Operation America: Hitler’s Global Aspirations
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Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains mature adult themes. Listener discretion is advised.

In late May 1942, two German U-boats left Lorient in Nazi-occupied France to make a mammoth journey of over 3,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States of America. Their mission: to land Nazi agents who were to carry out terrorist attacks on American civilians and sabotage the American war effort.

Incredibly, both U-boats managed to cross the Atlantic and reach the American coast without detection. In this episode, we uncover widespread support for Adolf Hitler in pre-war America and reveal outposts of Nazi Germany within the land of the free. I think he wanted to be the American sure. I think he wanted to organize an overthrow of the American government.

We'll also examine the Nazis' plans to invade America with colossal battleships and fleets of long-range bombers, and we'll find out just how global the Nazis' intentions truly were. Hitler's plans to invade America, as you might imagine, were on a gargantuan scale. On the 20th of February 1939, a crowd of 20,000 attended a Nazi rally to show their support for the regime.

It was filled with all the usual elements of Nazism: Hitler salutes, swastikas, Germanic music and anti-Semitic speeches. None of this would have looked out of place in any city in Germany. Except this wasn't Germany. This was the United States of America. Many Americans saw this new world that the Nazis were claiming to shape as progressive.

And many Americans, thinking of themselves as progressives, were very willing to give sympathy, understanding and time to the new regime. There was a significant number of people of German ancestry living in the States, and therefore they would have a natural sympathy for the old homeland, even though they weren't part of the fatherland in terms of having lived in Germany.

Amongst them were a number who did sympathize with the Nazis. The Nazi Party had a group within it called the Auslandsorganisation, the overseas organization, which made a specific effort within overseas German populations to foster Nazism to develop overseas Nazi Party. Back in the 1930s, near the town of Yapank on Long Island, just 60 miles from New York City, was a summer camp called Camp Siegfried.

This was for American citizens with German ancestry to come together and share their common culture. The camp provided an opportunity for young people of German ancestry from all over America to take part in fun and educational activities. There were archery competitions, hikes through the woods, and visitors were greeted at the gates by women in traditional German dress, all to the sound of German umpah bands.

As time went on, it became apparent that this was no ordinary innocent summer camp, because behind the gates of Camp Siegfried, something very sinister was going on.

Camp Siegfried, set up in Jappank suburb, New York City, was the first major attempt on the part of the pro-German, pro-Nazi movement to create a culture which could be observed and could flourish in the United States as a Nazi culture indeed. And so the young people were given training in Nazi ideology.

And those who were sympathetic to Hitler in particular were encouraged to make something of this in their family upbringing. And the activities, the fun that they had, was all meant to point to the idea that you could, in the United States, have a genuine movement that was pro-Nazi without being anti-American. The best way to describe it is a microcosm of Nazi Germany transported to America.

And so it was a sort of community where there were sort of hutments and streets named after the Nazi Party leadership. Anyone visiting Yappank in the 1930s would have been greeted by street signs that were named after Nazi leaders, such as Goering, Goebbels, and Adolf Hitler himself. But the actual camp...

It's like a large scout camp, a large military camp. And it went through military forms. They rose according to a revali in the morning. They marched and everybody had a particular function to play in terms of saluting the flag or

putting out insignia. And they wore uniforms on a daily basis, particularly at the weekend, of course, where they made much of this. And people were allowed to come in and observe this. It wasn't enclosed in that sense, but it was deliberately left open so that people could see that it was German and Nazi, but not anti-American. Guy Walters is visiting Longwood Public Library in Long Island.

historian and local resident Professor Steven Klipstein has agreed to show him the collection the library holds relating to Camp Siegfried.

Camp Siegfried on one level looks like a bit of a holiday camp, but actually when you start looking at some of these pictures, it looks very different, doesn't it? Well, it was a holiday camp, but it came with the wrappings of Nazi ideology and Nazi philosophy. And people were propagandized. However, there were many people who just did come out for a nice weekend at a lake where they could eat, where they could...

socialized with other German Americans from their community or other communities, and then went home and were not affected by the propaganda. But then you had pictures like this where you literally see the formation of an Aryan youth. And these children were clearly propagandized. They were clearly intended to grow up to be future Nazis.

I mean, you look at this picture here and you've got young men marching with swastikas and people giving the Hitler salute. It's not a regular holiday. No, it wasn't. But these were very attractive to many of the people who were there. The whole pomp and circumstance of the Nuremberg rallies where Hitler stood in front of hundreds of thousands of people with flags flying, torchlight parades. It is a mini Nuremberg. Yes, it is. It's a mini Nuremberg where Kuhn could get up there

and regale his followers about Nazi propaganda. Fritz Kuhn was the leader of an organization called the German-American Bund, which owned and operated Camp Siegfried. At its height, the Bund had over 25,000 members, consisting purely of American citizens of German descent, and their main aim was to promote the Nazi regime in the United States. But Kuhn had even bigger ideas.

