Hitler's American Friends: The Third Reich's Supporters in the United States

by Bradley W. Hart

Intervention versus isolationism was the most potent political issue from late 1939 until Pearl Harbor, dividing friends and families against one another in a way that would not again be seen until the Vietnam War era.

Maybe the same issue in different clothes

The entire goal of Nazi propaganda was to encourage apathy and confusion by sowing discord, discrediting the British, and turning Americans against one another.

the Germans were hoping to dissuade the United States government from any action at all. Nazi propagandists could therefore be ham-handed, aggressive, and contradictory in their approaches.

The entire German objective was to sow enough confusion and discord that the American people would grow weary and simply want to check out of the world events.

This was therefore a classic disinformation campaign full of the “fake news” and other distortions a new generation of Americans would again encounter in the 2016 presidential election. In the place of stories suggesting that President Barack Obama was secretly a Muslim from Kenya, Americans in 1940 were told that Franklin Roosevelt was secretly Jewish and had changed his name from “Rosen-feld.”

Nazism had tentacles that touched every American community to some extent. Thousands of people joined groups like the German American Bund and the Silver Legion, marching down American streets in Nazi-esque uniforms, sending their children to Nazi summer camps, and heiling their leaders. Supporters of celebrity radio host Father Coughlin’s Christian Front roughed up Jews on subway platforms and discouraged Americans from shopping at Jewish-owned stores. In the marbled corridors of Washington, DC, a German agent ran an ingenious operation to disseminate shocking quantities of isolationist and pro-German propaganda at taxpayer expense. This twentieth-century version of spam email showed up unsolicited in millions of mailboxes around the country. Business leaders found themselves courted by Nazi envoys who promised huge profits in the Reich if they could only convince Roosevelt to keep out of the war. Students at American universities were caught in the middle of academic freedom battles as anti-Nazi faculty were forced off campus and pro-Nazi groups spread hateful propaganda. Most sinisterly, some Americans were enticed by German military intelligence to offer their country’s secrets to the Reich. There was even a bold plot by Nazi agents and their American friends to meddle in the presidential election of 1940.

“The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact,”

“Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy.… Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the pow...

The only American Hitler admired was industrialist Henry Ford, “not so much as an industrial wonder-worker but rather as a reputed anti-Semite and a possible source of funds.” He also expressed an interest in the Ku Klux Klan as “a political movement similar to his own, with which it might be possible to make some pact, and I was never able to put its relative importance in proper perspective for him.”

I don’t see much future for the Americans. In my view, it’s a decayed country. And they have their racial problem, and the problem of social inequalities. Those were what caused the downfall of Rome, and yet Rome was a solid edifice that stood for something. Moreover, the Romans were inspired by great ideas.… my feelings against Americanism are feelings of hatred and deep repugnance. I feel myself more akin to any European country, no matter which. Everything about the behaviour of American society reveals that it’s half Judaised, and the other half negrified. How can one expect a State like that to hold together—a State where 80 per cent of the revenue is drained away for the public purse—a country where everything is built on the dollar?

Adolf Hitler on America

America First was the culmination of years of Nazi disinformation and propaganda, coupled with the extremism of home-grown fascism.

Whether Lindbergh was actually aware he was occupying this position is uncertain, but there is no doubt that many of his supporters viewed him as the perfect American Führer.

the US government was remarkably slow to respond to the threat posed by Hitler’s American friends and emulators. In fact, for much of the critical 1940–1941 period British intelligence was better informed, and clearer-eyed, about the activitie...

The British embassy in Washington was so well informed about German plots that its officials turned over evidence to American counterparts who often had no idea what was going on under their noses.

Ironically, the FBI’s blindness to the domestic Nazi threat was partially a deliberate choice. Throughout the 1920s the bureau was focused on organized crime, bootlegging, and communist subversion.

I am just as much opposed to Nazism and Fascism as I am to Communism,” Dies told a skeptical correspondent in 1938. “All of these ‘isms’ constitute a different form of dictatorship and I am sure you are just as much opposed to Communism as you are Nazism.”42 He viewed communism and fascism as two sides of the same coin. “I regard Communism to be as dangerous to the liberties of the people as Fascism,” he wrote in 1938. “In fact the lawlessness and violence inspired by Communism in Italy and Germany gave the Dictators an opportunity to seize control of the government. Communism is the forerunner of Fascism.”

Throughout the 1930s, religion underwent a significant change in American life, serving as a bastion of solace for many people who had lost everything in the Depression.

Interesting note on the evolution of christianity from compassion + charity to self interest, mega churches & "prosperity gospel"

Coughlin initially used his program to preach on a combination of the Scriptures and economic issues, and he initially supported Roosevelt. Yet by the mid-1930s he began turning toward classic anti-Semitism and, from there, clear Nazi sympathies.

Beware of all gurus & those who have "followers" the mere existence signifies a lack of integrity of all parties involved

Religion and politics thus went hand-in-hand for Hitler’s American friends, with devastating consequences.

the maintenance of a free, liberal, and democratic society requires diligence and active confrontation with antidemocratic ideas that threaten the very system that allows them to be discussed in the first place.

Throughout the 1930s, a series of demagogic leaders rose to national prominence with religiously based, anti-Roosevelt messages of economic equality and, later, nonintervention in the European war.