Nazis Took Over NYC — Then the Mob Declared War – ht

 

April 20th, 1938, the Yorkville Casino, Manhattan’s Upper East Side. 3,000 members of the German American Bund packed into a ballroom decorated with swastikas, celebrating Adolf Hitler’s 49th birthday. Fritz [ __ ] the self-proclaimed American furer, stood on stage imitating Hitler’s spitfleck delivery, screaming about the Jewish problem in America.

 Outside on East 86th Street, a street the locals nicknamed Sauerkraut Boulevard, brown shirted Nazis were still filing in after goostepping from Carl Schultz Park in full Stormtrooper uniforms. Nobody inside that ballroom noticed the short, quiet man sitting in the third row. His name was Meer Lansky, and he had not come to listen.

 at a signal nobody but his crew understood. Lansky’s men attacked from three sides simultaneously. One squad burst through the main doors. Another dropped from the fire escaped through an upstairs window. A third was already inside, scattered among the crowd, carrying baseball bats under their coats. 15 separate fist fights erupted at once.

 The screaming started immediately. Nazis were thrown out of windows. Bodies piled up near the exits. Contract killers who had earned their reputations murdering for the mob were now using those same skills on American fascists. The whole thing lasted about 15 minutes. When it was over, the ballroom floor was littered with unconscious Nazis.

 Men with compound fractures screaming on the ground. Blood smeared across the swastika banners. Lansky and his crew walked out wearing American Legion hats they had used for disguise. They dropped their baseball bats and pool cues on the sidewalk and disappeared into the city. This wasn’t a random street brawl. This was an organized military operation planned by a New York judge, funded by Jewish mobsters, and executed by the most feared killers in America.

 a secret Jewish army that waged war on Nazism in the streets of the United States while the rest of the world was still trying to negotiate with Hitler. Lansky later described the attack to an Israeli journalist. He said, “We attacked them in the hall and threw some of them out the windows.

 Most of the Nazis panicked and ran out. We chased them and beat them up, and some of them were out of action for months. Yes, it was violence. We wanted to show them that Jews would not always sit back and accept insults. This is the story of how Jewish gangsters did what governments wouldn’t. How Meer Lansky, Bugsy Seagull, and hundreds of mob soldiers beat American Nazis into submission across six major cities.

 And how the most violent criminals in the country became the most unlikely heroes of the 20th century. But here’s what the history books never tell you. A sitting judge started the whole thing. The FBI knew about it and nobody stopped it because secretly everybody wanted these Nazis destroyed. To understand how this happened, you have to understand what America looked like in the late 1930s.

And it was uglier than most people want to admit. During the Great Depression, roughly 100 anti-semitic organizations operated openly in the United States. The Ku Klux Clan had over 5 million members. A Catholic priest named Father Charles Coughlin was broadcasting hatred of Jews to millions of radio listeners every single week.

 And President Roosevelt’s own domestic program had been nicknamed the Jew deal by people who believed Jews controlled the banks. This wasn’t fringe behavior. This was mainstream America. Into this environment stepped the German American Bund. Founded in March of 1936, the Bund was a pro-Nazi organization requiring all members to be United States citizens of German ancestry.

 No Jewish blood, no African-American blood. Their leader, Fritz [ __ ] born in Germany in 1896, a World War I veteran who became a United States citizen in 1934, styled himself as America’s Hitler. He maintained an armed paramilitary wing called the Ordnungden, modeled directly after Hitler’s stormtroopers.

 At its peak, the Bund had approximately 25,000 dues paying members. And they marched through American streets in full Nazi uniforms, swastikas and all, protected by the First Amendment. You know what the Jewish establishment did about it? Almost nothing. The major Jewish organizations were terrified that fighting back would make things worse.

They counseledled patience. They counseledled restraint. They said, “Let the democratic process work.” But one man had seen enough. Nathan D. Pearlman 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. Pearlman had watched the Bund march through Manhattan in Stormtrooper uniforms. He had watched them taunt American Legion veterans. And one evening, over cocktails, he said what a lot of people were thinking, but nobody had the guts to say out loud. What those Nazis need is a good ass whipping.