I think he wanted to be the American Fuhrer. I think he wanted to organize an overthrow of the American government. And he was not alone. There were quite a few people who wanted to overthrow the American government, throw Roosevelt out, make sure that Germany would be protected and Hitler would be protected, and America not get onto Britain's side in the war.

He believed, Kuhn, that if the Nazi party could become a real political force and challenge perhaps the Democrats and Republicans, even with a view perhaps to some form of power sharing, if not power takeover at some point. He was guided, inspired by that notion, Kuhn, that he could in fact become a Hitler within the United States.

The Bund worked hard to establish a favorable view of Nazism in the United States and encouraged American citizens to ignore the escalating troubles in Europe. And what's more, it seemed to work. Another war? Not for me. This time America should keep out and I know I will.

If war breaks out in Europe, I think that this country should heed the advice of its first president and avoid all foreign entanglements. In the event of war in Europe, I think we should stay out of it entirely. But the German-American Bund wasn't the only organization in America openly supporting the Nazi regime. They were folded into the larger umbrella of the group called America First.

America First was a very strange conglomeration of far-right groups, very conservative, and far-left groups: socialists, utopians, people who were pacifists. There were other groups involved in this. There was a man named William Pelly who started the Silver Shirts SS. They had bookstores all over the United States selling right-wing Nazi material.

Support for Nazism wasn't just limited to small-scale organizations. Some supporters of the regime held positions of power and influence. These included the famous aviator and public figure, Charles Lindbergh. Charles Lindbergh, of course, the famous pilot, went on campaigning against American involvement in Europe. Of course, America had the Neutrality Act, and they were operating a policy of isolationism.

I come before you at this time to enter a plea for American independence. Why? With 130 million people, are we being told that we must give up our independent position? That our frontiers lie in Europe and that our destiny will be decided by European armies fighting on European soil?

They were very strong in favour of this idea of promoting Germany. One aspect of that was the Hindenburg, wasn't it? The Hindenburg had flights, didn't it, to America and back. And he was very much involved in promoting this idea of German technology. And also they were raising money as well. They raised quite a lot of money for Nazi organisations as well.

All of these groups worked tirelessly to promote Nazi ideas within the United States. And as the pro-Nazi movement in America started to grow, so too did the number of youth camps like Siegfried. At one point from Los Angeles to Long Island, there were 20 such camps across America, all teaching children about the ideals of Nazism.

The camp had a number of different purposes. It was first to try and bring an Aryan viewpoint to the United States and ultimately cause an overthrow of the American government and replace it with a Nazi-type government. The second was to basically propagandize children, to bring out as many children, German children as they could, and basically create a kind of Hitler Youth on Long Island, which they did.

These camps had, for the most part, been of little interest to the wider American community. But all of that changed when they became involved in a very public scandal after being accused of encouraging the production of so-called "Aryan children."

Were there young women at the camps as well, or was it just for boys? Apparently there were young women at the camp. And they, the Germans, the Nazis had this theory of promoting the births of as many blonde-haired and blue-eyed children. I honestly don't know if that occurred at Yapank. We know it did happen at a camp in New Jersey where a number of the young women were.

got pregnant, became pregnant. Parents were not happy about it. There was one woman who actually testified in front of a congressional committee that this had gone on and basically that part of it was ignored. But they did have the Liebensborn theories of producing, you know, Germanic-looking, Nordic-looking children. But their actions didn't go unchallenged. The American public had become concerned with the Bund's hate-filled rhetoric and pro-Nazi activities.

and it began to fight back. In turn, the American government established a House Committee of Un-American Activities to investigate the Bund. And in 1938, the state of New York finally forced Camp Siegfried to close. Fritz Kuhn, so enraged by the closure of his camp and the interference of the US government, decided to put on a display of strength to the American people.

On February the 20th, 1939, the German-American Bund staged their largest rally ever at New York City's Madison Square Garden. 20,000 people attended to hear the Bund leader, Fritz Kuhn, speak in a way that was frighteningly similar to Adolf Hitler in Germany. And where do you think this is? Right in Madison Square Garden, USA. And this is Fritz Kuhn.

leader of the German-American Bund, hiding behind the American flag, but taking his orders from Berlin and copying the methods of Berlin. When you see the footage of the German-American Bund rally in Madison Square Garden, you say, hang on.

