The mash-up of Jews, Nazis, and Hollywood, always a combustible brew for cinema and scholarship, has inspired two fascinating new books. Both are set in the motion-picture capital, both are thick with gangs of goose-stepping thugs, and both pulsate with the cloak-and-dagger intrigue of an espionage thriller. The twist is that the action is all off screen — and the Nazis are home grown.
Laura B. Rosenzweig’s Hollywood’s Spies: The Undercover Surveillance of Nazis in Los Angeles (NYU Press) and Steven J. Ross’s Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America (Bloomsbury Publishing) chronicle the fight against Nazism in a domestic theater of operations before formal hostilities were even declared. Rosenzweig, an independent scholar and instructional designer for the University of California, and Ross, a professor of history at the University of Southern California whose books include Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics (Oxford University Press, 2011), reveal the hitherto untold story of Jewish resistance to Nazi infiltration, not in Berlin or Warsaw but in Los Angeles during the 1930s, a time when Nazism, a distant rumble on the horizon for most Americans, was for tens of thousands of others a siren call to action.
The two worked independently but drew on the same trove of archives at the California State University at Northridge. The authors reconstruct a tale of off-the-cuff spycraft and deep-cover penetration directed at an indigenous Nazi menace. Inevitably, there is some overlap, but the two volumes are different enough in outlook — Rosenzweig’s comfort zone is Jewish studies, Ross’s is Hollywood history — to be read as companions rather than competitors.
Shaded in noirish undertones and filtered through a Chinatown haze, Los Angeles in the 1930s is a city under whose glamorous façade lurk networks of fascist fanatics. They bonded in paramilitary groups such as the Friends of New Germany, which became the German American Bund; the Silver Shirts; the American Labor Party, the American White Guards, the Russian National Revolutionary Party, and the Ku Klux Klan.
The authors reconstruct a tale of off-the-cuff spycraft and deep-cover penetration directed at an indigenous Nazi menace.
Some rejected foreign inspiration for a nativist blueprint of racial purity, while others were dedicated to the creation of an American Reich. They met in the well-stocked Aryan Bookstore on 15th Street in downtown LA, practiced drills in the Hollywood Hills, and packed meeting halls for mini-Nuremberg rallies, brandishing swastikas, raising their arms to Hitler’s portrait, and singing “The Horst Wessel Song.” The Great Depression offered fertile soil for recruits, many of whom were disgruntled veterans of World War I, their pensions slashed, their disability claims denied — battalions of men with good reason to seethe with resentment at the losing hand America had dealt them.
The flagship group for Nazi acolytes was the German American Bund, an authentic fifth column, partially financed by and directly wired from Berlin. Led by a burly former machine-gunner for the Kaiser named Fritz (Führer) Kuhn, the Bund orchestrated summer camps for homegrown Hitlerjugend and staged elaborate outdoor pageants with all the Nazi trimmings. Its local branch in Los Angeles, led by a cunning Hitlerite named Hermann Schwinn, boasted some 1,000 zealous adherents and perhaps several thousand fellow travelers.
Of course, the glue that bound all the groups together was a virulent hatred of the Jews. To the malcontents, Franklin Roosevelt’s “Jew Deal” was turning a great white Christian civilization into the “Jewnited States of America.” Neither Rosenzweig nor Ross flinches from quoting the worst of the anti-Semitic slurs and caricatures, a reminder of how widespread such sentiments were, not least in the Los Angeles Police Department, where the boys in blue seemed less interested in investigating the fifth columnists than in donning their silver shirts. Feeding the pathology were truckloads of Nazi propaganda with sophisticated graphics, designed and printed by Joseph Goebbels’s experts, and shipped over on German liners that docked in LA and San Pedro, Calif. The Bundists and Silver Shirts posted the handbills throughout Southern California and, in guerilla actions dubbed “snow storming,” took to the rooftops of buildings in downtown LA to toss leaflets down on pedestrians.
T he unassuming hero of both books is Leon Lewis — WW I veteran, prominent lawyer, and the kind of Jewish activist not content to limit his resistance to B’nai B’rith dinners. For 12 years, Lewis orchestrated a private counterintelligence campaign. With no formal training in espionage, he remade himself into a virtuoso spymaster, running a network of undercover operatives who penetrated into the inner circles of the Bund and the Silver Shirts. Aided by a cohort of mostly non-Jewish, Aryan-looking Americans who did the actual infiltrating, Lewis monitored the Nazis’ movements, sabotaged their schemes, and used agents provocateurs to mess with their minds. Gaining their trust and loosening their lips with booze, Lewis’s team took stenography at their meetings, edited their newsletters, gave speeches at their rallies — seemingly did everything but sell them the armbands.
In both accounts, Lewis emerges as a kind of George Smiley character, pulling the strings from offstage and keeping out of the spotlight. “The spymaster,” writes Ross, “was a ghostly presence: always there but rarely seen.” Yet that wise stratagem had an unfortunate consequence for his legacy. “Lewis was so effective in maintaining a low profile,” laments Rosenzweig, “that his contribution to American Jewish resistance of Nazism has been lost to history for decades.” No longer. He has been written back into the narrative in boldface type.
For the Bund and sundry anti-Semites without portfolio, Hollywood was ground zero for the Jewish conspiracy, a Sodom on the Pacific, where hook-nosed studio moguls defiled Aryan girls lured west by the promise of stardom. In the cross hairs, the moguls fired back — with their checkbooks.
Though the Bundsmen never put their plans into action, they dreamed of dispatching hit squads to kidnap and hang the city’s Jewish leaders, including the Hollywood moguls.
