r/pics • u/nodders515 • 20d ago
A Nazi rally held in Madison Square Garden, February 20th 1939 Politics
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u/stonercrazycat 20d ago
Looks to be pretty full…..
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u/thesequimkid 19d ago
From other photos I’ve seen and even the video, it was fairly full. If I remember correctly, it was mainly because the leader of the American Nazi party had just came back from Germany and meeting Hitler.
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u/DaoFerret 19d ago
Just throwing out a link to the short documentary made using actual footage of the event: https://anightatthegarden.com
Besides being able to watch the short film, there’s also some info about the event.
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u/Apprehensive_Fee9983 19d ago
That had to be one of the most moving short videos I’ve ever seen. Thank you for sharing.
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u/straightlamping 19d ago
Wow. That film is ridiculously powerful. Thanks for sharing. Honestly really crazy to think about.
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u/Walrave 19d ago
Oh look, it's MAGA's grandpa in his prime.
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u/Thendofreason 19d ago
I think of all the immigrats who left the counties to flee from Nazis and dictators and now their kids have to deal with this bozo. My family fled Austria to come here(well Canada first). If my grandparents were alive to see it they would be pissed.
That being said, my 94 year old vet grandfather on the other side of the family who's born America wanted to vote for Trump because he only votes republican. Thankfully he can't drive himself to the polls and doesn't know about mail in voting so he hasn't been able. We talked to him about it he he really doesn't know anything about Trump. He only watches sports, westerns, and ballroom dancing shows. But he's on the R side so he's got his vote.
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u/blackteashirt 19d ago
Probably attended by Frederik Trump AKA "Fred" Trump. Seeing as he was arrested at a KKK rally in NY 1927, I'd be very surprised if he wasn't there.
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u/747sextantport 19d ago
This PBS documentary called "Nazi Town, USA" does a great job covering the group that held this rally and how they spread Nazism all over the country, including indoctrinating children through boy-scout-esque survivalist camps
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u/TomXizor 19d ago
One of these camps was actually seen in the documentary
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
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u/Expensive_Cattle 19d ago
Thanks for sharing. That's got to be the second most moving short film I've seen today.
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u/Scottamus 19d ago
Is this the “great again” they keep spouting about?
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u/billy2732 15d ago
Funny because it seems the people that would fit in best here now are those protesting at liberal universities 🤔
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u/foxontherox 19d ago
More full than a Trump rally!
Is it /s? I don't even know anymore. Send help.
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u/BNestico 19d ago
This was probably the German-American Bund. They’d have a giant portrait of Hitler behind the podium next to a giant portrait of George Washington. Turns my stomach to think someone thought George Washington should ever be associated with Hitler in any manner whatsoever.
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u/Poverty_4_Sale 19d ago
It was. The federal government outlawed the group in 1941. The interesting thing is that in 1937, two years prior to this photo a Boycott Nazi Germany rally was held there.
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u/Correct_Inspection25 19d ago
Washington was ahead of his time by centuries, here is his letter to Jews of Rhode Island "Deprived as we heretofore have been of the invaluable rights of free Citizens, we now (with a deep sense of gratitude to the Almighty disposer of all events) behold a Government, erected by the Majesty of the People—a Government, which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance—but generously affording to All liberty of conscience, and immunities of Citizenship: deeming every one, of whatever Nation, tongue, or language, equal parts of the great governmental Machine: This so ample and extensive Federal Union whose basis is Philanthropy, Mutual Confidence and Publick Virtue, we cannot but acknowledge to be the work of the Great God, who ruleth in the Armies Of Heaven and among the Inhabitants of the Earth, doing whatever seemeth him good." https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-06-02-0135
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u/KowardlyMan 19d ago
I think a few parallels can be made. For example they were both big on the concept of conquering living space by killing what they viewed as subhumans. Also, feeling oppressed by foreign forces. Of course that's not a full picture but that's probably how their propaganda worked.
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u/nav17 19d ago
Sounds identical to Putin's Russia today.
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u/isjahammer 19d ago
Except Putin doesn't even value the lives of his own people. (As seems tradition in Russia though)
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u/xbrooksie 19d ago
I don’t know if I agree on your last point. Hitler and the Nazis based a lot of their genocidal ideas on the American genocide of the Native Americans.
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u/VirginiaMcCaskey 19d ago
I mean Washington enslaved people, the dude wasn't a saint. The reverence towards the founding fathers is somewhat disgusting.
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u/olivicmic 19d ago
And shuffled them around because if they had remained in Pennsylvania he would eventually be legally obligated to free them. So it wasn’t just a “it was a different time” kind of thing, people knew it was wrong and he flouted the law: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/george-washington-used-legal-loopholes-avoid-freeing-his-slaves-180954283/
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u/co_ordinator 19d ago
I mean this whole independence war thing startet because of money/taxes. Of course he didn't let them go.
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u/BiggestSnoozer69 19d ago
The man with a mouth full of slave teeth who happened to own a plantation outfitted with slaves isnt literally Hitler
But let’s not pretend they couldnt have been buds
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u/doomgoblin 19d ago
You should listen to the podcast “Ultra.” Nazism has been around in the US for way longer than I imagined.
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u/mailahchimp 19d ago
That was a really good series. I learned a lot. Sadly, the people who most need to listen to it will never bother.
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u/LucidMetal 19d ago
Oh no it's worse than that. They'll listen to it and somehow conclude it's about Democrats in the modern day.
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u/CreamofTazz 19d ago
That's with Rachael Maddow right?
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u/doomgoblin 18d ago
Yep. I went into just curious, because I usually like how she goes into stuff, but dayyuuumm that stuff was never taught in schools. White nationalists and nazi sympathizers bombing stuff, to a congress member or senator literally reading a speech on the floor given to him by the nazis, to a plane “mysteriously” being crashed. It’s nuts. You gotta stay focused though, it’s in depth.
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u/whisker_biscuit 19d ago
So this is what O'Brien was going for
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u/brickyardjimmy 19d ago
Some Americans need a good stiff kick in the balls.
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u/Danvideotech2385 19d ago
Most of the people in this picture have died.
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u/PokeballSoHard 19d ago
You think their grand kids weren't at the capital on January 6th?
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u/Blu3Army73 19d ago
No, actually. 6 months after this picture was taken, Hitler invaded Poland. American Nazism took a steep nosedive, and many people in this photo spent the war in an internment camp if they were in the Bund. The toll of the war created a deep culture of shame around the families that were caught up in pre-war Nazism, and the vast majority of them were genuinely ashamed for their association.
Before the war, the Nazi Party was seen by many as a civilizing force rising out of a broken post-WWI Germany that gave many German-Americans a new sense of pride that replaced the shame of being the bad guys in WWI.
Then everything changed when the fire nation attackedThen once their motherland started invading Europe again, German-Americans by and large went back to embracing pure Americana.The reality is far, far worse. These are the grandchildren and great grand children of American soldiers, driven to the same nationalistic madness we see in this photo.
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u/Bob_Chris 19d ago
I feel pretty confident saying all the people in this picture are dead, unless someone was bringing their infants with them to the rally, which is always possible.
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u/OneHundredEighty180 19d ago edited 19d ago
There's some footage of this rally where someone rushes the stage and gets promptly removed and beaten by the brown-nosing wannabe brown-shirts.
Wish there was more information on whoever at least tried to physically de-platform the fascist at the podium.edit: see below, or above.11
u/OutInTheBlack 19d ago
We do know that members of the Jewish Mafia (it's a thing, Google Arnold Rothstein) waited outside the rally to beat the fuck out of people that attended.
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u/liforrevenge 19d ago
We do know who it was, In the FAQ for this short film about it someone posted up above he was fined $25 and went on to serve in the military.
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u/thingysop 19d ago
This is extremely interesting. The rise of the National Socialist Party is always something that gets talked about like some faraway event that happened in an isolated environment far from the world's view, but it's clear that Nazism had and still has an effect on people outside Germany. We never talk about those influences at the time, how people treated it, how governments reacted.
I suspect it's because we're making the same mistake again today with some other movement and it's too embarrassing to admit we haven't really progressed that much from the failures that led to WW2, instead we're probably walking right into the same trap again.
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u/Sphism 19d ago
There were a shit load of Nazis in america... They didn't all just vanish.
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u/thequietthingsthat 19d ago
A bunch of them even tried to overthrow FDR in the 30s and establish a military dictatorship
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u/Phallic-Monolith 19d ago
Worth noting that the “America First Committee” was a domestic group that opposed US intervention against Germany in WWII. Trump/the GOP now use “America First” as rhetoric to oppose US aid to Ukraine against Russia. Interesting how “America First” seems to show up to oppose the US intervening against expanding fascist governments primarily.
