[This is an edited and updated version of an essay I posted in May 2021] It Has Happened Here

Several years ago I visited the Ridgewood section of Brooklyn where I grew up. What was, from about 1940 to 2000, an affordable nondescript working class neighborhood, has gradually been gentrified, with properties now selling at $700,000 or more.

In my early years, the neighborhood was populated by a distinctive majority of first and second generation German immigrants. Old German women scrubbed their porches and sidewalks in front of their homes while my friends and I played stickball in the street, challenging traffic and parked cars.

German bakeries, like Brown’s, featured mouth-watering strudel and crumb cake. Rudy Oswald’s Delicatessen sold delicious potato salads, macaroni salads, fine sausage, and cold cuts that attracted customers from surrounding neighborhoods. German restaurants and beer halls were ubiquitous and prosperous. The local German barber shop on Forest Avenue featured “Ten Barbers. No waiting.” A haircut was fourteen cents. Most of the barbers were German war refugees who spoke little or no English.

A popular blog about growing up in Ridgewood in the forties and fifties is filled with nostalgia about the “good old days, the simpler times.”

But the Ridgewood of the 1930’s, like the Yorkville neighborhood in New York City, was a much darker place. Shortly after Hitler took power in 1933, “Friends of a New Germany” surfaced in New York. Embracing Nazi ideology, it sought to mobilize anti-Semitic sentiment throughout the city. The organization circulated “Blue Eagle Stickers” to German merchants to display in their front windows, and they sprayed swastikas on the store windows of Jewish merchants. The synagogue on Ridgewood’s Cornelia Street was repeatedly defaced.

Peter Duffy’s book about a German American spy (Double Agent) describes how “two thousand people gathered on March 17 [1934] at the rustic Schwaben Hall on the Brooklyn side of Ridgewood.” The speakers charged that “Jewish economic masters” were seeking to impoverish all German Americans. By the end of the evening all hands were raised high in a salute to Hitler.

Three weeks later, and several blocks from Schwaben Hall, Duffy reports that “six thousand Germans crammed the Ridgewood Grove arena for a similar evening of obloquy and song, while a few thousand more gathered outside on Palmetto Street and St. Nicholas Avenue.”

Furthermore, in an effort to replicate what was going on in Hitler’s Germany, the American Nazis outside the rally engaged in “eighteen brawls” by one reporter’s count, primarily against the “Anti-Fascist League of Brooklyn and the Jewish War Veterans Association.”

Pro-Nazi momentum and membership was growing: On May 17, 1934, more than twenty thousand gathered at Madison Square Garden. Swastikas and American flags adorned the rafters. “One banner near the speaker’s rostrum urged German Americans to ‘Awake!’” NYPD officers protected the outside of the arena while eight hundred “Ordnungsdienst” enforcers patrolled the interior.”

“Friends of a New Germany” gathered moral and financial support from prominent anti-Semites and “America First” proponents like Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and radio priest, Father Coughlin. The central protagonist in the movement was Fritz Kuhn, the “American Hitler” and anointed leader of the German American Bund, a powerful group that pledged its 50,000 members’ support for Republican Alf Landon’s 1936 presidential run against Roosevelt.

The crowning moment for the Bund and the “Friends of the New Germany” occurred at Madison Square Garden eighty-two years ago, on February 20, 1939. The lower part of the Garden marquee announced two ordinary events — a Tuesday hockey game between the Rangers and Detroit and a Wednesday basketball game between Fordham and Pittsburgh. The top of the marquee read “Pro American Rally.”

A short documentary entitled “A Night at the Garden” -- nominated for Academy Award as Best Short Documentary -- captures without commentary the frenzied pageantry of the evening. Banners urged: “Stop Jewish Domination of Christian America” and “Wake Up America. Smash Jewish Communism.” They set the stage and the tone for 22,000 enthusiastic members of the German American Bund and their key speaker, Fritz Kuhn.

In the middle of his speech, a local columnist, Dorothy Thompson, laughed and heckled Kuhn by shouting “Bunk!” and was quickly removed by a “pair of storm troopers.”

Interestingly, Thompson was the wife of famed novelist Sinclair Lewis, the author of It Can’t Happen Here, a dystopian fantasy published in 1936 imagining what it might look like if fascism came to America. Lewis’ central character fancies himself a champion of the forgotten man, one who is eager to mobilize America’s white working class. Pursuing his dream, this character uses large rallies to denounce the the mainstream press and lash out against intellectuals, policy elites, as well as blacks and Jews. When he becomes President, he jails his political enemies and strips the Congress of its Constitutional authority.

Battalions of Nazi Storm Troopers (Brown Shirts) salute Hitler during a parade through Dortmund, Germany, 1933. Prisoners arrested during the crackdown on leftists and other targeted groups exercise in the courtyard of the Alexanderplatz prison. Munich, Germany, April 10, 1933. Holocaust Encyclopedia

Seven months after the rally in Madison Square Garden, Hitler invaded Poland, and the German America Bund dissipated as America went to war against Hitler’s Germany. Kuhn was deported in 1945, and his supporters went underground.

Trump has exhumed and renamed the American Bund and is dismantling our venerable Constitution. What’s old is new again. Today in America, masked American Storm Troopers, rampage among our states terrorizing, kidnapping, and imprisoning thousands of innocent people. Simultaneously, Trump threatens his political enemies, a free press, and long-time allies. He also operates an extortion racket, a kleptocracy, and illegally prosecutes a war on Venezuela. Venezuela!

Like Hitler, Trump is a national and international menace and, like Hitler, he must be stopped . . . or . . .what were hitherto unimaginable outrages from the “Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave” — until 2025 — will only get worse.

Prisoners at CECOT, captured in America and shipped to EL Salvador by ICE under the command of Trump’s Homeland Security.