- 07/07/2025
Fritz Julius Kuhn was a German emigrant who stylised himself as Hitler's deputy in America in the 1930s. Neither Hitler nor the FBI could stop him. In the end, a love affair brought him down - but how?
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00:00Taking this film was dangerous work.
00:06Much of it is badly lighted and uneven.
00:09But I have this film here, and I would like to show it to you.
00:22Ladies and gentlemen,
00:25fellow Americans,
00:27American patriot.
00:36This is Madison Square Garden in New York City,
00:39and not Berlin nor Nuremberg.
00:47They'd never seen anything like it in New York.
00:49They were estimated to be 100,000 people out there.
00:521,700 police officers in total.
00:57It was the largest police presence at any event in New York until 9-11.
01:02That's how big this thing was.
01:04It really looked like a smaller version of trying for the will.
01:11The people in the hall are supporters of the German-American Bund.
01:23At the head of the organization is a man named Fritz Julius Kuhn.
01:26Kuhn is this figure who kind of comes out of nowhere,
01:33much in some ways as Hitler does in the 1920s in Germany.
01:36Steps out of nowhere and becomes the leader of this political faction.
01:39You all have heard of me through the Jewish-controlled press,
01:42as a creature with horns, a cloven hoof, and a long tail.
01:56Fritz Kuhn was at the apex of his power.
01:58He thought he was now the Fuhrer of America.
02:07It seemed like a dangerous movement that was happening.
02:09It seemed like a Nazi movement was happening in America.
02:13Ladies and gentlemen, our national anthem.
02:40The Fourth of July is America's most important holiday.
02:50It celebrates America's declaration of independence against Great Britain
02:53and the American Revolution.
02:55And this in many ways is the most sacred American holiday from a civic perspective.
02:59And it's a day when Americans often do things like barbecue and drink beers together.
03:03It's sort of the ultimate expression of American patriotism.
03:06So on the Fourth of July, 1937, the German-American Bund decides that this is a holiday that they can use for their own purposes.
03:24At this point, the German-American Bund is only a year old.
03:34It's founded in 1936, and it's a very rapidly growing organization.
03:43We don't really know how many people are directly involved in this organization,
03:46but there's evidence that there's tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Americans that are interested in what it has to say.
03:56The speeches on this date are not about George Washington and the American Revolution necessarily.
04:01They're about praising Hitler.
04:03And calling upon German-Americans to have a closer sort of mental relationship with the changes taking place in Germany.
04:13This minority will be able to move mountains.
04:17And that is just what our Jewish friends wish to prevent.
04:21They know that the German-American element is justified to claim political representation in our government.
04:27And that the day will come no matter who stands in our way.
04:37At this point, Fritz Kuhn is 41 years old.
04:40He has been the head of the Bund for a year.
04:43He styles himself its Fuhrer.
04:45So historically speaking, we don't know many facts about his life, but we know the story he wants to tell about himself.
04:59Fritz Kuhn was born on May 15, 1896 in Munich, one of several children.
05:05During World War I, he enlisted in the German army.
05:08He claims to have served in a machine gun regiment that wins the Iron Cross for heroism in battle, although the battle that he claims to have won it in seems to have changed over time, according to his own account.
05:22Fritz Kuhn claims after the First World War, he becomes a member of what we might call the far-right milieu of the time.
05:33So he claims, like many veterans, to have joined the Freikorps in Munich, this far-right, violent organization.
05:39He claims to have brawled on the streets of Munich with communists, very much like many Freikorps members.
05:45He then claims to have been an early member of the NSDAP.
05:49Kuhn claims to have been a close associate of Hitler, and he claims to have actually been present for the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923.
06:03With stories about Hitler's failed coup in Munich, Kuhn presents himself as a fascist hero.
06:10Kuhn tries to actually fashion his method of speaking and actually the tactics he uses directly on Hitler.
06:17He also tries to emulate Hitler's sort of erratic hand gestures and very passionate form of speaking, and you can imagine in an era where, you know, comedy troops like the Marx Brothers and Charlie Chaplin are mocking Hitler.
