Kuhn, Fritz Julius b. May 15, 1896; Munich, Bavaria d. December 14, 1951; Munich, Bavaria
Leader of the German American Nazi movement in the United States between 1936 and 1941. Kuhn participated in World War I as an active member of the German Wehrmacht and joined a Frei- korps in Munich in 1921 before he started studying chemistry at the University of Munich in 1922.
In 1923 Kuhn left Germany for Mexico, but in 1927 immigrated to the United States. In the United States he found a position as a chemist at the Ford Motor works in Detroit. There he started his career as a political propagandist for the National So
cialist (German Worker’s) Party (NSDAP). Kuhn emerged as the political leader of the German American Nazi movement, when the Friends of the New Germany, the first German American Nazi organization in America, was banned. As a consequence, the Nazi Party tried to change its approach to the political mobilization of ethnic Germans in the United States. As the NSDAP did not want to lose the support of a segment of German American society, they created an organization, the German American Bund (GAB), mainly composed of American citizens of German descent, and sought to label it a “cultural” rather than a “political” group. In dire need of finding a successor to Fritz Gissibl, the leader of the Friends of the New Germany who chose to remigrate to Germany, the NSDAP installed Kuhn, who had gained full American citizenship, as leader of the German American Bund (founded on March 28/29, 1936, in Buffalo, New York).
However, under the leadership of Kuhn, this organization became even more aggressively antisemitic and antiCommunist than its predecessor. This shift was due to Kuhn’s personal ambition to become a major political figure in the Nazi movement. For this reason, he maintained a close friendship with Andree Anastase Vonsiatsky, the leader of the Ukrainian Hetman Organization in America, and with several American Fascist and racist groups.
Most notoriously, the GAB was involved in the George Washington Birthday Exercises in Madison Square Garden, New York, in February 1938 and a joint meeting with the Ku Klux Klan in 1940 at Camp Nordland, a “recreational” camp of the GAB at Yaphank, Long Island, which was also used for paramilitary training.Because of the nature of the First Amendment to the American Constitution, Kuhn could never be tried for the spreading of hate propaganda. However, on December 5, 1939, Kuhn was sentenced to two and a half to five years in prison for tax evasion and the misappropriation of GAB funds. He was successively denaturalized as an American citizen and deported to Germany in 1945. In 1948, he was subject to a denazification trial of the American military administration in Munich. There he was found guilty and sentenced to forced labor in a camp in Nuremberg.
Cornelia Wilhelm
See also Antisemitism; Denazification; Friends of the New Germany; German American Bund
References and Further Reading
Canedy, Susan. America’s Nazis: A Democratic Dilemma. Menlo Park, CA: Markgraf, 1990.
Diamond, Sander A. The Nazi Movement in the United States, 1923—1938. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1974.
Wilhelm, Cornelia. Bewegung oder Verein? Nationalsozialistische Volkstumspolitik in den USA. Stuttgart: Steiner, 1998.