Are you telling me this is the United States? No, this has got to be Germany. Just look at it. You would think it's Berlin. So you can imagine the fear and trepidation of the American people watching this take place, all the while knowing that the German footprint in Europe is rapidly expanding. In the cavernous space of the iconic Madison Square Garden, thousands of faithful listeners immerse themselves in the hateful speeches delivered by the Bund leaders.

Swastikas and Nazi banners adorned the stadium as they denounced Jews and even President Roosevelt himself. Kuhn and his men were there in the Nazi uniforms, and there were some really scurrilous speeches made about democracy, about the downfall of democracy, about how corrupt democracy was, about the need for a strong leader, about the undermining of American institutions, and of course their hatred of Jews.

Kuhn was trying to legitimize his organization as patriotic and truly American by idolizing the first president of the United States, George Washington. They had this tremendous picture of George Washington, as if somehow George Washington

represented their point of view. You know, this was, it was Washington's birthday when they had the rally. I don't know who came up with the brilliant idea to put Washington above the dais. Outside Madison Square Garden, over 50,000 anti-Nazi demonstrators had gathered and some 1,700 policemen mobilized to try to stop them from storming the building. Picketing had also been banned in order to try and keep the peace.

But of course, inevitably, there were riots and there were scuffles. And all this generated yet more and more publicity for the German-American Bund. The American government, supported by a frightened public, stepped up its crusade against the Bund. In December 1939, Kuhn was put on trial for tax evasion and embezzling money from the Bund itself. Basically, he was convicted and he was sent to Sing Sing.

Kuhn spent his war life in detention. After the war, he was deported back to Germany. He thought he was going to be rewarded and instead was banished. And he lived in a small house in some small German town in absolute ignominy. He was just ignored. Once Fritz Kuhn was out of the picture, the movement kind of died. And basically, that was that. What this meant

is that if Hitler wanted America to turn Nazi, he was going to have to do it by force. With its leader gone, the movement petered out and became little more than a footnote in history. But while the Bund had represented a very open and public pro-Nazi movement, it was replaced by something far less easy to detect.

Before the United States had even entered into the Second World War, a network of German spies had infiltrated multiple areas of American society. It was known as the Duquesne spy ring. 33 men and women were involved in the Nazi espionage network, known as the Duquesne spy ring.

It was named after its ringleader, Frederick Duquesne, and its mission was to gather information that could be used in the event of war and to commit acts of sabotage. Looking at the details of those involved, you can see how effectively these spies managed to work their way into key civilian jobs.

The ringleader, Frederick Duquesne, operated a front business called the Air Terminals Company, through which he provided crucial information about anything from national defense to shipping movements, which was then sent to Germany. Another member, René Mezenen, was an airline steward, who not only acted as a courier, but would also look out the window during flights to spy on convoys bound for Britain in the Mid-Atlantic.

And then there's Richard Eichenlaub, whose little casino restaurant in New York City served as a secret meeting place for spies and was also a great place for him to eavesdrop on his customers, many of whom held extremely sensitive posts in government. Many of the other members of the spy ring had obtained regular jobs at New York Harbor or in the wider shipping and aviation industries.

Holding these positions allowed them to collate and to send back to Germany any information they felt was of military importance, such as shipments of supplies to Britain, defense preparations of the Panama Canal, and even Winston Churchill's secret visit to America in 1941.

The Duquesne Spire Ring was one of several fostered by German-Americans and encouraged and financed by the Nazis to find out information about industrial products, military projects encouraged by the Nazis who wanted to keep an eye. They were aware.

that America was an enormous and growing superpower, and it would be great to keep them neutral. They thought there was a great danger of them coming into war on the Allied side, and they did everything they could to discourage that and to encourage pro-fascist forces. It was the most sophisticated German spying operation ever conducted on American soil, and provided the Germans with a steady supply of highly sensitive information.

One of the spies, Harry Sawyer, whose real name was Wilhelm Siebold, had an office on West 42nd Street, which was registered under the unassuming name of Diesel Research Company. This office was the meeting point for Nazi spies to discuss their plans. They would arrive with their blueprints, wartime information, and other classified documents, all of which was ready to be sent straight to Germany.

But unbeknownst to Germany and the other members of the spy ring, Sawyer was a double agent working with the FBI. The FBI fitted Sawyer's office with hidden microphones and two-way mirrors and therefore obtained hour after hour of incriminating footage of the spies. A concealed camera in the next office took these incriminating pictures. That's Heinrich Klosing, a cook on the Illini Argentina.