06:31Kuhn himself becomes the object of ridicule in a lot of people's minds, but I think that's actually overshadowing the real danger that he poses.
06:45The American law enforcement's knowledge of the Bund is pretty limited in 1937.
06:52They're much more interested in communism and communist infiltration of the labor movement.
06:58And so there's this view that the Bund might be kind of an object of scorn or ridicule, but that perhaps doesn't pose a huge threat.
07:04And that proves to be just a bad mistake.
07:11Unchallenged, the Bundists gather, even on America's National Day.
07:16In the audience that day, on July 4th, 1937, there was a 32-year-old man. His name, on paper at least, is John C. Metcalfe.
07:27This is my father. My father and the people in the Deutsche Markhansa Bund did wear uniforms.
07:38They just weren't quite as military-looking.
07:44Dad wore basically a short tie, a brownish shirt, and black pants.
07:50I know the music. I don't know the words. I don't know the German or American words.
08:16But, I mean, I could hum the whole thing right now if you wanted. I mean, it's embedded.
08:29There was a time during this period that Dad actually took me to a meeting.
08:35There were a lot of flags mixed in, like a mass of flags, of swastikas and the American flag.
08:50Now, I was told always not to say my name to anybody ever.
08:55John Metcalfe took his son with him as a cover.
08:59John Metcalfe is an investigative journalist for a Chicago newspaper, and his entire tactic is to essentially go undercover, to infiltrate the groups and organizations that he is writing about.
09:14This takes an immense amount of courage in the 1930s.
09:16For several decades, John Metcalfe's records from this period lay untouched in the Hoover Library in Stanford, California.
09:31I was one of the first scholars to really, really dig into these notes.
09:39These were one of the most remarkable accounts I had ever seen of what it was like within one of these extremist groups in the 1930s.
09:45I guess my father got into the Bund fairly easily, simply because he spoke perfect German, just like he spoke perfect English, but of course he always spoke perfect German in the Bund.
10:12My father's real name wasn't John Charles Metcalfe, it was Helmut Siegfried Maria Oberventer.
10:22John Metcalfe emigrated from Dresden to America with his mother and siblings in 1914.
10:40John Metcalfe in 1914, at the age of 10.
10:52Before the First World War, 20 million Americans had German roots.
10:57They are one of the most visible immigrant groups, and shape the country's economic and cultural life.
11:02But with the First World War, the lives of German-born Americans in their new homeland change.
11:27People no longer dare to say certain things, they no longer dare to speak German in public, and there was such strong pressure to conform socially.
11:46When dad and his mother and brother and sister came to this country, they still had the name Oberventer.
11:56They decided that at some point they would start using his mother's name, Metcalfe, and thereby avoiding the prejudice that was rampant in this country at the time.
12:11Dad was just totally patriotic. He became totally 100% American, even when he joined the Bund under false pretenses.
12:27As a member, Metcalfe has access to the Bund offices.
12:36The undercover journalist manages to learn more about the so-called Bundesführer.
12:41Fritz Kuhn went to the University of Munich, and he received what was the equivalent of a master's degree in chemistry.
12:57However, Kuhn does conceal one point in his curriculum vitae.
13:01During his studies, he stole coats and wallets from his fellow students.
13:06They arrested him, and he went to prison for about six months or so as a result of this.
13:12When he got out in 1924, his father arranged for him to have a job with Reinhold Spitz, a Jewish clothing manufacturer.
13:22Spitz noticed after some time that the bolts of cloth were coming up short.
13:27So Spitz started looking, and eventually he caught that Kuhn was cutting off sections of the bolts of cloth and smuggling them out of the factory and selling them on the black market.
13:39Now, he faced another prison time.
13:44Kuhn's father went to Spitz and said, please, can you do something? Please have mercy on him.
13:50Spitz, Spitz was generous.
13:52The factory owner not only refrains from pressing charges, but also gives Kuhn money to start a new life.
