Newly Released Footage Shows 20,000 American Nazis Rallying At Madison Square Garden

BY JAKE OFFENHARTZ IN ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT ON OCT 18, 2017 10:51 AM

{I can't link the video just yet.}

Back in August, following the deadly violence carried out by white supremacists in Charlottesville, we spoke with historian and author Arnie Bernstein about the time that 20,000 Nazi-supporting Americans staged a "Pro American Rally" at one of the old Madison Square Garden locations, at Eighth Avenue and West 50th Street. Organized by Fritz Kuhn, leader of the influential German-American Nazis group known as the Bund, the 1939 gathering also prompted some 100,000 angry New Yorkers to take to the streets, where they were met by the largest police presence in the city's history. According to Bernstein, the event was a defining moment for the emerging fascist and anti-fascist movements in the United States.

Now, for the first time, footage from that historic evening has been collected in one place and made available to the public — courtesy of filmmaker Marshall Curry and the documentary project Field of Vision. In the above short film, Kuhn can be heard speaking of a "white, gentile-ruled United States...free from Jewish Moscow-directed domination." At one point, thousands of well-dressed Americans give the Nazi salute to an American flag, a portrait of George Washington, and a Swastika. Soon after, a Jewish man charges the podium, and is swiftly dragged away by uniformed Bund men, to the crowd's great amusement.

Over email, we talked with Curry about how he stumbled across the disturbing footage, the identity of the brave disrupter, and the history "that we'd prefer to forget."

{snip}