(Times of Israel) Matt Lebovic - In the recently published book Hitler's American Friends, Bradley W. Hart describes some of the key German propaganda messages spread by Nazi spies in the U.S. during the late 1930s and into World War II. These include the claim that Franklin Roosevelt was a closet Jew whose real name was Rosenfeld, the war in Poland and Russia was entirely the fault of England, and the American press was bent on bringing the country into war against peaceful Germany. Throughout the 1930s, Nazi spies operated on Capitol Hill, from church pulpits, and in front of massive crowds at rallies. In 1937, Congress enacted the Foreign Agents Registration Act because so many Nazi spies had been caught seeking "to subvert the American democratic system." A hundred men and women were eventually convicted of spying for the Nazis, and six "saboteurs" were executed. The German American Bund, a network of 25,000 pro-Nazi activists, established training camps and strongholds throughout the country. In addition, the pro-Nazi Silver Legion boasted 15,000 members, modeling itself on Mussolini's Brown Shirts in Italy. A 1941 Fortune magazine poll revealed that 13 million Americans would not mind deporting Jews from the country. "The people who were members of anti-Semitic groups like the German American Bund or the Silver Legion didn't just disappear in 1945," Hart told the Times of Israel. "We don't really know much about what they taught their children or talked about at home in those later years."
2019-01-04 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive