Month: September 2024

At his campaign rally in Iowa this week, Donald Trump once again broke new ground, becoming the first leading presidential candidate to find it necessary to insist he had never read the most infamous book of the 20th century.

“I never read ‘Mein Kampf,'” Trump said, referring to Adolf Hitler’s manifesto (“My Struggle”) that provided the philosophical basis for Nazi Germany and, ultimately, the murder of more than 6 million Jews in the Holocaust.

This was the first time Trump had invoked Hitler’s name and the title of his memoir at a political rally, but there have been multiple reports over the years of Trump expressing a keen interest in, even admiration for, Hitler’s rule over Nazi Germany.

In the past, he’s actually acknowledged owning a copy of the book.

Trump’s denial that he had read Hitler’s memoir came after he has made a series of incendiary remarks in recent weeks referring to his political opponents as “vermin” and saying illegal immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

There’s no question that language echoes that Hitler used to describe his enemies, but there may have been some question about whether Trump knew he was using the same words Hitler used to justify his murderous and genocidal rule of Nazi Germany.

Now, after backlash that his words echoed Hitler’s, however, there is no doubt.

“They said Hitler said that,” Trump said Tuesday after he again told the crowd in Iowa that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of America.

After insisting Hitler used the words “in a much different way,” Trump went on to make the “blood” reference again. “It’s true. They’re destroying the blood of the country, they’re destroying the fabric of our country, and we’re going to have to get them out.”

In other words, Trump’s response when criticized for using Hitler’s language was to acknowledge the criticism and then to use it again. Whether he is telling the truth about not ever reading “Mein Kampf,” there have been multiple reports of Trump privately admiring Hitler.

As president, Trump reportedly complained that America’s military leaders were not “totally loyal” to him, telling his chief of staff, retired Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly, “Why can’t you be like the German generals?”

As reported in “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021” by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, Kelly responded by pointing out Nazi generals “tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off.”

And as I reported in “Tired of Winning: Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party,” Trump boasted to a Republican congressman that German Chancellor Angela Merkel had told him there was “only one” leader in history who had attracted crowds as large as Trump.

“She told me she was amazed at the size of the crowds that came to see me speak,” Trump told the Republican congressman. “She said she could never get crowds like that. In fact, she told me that there was only one other political leader who ever got crowds as big as mine.”

The Republican congressman, a close ally of Trump’s, couldn’t tell whether Trump knew that Merkel was referring to Hitler, who, of course, attracted massive crowds throughout his rule of Nazi Germany.

“And I’m thinking,” the congressman told me while recounting his interaction with Trump, “you knew who she is talking about, right?”

Back in 1990 — decades before he got into politics, Trump reportedly acknowledged owning a copy of “Mein Kampf.” The admission came in an interview with Vanity Fair shortly after his divorce from his first wife, Ivana. Here’s what the magazine reported:

“Last April, perhaps in a surge of Czech nationalism, Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, “My New Order,” which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed. Kennedy now guards a copy of “My New Order” in a closet at his office, as if it were a grenade.”

Vanity Fair reporter Marie Brenner asked Trump if his cousin had given up a copy of the book to him. She wrote this is how Trump responded:

“Actually, it was my friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of ‘Mein Kampf,’ and he’s a Jew,” Trump told Brenner.

Brenner then asked Marty Davis whether he gave Trump a copy of the book.

“I did give him a book about Hitler,’ Davis told her. “But it was ‘My New Order,’ Hitler’s speeches, not ‘Mein Kampf.’ I thought he would find it interesting. I am his friend, but I’m not Jewish.”

Brenner then wrote that Trump told her: “If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.”

In other words, Trump’s denial in Iowa that he had read “Mein Kampf” was not the first time he has denied reading Hitler — or the first time there was reason for him to issue such a denial.

ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl is the author of three books on Donald Trump: “Front Row at the Trump Show,” “Betrayal” and “Tired of Winning.”

The America of Trump’s Father: an Aspirational Fascism
Reigned in New York

Wayne Madsen

October 2, 2019

One
might have been confused about America’s actual loyalties
during the brewing years of World War II if they happened to
live in the greater New York City region. New York and its
suburbs in Long Island and New Jersey had a vibrant
community of first- and second-generation German Americans,
the latter having included Fred Trump, Sr., a rising star in
real estate and retailing.

