought to the attention of the FBI and other agencies, organizations, and journalists that Nazis were, for example, plotting to kill Jews in Los Angeles and to sabotage military installations. Their plans included hanging or shooting dozens of prominent L.A. and Hollywood figures who were Jewish or anti-Nazi, including Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Charlie Chaplin, Louis B. Mayer, and Samuel Goldwyn. They also hatched a plot to machine-gun as many Jews as possible on the streets of L.A.’s Jewish neighborhoods, all with assistance from Nazi-sympathizing L.A. cops. They set up a training school in Los Angeles to indoctrinate unemployed German-Americans, many war veterans, in the beliefs of Nazi National Socialism.

  An item from the Cal State Northridge collection: The Anti-Nazi News (subtitled “A Journal in Defense of American Democracy”) was a publication that the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League published from October 1936 to February 1940, to alert the public to local Nazi activities.

  Ross, a professor of history at the University of Southern California whose Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics (Oxford University Press) appeared in 2011, writes in his new book that he found details of the plots in such archived documents as the papers of Joseph Roos, who worked alongside Leon Lewis, and left his papers, including a memoir, to U.S.C. (Ross used the Edward G. Robinson archival collection at U.S.C. to prepare his 1999 account of Robinson’s anti-Nazi activities, some with the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, in his Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics.)

  The history of the efforts of Lewis, Roos, and colleagues was, Ross told the New York Times, “what every historian dreams about: an important story no one has ever told before.” In fact, the story had, to a degree, been told before, just not in such detail. Among material both Ross and Rosenzweig relied on was a large collection of documents held at California State University at Northridge, and the institution has been publicizing its collection, and its implications, for decades including through a 1989 exhibition.

  The Northridge collection, and now the books by Ross and Rosenzweig, show that Jewish community leaders mounted a spirited response to monitor, catalog, and inflitrate Nazi and anti-Semitic groups during the 1930s. The Los Angeles Jewish Community Committee launched as a special defense organization led by 40 influential Jewish-community leaders from such organizations as the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee; it later changed its name to the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles, Community Relations Committee. The Northridge collection holds records detailing the committee’s efforts to combat prejudice and to educate the public through cooperation with both Jewish and non-Jewish groups, from its formation in 1933 through to the early 1990s. Leon Lewis led the organization until 1946.

  Rosenzweig relates in Hollywood’s Spies: The Undercover Surveillance of Nazis in Los Angeles that the Los Angeles Jewish Community Committee — the first such resistance committee in the country during the 1930s — sent its reports on seditious activities to Congress, the Justice Department, the F.B.I., and the Los Angeles Police Department. Her book’s purposes, she writes, include to alert readers to a little-reported instance of organized Jewish resistance to the threat of Nazism in the United States. Resistance projects grew up in several major American cities, but the L.A. activities are less covered in histories of the period, which tend to concentrate on East Coast activities. Yet the L.A. historical records are rich, she says. The JAJCC papers include files on hundreds of anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi groups. Presenting the group’s response, she writes, should create a rounder historical account, one that balances bravery and resistance with the more often-reported fear and caution that, for example, led Jewish leaders to reject boycotts and public protests for fear of being labeled provocative, themselves. “Historians conclude that American Jewish political agency in the 1930s was shaped by fear,” she writes.

  With barely a reference to Urwand’s spectacular claims, Rosenzweig addresses their thrust: Her focus, she writes, “brings the Jewish executives of the motion picture industry into the narrative of American Jewish political culture in the 1930s.” For decades, she writes, historians searching for evidence of the moguls’ political opposition to Nazism, finding little documentary evidence, have turned to the movies themselves. She continues: “Some historians, disappointed with what they deem a paucity of films dealing witht he problem, conclude that the studio executives did not do enough to combat Nazism, either at home or abroad. Domestic and international censorship guidelines notwithstanding, these historians argue that the moguls were either too greedy or too indifferent to stand up to Nazism.” (Here, Rosenzweig’s endnote makes her sole direct reference to Urwand’s claims.)

  Were it not for the movie moguls, she writes, the LAJCC would not have been established as early as it was, nor been as effective. The movie executives provided the resistance effort with money, leadership, and strategic political support. A “Hollywood branch” of studio representatives headed the industry’s involvement. It did so at a time when German Nazi Party leaders were actively fomenting attacks on American Jews as part of a policy of seeding the globe with Nazism.