14:05Kuhn initially tries to move to the United States and is rejected, so he's unable to get a visa to enter the U.S.
14:12He then actually moves to Mexico, so Mexico has much less stringent immigration restrictions in this period.
14:18Kuhn has a plan.
14:23He wants to immigrate to the U.S.A. via Mexico.
14:27I think what's remarkable about Fritz Kuhn is that this is a man who always finds a way to get what he wants, seemingly.
14:33When he encounters an obstacle, he seemingly always finds a way to go around it.
14:36Kuhn's plan works out. In 1927, after three years in Mexico, he immigrates to the U.S.A. with his German wife and their two children.
14:48They move to Detroit. The car manufacturers there place high value on well-educated Germans.
14:59Kuhn applies to the anti-Semitic entrepreneur Henry Ford.
15:03Kuhn got a job working at the Henry Ford Hospital, given his background in chemistry. He got a job working in the x-ray department.
15:13He was one of 400,000 Germans who came to America between 1919 and 1933.
15:22The immigrants before 1918 and those after 1918 differed mainly in their perception of America and democracy.
15:32The pre-1918 immigrants left the authoritarian German Empire to start a new life in liberal America.
15:45They considered themselves Americans. Many fought against Germany in the First World War.
15:50And now in the 1920s and 30s, we have a new wave of immigration.
16:01They see themselves as people who are fighting for Germany's true soul in the place of this sort of liberal regime that they see as being imposed upon them at the Treaty Table of Versailles.
16:12And so these are people that see themselves as more German than Americans in many cases.
16:16These immigrants set up their own cultural and political associations. One group was called Teutonia.
16:29They felt like a vanguard of true German sentiment in a hostile America.
16:41Teutonia had its headquarters in Chicago.
16:44John Metcalf also lived there.
16:52My father decided to do some private investigations just on his own to see what was going on with the German immigrants to this country.
17:04The anti-Semitic factory owner Henry Ford tolerated the sale of Hitler's Mein Kampf outside his factory gates.
17:10The Teutonia members donated the proceeds.
17:13They wanted to honor Hitler, so they pulled some of their money and they sent it to Germany as a birthday gift for Hitler.
17:20He wrote back to them, thanking them.
17:22And he prophesied that he would soon need them.
17:23But we don't really know what Kuhn's involvement with a group like Teutonia is.
17:37We know that he loses his job at the Ford Motor Company because he's apparently practicing political speeches on the clock.
17:42I think here again we see Kuhn biding his time, waiting to see what's going to happen and waiting to make his move.
17:48We know that Hitler's knowledge of the United States is actually pretty limited.
18:04We have to remember that Hitler never visits the US, he never leaves Europe.
18:13Hitler's view of America is divided.
18:16On the one hand, the so-called Jewish threat also emanates from there.
18:21On the other, he admires the racism toward the blacks.
18:24He's impressed by the country's economic power, but at the same time he fears it.
18:30He's seen firsthand in World War I what happens when the US enters a war.
18:36Whatever side the US is fighting on is going to win, simply because of the industrial capacity that it brings to the table.
18:41So Hitler is desperate throughout the 1930s and 40s to keep the US neutral, keep it out of any conflict that's going to emerge.
18:50Shortly after the seizure of power, national socialist minded US clubs, such as the Teutonia, contacted Hitler.
18:57Naturally, the NSDAP was very keen to build up a network of confidence and supporters in the USA.
19:08What Hitler and the German foreign ministry are looking at is the fact that there's 20 million Americans of German-American descent that certainly are a political force to be reckoned with.
19:17Officially, GAU USA is founded, and a new association, Friends of the New Germany, Freunde des Neuen Deutschlands.
19:28Within a very short time, the association has 5,000 members, almost all of them with German passports.
19:35Fritz Kuhn joined the Friends of the New Germany Detroit chapter in November of 1934.
19:42And he had become an American citizen by this point and pledged his loyalty to America.
