Nazis in America

[BUMPER]

Why are there so many Nazis in the United States? How exactly is Donald Trump America’s Hitler? And why is the American taxpayer still paying Nazi war criminals to this day?

[INTRO]

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[EPISODE]

On June 17, 2015, a group of 14 African Americans were in the middle of a bible study in their Charleston, South Carolina church. At 8:16 pm, Dylann Roof, a self-described neo-Nazi, entered the church and attended their  bible study. After an hour into their discussion, Dylann pulled out a gun and murdered 9 people while leaving 5 unharmed.

During the attack, one of the victims asked him why he was doing this and he responded, saying “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over the nation. And you have to go.” Dylann was later arrested and convicted in 2017 of the hate crime but the attack was far from over.

In August 2017, only a few months after a judge sentenced Dylann Roof to life in prison, a group of 1,500 self-described neo-Nazis marched around Charlottesville chanting both racist and antisemetic slogans. They describe this “Unite The Right” rally as a protest in support of Dylann Roof and his actions, murdering 9 African Americans. And while counter-protesters showed up, a vast majority of the people there were neo-Nazis. 

At the time, the world was horrified to see Nazis marching on the streets of the United States with tiki torches and chanting white nationalist slogans. But for those of us who studied World War II, it was even more horrifying to see Donald Trump, the unfortunate president at the time, say there were “Some very fine people on both sides”. 

Over the past decade, you might have heard Trump and his administration use the same language that Adolf Hitler used during his rise to power. In fact, White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, Stephen Miller, spoke at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service this year and not only paraphrased but directly quoted Joseph Goebbel's 1932 speech called “The Storm is Coming”. For those who don’t know, Joseph was Hitler’s propaganda chief. 

Also for the past decade, you might have heard republicans screaming that liberals call everyone and everything a Nazi. Now, I’m not sure if you’re aware of this but there is an easy way to not be called a Nazi and that’s to simply not act like one. But let’s hold our judgement until the end because it’s important to learn our history on what a Nazi actually is and where it came from.

Its origins trace back to the end of World War I in November 1918. At the time, Germany’s economy was virtually collapsed and undergoing a Great Depression, much like the United States. Three months later, in January 1919, a group of Germans formed a political party called the German Workers’ Party. 

They usually met in a beer hall to discuss politics and how to get their country out of a depression. Because what’s a better way to figure out how to put food on the table for your family than by getting drunk at a bar with your buddies? 

Anyway, Germany was in dire need to reignite their economy so this group of workers was very open to extreme ideas to turn things around quickly. 

At the time, one of their party members was a man named Adolf Hitler. The party loved him because he gave fiery speeches that riled up his crowd to take violent action.

By February of 1920, they changed their name to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party which was later abbreviated to the Nazi party. So, Nazi is an abbreviation of National Socialist. 

Now, socialism is usually when the government owns everything. Nothing is truly yours or mine. It’s considered shared property. But National Socialists believed in authoritarianism and fascism where one leader would own everything in the country and all industries would work to support the goals of that dictator.

We might call this crazy nowadays but at the time, for a group of workers who lost their jobs, it wasn’t so radical to them because at least they were bringing home a paycheck…a paycheck some of them apparently spent on beer instead of their families.

So, even when it was founded, it was based on misinformation. The name was meant to draw in those who believed in socialism, even though the party heavily sided with being a dictatorship. It was meant to confuse people on purpose. Just like nowadays, Nazis use left-leaning slogans so when anything bad happens, everyone blames liberals. 

But anyway, their party believes heavily in ultra-nationalism where its members are very patriotic to their country. They believe everything they do is an act of patriotism, no matter if it was or wasn’t supporting their country. 

They believe in pseudo-scientific theories which make them believe their race or religion is superior to all others. 

And in their early propaganda, they even wrote how their party is uniting to make Germany great again and forming a greater Germany. You might have heard that phrase before but don’t get ahead of me…we have a long way to go.

By 1932, the Nazi party gained so much popularity that it was the largest political party in Germany’s legislature. The president of Germany at the time, Paul von Hindenburg, appointed Hitler as his Chancellor in January 1933, believing Hitler could be controlled. 

Sadly for Germany and the rest of the world,  President Hindenburg died in August 1934. This meant Hitler took over as dictator, calling his political opponents “undesirable” and called for them to be put in prison. Again, this might sound like a current events episode but I assure you it’s a history lesson.

Now, we all know Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, which sparked the second world war. But long before that, Germany had already invaded the United States with an effort called the “German American  Bund”, headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. 

By May 1938, that group of Nazis had nearly 50 summer camps to “...indoctrinate German American children. Campers wore uniforms of the Hitler Youth and carried Nazi banners.” These summer camps brought in thousands of children every year, even after the United States entered World War II. Yes, there were Nazi flags being flown at summer camps on American soil while we were fighting Nazis overseas. 