  As Ross writes in his book, the activities of Nazis in Los Angeles had some bizarre and chilling outcomes. As early as 1934, Nazi sympathizers among studio foremen, for example, fired so many Jewish employees that many studios had become almost completely “pure” in the Nazi conception of Aryan superiority.

  When Leon Lewis informed studio heads of this, the moguls ponied up to allow Lewis to run his operation — to recruit more spies, and earn for himself, among American Nazis, the title of “the most dangerous Jew in Los Angeles.”

  One irony of his research, Ross told the New York Times, is that it revealed that Georg Gyssling, one of the arch-villains of Urwand’s interpretation of events, was in fact a sort of double agent. Ross says that Gyssling, after being sent to L.A. by Hitler and Goebbels in 1933, secretly worked to subvert Hitler by passing information about German economic and military vulnerabilities to U.S. Army intelligence. He ended up working with American diplomat and spymaster Allen Dulles to negotiate the surrender of German forces.
  Tags: Ben Urwand, Georg Gyssling, Hays Code, Hays Office, hitler, Hollywood, Joseph Breen, Laura Rosenzweig, Nazis, Production Coda, Production Code Seal, Steven Ross, The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact with Hitler;Holly and Hitler: 1933-1939, thomas doherty
  Categories: Features • Of Special Interest
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• Timeline
  https://timeline.com/nazi-hollywood-spies-rosenzweig-6adf8a3c9a46
  Word count: 1422

  Daring anti-Nazi crusaders infiltrated groups of American fascists in 1930s Hollywood
  Historian Laura B. Rosenzweig’s new book explores the story
  Called as witness before the Special House Committee investigating Un-American activities, investigator John Metcalfe gives a Nazi salute before taking the stand. Having infiltrated the German-American bund under the pseudonym “Helmut Oberwinder,” Metcalfe testified to the organization’s secret relationship with the Nazi government in Germany. (Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images)

  “When you buy a shoe lace, refuse to take it if it was made in Germany!” author Lewis Browne urged the 3,000 people packed into the Philharmonic Hall in downtown L.A. in July of 1933. They were there for an anti-Nazi rally, organized by a consortium of 46 Jewish organizations. Browne, a writer, had just returned from Germany, where Hitler had been appointed chancellor six months prior. “The Nazis will not last under such economic pressure,” Browne said, encouraging those assembled to boycott even the most trifling German-made objects.

  The anti-Nazi gathering in L.A. was a smaller echo of the massive protests that dotted the country in the months following Hitler’s appointment. In March of 1933, a protest in New York City’s Madison Square Garden drew over 55,000, with crowds overflowing out of the venue and choking the city streets. A national Jewish boycott of all things German was underway, and with increasing fervor Jewish leaders were calling on their constituents to take the threat of Nazism seriously. “The time for prudence and caution is past. We must speak up like men,” said Rabbi Stephen Samuel Wise, then acting president of the American Jewish Congress. “It is not the German Jews who are being attacked. It is the Jews.”

  They couldn’t have known at the time that 1933 was just the beginning of one of the most horrifying chapters in human history. And while the worst of its horrors would be confined to Europe, Nazi groups were sprouting up in the U.S. too — fueled in part by the desperation and discontent of the Depression — and preaching a message far more violent and hateful than the garden variety anti-Semitism to which American Jews had become accustomed. In a new book, Hollywood’s Spies: The Undercover Surveillance of Nazis in Los Angeles, historian Laura B. Rosenzweig surfaces the largely untold story of the Nazis in America and Jewish efforts to battle insurgent Nazism at home. Rosenzweig points out that we tend to think that the rising tide of Nazism in the 1930s was confined to Europe, and attention to the wartime energies of American Jews has focused primarily on the efforts of East Coast Jews to help their imperiled brethren abroad. But fascist sympathizing and anti-Semitic sentiment were gaining ground in the U.S. at the same time, at the strategic encouragement of the Germans themselves.

  Anti-semitic sentiment was prevalent throughout the U.S. in the early 20th century, and representations of Jews in literature and, particularly, in the nascent film industry, did little to dispel popular stereotypes of Jewish people. According to a 1913 piece in Moving Picture World, “Whenever a producer wishes to depict a betrayer of public trust, a hard-boiled usurious moneylender, a crooked gambler, . . . a depraved firebug, a white slaver or other villain of one kind or another, the actor is directed to represent himself as a Jew.” A majority of Americans believed that “Jews had too much power in America,” according to two 1938 polls, one conducted by Fortune magazine.