19:46And as a member of the Friends of the New Germany, he also swears allegiance to Hitler.
19:57Officially, the association is dedicated to cultural work. Its aim is to promote a good image of the New Germany in America.
20:07Keep in mind, at this point, America still was trying to figure out Hitler and figure out, can we work with him?
20:16So, April 1st, 1933, the Nazi party announces a boycott of Jewish shops in Germany.
20:35This is not the type of moderation that many people had hoped Hitler would begin demonstrating.
20:39It also sparks an immediate backlash around the world.
20:41There are Jewish groups that call for boycotts of German shops and the removal of German goods from major department stores, especially in cities like New York.
20:54They're afraid of the members of the Friends of the New Germany because Nazi propaganda is suddenly appearing in U.S. cities.
21:01The Friends of the New Germany are also a distribution network for propaganda, which since 1933 has mostly landed in large quantities, mainly in New York, by the ships of Norddeutsche Lloyd and other German ships.
21:27And it spread from there.
21:36The American government was not pleased.
21:40It felt it was a serious interference in international political affairs.
21:47The U.S. government around President Roosevelt protests in Berlin and threatens diplomatic consequences.
21:53This actually might end up accomplishing what Hitler doesn't want, which is drawing the U.S. deeper into Europe.
22:00It could actually potentially, in the worst case scenario, create the pretext for a war, if Fong begins operating as an American arm of the Nazi party, so to speak.
22:10Hitler reacts and orders that all German citizens must leave the Friends of the Friends of the New Germany.
22:22Berlin and Washington assume that this has solved the problem.
22:25What they believe is that the Nazi party itself has enough authority over its followers to order them to simply cease their activities, and that proves to be just a bad mistake.
22:37So in 1936, the Friends of the New Germany, the surviving chapters, come together in Buffalo, New York to discuss the future of the organization.
22:53Is this group simply going to shut down? Is it going to disappear?
22:55Kuhn saw his chance and decided he was going to film the vacuum.
23:02John Metcalfe is also in Buffalo, and witnesses Kuhn winning over the audience.
23:10He talks enthusiastically about evenings with Hitler and Goering in the Munich-Bürgerbräuer Keller, and claims that he had to leave Germany because, like Hitler, he was politically persecuted.
23:21He has a certain charisma about him that I think, to a lot of Bund members, reminds them of a young Hitler, reminds them of what they potentially have even seen among the young Nazi leadership.
23:36Kuhn has a master plan for the Bund.
23:41Why not make this a German-American organization?
23:44Why not combine the principles of the Third Reich and German heritage with Americanism itself?
23:53Kuhn already has a name prepared, the German-American Bund, America Deutsche Volksbund.
24:00Metcalfe later notes, he came on stage as Fritz Kuhn and left it as an American Fuhrer.
24:06A new life now begins for him.
24:23As the Bundesfuhrer, he moves from Detroit to New York.
24:27This is the era in which tabloid journalism in the U.S. is really taking off in the modern sense.
24:39Fritz Kuhn begins appearing in the tabloids, leaving jazz clubs with all these beautiful women, rumored to be his mistresses, including a former Miss America.
24:47If nothing else, Kuhn is beginning to sell papers for New York tabloid culture.
24:51This, I think, makes him an almost larger-than-life figure in a lot of people's minds.
25:02Kim Mann, Kuhn had a genius for organization and for business.
25:08Newspaper advertisements, donations from Germany, or contributions from companies.
25:14Kuhn makes money this way.
25:16He had members give money from their businesses.
25:19Somebody had to make the uniforms.
25:21This is where the tailors came in.
25:22Somebody had to print their propaganda.
25:24This is where printers came in.
25:26Somebody had to do this.
25:27Somebody had to do that.
25:28So he was able to network all of these people into making the Bund a money-making organization.
25:36As in the NSDAP, the Fuhrer principle also applies in the Bund.
25:41Kuhn calls the shots.
25:43So Kuhn begins combining the outward symbols of Nazism with Americanism.
