Friends of the New GermanyNazi organization in the United States from 1933 to 1935.
The Friends of the New Germany (FONG) originated in July of 1933 with a Nazi salute. Rudolf Hess, the deputy fuhrer of Germany, approved the ambition of Heinz Spanknobel, a Nazi leader from Detroit, to lead a new Nazi organization in the United States.
From the beginning, the association embodied the grandiose foreign policy of Nazi Germany in the United States, and the willingness of immigrant leaders to comply with the aims of this policy. The history of FONG subsequently was tied to the interests of Adolf Hitler’s new government. Germany’s Nazi government funded the organization, played the role of kingmaker, and eventually succeeded in discrediting the group in the fall of 1935, after it had become a liability.The first front man of Nazi Germany in the United States was a brash and elusive figure. An unnaturalized immigrant, Spanknobel posed as a Seventh-Day Adventist itinerant. He was also the former leader of the Detroit office of the Gau- USA, a branch of Hitler’s National Socialist German Worker’s Party (NSDAP). Spanknobel won an audience in Berlin with Hess shortly after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. The Gau officer convinced the deputy fiihrer that he could lead an organization that would be both subservient to Hitler and winsome to Americans. He returned with a document that no other aspiring Nazi leader in the United States could gainsay: official authorization that he was now the American fiihrer.
Spanknobel achieved many of his goals. His “process of coordination,” which delegated the right of threatening violence to the toughest of Nazis, forced the remnants of other Nazi groups such as Gau- USA, the Teutonia Association, and the Swastika League to dissolve into FONG. Spanknobel’s larger association was then structured strictly along the lines of the NSDAP in Germany. Like the NSDAP, FONG practiced the leadership principle and maintained an Ordnungs-Dienst (OD, or Uniformed Service), an elite section of uniformed guards.
As with Germany’s NSDAP in the 1920s, FONG began to intimidate opponents, particularly in the New York City area. After threatening German American leaders with reprisals if they did not submit to him, Spanknobel personally visited the offices of Victor and Bernard Ridder of the New Yorker Staats- Zeitung (New York Public News). The leader of the FONG intimated that even the Ridders would not escape the rage of local Nazis if they did not prove more sympathetic to Hitler. Victor Ridder, however, demanded that Spanknobel leave his office, and called the police. The notoriety of the “Spanknobel affair” had a contradictory effect. Though the rough approach to well-known German Americans created many enemies, FONG also grew in the midst of their notoriety. By October 1933, the organization was publishing newspapers in five major cities (New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, and Cincinnati). It had about 5,000 members and would attract more in the coming years.Though FONG, like its successor, the German American Bund, aspired for national renown, its main strength was in the New York City area. There, a large, unchurched, immigrant German population had daily contacts with the still-larger Jewish community of greater New York. The Friends of the New Germany hoped that rising hatred for the Jews would abet their infiltration of German societies, and foment a tolerance for Nazi leadership. Spanknobel and his allies became activists in the United German Societies (UGS) of New York and nearly gained control of that organization, causing four Jewish groups to leave the federation. When it appeared, however, that a Nazi takeover of the UGS would turn German Day events (October 29, 1933) into a celebration of Nazism, Mayor John O’Brien of New York refused to grant a permit to allow German Day in
1933.
FONG succeeded all too well in inspiring hatred. During a FONG rally in Newark, the OD initiated a brawl with a crowd of hecklers. Crudely painted swastikas soon defaced a number of Jewish synagogues in the New York City area.
Jews of New York began a boycott of German- made goods, and FONG served local German merchants in organizing a more conspicuous counterboycott of Jewish stores. When it became evident that the strongarmed tactics of FONG served only to alienate Americans, the foreign-affairs section of Germany’s NSDAP revoked Spanknobel’s credentials, and he fled back to Germany in October 1933. In March of1934, Congress passed a resolution sponsored by Representative Samuel Dickstein of New York City, funding a committee to investigate un-American activities, particularly those of FONG.