  In spring of 1933, when LAPD Captain William “Red” Hynes received a report that “considerable quantities” of Nazi literature were circulating in downtown LA, he sent an officer to a public meeting of the Friends of the New Germany (FGN), a new local group. The report he got back confirmed his fear that Nazism had indeed come to California. FGN had converted an old mansion into a German American Hall and opened an Aryan bookstore. They played phonograph recordings of German marches at their meetings and talked about eliminating Jews from power. Perhaps most importantly, they were in contact with similar groups from cities all over the country, and with the Germans themselves.

  In the following year, amid suspicions that a retired Marine Corps general was leading a complicated fascist plot to overthrow President Roosevelt, the McCormack-Dickstein Committee was convened to investigate. For the authorities involved, like LAPD Captain Hynes, the hearings and the committee’s findings seemed to effectively halt pro-Nazi activity. The committee’s final report to Congress in 1935 made recommendations for legislations limiting foreign agents’ entrance into the country, one of which would become law. The Los Angeles Jewish Community Committee (LAJCC), along with national organizations like the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Congress, supported congressional efforts to stamp out Nazism at home. According to Rosenzweig, the LAJCC was such an important contributor to the congressional investigation that it “emerged as a new American Jewish voice in Washington.”

  Jewish groups saw the conclusion of the McCormack-Dickstein Committee hearings as proof that the Nazi network in America had been effectively disabled. But the FGN came back even stronger in 1935. In September of that year, they planted an anti-Semitic flyer inside of tens of thousands of copies of the Los Angeles Times. The flyer was titled “The Proclamation,” and it claimed that Jews, a “nation within a nation,” threatened the fabric of American society. That was when Jewish leaders began to realize that in order to understand and diffuse the threat posed by these groups, Jews and their allies had to go undercover.

  Rosenzweig chronicles in great detail the fascinating unfolding of efforts to infiltrate these operations. In particular, she tells the story of Neil Ness, an American engineer who became a secret agent in the German American Bund, uncovering the group’s connections to Berlin. As Rosenzweig writes, “Pro-Nazi newspapers, books, and pamphlets were written in English in Germany for an American audience by thirdparty publishers licensed by the German government. The materials were wrapped in unmarked packages and shipped to German propaganda agents around the world on German tourist ships” that regularly arrived at American ports, supplying agents with a steady stream of pro-Nazi material. In Los Angeles, the shipments arrived multiple times a month. “The Bund reprinted this literature under its own name to eliminate all traces of its German origins and then distributed it across the country to its domestic right-wing allies. Domestic groups, in turn, “Americanized” the Bund’s materials for their own newsletters and publications,” writes Rosenzweig. In his testimony to the Dies Committee (part of the House Un-American Activities Committee), Ness also claimed the group was plotting terrorism, saying, “We frequently discussed plans for blowing up water works, dock and munitions plants. We had a hundred men on whom we could depend to paralyze the Pacific Coast.” They discussed these plans in Bund meetings, he said. Ness continued spying through 1936, though he later said he was “nauseated” by the work. Others would take his place up until 1941, when the United States joined the war.

  Hollywood’s Spies tells a story mostly missing from American history books. Against the notion that American Jews were consumed by concern for European Jewry — or alternately, weren’t particularly concerned during the 1930s — Rosenzweig shows that in addition to the coordinated response of national Jewish organizations, local groups were establishing street-level community defense groups throughout the 1930s to combat the domestic spread of Nazism, and individuals were willing to risk everything to expose the insidiousness of the Nazi threat. Above all, Rosenzweig sheds light on the dark interplay of political forces — both within and beyond this country’s borders — determined to destroy each other. “There is no end to the outrageous lies they are willing to publish,” Ness wrote of the Bund. “[This is a] game of deep subterfuge, heavy with bait, infested with traps, poisonous with the fumes and stenches of the rats that slink forth from the filth of polluted sewers.”

  This article is part of our White Terror U.S.A. collection, covering the shameful history of white supremacy in America.

  History shapes the world around us — from national elections to cultural debates to marches in cities across the country. At Timeline, we spread knowledge of the past to help shape a better future. If you want to do the same, please share this and other Timeline stories and join us on Facebook and Twitter.

