On this day back in 1939, a Nazi rally was held.

That in and of itself is not surprising. The Nazi power was, after all, gaining rapid grounds and becoming wildly popular within Germany, with their fiery leader riling up both nationalist pride and antisemitic vitriol as his power grew. By this time, he’d already started work on his sixth concentration camp and, although a full invasion of Poland was still six and a half months away, rumbles of war were already starting to gain momentum. Still, Adolf Hitler basked in the love of his party, and rallies were a common occurrence across Germany.

So, no, a Nazi rally being held on February 20, 1939 shouldn’t come as a surprise.

But it’s location might.

Because this rally took place, not in the heart of Germany….but right here in the United States.

In Madison Square Garden, to be exact.

Organized by the German American Bund, a German-American Nazi organization established in 1936 and made up of American citizens of German descent whose main goal was to promote a favorable view of Nazi Germany. For the past several years, this openly anti-semitic organization had held Nazi summer camps for youth and their families as well as holding rallies with Nazi insignia which attacked the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jewish-American groups, Communism, “Moscow-directed” trade unions and American boycotts of German goods. Because of this, the group was often derided in the press as “anti-American,” a claim the organization tried to refute by displaying the flag of the United States alongside the flag of Nazi Germany at meetings, even going so far as to declare that George Washington was “the first Fascist” because he did not believe that democracy would work.

As things in Germany grew more unstable, however, support for the German American Bund began to wane. Tensions between the United States and Germany were already high, and the German Ambassador to the United States Hans-Heinrich Dieckhoff expressed his disapproval and concern over the group to Berlin, causing distrust between the Bund and the Nazi regime. The organization received no financial or verbal support from Germany. Public outcry within the States continued to grow and, on March 1, 1938, in an effort to help appease U.S. relations, the Nazi government decreed that no German nationals could be a member of the Bund, and that no Nazi emblems were to be used by the organization.

But the Bund refused to back down.

They began to plan for what would be their biggest and most explosive rally yet, right in the heart of New York City.

Knowing the event would be volatile, New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia dispatched the largest number of city police to guard a single event in the city’s history, sending 1,700 uniformed police officers to patrol the exterior of the venue and 600 undercover detectives and non-uniformed New York Police Department officers to be present inside the hall. Thirty-five members of the NY Fire Department stood nearby, armed with a heavy-duty fire hose in preparation in case of a riot. Even bomb squads combed the local arena in response to a threat received a week earlier, boasting of a series of time-activated devices to explode during the event.

On the day of the event, more than 20,000 attendees gathered inside the arena, raising Nazi salutes toward a 30-foot-tall portrait of George Washington flanked by swastikas. Banners waved, proclaiming messages like “Stop Jewish Domination of Christian Americans” and “Wake Up America. Smash Jewish Communism.” When Kuhn gave his closing speech, he referred to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as “Rosenfield,” and Manhattan District Attorney Thomas Dewey as “Thomas Jewey.”

“We, with American ideals, demand that our government shall be returned to the American people who founded it,” declared Kuhn, a naturalized American who lost his citizenship during World War II. “If you ask what we are actively fighting for under our charter: First, a socially just, white, Gentile-ruled United States. Second, Gentile-controlled labor unions, free from Jewish Moscow-directed domination.”

But if the crowd of Nazi supporters was big, it was nothing to group who had gathered outside. About 100,000 anti-Nazi protesters gathered around the arena, carrying signs stating “Smash Anti-Semitism” and “Drive the Nazis Out of New York”. Although the group was held back by a substantial law enforcement presence, a total of three attempts were made to break the arm-linking lines of police, the first of these, a group of World War I veterans, wrapped in red, white and blue of the Stars and Stripes, were held off by police on mounted horseback, the next, a “burly man carrying an American flag” and finally, a Trotskyist group known as the Socialist Workers Party, who like those before, had their efforts halted by city police. As the rally ended, however, several protestors managed to extricate themselves from the barriers and come face to face with the departing Nazis; there were reports of several Hitler sympathizers getting punched in the rally’s aftermath.

The gathering did not have the effect the Bund had been hoping for.

Instead, the group continued its rapid decline. In addition to rapidly changing American sympathies, the Bund also came under investigation. After its financial records were seized in a raid on the group’s Yorkville, Manhattan headquarters on the Upper Eastside, authorities discovered that $14,000 (worth about $273,000 in 2021) which was raised by the Bund during the rally was unaccounted for – Kuhn had spent it on his mistress and various personal expenses. Kuhn was later convicted of embezzlement and sent to Sing Sing prison in upstate Ossining, New York in December 1939. While in prison, his citizenship was canceled. After serving 43 months in state prison, Kuhn was released….only to be re-arrested on June 21, 1943, as an enemy alien and interned by the federal government at a camp in Crystal City, Texas. After the war, Kuhn was interned at Ellis Island and deported to Germany on September 15, 1945.

Kuhn’s successor as the Bund’s leader was Gerhard Wilhelm Kunze, a spy for German military intelligence who fled south from the United States in November 1941. However, cooperative Mexican authorities forced him to return to the United States, where he was sentenced to serve 15 years in prison for espionage. The Bund’s final national leader was George Froboese, who was in charge of the organization when Germany declared war on the United States, several days after the Attack on Pearl Harbor, December 11, 1941. Froboese committed suicide a year later in 1942 after he received a federal grand jury subpoena.