That goes to show you how absolute our free speech laws are in America. So, Trump’s going to have a hard time cracking down on hate speech against him. Speaking of which, we forgot our weekly address to Donald Trump…Fuck you.

Just before Germany invaded Poland, the Nazi party even rented out Madison Square Garden in New York City in 1939. They not only filled it to capacity, but had thousands of people overflowing on the streets outside for a rally where they “...booed any mention of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and cheered “Heil Hitler!””

One of the thousands of children to go to these summer camps was Charles Lindbergh, the same guy who was later named Time Magazine’s first ever Man of the Year for making the first nonstop flight from New York to Paris in his aircraft Spirit of St. Louis.

His father was a congressman who opposed fighting Germany in World War I and Charles himself openly instructed American and British leaders not to fight Germany, saying it would be disastrous for them to fight the superior air force of the Nazis. 

When the U.S. entered World War II, Charles applied to be a pilot in the Air Force but was denied from service. He claimed it was because he wasn’t physically fit enough to be a pilot but the U.S. government claims they denied him because they truly didn’t know which planes he would be trying to shoot down, the Nazis or their own.

In the early days of World War II, Charles authored an article in Reader’s Digest saying America needs to stay out of the war but Germany has every right to invade the Soviet Union. He went on the radio and incorrectly condemned the Jews for allegedly owning all of the media in the United States. And he spoke at Madison Square Garden and Chicago’s Soldier Field at similar Nazi rallies, saying America needs to stay away from Germany. 

He even became the spokesperson for the “America First Committee”, a political party whose name you might have heard before but back then, it opposed the United States fighting the awesome power of Germany’s military. Franklin D. Roosevelt later said “If I should die tomorrow, I want you to know this, I am absolutely convinced Lindbergh is a Nazi.” 

Another important story to tell here is of William Rhodes Davis who was an oil businessman from Oklahoma and lived very close to another of the German American Bund summer camps. There is no evidence he went to these camps but he lived eerily close, so it’s possible.

He later built an oil refinery in Germany and shipped oil from the U.S. to Germany in the years leading up to World War II so they could build up a supply of fuel. 

When the war started, he was given hundreds of millions of dollars by the Nazis to influence high-level officials in the U.S. government to stay out of the war. So, he effectively became a lobbyist for Nazi interests. 

When the U.S. entered the war, his oil tankers were the only American ships that German U-Boats never sank as they entered German ports. It’s almost like the Germans knew which boats were his. 

But even in December 1940, shortly before the Allied Forces began their offensive attack which led to the Nazis losing the war, William came to President FDR with a peace plan where the Germans would impose “German peace” on the land they invaded and America would back off. Luckily, FDR not only told him to eat shit but also ordered the FBI to put him under surveillance.

So, why do these stories matter? Well, it shows that Nazis were not only here in the United States long before World War II, but it shows they were celebrated. 

I still remember visiting the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC when I was in school. Inside that museum is the Spirit of St. Louis plane. 

That plane was actually named after a ship called the MS St. Louis that carried Germans to the United States, Cuba, Great Britain, and other countries. So, even its name was in honor of the Nazis. After the war started, that same ship would be used in a failed attempt to get Jews out of Germany. But our teachers taught us that Charles Lindbergh was an American hero. They left out the part where he was a Nazi and his plane was named after a Nazi ship.

And that’s my point. Our education system whitewashed history so much that most Americans don’t know how dangerous Nazis can be. They don’t know what warning signs to look out for. And that’s why they don’t consider themselves Nazi supporters even as the people they support say and do Nazi things. 

Even Germany, the country that started all of this, learned from their mistakes in the past. They now have a series of laws which make it illegal to own or display any Nazi symbols, illegal to deny the holocaust, and many other restrictions to prevent the movement from ever starting up again.

You would assume that the United States, which just lost over 416,000 soldiers to the Nazis after World War II, would crack down on Nazi propaganda and summer camps on our own soil. This way, we never had to fight Nazis again. But we did the exact opposite. Rather than cracking down on the Nazis that were already here, we welcomed in more. 

Shortly after the war was over, America started Operation Paperclip which was in charge of bringing Nazi scientists and engineers over from Germany to the U.S. to work for us instead. Those scientists and engineers helped us invent the Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles and many other inventions America would later have. 

But while some of these engineers may not have believed fully in the Nazi mission, a number of them still believed in that ideology. Let me be clear, when the Allied Forces found these scientists and engineers, the American military had a choice. 

They could capture these engineers and send them to America, forcing them to work for us instead. Or they could wait for the Soviets to capture the engineers and the Soviet Union would have had those inventions. Or they could charge the engineers with war crimes and let them be executed with the Nuremberg trials.

