20,000 members of the American Nazi Party once rallied in Madison Square Garden. Could it happen again?

Oct 25, 2024
German American Bund rally New York, Madison Square Garden, Febr 1939; from

On October 10, The Atlantic premiered ‘A Night at the Garden‘, an unsettling seven minutes and five seconds long video made of film footage that American documentary filmmaker Marshall Curry had accidentally found.

The footage showed the 20,000-strong rally held by the American Nazi Party — the German American Bund — at Madison Square Garden in New York on 20 February 1939.

Historically speaking, the Bund’s antisemitic evening was the apotheosis of a farce. Following the September outbreak of the Second World War in Europe, the Bund broke up. Its German American immigrant leader Fritz Kuhn was imprisoned and lost his American citizenship in 1943. Later, he was deported to a West German gaol, where he died forgotten in 1953.

But still, Curry’s film confronts.

A facsimile of Nazi fascism in New York: the massed crowd in blocks — beds in the garden — swastikas, flags, a drum corps, brownshirts, Aryan youth, and a forty-foot figure of George Washington towering over proceedings.

The crowd stands in a fit of Nazi saluting. Kuhn comes to the podium and begins with slovenly arrogance his anti-Jewish hate speech. Laughter and agitation. Violence. And the vicarious thrill of it amongst onlookers when, on mounting the stage in protest, unemployed Brooklyn plumber Isadore Greenbaum is savagely beaten by brownshirts.

The New York police probably saved his life.

Outside the dark circus, mounted police attempt to maintain order, while New Yorkers do street battle with Bund members leaving Madison Square Garden.

Astounded, Curry told The Atlantic that, as though in some episode of The Twilight Zone, the footage made him wonder if ‘history has taken a different path’. Could this have happening in New York? As he realised, the film footage was not only real but ‘felt eerily familiar, given today’s political situation.’

And, indeed, The Guardian (18 October) has reported that Donald Trump now plans the culmination of his anti-immigration ‘poisoning of the blood’ crusade at Madison Square Garden on 27 October, one week before the US Presidential election, which has far-reaching implications. For indeed Australians, like many others around the world, will have their own reasons to worry that Trump’s 27 October event will recall the American Nazi mass rally held at The Garden on 20 February 1939 — which will recall events in the real Reich.

On 12 October, SBS News Australia was one media outlet which observed that ‘around 50 balaclava-clad men … in Corowa, on the Murray River … huddled under a banner that read “white man fight back”‘.  Government repudiation was appropriately swift. Beyond this echo of history as farce, however, it reminds us alongside the US election that populism with a tilt towards white supremacy is not only a corrosive American problem.

As Curry intended, everyone, especially school children, should see ‘A Night at the Garden’. For it comes as a cautionary ‘provocation’, a jolt to complacent assumptions that history is automatically on the side of good.

See the premiere of Marshall Curry’s video ‘A night at the Garden’ with his comment embedded in The Atlantic.

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