25:54So rather than heiling Hitler, for instance, they used the term free America.
25:58His trademark was perhaps also the many recreational camps he founded all over the USA.
26:11Not only on the East Coast, but also in California.
26:14Kuhn has life in the camps filmed for promotional purposes.
26:27A majority of the German immigrants lived in cities and maybe in apartment buildings and were of a poorer class than most of the rest of the United States.
26:43So for the German-American Bund members, this was an opportunity to send your children or to send your family to the fresh air of the countryside during the summer and get out of the cities.
26:57Tens of thousands of boys and girls spend their vacations in these camps.
27:06So this is now the heyday of the Bund.
27:08Kuhn is enjoying the power he has gathered.
27:11He's enjoying the fact that he has a nationwide system of camps that he's setting up.
27:15He's enjoying being pictured in the tabloids in New York City.
27:22There's one puzzle piece missing for Kuhn, though, in mid-1936.
27:27What does Hitler himself think about this group?
27:29Kuhn decided that they needed to get the official blessing from Germany in order to continue.
27:48So they decided to go to the Berlin Olympics in 1936.
27:53Hitler's Olympics, as it was known.
27:55Hitler puts on a good propaganda show in 1936.
27:59He tries to meet with as many foreign delegations as possible to humanize himself.
28:05He tries to shake as many hands.
28:07Kuhn takes advantage of this and sets up a meeting with Hitler to deliver him this charitable contribution to the Reich's Winter Help Fund.
28:17Before the agreed meeting, Bundists march along Unterding Linden.
28:23Afterwards, they proceed to the Reich Chancellery.
28:27They were ushered into Hitler's office, Kuhn and some of his top people, and they presented Hitler with a golden book and their donation to the Winter Fund.
28:39And this was to be Fritz Kuhn's shining moment.
28:45Shook hands, picture was taken.
28:48Now what's interesting about this photo is that unlike most of Hitler's photos that are very carefully staged and he strikes a pose, we actually only see half of Hitler.
28:57We only see sort of the right half of his body and it looks like almost a paparazzi-style snapshot.
29:06This is fundamentally a defeat for Kuhn.
29:08Of course, he would have loved to have a staged photo with Hitler or even been presented in some official context as the leader of the future American Reich or something outlandish like that.
29:17But this again, I think, shows Kuhn's marketing genius here.
29:22He has at least some tangible piece of evidence.
29:24He's got a photograph with Hitler.
29:31Kuhn comes back to the United States, runs this across the front page of his newspaper.
29:36Other newspapers, of course, pick this up.
29:39Kuhn claims that Hitler commissioned him to continue the fight in America.
29:44The U.S. government is actually deeply concerned about this.
29:49Meeting with Hitler is certainly a pretty bold move for an American citizen to make, which of course Kuhn is at this point.
29:56The State Department begins investigating Kuhn to see what Kuhn's intentions really are.
30:02There was much anger in Berlin, too.
30:05Diplomats from the Foreign Office are furious.
30:07How could Hitler have allowed himself to be photographed with Kuhn?
30:10Hitler justifies himself saying he did it during the Olympics, as he did with many others.
30:17This does not reassure the diplomats.
30:20What if Roosevelt decides to expel the German ambassador or even potentially start a war over the Boone's activities?
30:28I think there's a great deal of ambiguity in terms of how the Reich reacts to this.
30:33They're not entirely sure what to make of Kuhn.
30:35Is he simply a showboat emulator of Hitler?
30:38Is this a man who has real political influence?
30:44Hitler plays the tactician.
30:46Officially, he's distanced himself from the Bund.
30:49Unofficially, he's allowed high NSDAP functionaries to contact Kuhn.
30:57Kuhn continues to dissimulate.
31:00We don't get any orders or any money from Germany.
31:05We are American citizens and we demand our rights to be American citizens.
31:11They march through the streets of New York with the Nazi flags in goose-stepping, in formation.
31:28All over America, new chapters form.
