Gangsters vs. Nazis: How Jewish Mobsters Battled Nazis in WW2 Era America

by Michael Benson

To put it simply, fascism is the belief that a dictatorial leader is preferable to an elected one because many voters are enemies of the people and need to be oppressed. As a philosophy, it requires a strong leader and a weaker scapegoat. In Germany, Hitler became the dictator and Jews the scapegoat.

The White Camellias were a lot like the Ku Klux Klan, but their members were exclusively landowners. The KKK riders were the guys in the saloon on a Tuesday morning. The White Camellias were doctors and lawyers, newspaper publishers, community leaders, all dedicated to keeping the White race pure.

James said that the Bund was already building youth camps across the nation to indoctrinate the young and that there were plans to build rifle ranges and to train young men in the operation of military-grade weapons.

The instant that the Bund admitted to representing a foreign power, it would lose the protections of the US Constitution.

Before the Civil War, US Vice President John C. Calhoun said that keeping a racial minority down was the simplest way of guaranteeing equality among Whites.

America, Hitler figured, was bound to understand the mistreatment of Jews in Germany because of America’s own history of lynching.

The other topic at that meeting that had been lifted from US history was the notion of manifest destiny, the unwritten law that allowed White men in good conscience to wipe out millions of Native Americans because of the belief that it was manifest destiny that the White man would control North America from coast to coast. Hitler told his followers that the “Americans had gunned down millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousands and now kept the modest remnant under observation in a cage.” America’s actions emboldened Hitler, as he had genocide of his own in mind.

The final Chicago riot of 1938 took place at a hall where Bund members were watching a German movie. Eleven Jews were arrested and scolded, this time by Judge Charles S. Dougherty, who said he “appreciated the motive” behind the attacks but suggested the best way to make the Nazis go away was to ignore them.

Jewish boxers were brave and tough, but they did fear one personage above all others—their mothers. —Mike Silver

We will undermine the morale of the people of America. Once there is confusion and after we have succeeded in undermining the faith of the American people in their own government, a new group will take over; this will be the German-American group, and we will help them assume power. —ADOLF HITLER, 1933

This is the same Eric Sevareid who would become a top reporter and commentator for CBS News, the same man who editorialized on November 22, 1963, that President John F. Kennedy had been murdered by the city of Dallas, a metropolis he called the “City of Hate.”

Asked why she had laughed so loudly, she said, “I laughed because these Nazis were exercising the free speech which one day they would deny everyone.”

Meyer Lansky, the giver of giant gift baskets, lived to be old and was never convicted of anything more serious than illegal gambling. How did he stay out of trouble? Author Anthony Summers wrote that Lansky possessed compromising photos of J. Edgar Hoover and his close aide Clyde Tolson.