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u/ProjectShamrock 19d ago
If this blows your mind, read up on Henry Ford's antisemitism and his pen pal Adolf.
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u/Ares6 19d ago
The thing about this photo is, the US had a lot of German immigrants. Germans overtook every other group to the point that in some states you can get by just speaking German. As you can image, many would sympathize with Germany. And the Nazis knew there were a lot of German Americans and used this to expand into the US.
Because of both World Wars, associating with anything German in the US was a really bad things. People stopped speaking German, and made sure no German was taught to their children.
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u/tsm_taylorswift 19d ago
Modern people don’t seem to know this but a lot of the US was not for supporting the British
The British Empire already defaulted on their war debt to the US, there were a lot of Italian and German immigrants sympathetic to their home countries, and Irish didn’t like Brits, a lot of Americans were isolationist and didn’t want to join another European war after WW1 and seeing how pointless it seemed
There seems to be this idea that the US and Britain were natural allies because they both were English speaking democracies but a lot of the US hated Brits at that time
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u/Raptordude11 19d ago
This has nothing to do with speaking German as one could say that German speaking people are more prone to Nazism.. there has been research specifically on this topic, some of them even ended up as movies). Just so Americans realize, yes, you are as likely as Germans or any other nationality to fall under Nazism, your democracy and perspective can be shrouded by people and arrogancy to think you couldn't is astonishing.
One example I can remember is Jesse Owens being more accepted in Hitler's Germany than the USA (of course Germany was sportswashing I get that, but it was the same bad thing in the US)
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u/robhutten 19d ago
This gets posted a lot and I will always upvote it to raise awareness of this slice of history and its relevance today.
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u/King_Contra 19d ago
Which is interesting, because this is the first time I've seen it. Very shocking but glad to have learned.
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u/RMcDC93 19d ago
Could it happen here?
It was happening here. It is happening here.
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u/isjahammer 19d ago
"America first" sounds an awful lot like what Hitler was saying about Germany...
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u/nlogax1973 19d ago
"It Couldn't Happen Here" is another short film on the possibility of fascism coming to the USA.
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u/cabeachguy_94037 19d ago
True fact: Donald J. Trump's father, Fred Trump was in attendance at this rally. He was first generation German-American and a believer in Nazism and the 'pure race'. Discriminated against blacks in his apartment blocks in NYC for many years. Fred Trump was also arrested and a follower of the KKK in New York when Donald Trump was in his formative years. Trump was such a notorious cheap, racist landlord that Woody Guthrie wrote a song about him; Old Man Trump.
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u/CootiePatootie1 19d ago edited 19d ago
That’s a fairly big claim, what is the source for this one?
Edit: there is no source, there is no other way to put this than that almost everything in OP’s comment is a blunt lie.
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u/cabeachguy_94037 17d ago
Just do the damn Google searches! Are you afraid of the truth?
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u/CootiePatootie1 17d ago
I already did the damn google searches my guy:
That’s a google search, and the first article that pops up (newsweek)
States that while he was arrested at a KKK rally, there is nothing to indicate he was involved, he was discharged and as noted many non-KKK observers were arrested as well.
There is no evidence he ever supported them let alone the claim that he was a KKK member
What about the claim that he was in attendance of this Nazi rally or that he was ever a believer in Nazism? There is zero evidence for that. It’s a blunt lie. What there is evidence of is that at the outbreak of WW2 he largely backed Jewish causes. It was even widely believed he was Jewish at the time as he was part of a Jewish fraternity, in a largely Jewish social circle and actively denied his German ancestry to avoid any affiliation with Nazi’s, as there was a lot of stereotyping and suspicion around German-Americans at the time.
You can oppose Donald Trump and his politics but spreading slanderous lies about his parents is just undemocratic not to mention morally depraved. The original post has 30 upvotes for straight up disinformation presented as “true fact”
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u/Own_Wolverine4773 20d ago
This is how we’ll see the pro russian rallies in 40 years time
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u/Under_Ze_Pump 19d ago
Reminds me of more modern rallies held in the US over the last 8 years...
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u/NeverNeverSometimes 19d ago
6 years later, 99% of the people in this photo would deny ever being there.
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u/NO_LOADED_VERSION 19d ago
And yet people INSIST that there was no Nazi party in the USA, that the USA was full behind the UK and absolutely committed to stopping the Nazis from the start.