31:32It looked scary. It was intimidating, which is what they wanted to do. They wanted to frighten people.
31:37John Metcalf also marches on the cover through New York, doing the goose step.
31:52Metcalf has a very abrupt career in the German-American Bund.
31:56And he actually meets Fritz Kuhn himself.
31:58And Kuhn is favorably impressed with Metcalf.
32:00This is a man who knows how to write reports.
32:03Of course, what Kuhn doesn't know is that he's a professional reporter.
32:05He seems to be loyal, as far as the boon can tell.
32:08And so he very quickly becomes Kuhn's right-hand man.
32:14Kuhn's first assignment for Metcalf, he is to visit all the chapters.
32:20Kuhn's idea is that Metcalf is going to provide him with intelligence as to what's going on with these far-flung chapters.
32:25Are they actually buying their uniforms? Are they actually paying their dues?
32:28Are they actually sending their dues to New York?
32:30Metcalf, the undercover journalist, thus gains insight into the world of the Bundists.
32:41What Metcalf very quickly finds is that the Bund is a complete hodgepodge.
32:44There are some membership chapters that apparently don't even bother to collect dues.
32:48There are some that haven't bought the regulated uniforms or have modified them in certain ways.
32:53But Metcalf also discovers that there's a very different set of expectations among Bund members nationwide.
33:04Some chapters are in close contact with other extremist U.S. groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan.
33:09What all Bund chapters have in common is anti-Semitism, anti-communism, and this view that in the future German Americans are going to in some way rise up.
33:21They had something they had that they talked about called Der Tag, which meant the day.
33:33And this would be the day that they would rise up and defeat the Jews in America.
33:37In some places Metcalf finds that the Bund is ready for action immediately.
33:44What Metcalf also hears, and this is what troubles him particularly, is they don't necessarily think that Fritz Kuhn is going to be the man who seizes power.
34:03Rumors are circulating that a famous U.S. American will soon take over the Bund.
34:09Charles Lindbergh, the transatlantic flyer and self-confessed Hitler admirer.
34:16And what Metcalf realizes is the Bund is really the kernel of a future movement. It's not the movement itself.
34:22He sees it as building towards something even bigger.
34:32Metcalf decides to go public.
34:39Metcalf's scoop finally hits in the Daily Time.
34:44So it runs under the headline, Secrets of Nazi Army in USA, by Timesman who joined it.
34:51It's a sensational scoop.
34:54And in the days to come actually, Metcalf's stories get picked up by a ton of newspapers across the country.
35:00This becomes a national story overnight.
35:02After the stories were out, and Dad was out lecturing about his experiences in the Bund,
35:12he was driving to the next town that he was going to give the lecture in.
35:17Somebody shot at him, and it was rapid fire, so we assumed that it was some kind of an automatic weapon.
35:28But it was aimed at the car, and Dad just drove as fast as he could and got away.
35:34Metcalf will not be intimidated. In uniform, he addresses all Americans.
35:43One of the most disturbing things I found in the American Nazi movement was the Hitlerizing of American boys and girls.
35:59He sees that these camps are not all about having a good time in the summer.
36:04He sees children doing hard work, training with weights, being forced to do manual labor.
36:10And the Bund explains this, or he's told by the camp's leadership, that this is about making strong young German.
36:15There was one teenager who was a leader of the girls. Her name was Tilly Koch.
36:27She stood outside the girls' bunks at night. Now, it was cold, and it was rainy.
36:36She caught pneumonia, and they refused to take her to a doctor. They said, no, no, you're a strong German young woman. You don't get sick.
36:44And Tilly Koch died.
36:51The key to Metcalf's articles, I think, is that it wakes Americans up to the fact that fascism can happen on their own soil.
37:01This is not just a European problem or a European phenomenon. There are groups planning it in the United States itself.
37:07The Un-American Activities Committee becomes aware of the Bund and summons Fritz Kuhn.
37:16He claims innocence and complains of being unjustly labeled public enemy number one.