• Reviews by Amos Lassen
  http://reviewsbyamoslassen.com/?p=60038
  Word count: 543

  Hollywood’s Spies: The Undercover Surveillance of Nazis in Los Angeles” by Laura B. Rosenzweig— Jewish Moguls and Nazi Resistance
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  Rosenzweig, Laura B. “Hollywood’s Spies: The Undercover Surveillance of Nazis in Los Angeles”, (Goldstein-Goren Series in American Jewish History), NYU Press, 2017.

  Jewish Moguls and Nazi Resistance

  Amos Lassen

  Most of us are unaware that the Jewish moguls in Hollywood established the first anti-Nazi Jewish resistance organization in the country in the 1930s. In April 1939, Warner Brothers studios released “Confessions of a Spy”, the first Hollywood film to deal with the Nazi threat in the United States. The film starred \Edward G. Robinson and told the story of German agents in New York City working to overthrow the U.S. government. As the film played, those who watched it were made aware of the dangers of Nazism in this country and they were encouraged to defend themselves against the rising tide of Nazism. While this was the first film to deal with the issue, it did not bring about the awakening of the film industry but it was a start. “Hollywood’s Spies” is the story of those Jewish moguls in Hollywood who paid private investigators to infiltrate Nazi groups that were operating in Los Angeles and in doing so; they established the first anti-Nazi Jewish resistance organization in the country. Author Laura B. Rosenzweig did extensive research and went through more than 15,000 pages of archival documents. The result is this book and a compelling narrative that shows the role that Jewish Americans played in combating insurgent Nazism in the United States in the 1930s. The Los Angles Jewish Community Committee was the organization that the moguls founded but it was forced undercover by the anti-Semitic climate of the decade. It partnered with organizations whose Americanism was unimpeachable; such as the American Legion to channel information regarding seditious Nazi plots to Congress, the Justice Department, the FBI and the Los Angeles Police.

  For so long there was the belief that American Jews lacked the political organization and leadership to assert their political interests during this time but we learn that the LAJCC was one of many covert operations funded by American Jews that were designed to root out Nazism in the United States. The efforts by Jewish Americans tried to infiltrate pro-Nazi organizations in Los Angeles at that time.

  Rosenzweig raises important questions about American Jewish political activism in the years that led up to the Holocaust. We see that there indeed was Berlin-sponsored pro-Nazi activity in America and that it was the LAJCC that worked hard to defend us against their activity. Rosenzweig carefully documents the Los Angeles Jewish Community Committee’s undercover surveillance (which was extensive) of hostile groups in Southern California. We get a brilliant analysis of its impact on national perceptions of the domestic pro-Nazi menace. Bu making us privy to this, we gain a new dimension to our understanding of American Jewish responses to anti-Semitism. Here is a story that has been virtually unknown and it is fascinating. The LAJCC findings that are quoted surprise us when we learn of how extensive and active pro-Nazi groups were in Southern California.

• Jewish Book Council
  https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/book/hollywoods-spies-undercover-surveillance-nazis-los-angeles
  Word count: 681

  Hollywood's Spies: The Undercover Surveillance of Nazis in Los Angeles
  Laura B. Rosenzweig

  NYU Press 2017
  320 Pages $29.95
  ISBN: 978-1479855179
  amazon indiebound
  barnesandnoble

  Review by Edward Shapiro

  Laura B. Rosenzweig, an independent scholar, has transformed her doctoral dissertation into an important monograph. Her well-written and copiously documented volume, based on previously untapped primary sources, is a revisionist study in at least two respects. Firstly, previous studies examining the threat posed by American Nazis during the 1930s have focused on New York City, Boston, Chicago, and other major cities in the East and Midwest. Rosenzweig makes a convincing case that the most effective campaign waged by American Jews against the Nazis, either locally or nationally, actually occurred in Los Angeles. This campaign also helped establish the city “as a new site of Jewish political influence in the United States.” Today metropolitan Los Angeles has more Jews than anywhere else in the United States, with the exception of New York City, and Rosenzweig’s book is another indication that writing the history of the Jews of Los Angeles has come of age.

  Secondly, while several scholars have recently accused the Hollywood moguls of appeasing Nazi Germany due to fears of an economic boycott of their films, Rosenzweig balances the picture by showing that, at least when it came to homegrown Nazis, the Hollywood movie world was not passive. Instead it exhibited “an instance of American Jewish political agency in the 1930s that was shaped not by fear but by courage.” The moguls, along with actors, directors, producers, screenwriters, and others involved in the entertainment industry funded the anti-Nazi campaign in Los Angeles, including such luminaries as Pandro Berman, George Cukor, Sam Jaffe, Ernst Lubitsch, Joseph Mankiewicz, Louis B. Mayer, Leo Rosten, David Selznick, Dore Schary, Irving Thalberg, Walter Wanger, Jack Warner, and Eugene Zukor.

