On the night of April 20, 1938, roughly 3,000 members of the German-American Bund packed the Yorkville Casino on Manhattan's Upper East Side. The ballroom was decorated with swastikas for a celebration of Adolf Hitler's 49th birthday. Bund leader Fritz Kuhn, who styled himself the American Führer, stood on stage imitating Hitler's screaming delivery and railing about what he called the Jewish problem in America.
Outside on East 86th Street, a thoroughfare locals nicknamed Sauerkraut Boulevard, brown-shirted Nazis were still arriving after a goose-stepping march from Carl Schurz Park in full stormtrooper uniforms. None of them noticed the short, quiet man sitting in the third row. His name was Meyer Lansky, and he had not come to listen.
At a signal understood only by his crew, Lansky's men attacked from three sides at once. One squad burst through the main doors. Another dropped from the fire escape through an upstairs window. A third was already inside, scattered through the crowd with baseball bats hidden under their coats. Fifteen separate fistfights erupted simultaneously.
Nazis were thrown out of windows. Bodies piled up near the exits. Contract killers who had built their reputations murdering for the mob now turned those same skills on American fascists. The whole assault lasted about fifteen minutes. When it was over, the ballroom floor was littered with unconscious Nazis and men with compound fractures screaming on the ground. Blood was smeared across the swastika banners.
Lansky and his crew walked out wearing American Legion hats they had used as disguises. They dropped their baseball bats and pool cues on the sidewalk and disappeared into the city.
This was not a random street brawl. It was an organized operation planned by a New York judge, funded by Jewish mobsters, and executed by some of the most feared killers in America. It was part of a secret campaign that waged war on Nazism in American streets while much of the world was still trying to negotiate with Hitler.
Lansky later described the attack to an Israeli journalist. He said the men attacked the Nazis in the hall and threw some of them out the windows, that most of the Nazis panicked and ran, and that his crew chased and beat them, leaving some out of action for months. He acknowledged it was violence, and said the point was to show that Jews would not always sit back and accept insults.
To understand how this happened, it helps to understand what America looked like in the late 1930s. During the Great Depression, roughly 100 anti-Semitic organizations operated openly in the United States. The Ku Klux Klan had over 5 million members. A Catholic priest named Father Charles Coughlin broadcast hatred of Jews to millions of radio listeners every week. President Roosevelt's domestic program had been derisively nicknamed the Jew Deal by people who believed Jews controlled the banks.
This was not fringe behavior. It was mainstream America. Into that environment stepped the German-American Bund.
Founded in March 1936, the Bund was a pro-Nazi organization that required all members to be United States citizens of German ancestry. No Jewish blood, no African-American blood. Its leader, Fritz Kuhn, was born in Germany in 1896, served as a World War I veteran, and became a United States citizen in 1934. He styled himself as America's Hitler and maintained an armed paramilitary wing called the Ordnungsdienst, modeled directly after Hitler's stormtroopers.
At its peak, the Bund had approximately 25,000 dues-paying members. They marched through American streets in full Nazi uniforms, swastikas and all, protected by the First Amendment.
The Jewish establishment did almost nothing. The major Jewish organizations were terrified that fighting back would make things worse. They counseled patience and restraint, urging that the democratic process be allowed to work.
One man had seen enough. Nathan D. Perlman was a former United States congressman and a justice of the Court of Special Sessions of New York City. Born in Poland in 1887, he had immigrated to America as a child and worked his way through NYU Law School. He was also chairman of the American Jewish Congress.
Perlman had watched the Bund march through Manhattan in stormtrooper uniforms. He had watched them taunt American Legion veterans. One evening, over cocktails, he said what many people were thinking but few had the courage to say out loud: what those Nazis needed was a good ass whipping. The cocktail wore off. The thought did not.
Perlman picked up the phone and called the most dangerous Jewish man in America, Meyer Lansky. He arranged a face-to-face meeting and brought along Rabbi Stephen Wise, one of the most prominent Reform rabbis and Zionist leaders in the country. The three men sat down together — a judge, a rabbi, and a gangster — and made a deal that would change history.
Perlman asked Lansky whether he had some boys who might want to punch a Nazi. Lansky's answer tells you everything about the man. He said he did, but that respectfully, they could do better than punch. He said he knew just the crew in Brownsville, the boys the press called Murder, Incorporated.
Perlman did not blink. He said he wanted them to do anything but kill. Lansky reportedly answered that they would marinate them, not ice them. When Perlman offered to pay for the work, Lansky refused the money. He said he needed no pay, that he was a Jew and felt for the Jews in Europe who were suffering. Lansky had one request for the rabbi: no negative press comments from Jewish community leaders about the violence. Rabbi Wise agreed.
Lansky had grown up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan with Benjamin Bugsy Siegel and Charles Lucky Luciano. As Jewish kids in the early 1900s, Lansky and Siegel had watched Irish, Italian, and Polish gangs beat up yeshiva students on their way to school. They formed their own gang as teenagers to protect Jewish kids from getting beaten.
By the late 1930s, Lansky was the foremost Jewish racketeer in America and the mob's financial genius. When Lucky Luciano offered to send his Italian thugs to help with the Nazi problem, Lansky turned him down. He said it was a job for Jews.
Lansky assembled his army from Murder Incorporated, the Brooklyn-based enforcement arm of the National Crime Syndicate. The roster included men like Mendy the Choker Weiss, who strangled men for a living, along with Bugsy Goldstein, Harry Pep Strauss, one of the most prolific contract killers in American history, and Jacob Drucker, known on the streets as the Ice Pick Man.
Lansky had them trained by professional boxers and armed with baseball bats, pool cues, and clubs. Guns were strictly forbidden. Ice picks were absolutely off-limits. The rules were clear: break bones, crack skulls, send them to the hospital, but do not kill anyone.
After the Battle of Yorkville, the Bund's attendance dropped dramatically. Members stopped wearing uniforms on the streets. Mayor LaGuardia confined their parades to Yorkville and assigned Jewish and African-American officers to patrol the routes. That was LaGuardia telling the Nazis what he thought without saying a word.
When the Bund moved meetings to White Plains, Lansky bribed two local teenagers one dollar each to smuggle stink bombs inside. One boy yelled a crude taunt about Hitler, and both threw their vials toward the stage. The crowd fled and the meeting was over.
While Lansky was cleaning up New York, Judge Perlman was on the phone to every major city in America. In each city, Jewish gangsters answered the call.
In Newark, New Jersey, the Bund posted flyers saying the streets would run with Jewish blood. What they did not know was that Newark was controlled by Abner Longie Zwillman, born July 27, 1904, the man newspapers called the Al Capone of New Jersey. Zwillman ran every racket in the city — numbers, bootlegging, gambling — and he also controlled the Newark police.
Zwillman started his anti-Nazi operation as early as 1934, turning to a man named Nat Arno to build a fighting force. Arno's real name was Sidney Nathaniel Abramowitz, born April 1, 1910, in Newark. He stood five foot five, was a Jewish professional boxer who wore a Star of David on his trunks, and compiled a career record of 81 wins, 23 losses, and 13 draws, with 21 knockouts across 118 fights. He turned pro two weeks before his fifteenth birthday because his family needed the ten dollars per fight. By 1932 he had retired from boxing and gone to work full-time as Zwillman's enforcer.
When the Nazis came to Newark, Arno found a new purpose. Zwillman chose him as commander of the Newark Minutemen, named after the American Revolution. The group was made up of Jewish boxers, street fighters, and mob soldiers whose single mission was to make sure no Nazi meeting could be held in New Jersey. Among them were Max Puddie Hinkes and Harry the Dropper Levine.
The group eventually numbered in the thousands and built an intelligence network that would have made the FBI jealous. Whenever the Bund scheduled a meeting, the Newark police informed Zwillman of the time and place, then conveniently abandoned their posts so the Nazis were left unprotected.
The Minutemen's most famous operation took place at the Schwabenhalle on Springfield Avenue in Irvington. Hinkes later described it. He said the Nazi scumbags were meeting on the second floor, and that he and Nat Arno went upstairs and threw stink bombs into the room. As the Nazis came running down the steps to escape, the Minutemen were waiting with bats and iron bars. Hinkes described it as running a gauntlet, with their boys lined up on both sides and the Nazis screaming blue murder. After that night, there were no more Bund meetings in Newark. Not one.
In later battles, a Minuteman named the Weasel Kugel was seen incapacitating Nazis with frying pan blows to the head.
In Chicago, Judge Perlman reached out to Jake Greasy Thumb Guzik, the mob's Jewish financier. Guzik assembled Jewish boxers and street fighters. One of them was a young pool hall tough named Jacob Rubenstein, who later changed his name to Jack Ruby — the same Jack Ruby who, twenty-five years later, killed Lee Harvey Oswald on live television. In the late 1930s, Ruby and his friends would drink beers, then hit the streets looking for Bund meetings to break up. He was personally responsible for cracking a few heads.
Chicago also had something more creative. A blond-haired, blue-eyed Jewish crime reporter named Herb Brin infiltrated the local Nazi party as a spy. He marched with them, attended their meetings, and gathered intelligence, then came back with Jewish gangs and, as he put it, beat them up good.
In Minneapolis, the problem was not the Bund but the Silver Shirt Legion, a pro-Nazi organization with roughly 15,000 members led by William Dudley Pelley. The city's gambling czar was David Berman, an associate of Isadore Kid Cann Blumenfeld, who ran an all-Jewish crime syndicate.
One evening, a call came into Berman's bookmaking operation at the Radisson Hotel tipping him off about a Silver Shirt meeting at the Elks Lodge. Berman called his men and told them to be at the office at seven and bring everything they had. He distributed brass knuckles and clubs. They drove in a convoy of Cadillacs. When the Silver Shirt leaders started screaming about ending all the Jew bastards in the city, Berman's men charged through the doors.
The attack lasted ten minutes. When it was over, Berman, his suit covered in blood, took the microphone and said, "This is a warning." Then he pulled out a pistol and fired a single shot into the air. It took two more attacks before the Silver Shirts disappeared. Berman and Blumenfeld paid off the police. There were zero arrests.
On the West Coast, Bugsy Siegel and Mickey Cohen handled Los Angeles. During the summer of 1938, Cohen was serving a short sentence in the county jail when he found himself in a holding area with men wearing Bund uniforms. When the officers stepped out, Cohen stood up, walked over to the Nazis, and banged their heads together like coconuts. The men screamed and tried to climb the bars of the holding cell to get away from him.
After his release, Cohen went after Nazi meetings across the city with the same enthusiasm he brought to everything else. Jewish spies in Los Angeles also gathered intelligence on Nazi attempts to infiltrate the Hollywood film industry and reported back to the FBI and United States Naval Intelligence.
The story reached its peak on February 20, 1939, at Madison Square Garden. Fritz Kuhn organized the largest Nazi rally ever held on American soil, calling it the Pro-America rally. Over 20,000 Bund members filled the arena. The stage featured a thirty-foot portrait of George Washington flanked by swastikas. Banners read, "Stop Jewish domination of Christian Americans" and "Wake up, America, smash Jewish communism."
Kuhn gave a closing speech in which he mocked President Roosevelt and District Attorney Thomas Dewey with antisemitic name-calling. Twenty thousand voices chanted, "Free America."
Outside, the city deployed the largest police force ever assembled for a single event: 1,700 uniformed officers, 600 undercover detectives, and 35 firefighters. Approximately 100,000 anti-Nazi protesters surrounded the building. Among them was Lansky's crew.
But the moment that defined the night belonged to one man who had nothing to do with the mob. Isidore Greenbaum, twenty-six years old, was a plumber's assistant from Brooklyn. Earlier that evening, he had kissed his wife goodbye and left his young child sleeping. He came into Manhattan alone, snuck past security, and waited.
In the middle of Kuhn's speech, Greenbaum charged the stage. He ripped out the microphone cables and yelled, "Down with Hitler!" The Ordnungsdienst swarmed him instantly. A pack of uniformed men blasted away with fists and boots at a lone Jewish man while the crowd cheered. Police finally pulled him away before the beating turned fatal, ripping his pants in the process. He was charged with disorderly conduct and fined twenty-five dollars. When asked why he did it, Greenbaum said he was simply an American who did not believe in Nazism.
Then everything collapsed. In May 1939, Kuhn was arrested for stealing $14,548 from the Bund's own funds. The American Führer was a common thief who had spent the money on a mistress. He was convicted, imprisoned, his citizenship revoked, and eventually deported to Germany, where he died in 1951. The Bund fell into chaos.
Then came Pearl Harbor. On December 16, 1941, the government disbanded the German-American Bund. The Jewish mob had won.
The price came later. Longy Zwillman was found hanged in his West Orange home on February 27, 1959. The death was ruled a suicide, but police found bruises on his wrists. He was fifty-four.
Nat Arno enlisted in the army in 1941, before America even entered the war. He saw action in the European theater and was wounded at the Battle of Normandy in 1944. The man who beat Nazis in Newark went overseas to fight them on the beaches of France. After the war, he moved to California, ran a liquor store, joined the Disabled American Veterans, and became a quiet family man who attended fundraisers at his local synagogue. He died August 8, 1973, at sixty-three.
One last detail about Arno tells you who he really was. In the early 1960s, the American Nazi Party held a rally in Los Angeles. Arno, now in his fifties, sat in the audience listening. When a speaker said something anti-Semitic, the old boxer stood up and pummeled the Nazi as if it were the 1930s all over again.
Meyer Lansky died in Miami Beach in 1983 at eighty years old, with a reported net worth of $300. In 1945, Judge Perlman consulted with Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, the chief American prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials. The man who secretly directed gangsters to beat American Nazis helped prosecute the real ones.
So why is this story not better known? Jewish organizations did not want to publicize that gangsters had done their fighting for them. The mob did not want credit for patriotism, because it was bad for the tough-guy image. And the United States government, which had tacitly allowed American Nazis to operate under the First Amendment while knowing Jewish criminals were systematically destroying those same organizations, had no interest in explaining how that arrangement worked. Everyone had reasons to keep quiet, so the story disappeared.
Much of what is known today comes from historians such as Michael Benson, who pieced it together decades later from court records, old newspapers, and the few surviving witnesses willing to talk.
While governments appeased Hitler and diplomats signed treaties they knew would not hold, a judge in New York picked up a telephone and called a gangster. That gangster assembled an army of killers, boxers, and street fighters who went to war against fascism with baseball bats. They did not write editorials. They did not organize boycotts. They picked up bats and went to work.
They were murderers and racketeers who destroyed families through their criminal enterprises. And yet, 20,000 Americans cheered for Hitler in Manhattan. Sometimes the only people willing to do what needs doing are the ones who have already crossed every other line. The lesson is not that violence solves everything, but that when civilization fails to protect its own, sometimes the most uncivilized people step up first. As Lansky told that judge in 1938, "I am a Jew, and I feel for the Jews in Europe who are suffering."