Chapter 1 |Nazi Town, USA

♪ ♪ NEWSREEL NARRATOR: In ever-increasing numbers, the nation's youth has been going away to camp.

This year has seen more boys and girls at camp than ever before.

All of them have enjoyed common experiences, common adventures.

♪ ♪ Building muscle, learning fellowship, acquiring camp spirit.

♪ ♪ (rifle shot) ARNIE BERNSTEIN: It looked like any summer camp in America.

It looked normal.

But it wasn't normal.

It was Nazi camp.

In the 1930s, there were these camps all across the country.

SARAH CHURCHWELL: They were indoctrinating centers.

That's what they were for.

As well as for protecting the purity and the health of your superior breed.

HART: The camps were the creation of something called the German American Bund.

The Bund's vision was an America ruled by white Christians, and they thought that Nazism was entirely consistent with American ideals.

RALLY LEADER: My fellow Americans, what would George Washington think and do were he alive today?

Would he not plead with the thinking, the loyal and law-abiding people, the true Christian Americans?

LEAH WRIGHT RIGUEUR: The German American Bund is after power, they're after influence, within the very fabric of the United States.

They want their ideas to become mainstream, and they want people to embrace those ideas.

WILLIAM HITCHCOCK: They were against democracy.

And thought that America would be a kind of star in a constellation of pro-Nazi governments around the world.

♪ ♪ RIGUEUR: We assume that democracy is something that all Americans embrace.

But in the 1930s, there were people in the United States who were ready to try something different.

(crowd chanting) BEVERLY GAGE: In the 1930s, lots of Americans thought the whole social order was about to collapse.

Capitalism, democracy, they were done for, and something else was going to have to come along to take its place.

And a lot of people thought that was going to be fascism.

SINGERS (on radio): ♪ Gave proof through the night that our flag ♪ ♪ Was still there ♪ ♪ O say does that ♪ ♪ Star-spangled banner yet wave?

♪ ♪ O'er the land ♪ ♪ Of the free... ♪ HITCHCOCK: In the 1930s, the largest fascist group in the United States was the German American Bund.

"Bund" simply means organization.

But, fundamentally, this is an American organization.

They believe in a pure nation.

They believe in a strong nation.

They believe that government is best when it is organized in a hierarchical way with a powerful dictator at the top, and that this would improve America.

We have no time, nor excuse, to be idle, so march along with the Bund!

GAGE: The popularity of the Bund showed that there were certain elements of the fascist vision that had real appeal in the United States.

BUND SPEAKER: We have to fight for our rights!

CHURCHWELL: When you look at American fascism in the 1920s and '30s, the outcome of German fascism had not yet happened and was not known.

We have the benefit of hindsight, but Americans at the time didn't know where it was going to go.

(crowd singing) HART: As foreign as this might seem, fascist ideology tapped into some deep historical realities, dark realities, in America.

So the United States was fertile ground for groups like the German American Bund to emerge.

GAGE: The United States in the 1920s is a place of powerful divisions.

It is a place of deep antisemitism and it is a place that has very formal racial segregation.

HITCHCOCK: The separation of races was something that Americans have been doing for centuries, but they've been doing it legally since the end of the Civil War through Jim Crow, the body of laws, as well as habits and customs, that kept white and Black people apart in public spaces.

In fact, the whole structure of racism in America had broad popular support.

GAGE: In the 1920s, one of the biggest organizations in the United States was the Ku Klux Klan, which was not only anti-Black, it was anti-Jew, it was anti-immigrant, and those weren't marginal ideas.

HITCHCOCK: In 1924, five million people were in the Ku Klux Klan, including a couple of dozen senators and congressmen.

The Klan's basic message was a combination of white Christian nationalism combined with family values, which was a message that was appealing to millions of people.

STEVEN ROSS: Father Coughlin, Charles Coughlin, known as the radio priest, every week went on the air to 14 million listeners, basically warning the country that Jews were destroying it.

COUGHLIN (over radio): We are Christian in so far as we believe in Christ's principle of love your neighbor as yourself.

And with that principle, I challenge every Jew in this nation to tell me that he does not believe in it.

(cheers and applause) ROSS: Antisemitism is rife in the United States, and at this point, it's out in the open.

The most famous antisemite in America was probably Henry Ford.

HITCHCOCK: Henry Ford was an inventor, an extraordinary capitalist, but he used his wealth to promote some of the most virulent antisemitic conspiracy theories.

He published a notorious book called "The International Jew," and had it distributed widely around the country.

Millions of people might have heard of this book, but never actually seen it.

Well, Ford took care of that.

CHURCHWELL: At that time, antisemitic and white supremacist ideas were supported by a pseudo-scientific movement that was wildly popular in Europe and in the United States called eugenics.

What is the bearing of the laws of heredity upon human affairs?

Eugenics provides the answer so far as this is known.

Eugenics seeks to apply the known laws of heredity so as to prevent the degeneration of the race and improve its inborn qualities.

CHURCHWELL: Eugenics said that white supremacy was biologically determined and could be proven.

As could the identities of the inferior, you know, so-called inferior races.

It rationalized white supremacism by apparently giving it a scientific basis.

Laws were based on these ideas.

RIGUEUR: In 1924, the United States passes the Johnson-Reed Act, which puts a quota system on people immigrating into the United States from Europe.

Under this new law, roughly 90% of them are going to come from northern European countries; a.k.a., white.

(man shouting commands) ROSS: All this led right wing groups like the German American Bund to believe that they would actually have a receptive audience in America.

Because, look, Americans had cast themselves as a white nation.

(cheers and applause) RALLY LEADER: We are decidedly not preaching un-Americanism or anything basically new.

We have an Asiatic exclusion act, Jim Crow laws, and a complicated system of immigration quotas differentiating even between the various white peoples.

It has then always been very much American.

(cheers and applause)