Closing's work was to act as courier, carrying military information. These spies had a radio station, which unknown to them, was operated by an FBI agent. And information was falsified until it was worthless, saving the lives of thousands of American seamen, American tonnage, and American goods. This allowed the FBI to identify dozens of American agents working in the U.S., Mexico, and South America.

The FBI, under Hoover's direction, make their first big move against the Duquesne Ring. In June 1941, members of the spy ring were rounded up and put on trial. It was the biggest espionage bust in U.S. history. The 33 members were sentenced to serve a total of over 300 years in prison.

In the end, most of these spy rings, when it came to war, were broken up by the FBI under the notorious director J. Edgar Hoover, who previously had concentrated on exposing communism and communist agents, but he then turned his attention to the Nazis. The fact that Hitler was sending spies to the United States seemed to show that he was thinking ahead to a possible war with America, and maybe even its conquest.

But the American public, still remembering the horrors of the First World War, were 80% opposed to entering what they considered to be a European conflict. But in October 1941, President Roosevelt announced to the world the discovery of a map which showed Hitler had in fact set his sights firmly on the United States. I have in my possession a secret map made in Germany.

by Hitler's government, by the planners of the new world order. So what did the map show? For a start, it's got the German word for secret at the top, and it divides the whole of South America into five new Germanic states. And it also shows Lufthansa air routes all over the continent.

But most sinister of all is a new territory, Neuospanien, containing Panama, which of course contains the Panama Canal, strategically vital to the US. So, to the American people, it looked like Hitler was planning to be right on their doorstep. Faced with this new evidence, the American people who'd been against the idea of war with Germany were starting to change their minds.

The Nazi government, however, reacted angrily to the news, claiming to know nothing about the map and declaring it to be a forgery. But now, today, some believe that Germany had been telling the truth and the map was indeed a forgery planted by the British. Churchill says to his son Randolph, almost as soon as he becomes Prime Minister in May 1940, "What I'm going to do is get the Americans into the war."

Some historians have now come to the conclusion that the map was the product of a division of British intelligence called the British Security Coordination and it was designed to push America into the war. The organization was based at Rockefeller Center, right in the heart of New York City.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of British secret agents worked tirelessly to spread propaganda and fake news stories to try to convince the American public to support the United States in taking an active role in the war in Europe. And we also made out that the Bolivian military attache in Berlin

Major Belmonte was going to lead a coup d'état and establish a Nazi dictator or fascist dictatorship in Bolivia. Completely false. Although the British security coordination used propaganda, disinformation, and underhand tactics to try to gain the support of the American people, nothing could have changed public opinion more than what happened on the 7th of December 1941.

That, of course, was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In the wake of that, America immediately declared war on Japan. And Hitler, in turn, declared war on the United States. I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan

Hitler's decision to instigate war against America went against all reason.

The United States had nearly twice Germany's population at this point, and had already ramped up military production in readiness for a possible conflict with both Germany and Japan. But Hitler's warped racial views led him to believe that victory over the United States was pretty much inevitable. He actually despised Americans, and he despised and loathed Roosevelt, I think, far more than Churchill or Stalin.

-He calls it at one point, you know, a Jewish-controlled organization, a melting pot of different races. And he said, you know, any country that has so many races in it can't possibly rise up to be a major power. -He had a blind spot, I think. He didn't realize the importance of America coming into the war. And so he just regarded it all as a terrific bluff.

Fearful of America's mighty capacity for military production and its abundant supply of raw materials, Hitler almost immediately authorized a plan to sabotage the American war effort. Germany would land agents on the American mainland, over 3,000 miles away, with the aim of destroying key American industrial sites and spreading a wave of terror throughout the United States.

The plan was given the code name "Operation Pistorius" and eight Nazi agents were selected to go on it. Why? Because they were all German citizens who had spent a long time in America. Some of them were actually Americans, and they were therefore ideal candidates to go on the mission.

Equipped with explosives, fake identities, and nearly $174,000 in cash, the two U-boats made their way across the Atlantic and into American waters. One landed on the Florida coast and the other on a beach near Amagansett on Long Island.

The U-boat landed near Amagansett on the 13th of June 1942, and immediately the four Nazi agents disembarked and made their way across the beach and over the sand dunes. They almost immediately ran into trouble when they came across a member of the US Coast Guard. John C. Cullen was patrolling the beach when he came across the four Nazi spies.

Unarmed, Cullen was overpowered by German agent George Dash, who threatened him before stuffing $260 in his pocket to keep quiet. On his return to the station, Cullen immediately reported the incident to his superiors. But by the time they had returned to the beach with an armed guard, Dash and his accomplices had fled the scene and were already on their way to Manhattan.

