This is the only known meeting between Khun and the Fhrer and there is no evidence that Hitler attached any special significance to it. ll.They invent labels which, in due course, are thoughtlessly parroted and tend to set the desired concepts in concrete, obviating any further need for argument.Mitchell Palmer on subversive and revolutionary Communist groups, mostly on New Yorks Lower East Side, in 1919 and 1920, have been derisively labeled The Great Red Scare.
This neatly glosses over the very real threat such groups constituted in the early days of Bolshevik euphoria and proselytizing and the horrors taking place concurrently not only in Russia but in Bavaria, Hungary, and elsewhere under Communist regimes. The potent label McCarthyism is a later example of the use of this tactic to deflect any expression of concern about subversive conspiracies. The Bund, however, which is the subject of this paper, was never, as I will show, a danger or in any way unpatriotic or subversive. Its enthusiasm for the recovery of German pride, self-confidence, economy, and independence after 1933 was a natural enough emotion in an ethnic and cultural minority, especially one which had suffered great humiliation and persecution during the recent war. But there were many and powerful special interests which sought, with considerable success, to create the image of a frightful menace in the Bund. ![]() Besides, even the color brown seems a more appropriate modifier for the noun scare. In its brief lifetime, the Bund was the object of much hostility, suspicion and fear. It had an almost universally bad press and wild exaggerations concerning its aims, its size and its resources were uttered with patent self-interest and arrires penses by a number of politicians, journalists and assorted public figures. Yet post-war historians usually dismiss the Bund in a sentence or two when writing general histories of the American thirties. It attracted so few members and aroused so much antagonism that the Third Reich severed its ties with this stupid and noisy organization which it recognized to be a liability. The same writer just cited offers an apparently contradictory assessment of the Bunds strength, however, when he tells us that in February, 1939, 22,000 members and sympathizers of the German-American Bund packed Madison Square Garden. Nevertheless, contemporary magazines and newspapers provide us with a great deal of information from which it is relatively easy to filter out mere invective and diatribe. And it did not spring into existence fully grown like Pallas Athene from the head of Zeus. In its final form was it a tactless, overly vocal, overly demonstrative reaction of largely unsophisticated elements to a painful and humiliating ethnic experience Or was it, as its enemies alleged, a sinister and subversive alien conspiracy and a nest of treason. A Nuremberg-type rally in Madison Square Garden, with all its sweating solemnity and raucous appeals to unreason, was an hilarious spectacle when looked back upon. Time describes the Bundesleiter thus: No great shakes as a chemist was simple, earnest Fritz Kuhn emphasis added. On the other hand, OConnor says. After the war he had attended the University of Munich and received a masters degree in sciences. On the one hand, we have an entirely undocumented assertion by Harold Lavine of the Institute of Propaganda Analysis that Dr. Goebbels had created the Bund; 9 on the other hand, we have the utter failure of successive official investigations to demonstrate any connection between the Bund and the Reich government bureaux beyond a natural and unconcealed exchange of literature. A feature article in the New York Times as late as February, 1939, concludes: There has been no evidence of any active support of nazism sic in America on the part of the Nazi sic diplomatic force in this country. Even Alton Frye, a virulently hostile commentator, says. This was not strictly true, but the Bund readily adapted itself to the will of the Nazi Party without the need of specific instructions. Shortly after the founding of the Bund, Kuhn led a delegation to Berlin for the 1936 Olympics, where he was receive briefly by Hitler. This is the only known meeting between Khun and the Fhrer and there is no evidence that Hitler attached any special significance to it.
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