  Leaders in the film industry were active members of the Los Angeles Jewish Community Committee. The LAJCC, founded in 1934, was the first American anti-Nazi Jewish resistance organization. Its activities included infiltrating private investigators into the local Nazi groups, and then communicating their findings to Congressional committees and the Los Angeles police. According to Rosenzweig, the LAJCC--not the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, or local Jewish organizations--was the most important source of information for other Jewish organizations, churches, the press, veterans’ groups, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the American military on the insurgent Nazi threat. Particularly important in this respect was the newsletter of the LAJCC’s News Research Service. The NRS, Rosenzweig notes, “elevated the LAJCC to a level of national political influence unmatched by any of the other community-based American resistance organizations in the 1930s.”

  Hollywood’s Spies would have been an even better book had the story of the LAJCC been put into a broader context. While it is understandable that Los Angeles Jews were horrified by the local Nazis, how important were they in the great scheme of things? They were a noisy and loathsome group, but there is no evidence, except in their own eyes, that they were significant, either in Los Angeles or elsewhere. The Nazis had only a couple of hundred followers in Los Angeles, they never won any elections, they failed to attract any significant financial support, and they had no presence within the city’s political, social, and economic elite. Despite their anti-Semitic threats, the local Nazis, as Rosenzweig notes, these “never amounted to anything more than boisterous disruptions of antifascist political meetings and isolated incidents of vandalism”. They were even disdained by the local Ku Klux Klan chapter for being an un-American instrument of a foreign country. It was a kiss of death for any American politician during the 1930s to be associated with pro-Nazi Americans, and even Berlin realized that they were an embarrassment. The febrile response of Los Angeles Jewry to the local Nazi menace was, in fact, more indicative of their own insecurity than of any “heroism” or “courage.”

• Los Angeles Review of Books
  https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/hollywood-los-angeles-spies-and-the-underground-battle-against-hitler/
  Word count: 2111

  Hollywood, Los Angeles Spies, and the Underground Battle Against Hitler

  By Chris Yogerst

  OCTOBER 23, 2017

  THE GERMANS TRIED to destabilize the United States government in the 1930s, and founded groups like Friends of New Germany (FNG) and the Silver Shirts to sow internal discord. But a counterintelligence ring in Los Angeles infiltrated these groups and helped bring them down. Their leader, Leon Lewis, was said to be “feared more than the entire FBI put together,” but he has largely remained unknown, mainly because his work was so discreet and effective. He is the spymaster who remains in the shadows.

  Lewis rightfully predicted that his agents could best hinder the Nazis by working in secret. His men were able to foil plots before they got off the ground, and there were no dramatic stand-offs or shootouts. Lewis was not always believer in the ponderous gathering of courtroom evidence through surveillance; he thought it best to never allow a Nazi plot to develop past the planning stage. Lewis would risk dumping information and exposing his spies only when it could permanently damage a hate group.

  The story of this courageous anti-Nazi espionage — based in Los Angeles, no less — has been recounted in two new studies: Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America by Steven J. Ross and Hollywood’s Spies: The Undercover Surveillance of Nazis in Los Angeles by Laura B. Rosenzweig.

  In the early 1930s, fascist groups began to reach out to disgruntled World War I veterans (one-third of them resided in Southern California) who felt like they hadn’t received their promised benefits. While the population in Los Angeles was climbing, so was the poverty rate. In addition, a large portion of Angelenos began following nationally known hatemongers like radio personalities Gerald B. Winrod and Father Charles Coughlin, whose program had a reach of 14 million. Also on the rise: A fascist organization known as the Silver Shirts, headed by former Hollywood screenwriter William Dudley Pelley.

  The popularity of fascism led Pelley to run for president in 1936, forming his own party only to get shellacked. Six years later, Pelley would land a 15-year stretch in prison for sedition. Pelley wasn’t the only concern, as the soul of Los Angeles was in jeopardy of being taken over by any number of radical leaders hoping to prey on those eager to belong in a city quickly becoming a melting pot.

  Identity was also a concern for Hollywood, which became a booming industry over the previous decades and drew a wide range of newcomers to the city. Many of the studio’s founders were immigrants from Europe. The film studios migrated from New York to Southern California as a way to dodge Thomas Edison’s patent attorneys and to enjoy weather that allowed for year-round filming. Assimilating into the United States culture was not easy for many of the Jewish moguls who worked to keep their faith under the radar of rising anti-Semitism. By the 1930s the West Side of Los Angeles had a large Jewish population, including the Hillcrest Country Club in Beverly Hills — one of the only safe places for Jews to meet in the area. For these Hollywood Jews, the desire to belong to their heritage as well as a newfound identity as an American was an inner struggle for many in the film industry.

  No one was more aware of the rising threat to Jews in Los Angeles than Leon Lewis. His law office on 626 West 7th street was only blocks away from several fascist hangouts for groups like the Silver Shirts, American Warriors, American Nationalist Party, and the KKK. Lewis recruited a team of volunteers from the Los Angeles Jewish Community Committee (LAJCC) to keep an eye on them.

  Lewis had been involved in faith-based causes before: he worked for the Anti-Defamation League, founded B’nai B’rith Magazine, and helped create the Hillel Foundation to help Jewish kids on college campuses.

  His first spy, John Schmidt, was both a former German military cadet and former US Army captain. Schmidt had a perfect background to fool Nazi sympathizers as a disgruntled veteran, though he had to keep a tight lid on his feeling that Nazis “ought to be lined up against the wall and filled full of lead.”

  Schmidt, along with his wife Alice, joined the Friends of New Germany (FNG) in 1933 and quickly gained the confidence of the pro-Nazi crowd. Schmidt regularly hung out at the Deutsches Haus, a mansion on 634 W. 15th street, which held the Aryan Bookstore and was a FNG hub of activity full of anti-Semitic books and magazines. They quickly learned that the FNG was a pro-Nazi paramilitary outfit.

  Alice Schmidt was invited to become a secretary at the Aryan Bookstore, where she “typed key documents, overheard key conversations, and then went home and typed reports to Lewis on what she had observed.” Lewis gathered proof that the FNG’s real agenda was to help take over the United States. Germany sent regular orders through the ranks to get maps of armories and to dump anti-Semitic pamphlets in highly populated areas (commonly referred to as “snow storming”).

  Lewis arranged for two other spies (Bert Allen and Carl Sunderland) to “betray” John Schmidt so that he could testify against the FNG and expose their real motives. But crucially, it wasn’t a criminal case. Lewis arranged a civil suit that would pit several German organizations against the FNG, which could in turn allow Lewis to call Schmidt to testify on his findings. Motivated primarily by publicity, the courtroom proceedings were heavily covered in the papers and made the Nazi conspiracies in Los Angeles public in spectacular fashion.

  On the fifth day in court, Schmidt was listening to another testimony when a man sat down next to him. “We’ll kill you Schmidt, you son of a bitch,” he said before leaving the room. It was clear that Lewis’s work was far from over.

  Lewis knew regular funding would be a major hurdle, and turned to his friend Mendel Silberberg, who mined his Hollywood contacts and organized a gathering at the Hillcrest Country Club for dozens of the film industry’s most powerful figures. Attendees were shown copies of Liberation and Silver Ranger, venomous anti-Semetic publications made and dispersed by Silver Shirts that attacked Hollywood Jews. Warner Bros. and MGM soon chipped in thousand of dollars. MGM co-founder Louis B. Mayer appointed a committee to oversee continued financing of Lewis’s work, which included Emanuel Cohen, Jack Warner, and Harry Rapf. Radio star Eddie Cantor and Warner Bros. stars Paul Muni, Al Jolson, and Edward G. Robinson sought funding from actors and actresses around town.

  German conspirators were not the only problem. Los Angeles Police Captain Jesse Hopkins and Los Angeles County Sheriff James Foze were both suspicious of Jews and felt they were all communists. Each man made anti-Semitic comments to Lewis employee Robert Carroll, such as Foze saying “all Jews ought to have their nuts cut out and kicked out of the city.” Communists, rather than Nazis, were the law enforcement obsession of the day. The newly formed House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) put their focus largely on Reds.