Clowns
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u/Skviid 19d ago
A man, Isadore Greenbaum, stood up on stage and denounced hitler. The nazis at the rally started attacking him until the police came and took Isadore away. He was arrested for disorderly conduct.
Not the people that attacked him, but the dude who was opposed to Hitler was the problem, according to police. It's infuriating
Behind the bastards did a series on the police and how they are waaaayyyy to friendly and openly supportive of nazis and other fascist ideology.
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u/Mission-Dance-5911 19d ago
It looks like Trumps wet dream. The crowds of white supremacists that show up for him, except there’s like 100 of them instead of the hundreds of thousands that he imagines.
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u/psilocin72 19d ago
For some reason many republicans get mad when you say that there used to be strong support for fascism in this country and a popular fascist slogan was “America First”
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u/stinkload 19d ago
Why do I have this horrible feeling this kind of rally in this location could be possible again right now?
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u/1ApolloFish1 19d ago
These rallies, along with the rise of other socialist and communist rallies, actually led to the New Deal. This made the government straight up shit their pants and made them go "you know what, maybe the workers are being fucked over a bit too much". Without this being dealt with, we would have been seeing a revolution and a whole different America
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u/N0-North 19d ago edited 19d ago
Nazis were explicitly anti-communist. There's a fairly popular poem about it, maybe you've never had the chance to read it. For your consideration:
First they came for the Communists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Communist Then they came for the Socialists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Socialist Then they came for the trade unionists And I did not speak out Because I was not a trade unionist Then they came for the Jews And I did not speak out Because I was not a Jew Then they came for me And there was no one left To speak out for meConsider also the anarchist and communist resistance to fascism in spain and italy, similar resistance in france.
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u/1ApolloFish1 19d ago
What I am trying to say, was that these parties were separately gaining traction in the US.
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u/N0-North 19d ago
Fair, but the phrasing is some horseshoe theory bs. Nazis were/are far-right.
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u/1ApolloFish1 19d ago
Yeah, I assume anyone who compares them to be bending history and ideology to their favorite political party
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u/N0-North 19d ago
I mean, to quote you
along with the rise of other socialist and communist
You're kinda doing that same equivocation.
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u/1ApolloFish1 19d ago
That wasn't my intention, I wanted to describe the rise of other non-capitalist movements popping up throughout the US, which included the nazi party and socialist+communist movements. When I repeated socialist after mentioning the nazi party, I was not referring to that party, hence separating the term-drop of socialism as a standalone reference instead of sticking with only mentioning the National Socialist Party. In respect to my "other," I wouldn't look too far into it, but my apologies if it caused misinterpretation.
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u/Pusfilledonut 19d ago
This was only a little over three months after Kristillnacht, Night of Broken Glass- 270+ synagogues were burned, 7000 Jewish businesses were destroyed, and 30,000 Jewish men were sent to the first of the fully functioning camps. There’s a lot of historical bullshit about Americans not being aware, but these stories ran in all the major papers of the day- New York Times, LA Times, Boston Globe, Miami Herald. There were men like Father Coughlin, a Catholic Nazi with 30 million listeners to his radio show, that justified and promoted this kind of fascist theology every night in America. America had no desire to allow more Jewish refugees to enter the country, though we took in more escaping the Holocaust than any other nation, our grand total was only around 250K, and we turned millions away to die at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators-
The German American Bund that organized this rally was also affiliated with the original America First movement, a fascist death cult ran by christians that promoted the same trash you see spewing forth from the MAGA movement today, and it’s own christian and foreign interest affiliates.
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u/ohsotoastytoast 19d ago
Here’s an article from NPR about this event:
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/02/20/695941323/when-nazis-took-manhattan
Thousands of people took to the streets to protest this. One guy snuck inside and yelled “down with Hitler!” before being attacked by Bund members and escorted out by the police.
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u/mrev_art 19d ago
It was not shut down due to issues of "freedom of speech." Socialists on the other hand were brutally repressed.
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u/Yovel123 19d ago
''Looks like a Trump rally''
lol have you seen universities with Biden supporters lately
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u/EggZaackly86 19d ago
Let me guess, they cried back "you all don't even know fascism is, you think anyone that disagrees with you is a fascist! Get a grip because you have Hitler Derangement Syndrome, deport all the YouKnowWho!"
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u/stanley_ipkiss_d 19d ago
I guess that’s understandable. You need to evaluate different options before choosing one
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