So, rather than letting that “talent” go to waste, they brought the engineers here to the U.S. and gave them homes to live in, food on their tables, and let them live freely - other than working on our inventions. This meant they were able to raise families and live freely in a country they were trying to kill just a few months ago. 

But this was just a drop in the bucket compared to the estimated number of over ten thousand Nazi war criminals who entered the United States after World War II. A vast majority of them were not engineers or scientists who were watched over by the American military to make sure they kept in line. 

By the late 1970’s, under President Jimmy Carter, the U.S. government formed the Office of Special Investigations that was tasked with finding Nazi war criminals hiding in the United States. The best way I can describe this is to imagine playing hide and seek but you give your opponents 30 years to hide before you go looking for them. 

Most of them hid really well and were never found. Some of them died. Others had started families in America and were living full lives with the freedoms and protections that our soldiers died to give them. 

Even for the Nazi war criminals who were captured and forced to go back to Germany, the U.S. House of Representatives reports that they still send each of them or their children a check every month for about $1,500. This money reportedly comes out of our Social Security funds “...through a legal loophole that gave the U.S. Justice Department leverage to persuade Nazi suspects to leave.” the U.S. That fund is still being paid out to this day and has, so far, cost the American taxpayers millions of dollars for what they report to be only a few dozen Nazi war criminals who were asked to leave America.

That’s not to mention the thousands of Hitler Youth who went to German American Bund summer camps on American soil and were indoctrinated with Nazi propaganda early in life. They all now had families of their own. This now meant Nazi ideas were deeply embedded in American culture.

In fact, that movement grew so much in the U.S. that there are currently over 55 organizations across the U.S. that proudly identify themselves as Nazis and supportive of Adolf Hitler. 

That brings us to 2015 when an orange man came riding down an escalator. You might have heard several parts of this history lesson so far that seem to parallel current events. Even while writing this episode, it felt like we were writing a current events piece instead of a historical one. But that scary feeling you have right now is because history repeats itself…and that’s actually a good thing.

Sure, JD Vance, who is Trump’s Vice President, once said Donald Trump is “America’s Hitler”. But the similarities don’t end there. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party was shortened to Nazi just like Make America Great Again was shortened to MAGA. That reminds me, Make America Great Again sounds a lot like the old Nazi slogan of Make Germany Great Again and greater Germany slogans. 

Republicans don’t want the government to control their business but are perfectly fine with Donald Trump running their business, like you would get under fascism. 

MAGA fans are ultra-nationalists, even calling themselves Christian Nationalists and putting Trump’s face or the American flag on everything they can, even if it goes against the interest of the United States. I remember vividly the images of a Trump supporter holding the American flag while attacking our capital building in an act of treason on January 6, 2021.

They believe they are superior to liberals and think liberals drink the blood of babies in the basement of a pizza shop in Washington D.C. to look younger. For those outside the US who might wonder what medication those people might be on to make them believe that liberals are eating babies, let me tell you…obviously, not enough.

Just like Hitler, Donald Trump was elected into power and was well-known for giving fiery speeches which push his followers to do terrible acts of violence. 

Before the 2024 election, Trump even said he will become a dictator on day one and he will be in office for a 4th term, because in his mind, he never lost the 2020 election and we are currently living through his 3rd term. 

Trump doesn’t have summer camps but does have Trump Youth and Trump Stores across the country. 

Trump even did a rally in Madison Square Garden and said holding a rally in MSG was a lifelong goal of his. Oh, and Trump also did an event in Chicago’s Soldier Field too. 

Trump was also named Time Magazine’s Man of the Year in 2024 and his father was very influential in politics too, just like Charles Lindbergh. He claims to not have any ties to other countries but the U.S. military and CIA won’t give him classified information, knowing Trump will leak it to the Russians. 

Much like Lindbergh, Trump even started the “America First” policies and political committee to finance his campaigns.

Just like William Rhodes Davis, Trump makes millions in profits from our enemies, even though we’re in the middle of wars with them. And he says that he can broker a deal of peace between Ukraine and Russia, even though the deal he proposes would massively favor Russia. 

In his speeches, he paraphrases Hitler and his team directly quotes Nazi leadership. Just like Hitler, Trump has threatened to invade our allies in Canada and Greenland. Trump has a concentration camp in El Salvador and even suggested on the floor of the United Nations this past month that he sends his “undesirables” there to be exterminated. 

While those of us who call Trump a Nazi have a list of reasons why we call him that, Republicans will be keyboard warriors, saying we’re crazy for calling Trump a Nazi while at the same time, supporting every Nazi thing Trump does. 

Truthfully, it’s because they don’t know any better. Even Trump has said that smart people don’t like him but there’s a reason his audience never got upset by that comment. And I might offend some people saying this but I think Trump was right for once. 

I’m not really sure if his audience was smart enough to figure out that Trump just called his supporters stupid. 

Let me be clear, I don’t think it’s their fault. Our education system clearly lacks resources and every chance they can, Republicans defund our education system more. Our politicians want us to be stupid so we’re easy to control and manipulate. 

It’s easy to manipulate people when you can lie to their faces and they don’t know how to fact check you. For example, in a recent episode, we covered a right-wing Twitter account who Tweets hundreds of times per day with a bunch of nonsense that people believe because they already hate the group of people that post is targeting. 

But it took us several minutes to debunk that one post in a video and that’s the problem. Those of us who do the research, are trying our best to keep up with endless amounts of lies. Meanwhile the lies keep coming hundreds of times per day. And to our elected leaders on both sides, that’s a feature, not a bug in the system. 

Honestly, I can’t tell if Trump is smart enough to know he’s quoting Adolf Hitler or is he just saying what his team tells him to say? Either way, at some point we have to say that someone pretending to be a Nazi is just considered being a Nazi. 

No matter the case, I think Trump and his team know what he’s doing and those of us reporting on him know what he’s doing too. But there’s a group of hundreds of millions of people in the middle who don’t know what the red flags are to watch out for.

They will live out their days thinking Charles Lindbergh was an American hero because their 3rd grade teacher told them so. They’ll believe Trump is looking out for them while he gives billionaires tax breaks and leaves their farm to go bankrupt. 

That brings me to the final thing we know about Nazis. They never care about their own self-interests. Nowadays, there are people identifying as “Morenazi’s” who are mixed-race, black, and hispanic people who support Adolf Hitler’s ideas even though Hitler sent people of their race for extermination. 

There are gay nazis who support Hitler, even though the Pink Triangle is a great symbol to help you remember that the Nazis killed over 100,000 homosexuals. Even the co-founder of the Nazi Party’s paramilitary wing, Ernst Rohm, was an openly gay man and close friend of Adolf Hitler. But in 1934, he was still murdered by Hitler for being homosexual. 

There’s even a group called “Nazifurs”, short for Nazi furries, which is being led by a furry named “Foxler”, an abbreviation of Fox Hitler. And while there are no specific reports of Nazis killing furries in the camps, I still don’t think Hitler would have been friendly to the furry fandom. I especially don’t think those of us in the fandom should accept any fursuit with a swastika armband…which, I’m not kidding, they literally have on their arm while they’re in fursuit. 

It’s the same thing with Trump. There are Hispanic people who support Trump even though he wants to deport them. There are African Americans and women who support Trump even though, in Trump Bibles which are mandatory in all Oklahoma schools this year, he left out the amendments of the constitution freeing the slaves and giving women the right to vote. Plus, he just took away women's Healthcare the last time he was in office.

There are gay and trans people who campaigned on his behalf thinking somehow they’ll be spared his camps. There are farmers and truckers and everything in between who supported him, thinking they’ll somehow be the only ones not affected…until suddenly, they are. 

Everything you’ve seen for the past decade in America has been straight out of Hitler’s playbook. Sure, Donald Trump is going after Hispanic and transgender people instead of Jews. But Nazis will always find someone other than themselves to blame for all of the world’s problems. Just like Hitler, they’ll convince their followers that those “other” people are at fault for everything…and only they can solve it. 

Hitler’s Youth grew up going to Nazi summer camps on American soil. War criminals snuck their way into America or were forced to come here under Operation Paperclip. They all grew up, raised families, had jobs, retired, and passed on those Nazi ideologies to their children. Those children would be of voting age nowadays and we’re seeing a lot of them in Trump’s MAGA crowd. 

I consider myself to be lucky. Our 4th largest audience comes from Germany where they teach all about the Nazi party in schools so it never happens again. Every time we cover current events, someone from Germany will let us know that whatever Trump said or done, is a quote from Hitler or an action he took as he was gaining power. So, a huge Danke to our German viewers for sharing their knowledge and their sympathy with those of us who are smart enough to be frightened.

But the good news for all of us is, we’ve been here before. History repeats itself and in this case, maybe that’s a good thing, because we’ve defeated the Nazis many times before. And we’ll do it again. The only question now is, how will it end? 

Will our Congress finally grow a set of balls and impeach him and give him some jail time? Will it be the military to force a surrender? Will he die on the toilet at 3 AM while writing a mean tweet to get Jimmy Kimmel cancelled? Will it be a trip and fall on an escalator that suddenly becomes a set of stairs? Or will history repeat itself so poetically that the Allies will take back our country as it all ends in a bunker?

One thing that is certain is that we have to learn our lesson this time. After we defeat the Nazis again, we can never welcome their ideas back into our world. Because it would sure be nice to say those Nazis are something only found in history books instead of saying America elected one of them to be President.

[OUTRO]

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