Their plan was to blow up aluminum plants in the United States, in various places along the way. All of the German saboteurs were now ready to carry out their planned attack, except for one: George Dash. Did the encounter with the Coast Guard give him cold feet? Or did he never intend to carry out the mission in the first place? George Dash decided to betray the entire mission.

and he enlisted the help of Ernest Berger, who himself had been incarcerated in a concentration camp for well over a year. Together, the two men betrayed the entire operation. Daesh had already given up on the idea of terrorism in the States, and he said to Berger, "Look, this is a crazy idea. We can't sow the fatherland. We don't wish to sow the fatherland. The only thing we can really do is give ourselves up and agree to be double agents."

Dash decided to hand himself in at the FBI headquarters and give up his fellow saboteurs. The FBI initially didn't give him the time of day, but then he comes in and dumps the entire budget of the mission onto the desk of the assistant director. Now that got their attention. Adesh and Berger were as Roosevelt had wanted. They were given clemency. The others were executed.

Operation Pistorius had been an embarrassing failure for Germany, and it would be Hitler's last sabotage attempt in America. But it did prove one thing: that German forces were capable of crossing the Atlantic and reaching the mainland of the United States. Spurred on by this idea, Hitler requested his top military planners and engineers to ramp up plans for an all-out attack on the United States.

Hitler's architect, Albert Speer, recalled how Hitler used to fantasize about seeing New York City in flames. In 1938, initial planning had already begun on a project that, had it been successful, would have seen the skies in New York City filled with German warplanes, raining utter devastation on the city below. It was called the American Bomber Project. Its objective

to produce an aircraft capable of flying non-stop from Nazi-occupied Europe to the United States and to carry out bombing raids. They'd already developed bombers with the ability to make the 3,000-plus mile journey to America, but that was only half the problem. He didn't develop a sufficient long-range petrol tank for a return journey. So it would be a suicide mission, which really didn't inspire them. They didn't want to see planes lost in that way.

But on the 12th of May 1942, concrete plans were finally submitted to the commander-in-chief of the German Luftwaffe, Hermann Göring. Because the distances between Europe and the United States are so great, they spoke of using the Azores as a transit airfield. It's in this way that Hitler's bombers would have been able to get across the Atlantic and unleash their terror on American soil. Four companies developed such bombers.

Messerschmitt, Junkers, Heinkel and Focke-Wulf. The most promising of these was the Junkers Ju 390. The first prototype made its maiden flight in October 1943. It performed well and a further 26 aircraft were specially ordered for an attack on the United States. Hitler wanted to bring

the war to America and especially to New York and the, what he saw, the Jewish-dominated New York and Washington. And so German aircraft manufacturers were all invited to draw up plans of a New York, a bomber that would get to New York and back. But fleets of bombers were only part of the plan. There were also schemes to attack the United States by sea.

In early 1939, Hitler had ordered what was known as Plan Z, the colossal expansion of the German navy.

Hitler's plans to invade America, as you might imagine, were on a gargantuan scale. There was to be a fleet of 3.3 million tons, including 20 battleships, 16 aircraft carriers, 100 cruisers, and 500 submarines. This is what Hitler thought he needed to invade mainland America.

I think Hitler knew how important submarine warfare had been in the First World War, and he thought that if he stepped this up under the U-boat fleet commander, Karl Dönitz, who was to be his eventual successor as Fuhrer, that this was a way of waging economic war, isolating Britain and also attacking America, because the U-boats were mainly operating the Atlantic.

Neither the project for the long-range bomber nor an expanded navy were ever completed. As the war progressed, Germany's rapidly depleting resources put a halt to Hitler's plans. But despite all this, Hitler still continued to believe that ultimate victory over America was a foregone conclusion.

I think it's true to say, and he goes on record in his notorious table talk, that he regards America not as a nation at all, really. He thinks it's been defiled by the Jews, by the Negroes, as he put it. It wasn't a country that he saw the Americans being completely devoid of culture. Due to his twisted belief in the racially diverse nature of America,

Hitler thought that the victory of the superior German people was inevitable. These warped views also meant that he never quite gave up the idea of an alliance with Britain, believing that the inevitable German victory over the Soviet Union would cause Britain to switch sides and join in an alliance with Germany, forging a united front against America. Of course, Hitler's so-called inevitable victory turned into a catastrophic defeat.

The Allies advanced on Berlin and Germany surrendered a week later. Historians will probably never agree on what Hitler's true plans for the United States were, but what is clear is that his plans for America saw him at his most ambitious and his most deluded. Grossly underestimating the United States led him to declare war on the country, arguably signing the Third Reich's death warrant.