37:22Kuhn was grilled for two days. And at the end, he said, are we done? They said, yes, you are dismissed.
37:33Kuhn stood up and said, gentlemen, it has been a pleasure.
37:37So in the aftermath of this increasing pressure from the U.S. government and from the American public, Kuhn plans his largest demonstration to date.
37:52The Bund rents Madison Square Garden in New York.
37:59Kuhn and his supporters ostensibly want to celebrate George Washington's birthday there.
38:0820,000 tickets are sold in advance.
38:15This will be an event that he believes will propel him to the next level of his own fame and his own political power.
38:22100,000 people gather outside to demonstrate against Kuhn.
38:29He claims that if George Washington, this man who is the founding father of the United States in many people's minds, if Washington were alive today, he would certainly be a Nazi.
38:38We with American ideals demand that our government shall be returned to the American people who founded it.
38:48He talked about President Rosenfeld, Franklin Roosevelt, the secret Jew.
38:52He talked about Jewish influence in the American government since the founding of the country and how awful it was.
38:58But there's another man there, too, whose name is Isidore Greenbaum.
39:01Isidore Greenbaum is a plumber's apprentice.
39:04He's a Jewish American, and he is there really to show his dislike for the anti-Semitic bile that Kuhn is hurling from this stage.
39:13He feels so outraged by these assaults against America's Jews and against the principles of the United States that he feels compelled, he says, to rush the stage.
39:23The O.D. attacked Greenbaum.
39:33They beat him to a bloody pulp.
39:37They were kicking him and hitting him, and his pants got ripped off at some point.
39:42But the police finally grabbed Greenbaum.
39:45Greenbaum is actually booked for disorderly conduct by the New York City Police Department, but the local Jewish and labor community comes together and bails him out.
39:58And there's photos a few days later of him leaving jail and kissing his wife, this sort of newly minted American hero.
40:04When the Greenbaum photos are splashed across most of the major papers in the country the next day, it really becomes this galvanizing moment, I think, where Americans can no longer ignore that this is an organization that is intrinsically violent.
40:22You couldn't get Kuhn on freedom of speech. He had the right to be obnoxious. But there had to be another way to get him. They decided to look at the taxes.
40:34Investigators check the Bund's finances and make a discovery. Kuhn is paying his mistress's private bills from the organization's coffers.
40:44Now they had a case against Fritz Kuhn. Embezzlement. And this is what led to the downfall of Fritz Kuhn. Not his Nazism. Not his obnoxious speeches. He couldn't keep his pants zipped.
41:00On December 6, 1939, Kuhn is sentenced to two and a half years in prison for forgery and embezzlement. This also seals the fate of the Bund. Without a leader, it becomes meaningless.
41:22People in Berlin are relieved.
41:26It's said that Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister, remarks to Hitler that after Kuhn's trial, Kuhn is finished. That his career essentially is over.
41:43Fritz Kuhn is deported to Germany a few months after the end of the Second World War. His American citizenship had already been revoked.
41:56A German civilian court handling denazification initially sentences him to ten years in prison. The sentence is later reduced to two years.
42:06When the sentence is pronounced, Kuhn declares with a grin that he will never found an organization again.
42:12I think Fritz Kuhn was a major threat to the United States.
42:17His combination of the symbols of Nazism and Americanism represented perhaps the boldest attempt of the time to argue that Americans had nothing to fear from Nazism.
42:27He really was, he was the most incongruous threat you can imagine, but he was loud. And he said a lot of scary things. And in America, if you're loud and you say a lot of scary things, people have a way of paying attention.
42:43Fritz Kuhn died lonely and impoverished in Munich in 1951.
42:50The New York Times reported his death as a marginal note only months later.
42:58John Metcalf continued to work as a journalist, consultant and speechwriter.
43:04Years later, I thought I should say something. I was on the phone to my mother and I said, would you do me a favor and tell dad something? Tell him how proud I am of what he's done in his life.
43:23And she did. And then she called me back a few days later and said that he almost cried.
43:53The New York Times
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