On March 13, 1934, Lewis convened an epochal meeting of the major Jewish studio heads at the Hillcrest Country Club, the forum of choice for upper-income Jews locked out of the city’s elite Christian clubs. At each seat, he placed samples of the inventory from the Aryan Bookstore. Expecting to see a menu, the moguls instead saw themselves reviled in capital letters as “THE BULBOUS NOSED LORDS OF INTERNATIONAL JEWRY.” Understates Ross: “Lewis had gained their attention.” By the end of the evening, the lawyer had secured $24,000 in pledges of support, a cash cushion that was crucial to the success of his operation. The subvention was an act of self-preservation: Though the Bundsmen never put their plans into action, they dreamed of dispatching hit squads to kidnap and hang the city’s Jewish leaders, including the Hollywood moguls.
T hough both the Bund and the Silver Shirts sought to give Nazism an all-American face, an emissary from the fatherland played a pivotal role in inspiring and financing Hitler’s local auxiliaries: the notorious Georg Gyssling, German consul to the United States and Hitler’s man in Hollywood, a suave diplomat Ross calls “the most charming Nazi in Los Angeles.” At first blush, Gyssling seems a familiar figure. A doctor of philosophy, former Olympian, and natural charmer, he fit the central-casting model of a cultivated German aristocrat, the kind who looked down his nose at Hitler and his vulgar henchmen while quietly and efficiently doing their bidding. Fawned over by LA’s society matrons and gossip columnists, he was a prized ornament at breakfast clubs and after-hours soirees.
Like all consuls in Hollywood, Gyssling was tasked with keeping an eye on the studios to make sure his native land was not villainized on screen. Whenever he heard of a German-themed scenario offensive to the Third Reich — either by way of the trade press or a network of informants on the studio payroll — he would dictate a letter of protest to Joseph I. Breen, director of Hollywood’s self-censorship regime. Gyssling was also known to send letters on Nazi stationery threatening German-American actors. In the case of The Road Back (1937), a sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), his threats went public and spurred a diplomatic dust-up. In recent years, Gyssling has emerged as a featured player in histories of Hollywood censorship, so much so that he currently appears as a nefarious character in the Amazon series The Last Tycoon, based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s roman à clef of Hollywood in the 1930s.
Ross has a blockbuster revelation. Tipped off by a character reference written by Brigadier General Julius Klein in the file on Gyssling compiled by the postwar Nuremberg trials, Ross tracked down Gyssling’s daughter, Angelica. Raised as a California girl, she returned to Germany with her father in 1941. After the war, she married an American military officer and returned stateside to settle in Morro Bay, Calif. She died in 2016, but not before Ross debriefed her.
“As the son of Holocaust survivors, I was prepared to think the worst of” Gyssling, Ross confides in his endnotes. Angelica confirmed to Ross that General Klein, a German-speaking Jew investigating Nazi infiltration for General George C. Marshall, met regularly with Gyssling in his home — chatting and dining together for hours, behind locked doors. Amazingly, the Nazi vice consul was funneling information about Nazi war plans to “the little general,” as the family affectionately called Klein. Unbeknownst to Lewis, and to film scholars who have demonized the vice consul, Gyssling was a double agent — hence his escape from prosecution at Nuremberg.
After the outbreak of World War II in Europe, the rest of the nation caught up with Leon Lewis. The FBI — finally — undertook surveillance of the Nazi fifth columnists and rounded up the unusual suspects. Lewis and his right-hand man Joseph Roos turned their efforts increasingly to a press agency, News Research Service, established in January 1939, that provided information on domestic Nazis to the mainstream press.
O f the two books, Rosenzweig’s engages more deeply with Jewish-American historiography. She sets her work against the main currents of a discipline she sees as too New York-centric in perspective and too fixated on campaigns to persuade America to open up its doors to Jewish refugees. Displaying more than a dollop of West Coast chauvinism, she portrays LA. Jews as less timorous than their NYC. kinsmen, less riven by internal rivalries, and less anguished about alienating Christian America by “special pleading” for the Jews. Being in LA, far away from the insular tribalism of New York, proved an advantage to Lewis and his team. Hers is a story of proactive resistance, a vision of “American Jewish political agency shaped less by fear and more by courage.”
While not slighting the Jewish angle, Ross’s historiographical critique casts a wider net. A major leitmotif of the work is that liberal academic historians have doted far too much on their kindred spirits in the 1930s, lavishing attention on the left-wing popular front and succumbing to what has been called the romance of American Communism. They need to pay closer attention to the nativist, right-wing, and outright Nazi groups that thrived in the soil of the Great Depression. Who knows? It could have topical resonance.
Both books also offer a corrective to the claims in Ben Urwand’s controversial 2013 indictment The Collaboration: Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler (Harvard University Press) — osenzweig’s by implication, Ross’s by confrontation. “The moguls were not indifferent to Nazism,” Rosenzweig argues. “They did take political action to combat the problem at home, but they did so discreetly, offscreen.” Writes Ross: “Urwand accuses the moguls of cowardice, complicity, and collaboration. He could not have been more wrong.” (Full disclosure: My own work on the topic has been in synch with Rosenzweig’s and Ross’s.)
In a touching coda to her homage, Rosenzweig recounts that in 1945, amid the wreckage of postwar Berlin, a GI friend of Lewis’s, rummaging through Hitler’s Chancellery, came across a cache of official Nazi stationery and blank Iron Cross certificates. He filled in the blanks with Lewis’s name and bestowed upon him an ironic Iron Cross for his service to the Jewish people. Rosenzweig and Ross perform the selfsame gesture — filling in the historical blanks to give due credit to an unsung hero of the Jewish resistance.
Thomas Doherty is a professor of American studies at Brandeis University and the author of Show Trial: Hollywood, HUAC, and the Birth of the Blacklist, forthcoming from Columbia University Press.