Some Charm City Germans in the 1930's

March 26, 2018 11:06 AM

"What the rise of Nazism looked like in Baltimore during the 1930s"
posted by josher71 (12 comments total)

That was interesting, thanks! What a lot of research went into that, and effort made to weave many strands of the story and make it feel real. I really appreciated that.
posted by eggkeeper at 12:06 PM on March 26, 2018 [3 favorites]

I've had the German American Bund on my list as s potential FPP for a long time. Looking into the spread of Naziism in the US in the 1930s is enlightening, in general. There is a local history of this across the nation. If anything, it's perversely comforting to know this country has always had a subsector of folks totally ready to turn traitor.
posted by Miko at 12:19 PM on March 26, 2018 [3 favorites]

Oh. My. My father was 3/4 a 3rd Generation German-American growing up in Baltimore in the 1930s. He was of draft-able age when the Draft was instituted a year before Pearl Harbor and he enlisted soon after just to demonstrate his patriotism. With a German surname that literally rhymed with "Hitler", they made sure he was kept half a world away from the German Army, sent to the Pacific Theater to fight the Japanese as a member of the Marines Air Corps, but always as a gunner or bombadier, never a pilot (one of a long list of things he never talked to me about).

this country has always had a subsector of folks totally ready to turn traitor.
If they were like my father's family I knew of, many of them were solidly pro-German when it was not considered traitorous and changed sides sheepishly when it was prudent to do.
posted by oneswellfoop at 12:29 PM on March 26, 2018 [6 favorites]

this country has always had a subsector of folks totally ready to turn traitor.

67 million at last count...
posted by Naberius at 12:37 PM on March 26, 2018 [10 favorites]

“In the face of the established fact that Hitler finds increasingly more brutal measures necessary to suppress the opposition which is rising against him in Germany,” the girls write, “the Rev. Evers made the statement that the Germans were happy and satisfied. . . . In spite of the mountains of authoritative data proving that the Hitler government is one of the most backward and barbaric in history, the Rev. Evers spoke approvingly of some of its work, and tacitly approved the rest by failing to attack it.”

The principal is dumbfounded by the petition, admitting he couldn't find “anything that could be called offensive” in the pastor's speech.

Asked for comment, Evers says that he meant no offense and that the girls must be “supersensitive.”

Apart from the present/past tense change, one almost wouldn't be able to tell if this was from 1938 or 2018.
posted by zombieflanders at 12:39 PM on March 26, 2018 [24 favorites]

On the question of Hitler's treatment of the Jews, Dr. Notz, who is an economist by trade, relates an anecdote from his own meeting with the Führer two years earlier in Germany. “If your country,” Hitler told him, “was flooded with Japanese, fomenting strikes and plotting against the government, what would the citizens of your country do?”

a logical, evil, nativist assumption presumably derived from Hitler's own understanding of American eugenics as promoted by the likes of Stanford

it takes on evil nativist to know another, you could say. that this still predicts how Muslim-Americans and Latinx-Americans are treated in America in 2018 says a lot of about how very precious little progress we've made in dispelling racist assumptions in the American imaginary
posted by runt at 1:04 PM on March 26, 2018 [10 favorites]

"What the rise of Nazism looked like in Baltimore during the 1930s"

brings to mind some research I was doing a few years back in the archives of the city of Nanaimo, and stumbling across a 1930s ad for a local restaurant.

'Guaranteed White Only Service'

I pointed it out to one of the archivists. She nodded grimly and said, "We're still not one hundred percent sure if that meant no non-whites served, or no non-white service staff. Probably both."
posted by philip-random at 2:28 PM on March 26, 2018 [1 favorite]

If anything, it's perversely comforting to know this country has always had a subsector of folks totally ready to turn traitor.

A fine time to revisit Dorothy Thompson's 1941 article in Harper's, "Who Goes Nazi?"
posted by mhum at 3:39 PM on March 26, 2018 [7 favorites]

Thanks for this. For a few minutes I forgot the Baltimore City Paper had been shuttered. This was from Feb 2017. There is a pretty gaping hole in local news here now.
posted by jetsetsc at 6:03 PM on March 26, 2018 [3 favorites]

As footnotes to a fascinating article (thank you, josher71), here's a photo of the Hansa House, "that German-ass-looking building at the corner of N. Charles and Redwood streets." And here's some history of the sabotage ring that worked out of the building, whose work damaged the Statue of Liberty (and much more), as mentioned in TFA.
posted by bryon at 11:46 PM on March 26, 2018 [2 favorites]

I've long been curious about this (possible) aspect of Indianapolis' history, given it's large and active German population throughout both world wars. But, man, digging anything up, one way or another, is pretty frustrating.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:17 AM on March 27, 2018

This is amazing. Thanks so much for posting it.

The contrast we see in this section is exceptionally powerful. It's very near the end of the piece.

Dec. 9, 1941

Early this morning, the FBI and Department of Immigration launch a roundup across the city that nets 71 foreign-born Baltimoreans, some of them sent to the City Jail for safe keeping and others to locations undisclosed for questioning. Most of those taken in are Italians and Germans, including a local travel agent and German-language radio host who allegedly agreed to an offer from the Reich to spread Nazi propaganda on Baltimore airwaves. The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor two days earlier; yesterday America entered World War II.

The FBI also grabs Harry H. Sekine, manager of the I. Sekine Company's brush factory in Reservoir Hill. The factory employs 140 people, none of them Japanese save for him. For the 20 years Sekine has lived here, there have been no Japanese singing societies or baseball teams for him to join, no saké halls to frequent, no Japanese Days at Gwynn Oak Park, no conversation in his native language except at home on Wilkins Avenue. The FBI lets him go almost immediately but the factory isn't allowed to reopen until Christmas, when Sekine sees to it that his employees are paid back their lost wages in full. According to the company's lawyer, during the month of closure Sekine's workers “showed more concern for his fate than for their jobs.”

Harry Sekine lived with his wife, Cherry Blossom Sekine, until he died in Catonsville in 1975, too soon to see President Reagan sign the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 that formally recognized the injustice of Japanese internment and began a program of reparations. And though he himself was spared the fate of over 100,000 Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast during the war, that thought could never have been far from him as he lived out the rest of his life in Baltimore. Close, too, must have been the thought of what could have been if he had never left Japan in the first place. He must have wondered, now and again, what he had gotten himself into coming to a city like ours.

------
Searching online, it looks like Mr. Sekine's brush factory was housed in the Whitehall Mill, which is very close to Johns Hopkins University in Hampden.

Whitehall consists of four interconnected buildings constructed between 1865 and the 1880s. Records indicate that there has been a mill on the property since 1798.

Besides serving as a cotton mill, the buildings have housed the Sekine Brush Factory and Penguin Books. They were last used as a warehouse for pornography and sex toys by Komar Company, which relocated. Sex toys were stored on the second level, while magazines were stored on the first level. After heavy storms, floodwater from the Jones Falls would get into the lower level and damage the magazines stored there.

posted by zarq at 12:54 PM on March 27, 2018