If a nationwide vote were taken to discover the most despised politico-social organization currently extant, the Amerikadeutscher Volksbund would stand at least a fair chance of winning. A group of some 125,000 U. S. citizens of German blood and clubby tendencies, it is hated in the U. S. as an offspring of Naziism. In Germany it is apparently equally scorned by the Hitler Government: 1) as a feeble, provincial imitation, and 2) as a source of damaging publicity.
Several months ago U. S. disapproval of the German-American Bund twice got the organization into the headlines characteristically. First, the peaceful village of Southbury, Conn. refused to permit establishment of a Bund camp on village property. Then a midwestern Bund convention was postponed twice because of difficulty in finding a St. Louis hall in which to hold it. Last week the Bund encountered trouble again, this time from another source. In Washington German Ambassador Dr. Hans Heinrich Dieckhoff called on Secretary Hull to announce that the German Government had again warned its 350,000 nationals residing in the U. S. that they "must not belong to" the Bund or any "possible substitute organizations of that kind." In New York Bund leaders promptly announced that since their membership for two years past has been restricted to U. S. citizens, the requests of the German Government did not affect them at all. Nonetheless, Ambassador Dieckhoff's statement, for which he got the State Department's hearty thanks, aroused again the familiar question of what the Bund is, what it wants and whether it can get it.
Origin of the Nazi movement in the U. S. antedates the Hitler regime by ten years. In 1923 the Teutonia Society, patterned vaguely on Klan principles, was the biggest of a dozen or so similar groups whose members gave aid to the National Socialist Party in Germany throughout the late 20's. In 1933 these groups were merged as "Friends of New Germany," run by Heinz Spanknobel, a Nazi party member. Herr Spanknobel, indicted by a New York Federal Grand Jury for failing to register as the agent of a foreign nation, speedily fled to Nazi Germany. In 1934 a Congressional Committee investigated the Friends of New Germany, found it "for ail practical purposes the American section of the Nazi party." The Friends changed this name to Amerikadeutscher Volksbund in 1936, resumed functioning under the leadership of a sleek, pompous, garrulous ex-chemist named Fritz Kuhn whose offices in Manhattan are decorated by portraits of Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler.