When the Bund Strutted in Yaphank

YAPHANK ON balmy spring days, a breeze from the Carmans River still winds up the bluff past the gingerbreadfringed cottages of Siegfried Park, crosses its empty athletic field and ripples the pine trees next to the Edelweiss Hauss Community Hall.

It is difficult to believe that 40 years ago this quiet community with its carefully manicured hedges and well‐tended plots was the scene of elaborate Nazi rituals that duplicated the drama of European history here in the Island's heartland.

Yet, in the spring of 1937, thousands of German‐Atherican Bund members flocked to Yaphank on Sunday afternoons hear Fritz Kuhn, the would‐be American fuhrer, lash out against Jews, blacks, Communists, democracy and materialism.

Bund meetings were sporadic affairs held on summer weekends, and the fanatic followers of Kuhn were never more than a small percentage of the large population of German‐Americans living in the Long Island and New York area.

For Americans from Manhattan's Yorkville and Brooklyn's Ridgewood sections, Yaphank was a place to get away to from the sweltering city. Although many rented seasonal camp sites, some purchased tiny building plots from the German‐American Settlement League, which owned a communal‐type settlement next to a small lake in Yaphank.

This small group of tenacious settlers was soon forgotten in the torrent of publicity that engulfed Yaphank because of Bund activities. But they stayed on after the Bund was broken, its leaders jailed, and many of its followers fled to Germany. And they are proud that they came through the maelstrom and survived.

Though only a few of the original settlers are still living in Siegfried Park today, most residents deeply resent the Bund and the notorious image of German‐Americans in the 30's that is the Bund legacy. They consider the Bund a criminal conspiracy that tried to wrest control of the community from the hard‐working people who owned it.

Kuhn and his Amerikandeutscher Volksbund infiltrated and then took control of the German‐American Settlement League in 1936. The president of the league, Ernst Mueller, joined the Bund and then asked Kuhn to manage the affairs of the league's camp in Yaphank.

Mueller and a trustee of the German‐American Bund purchased the 42‐acre Yaphank site in 1936. At first, Mueller and his league were welcomed by business leaders and the many citizens of German descent in the Yaphank area. The league advertised in New York German‐language newspapers that plots for campsites and bungalows were for rent or for sale.

Kuhn named the community Camp Siegfried and called the footpaths that crisscrossed the old farm fields Hitler, Goering and Goebbels Streets. Inside a hastily built frame restaurant, photos of Nazi leaders were intermingled with swastikas. Other buildings were set up for Bund groups from Astoria, Mineola, Lindenhurst, Manhattan and Brooklyn, and large Army tents were set up in a corner of the property to house the overflow. Along the bluff overlooking the Mill River, as the Carmans was then called, bungalows were built by German‐Americans lucky enough to afford them.

Flatboats were available for those who wanted to do more than bathe in the lake, and the restaurant and bar did a brisk business in beer, hot dogs and hamburgers.

Kuhn made Camp Siegfried a source of income for the Bund instead of the league, which he incorporated as an independent division of the Bund. Vendors and suppliers who dealt with the camp were forced to pay a 10 percent surcharge to the Bund. Other sources of income were realized from the sale of Nazi paraphernalia including decorative swords, Bund newspapers, copies of “Mein Kampf,” Nazi flags and photos of Nazi leaders.

Even militarism was made to pay for the Bund. Copying Baldur von Schirach's Hitler Youth, Kuhn set up a youth section of the camp for boys and girls where loyal Bundists could send their children—at $5 a week—for martial training, Nazi indoctrination, hiking and singing of German Army marching songs.

Yaphank residents soon found out about their new neighbors, on Germany Day, Aug. 30, 1936. Standing under a banner that read “Amerika Verpflichter, Deutschland Dernunded” (Obligated to America, Tied to Germany), Dr. Bernard Lippert, German vice consul from New York, reviewed a squad of Ordungs‐Dienst (uniformed services) as a brass band played German military marches. The Ordungs‐Dienst, dressed in brown shorts, tan shirts, Sam Browne belts with Blut and Ehre—blood and honor—buckles and swastika armbands, performed close‐order drills using wooden staffs in place of weapons for the delighted crowd.

More than 2,800 cars had brought the Bund faithful from throughout the metropolitan area. Another 1,500 had arrived on the first of the Long Island Rail Road's Camp Siegfried specials originating from Pennsylvania Station, Flatbush and Jamaica. The thirsty audience downed 200 barrels of American and 60 barrels of German beer.

For all its bluster, though, the “ora tory was calm and totally lacking in anti‐Semitic vituperation,” a local weekly reported. One explanation was that Kuhn was in Berlin at the Olympics. Another reason for the new attitude was that the predecessor of the Bund, the Friends of the New Germany, had been recently disbanded and all German nationals ordered out of the Bund movement by Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy, who felt the Nazi movement in America was hurting United States‐German relations.

After withdrawing direct support, German leaders expected the American Bund movement to die. But Fritz Julius Kuhn upset German plans and singlehandedly resurrected the Bund movement.

A master con artist and actor, Kuhn aped Hitler's mannerisms. He lied to his followers, saying that he was the Fuh rer's confidante and enjoyed the secret support of the German Foreign Office. He brought the splintered Bund movement under his total domination. Heshaa Hitler's flair for publicity and he be came a media star of the late 30's.

A native of Germany and a veteran artillery officer, Kuhn had a degree in chemical engineering from Munich University. He worked at the Ford factory in Detroit before assuming control of the Bund in Buffalo in 1936.

Instead of creating a national movement among German‐Americans, Kuhn made the Bund anathema and a target of continuous Government investigations and harassment from 1936 to the outbreak of the war.

Moreover, Kuhn was a failure. During its high‐water mark from 1936 to 1938, the Bund could claim only 25,000 members throughout the country.

Most Bund members were new arrivals in America who were part of the 430,000 German immigrants who arrived in America between 1919 and 1933. Many had been members of Hitler's Nazi Party before they left, and others were embittered veterans of the Freikorps who felt Germany had been tricked out of victory in World War I. Those who joined the Bund usually did not intend to stay in the United States permanently, but planned to return to Germany when economic conditions improved.

For the Bund movement to succeed, Kuhn knew that he had to attract a large number of the 5.5 million Germans who arrived in America earlier. Vigorously rejecting the melting‐pot concept as a “Jewish invention,” the Bund credo was that blood was thicker than place of birth. Kuhn believed that millions of German‐Americans across the country would rush to join his Bund. Then would come Der Tag—the day—when GermanAmericans would rise up and demand their share of political power. Streets would run red with blood as the United States would be purged of Jews and Communists and American “materialism” would be replaced by Aryan “idealism.”

When German‐Americans failed to join the Bund in large numbers, Kuhn and his Nazi followers retreated into a fantasyland to lash out at a hostile America. From Camp Siegfried on the Island, Camp Nordland in New Jersey, Camp Deutschhorts in Pennsylvania, Camp Hindenberg in Wisconsin, the Bund now struck out at Germans it said were contaminated by Americanization, as well as the old standard targets—Jews and Communists.

In July 1937, Long Island farmhands gaped as a German brass marching band, its members dressed in riding breeches and jack boots, led a large group of black‐shirted Bundists with swastika armbands from the railroad station (near the present Suffolk County office buildings) through the streets of Yaphank to Camp Siegfried.

Camp Siegfried's Gotterdammerung was the summer of 1938. As many as 50,000 people squeezed into Camp Siegfreid to hear Kuhn proclaim this small bit of Long Island real estate an “Aryan paradise and part of Germany in America.”

But things had gone too far for residents of the Island. As Kuhn reviewed troops and made his speech, agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation jotted down license plate numbers and infiltrated the crowd. And in nearby Lake Ronkonkoma, only an impassioned plea by District Attorney Lindsay R. Henry dissuaded a large group of American Legionnaires from driving to the camp “to clean the place out once and for all.”

The end of Camp Siegfried followed shortly. On May 21, 1938, six officers of the German‐American Settlement League were arrested; they were indicted and later convicted of a violation of the civil‐rights law for failure to file a roster of leaders and members with the Secretary of State in Albany.

Although the violation was only a misdemeanor, Ernst Mueller received a one‐year jail sentence and a fine of $500. The Settlement League was fined $10,000. The other defendants were given one‐year suspended sentences and fines.

The Suffolk County Sheriff seized Camp property to enforce payment of the fine. In October, the Suffolk Alchoholic Beverage Control Board refused the camp's application for renewal of its beer and wine license. Although the Appellate Division later threw out the convictions—on Nov. 4, 1938—the Bund. was finished on the Island.

Less than a week later, the Kristallnacht (night of the broken glass) in Germany, a well‐organized pogrom against the Jews in Germany that was directed by Hermann Goering, exposed to a horrified world Fascist Germany's true intentions.

The mood in the United States turned sharply anti‐Nazi almost overnight. People who had previously considered the Nazis a fanatical but harmless group became rabid Nazi‐haters. The United States and Germany recalled ambassadors. Congress financed an investigation of the Bund by Representative Martin Dies's House Un‐American Activities Committee. The Nazis were hunted down in the United States.

Fritz Kuhn knew he was through. “They are out to get me,” he said. They were and they did.

Camp Siegfried once again made headlines as the instrument of Kuhn's downfall. Kuhn was arrested on Nov. 9. 1939, and convicted on Dec. 5 of larceny and forgery. He had pocketed a $500 legal fee for the attorney who defended the six Settlement League directors and forged an entry into the ledger book stating that he had paid it.

With Kuhn in Sing Sing, the Bund creditors moved in. Wilhelm Kunze, Kuhn's successor, took advantage of the elaborate corporate structures set up to protect the Bund, and announced that the Bund had severed all connections with the German‐American Settlement League. He asserted that the director of the league had incurred a huge debt—including a $3,000 beer bill—and disclaimed Bund responsibility.

Abandoned by the Bund, and deeply in debt, the German‐American Settlement League went to court in July 1940 to try to wrest its financial records from the Bund. The successor to Ernst Mueller as league president, Henry A. Wagner, said the league “had grown tired of the Bund in the two years it had managed their camp and wished to be released from any connection with the Bund and to operate Camp Siegfried as a summer resort with no political activities.”

But the Bund held on. As late as May 1941, the A.V. Development Company, a Bund holding corporation, was trying to foreclose two mortgages on the camp. The war put an end to the legal struggles as the United States Office of Alien Property seized the assets of the A.V. Development Company, including the camp's mortgages and deed.

Quiet settled over Yaphank as the Holocaust raged in Europe, where many former Bundists fought and died for the Wehrmacht. The drill field that had trembled beneath the boots of would‐be storm troopers reverted to its original use. A local farmer used it to grow asparagus.

In the late 40's, with the renewal of peace and the postwar housing shortage, German‐Americans remembered Camp. Siegfried—and came back. In 1957 after a long legal battle, the German‐American Settlement League purchased the mortgages and deed to the Yaphank community from the Federal Government. It renamed the community Siegfried Park and the streets after two of Germany's cultural greats —Bach and Schiller. The last vestiges of the Bund had disappeared from Yaphank.

The community rapidly took the shape that it remains in today, a neighborhood of 48 converted bungalows nestled amid the oak, pine and cedar trees of the Island.

The two‐story. Bavarian‐style hall is now used by other Yaphank community groups. The Veterans of Foreign Wars, the P.T.A., church and labor groups meet regutarly in the stucco building, unfazed by its past notoriety. On Saturday mornings the Steuben Society of New York gives German lessons there.

And even that definitive sign of assimilation that the Bund hated has appeared. A new generation of native‐born Americans are moving in. Ask them about the Bund and all they can say is that they have heard the rumors.

For this new generation of residents, the past is dead, along with the residents of Camp Siegfried who lie beside the old Yankee stock in the Yaphank cemetery. All the young people can tell you is their dreams. Life is before them, not behind them. ■