Also active in the New York-New
Jersey region was the German American Bund or
“Amerikadeutscher Bund,” an organization that supported
Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party and the goals and aspirations of
the “New Germany.” The Bund had been created in May 1933
on the orders of German Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess. The
first Bund leader was German immigrant Heinrich “Heinz”
Spanknöbel, who initially called his group the “Friends
of New Germany.” In fact, the “Bund” was nothing more
than an overseas extension of the German Nazi Party and it
took its orders directly from Berlin.

The Bund only
accepted as members Americans of German descent. In 1936,
the Friends of New Germany morphed into the German American
Bund in Buffalo, New York. The group’s leader or
Bundesführer was Fritz Julius Kuhn, a German immigrant and
Nazi Party member, who received US citizenship in 1934. The
general belief is that Kuhn was one of many Nazi members
dispatched abroad in the 1930s by the nascent German Nazi
Party to act as Nazi “eyes and ears” in the United
States, Canada, and other countries. These recent
immigrants, who would become Bund leaders across America,
were later involved in espionage for the German Gestapo and
military intelligence Abwehr before and during World War
II.

The Bund established its national headquarters at 178
East 85th Street in the heavily German neighborhood of
Yorkville in Manhattan. It mirrored the Hitler Youth in
Germany by establishing several Nazi youth camps, most
notably Camp Nordland, Camp Will and Might, Camp Bergwald in
New Jersey, Camp Siegfried in Sussex County on Long Island
in New York, and Camp Highland in upstate New York, outside
of the town of Windham.

The height of the Bund’s
activities was a February 20, 1939 rally at New York
City’s Madison Square Garden. It drew some 20,000 Bund
members and Nazi supporters. One German American who did not
hide his far-right views was Fred Trump, Sr., the father of
Donald Trump. On May 31, 1927, Fred Trump was arrested by
police while participating in a Ku Klux Klan march in his
home borough of Queens in New York. The elder Trump was
publicly known to be a racist and he refused to rent his
apartments in Queens and Brooklyn to African Americans. In
1927, there were few organizations for far-right extremists
like Fred Trump to join. One was the KKK, which had its
roots in the post-Civil War Reconstruction South. Another
was Italian leader Benito Mussolini’s overseas
“Fascisti,” which was primarily composed of Italian
immigrants to the United States. By the early 1930s,
far-right wingers in the American North were fast to embrace
the Nazis and Kuhn’s Bund was able and ready to answer the
call and begin recruiting to its ranks. Fred Trump’s FBI
file – which includes the 1927 arrest at the KKK march –
appears to be missing his pre-war and immediate post-war
year activities. The file does not resume until the 1960s,
when the FBI began monitoring the elder Trump’s
association with Mafia syndicates in New York.

It is known
that “Old Man Trump,” the appellation given him by folk
singer Woody Guthrie in a 1950 song by the same title,
continued his racist ways after the war. Guthrie, who had
the misfortune of renting a unit in the Trump-owned Beach
Haven Apartments in Brooklyn, penned the following lyric:
“Beach Haven is Trump’s Tower. Where no black folks come
to roam. No, no, Old Man Trump! Old Beach Haven ain’t my
home!” It is also interesting that after the war, Trump
insisted that he was of Swedish descent. In fact, Old Man
Trump’s father, Frederick Trump, was an immigrant from
Kallstadt, Bavaria. It was famed aviator Charles Lindbergh,
a Nazi sympathizer, who stressed his Swedish descent to
defend against charges that he was a supporter of Hitler.
However, in both cases – Old Man Trump and Lindbergh –
there was no question of their sympathies to the racial
policies of Hitler and the “New Germany.”

Old Man
Trump’s home and businesses sat in the midst of Bund
activities and businesses that supported the Bund. One of
the most popular newspapers among the German American
community in New York and New Jersey was the Bund’s “The
Free American and Deutscher Weckruf,” published from 1935
to 1941 in both English and German.

The newspaper served
to rally the Nazi cause in New York and New Jersey. The
paper advertised New York theaters like the Tobis, 86th
Casino, 79th Street, and Bijou that screened propaganda
films fresh from the studios of Nazi filmmaker Leni
Riefenstahl. Nazi Germany’s cultural inundation of the
United States was a personal project of Propaganda Minister
Joseph Goebbels.