FONG survived its first year, as Nazis on both sides of the Atlantic still saw its existence as necessary. The foreign section of Germany’s NSDAP chose a replacement for Spanknobel, Fritz Gissibl, and nearly shelved him in turn when the group failed to shed its image as a fifth column. Gissibl, a founder of an earlier Nazi group, the Teutonia, proved less compliant than Spanknobel. Gissibl proved willing to curtail his own power if the German Nazis insisted, but rather than leaving the country like Spanknobel, Gissibl got a naturalized American, Hubert Schnuch, to pose as the group’s new leader. Throughout 1934 FONG saw self-proclaimed fiihrers rise against Gissibl for real control of the organization, but the latter, who could claim some support from the Fatherland, remained in control. One challenger named Ignatz Griebl, for instance, was eased out of contention by German officials who hired him as a member of the Abwehr, the intelligence section of the German armed services.
The irony about FONG from beginning to end was that though vetted by German Nazis, the society did little but tarnish Germany’s image in the United States. Under Gissibl, FONG supported Bruno Hauptmann’s unpopular effort to get a fair trial after he was accused of killing the baby of Charles and Anne Lindbergh. They opened camps, drilled young boys, chased invasive journalists from the grounds, and blared propaganda from movies and loudspeakers.
By 1934, the group’s presence created a stir wherever sizable numbers of recent German immigrants were found. In Buffalo, for instance, a journalistic expose of FONG in 1934 showed that the key figure in the local effort was Gerhard Kiessow, a German consular agent. The reports spoke of power struggles; the efforts of local Nazis to take over the Volksfreund (People’s Friend), the last German daily in the city; and a recent local rally held by the traveling Fritz Gissibl. When interviewed, Frank X. Schwab, a recognized leader of the local German community, castigated the Nazi front. He saw FONG as a German variation of the Ku Klux Klan and warned that if they tried straight-armed tactics in Buffalo, that he would die, if necessary, in the fight against them.The decline of FONG was more related to German decisions overseas than to any cowardice or fear of unpopularity
among recent German immigrants. In 1934, as Gissibl warred against competing factions, German consular agents withdrew financial support. In 1935, when Gissibl sent his brother Peter and front man Hubert Schnuch to Germany for help, Nazi officials claimed that they would do nothing to interfere in American affairs. Actually, they would interfere, but not in the way Gissibl had hoped. By this time, German ambassador Hans Luther and other observers of the American scene, such as Theodore Hoffmann, head of the Steuben Society, had convinced leading Nazis— even, it seems, Hitler—that FONG was not even kindling the enthusiasm of the rooted German American element for the new Germany. If the Nazis wanted American neutrality for a future European war, FONG was not going to be very helpful. Aware that the Dickstein committee at this time was helping to smear Germany’s reputation in the eyes of Americans, Nazi officials decided that a complete renunciation of their American organization was in their best interests.
In October 1935, the Gissibl brothers and OD elite were startled to learn that the German Foreign Ministry had proscribed membership in FONG for all German nationals.
This meant that a large fraction of the organization’s membership would either have to quit the group or face the future confiscation of their passports and the revocation of their German citizenship. When Peter Gissibl stormed into the German consulate in Chicago and warned that his brother would personally confront Rudolf Hess about the edict, he was told that if his brother tried to go to Germany, he would be thrown into a concentration camp. Fritz Gissibl, nevertheless, booked a berth to Germany at this time and did meet with German officials. However, his trip served only to help extend the deadline for the new edict to December 31, 1935. Gissibl, ultimately true to the party who had chosen him, resigned his post and returned to Germany. He did not consign the American movement to oblivion, however, for he handpicked a successor who would become the most infamous and effective Nazi leader in American history, Fritz Kuhn. In March 1936 Kuhn reorganized FONG into the German American Bund.Andrew Yox
See also Antisemitism; Buffalo; German American Bund; Kuhn, Fritz Julius; Lindbergh, Charles Augustus; New Yorker Staats-Zeitung; Schwab, Frank X.; Steuben Society of America
References and Further Reading
Berninger, Dieter. “Milwaukee’s German American Community and the Nazi Challenge of the 1930s.” Wisconsin Magazine of History 71 (Winter 1987-1988): 118-142.
Canedy, Susan. America’s Nazis: A Democratic Dilemma. Menlo Park, CA: Markgraf, 1990.
Diamond, Sander. The Nazi Movement in the United States, 1924—1941. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974.
Jenkins, Philip. Hoods and Shirts: The Extreme Right in Pennsylvania, 1925—1950. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.