History Of The German American Bund Foundation

American Nazism is an ongoing and deeply rooted issue that has persisted before World War Two and the Holocaust. While there are presently hate groups around today, there was one group that garnered a lot of attention during the late 1930s, the German American Bund Foundation. This organization held the attention of Americans and caused a stir over their movements before and during World War Two. The German American Bund Foundation used various forms of media (ads, fliers, movies, etc.) to persuade the public to not join the war and support the Third Reich. By understanding the methods that they used and how the American public reacted to those methods, it is important to remember that they were never successful in any attempt to better

Some fliers that the Bund Foundation would use suggested that nothing bad was happening in Germany and that all the Germans were doing was “cleaning house” of all those who might try to oppress them.6 What is notable about their message was how they framed their words of the war and their impression of the Nazis. The Bund Foundation used their identity as an organization based on protecting German Americans to justify their antisemitism and hatred of Jewish people and

From the beginning of their organization, they were never popular with the public since they were formed based on National Socialism and thinly veiled antisemitism disguised as anti-communist.14 The Bund Foundation also failed in persuading the American people to support National Socialism because they failed to remember how many diverse social groups were in America, so many that it would be fruitless to convince them. ”Basic to the Bund's failure to capture a mass following was this attempt to relate a foreign ideology to the American scene. This mindless effort produced ludicrous interpretations of American life and showed that the Bund lived in an eerie world of fantasy and fabrication.”15 One form of retaliation against the Bund Foundation was the creation of a Warner Brothers film called Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939), which was a film that threw aside American neutrality in the war and attacked the Bund Foundation for their actions in supporting the Nazi