In 1933, Trump opened the Trump Super
Market in Queens at the corner of 78th Street and Jamaica
Avenue. Since it was the first store of its type in Queens,
it was an immediate success. Considering Old Man Trump’s
political viewpoints, it is very likely that he purchased
wholesale products, including meats from Bund butchers and
German baked goods from Bund bakers, of which there were
several in New York City for his store. Several German
American-owned area businesses, including Maier’s Pork
Store and Ehmer’s Pork Store, both on “Dritte Avenue”
(Third Avenue) in Manhattan, and dairies like Karsten’s
Milch of The Bronx and Astoria in Queens and Erb’s German
Sweet Shop in Manhattan, kept the advertising-dependent
“The Free American and Deutscher Weckruf” flush with ad
revenue. Even large corporations like Philco, a manufacturer
of radios, Texaco, Olympia Typewriter, and Simmons Mattress
Company advertised in the Nazi newspaper. Nazi propaganda in
German was broadcast on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays
from the studios of WBNX, first located in The Bronx and
then moved to New Jersey.

Old Man Trump rented thousands
of his apartment units in Jamaica Estates in Queens and
Brooklyn to white Americans only. Bund supporters cheered
Hitler for refusing to shake the hand of black American
Olympian Jesse Owens after he won four gold medals in the
1936 Berlin Olympics. Considering Old Man Trump’s previous
membership in the KKK, he was undoubtedly cheering
Hitler’s snub of Owens, along with the Bund in New York.
Old Man Trump also suspiciously volunteered, after dodging
the World War II draft, to construct Navy barracks and
garden apartments in at least three highly sensitive Navy
ports in Chester, Pennsylvania; and Norfolk and Newport
News, Virginia. All three ports saw thousands of American
and Canadian troops embarked for combat in North Africa and
Europe. Some of these troop ships fell prey to German
U-boats, which received intelligence on the Allied ship
movements from Nazi agents in the very same port areas where
Old Man Trump so “generously” bid on construction
contracts with the Navy.

Today, Donald Trump, who has
championed concentration camps for asylum seekers and
homeless people, torn babies from their parents, and praised
neo-Nazi marchers in Virginia, echoes the political vitriol
of his father’s era Bund. Today, Trump is fond of
demonizing Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. In
Trump’s father’s era such venom was directed by the Bund
against New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, the late
President Woodrow Wilson, President Franklin D. Roosevelt
(who was sometimes referred to as “Frank Rosenfeld”),
and prominent Jews, including New York US Representative
Samuel Dickstein and Bernard Baruch, all of whom were
labeled as pro-Bolshevik “internationalists.”

Donald
Trump now uses the pejorative term of “globalists.” The
same groups of “socialists,” “Communists,” and
“Jews” singled out for attacks by the Bund are today
targeted by Trump and his supporters under almost identical
labels of “socialists,” “Communists,” and
“globalists.” In Old Man Trump’s Nazi-imbued New York,
the Soviet Union was condemned by Nazis as a Jewish
Communist enterprise. The Bund paper published lists of Jews
in charge of various Soviet republics and regions, naming,
for example “Jude” (Jewish) officials in charge of
Abkhazia, Ajaria, Azerbaijan, Bashkiria, Byelorussia, Far
East Federation, Dagestan, West Siberia, Southwest Region,
Kirghizia, Karelia, Crimea, Kirov Region, Gorky Region,
Moldavia, Mari Region, Nenets Region, Omsk Region, Orenburg
Region, Stalingrad Region, Sverdlovsk Region, East Siberia
Region, Tatarstan, Ukraine, Chechenia, and Yakutsk Region.
The list appeared to be a future execution list for the
Nazis. The Bund championed Hitler’s dream of a Russia
“cleansed” of “Jewish Bolsheviks.”

Donald
Trump’s recent September 24 speech before the UN General
Assembly was no different than the “America First”
rantings of Lindbergh before audiences consisting of people
who shared the racist beliefs of Old Man Trump. His son,
Donald, kept a book of Hitler’s speeches of Hitler on his
bed stand for a reason. Old Man Trump must have instilled in
his family business heir a strong belief in the causes of
the Nazis and the Bund.

After the Bund was declared an
enemy organization in 1941 and the Allies defeated the Axis
powers in the war, Old Man Trump began currying favor with
New York’s Jewish community, making donations to Jewish
philanthropies, including those involved with creating the
State of Israel in Palestine. Just as other Nazis, including
Adolf Eichmann in Argentina, tried to assume benevolent
post-war profiles – even living among expatriate German
Jewish communities – Old Man Trump became a close friend
of Binyamin Netanyahu and other top Israelis and New York
Jewish community leaders. Just as Old Man Trump was not
really fooling anyone in pre-war New York, his son is not
fooling anyone today with his fascist tendencies masked as
“Making America Great Again.” These policies are driven
as much by Trump family Nazi ideology as by political
expediency and personal
greed.

ends

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