  By the mid-1930s, anti-Semitism was mainstream in the United States. In September 1935, Los Angeles Times readers opened papers to an anti-Semitic flyer titled “The Proclamation.” The flyer pushed for a boycott of all things Jewish: “BUY GENTILE! EMPLOY GENTILE! VOTE GENTILE.” Three years later, Hollywood residents saw a flyer announcing, “Hollywood is the Sodom and Gomorrah where international Jewry controls Vice-Dope-Gambling,” and “where young gentile girls are raped by Jewish producers, directors, [and] casting directors who go unpunished.”

  Rosenzweig cites a national poll from Fortune magazine that showed up to 65 percent of respondents felt “Jews had too much power.” During the 1930s, pro-Nazi propaganda was distributed in major cities. As my own research shows, the first Hollywood blow to Germany occurred in April 1933 when Warner Bros. pulled their product from the lucrative foreign market in protest. However, the Jewish-run Hollywood studios still had difficulty making films that even mentioned Jews.

  One man who made this difficult was Georg Gyssling, the German consul to Los Angeles, who played a complicated role. He had been sent to Los Angeles in 1933 by Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels to pressure the film industry into making German-friendly films. Any film that presented Germans in a negative light would not be imported to Germany, a lucrative market for Hollywood films. But he was no lover of the Nazi Party himself, and he outsourced most of the dirty work to an American.

  The Production Code Administration (PCA) hired the anti-Semitic Joseph Breen as their attack dog. Breen was a perfect useful idiot for the Nazis, a passionate Catholic who felt Hollywood Jews were “the scum of the Earth.” Using the PCA rules against defaming other nations or religions, Breen could get the studios to bend.

  Not even HUAC could continue to ignore the Nazi presence in Los Angeles. One of Lewis’s top spies, Neil Ness, told the committee in October 1939 that he had infiltrated the German American Bund and went with him to shipyards to pick up flyers, money, and orders from Germany. Now on the national stage, the German American Bund was declared by Ness “an arm of the German government.”

  The late 1930s also saw the rise of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League (HANL), a group destined to connect with Lewis. And they fought using the powerful celebrity of Hollywood elite players like Eddie Cantor and John Ford, and by regularly broadcasting anti-Nazi satire and news through the Warner Bros.’s radio network. While Lewis’s spies worked underground, the HANL members drew massive crowds at events featuring anti-fascist speakers.

  Warner Bros. also began producing more directly anti-fascist films, such as Black Legion, about the rise of Midwestern hate groups, and They Won’t Forget, based on the infamous lynching of Jewish factory owner Leo Frank case. Most prominently, Warner Bros. released Confessions of a Nazi Spy in 1939. The film was the first to formally go after Nazis and its release day, Ross argues, was the day “Warner Brothers Studios declared war on Germany.” The film was a watershed moment for anti-Nazi filmmakers.

  The next year, Charlie Chaplin released the masterful fascist satire The Great Dictator (1940) through United Artists, Fox released I Married a Nazi (1940), and MGM produced the powerful The Mortal Storm (1940). For isolationists in the US Senate, these films were proof that foreign interests in Hollywood were trying to “rouse us to a state of war hysteria.” These accusations led a Senate subcommittee to investigate the film industry; movies were not then considered a protected form of free speech.

  The motion picture propaganda investigations are not new to film historians, but Ross uncovered an ugly new detail. When North Dakota Senator Gerald Nye spoke of Hollywood and read the names of several moguls to the crowd, Louis B. Mayer, Adolph Zukor, Jack Warner, and so on, an audibly intoned “Jew” could be heard after each name. As an admirer of Nye, Joseph Goebbels couldn’t have been happier.

  The anti-Semitic rhetoric of these investigations shows how prominent and passionate the isolationist movement was. Harry Warner gave an impassioned defense to the Senate, arguing that their new films were no different than their previous films — each production mirrored the world in one way or another. Wendell Willkie, an attorney for the film industry, went as far to write Nye a letter detailing that the accusations of his committee had no legal bearing.

  The investigations were ultimately dissolved in the aftermath of December 7, 1941, when the United States had the next World War at its Pacific doorstep. By then, Lewis had helped the LAJCC land a powerful roster of sympathetic executives from MGM, Warner Bros., RKO, and Paramount Studios, and the Nazi influence on Hollywood had been broken for good.

  Hitler in Los Angeles and Hollywood’s Spies expose a buried story about underground plots waged by Nazis against major Hollywood figures as part of a plan to win over the United States. The quiet heroism of Lewis and his allies is a too-long-neglected tale about the power of volunteers and activist citizens to make a difference in frightening times.

  ¤