 The cocktail wore off. The thought didn’t. Here’s where it gets interesting. Pearlman picked up the phone and called the most dangerous Jewish man in America, Meer Lansky. He arranged a face-to-face meeting and brought along Rabbi Steven Weise, one of the most prominent reformed rabbis and Zionist leaders in the country.

 The three men sat down together, a judge, a rabbi, and a gangster, and they made a deal that would change history. Pearlman looked at Lansky and asked, “You got some boys who might want to punch a Nazi?” Lansky’s answer tells you everything about the man. He said, “I do, judge. Respectfully, you understand we can do better than punch.

 I know just the crew in Brownsville. The boys in the press call them Murder Incorporated.” Pearlman didn’t blink. He said, “I want you to do anything but kill them.” Lansky reportedly answered, “We’ll marinate them. We won’t ice them.” When Pearlman offered to pay for the work, Lansky refused the money. He said, “I need no pay, judge.

 I am a Jew, and I feel for the Jews in Europe who are suffering.” Lansky had one request for the rabbi. No negative press comments from Jewish community leaders about the violence. Rabbi Wise agreed. Now you need to understand who Lansky actually was. He had grown up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan with Benjamin Bugsy Seagull and Charles Lucky Luchiano.

 As Jewish kids in the early 1900s, Lansky and Seagull had watched Irish, Italian, and Polish gangs beat up yesa 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 rakateeer in America, the mob’s financial genius.

 When Lucky Luciano himself offered to send his Italian thugs to help with the Nazi problem, Lansky turned him down. He said, “It’s a job for Jews.” So, Lansky assembled his army from Murder Incorporated, the Brooklyn-based enforcement arm of the National Crime Syndicate. Men like Mendy the Choker Weiss who strangled men for a living.

 Bugsy Goldstein, Harry Pep Strauss, one of the most prolific contract killers in American history. And Jacob Ducker, known on the streets as the ice pick man, Lansky had them trained by professional boxers 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 don’t kill anyone. After the Battle of Yorkville, the Buns 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 roots.

 That was LaGuardia telling the Nazis what he thought without saying a word. When the bun moved meetings to White Plains, Lansky bribed two local teenagers $1 each to smuggle stink bombs inside. One boy yelled, “Hitler’s got one ball,” and both threw their vials toward the stage. The crowd fled, meeting over.

 But that’s not the crazy part. While Lansky was cleaning up New York, Judge Pearlman was on the phone to every major city in America. And in every city, Jewish gangsters answered the call. In Newark, New Jersey, the bun posted flyers saying the streets would run with Jewish blood. What they didn’t know was that Newark was controlled by Abner Longi Zilman, born July 27th, 1904.

 The man newspapers called the Al Capone of New Jersey. Zwelman ran every racket in the city. Numbers, bootlegging, gambling, and here’s the thing, he also controlled the Newark police. Zilman 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 Sydney Nathaniel Abramowitz, born April 1st, 1910 in Newark, 5’5, a Jewish professional boxer who wore a Star of David on his trunks.

 His career record was 81 wins, 23 losses, 13 draws with 21 knockouts across8 fights. He turned pro two weeks before his 15th birthday because his family needed the $10 per fight. By 1932, he retired from boxing and went to work as Zwillman’s enforcer full-time. When the Nazis came to Newark, Arno found a new purpose.

 Zilman chose Arno as commander of the Newark Minutemen, named after the American Revolution. 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 Putty Hinkis and Harry the Dropper Lavine. The group eventually numbered in the thousands, and they had an intelligence network that would make 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 happened at the Schwaban Holly on Springfield Avenue in Irvington. Hankis later described it.

 He said, “The Nazi scumbags were meeting on the second floor. Natarnno and I went upstairs and threw stink bombs into the room where the creeps were. As they came out, running down the steps to escape, our boys were waiting with bats and iron bars. It was like running a gauntlet. Our boys were lined up on both sides.

The Nazis were screaming blue murder. After that night, there were no more bund meetings in Newark. Not one. In subsequent battles, a minute man named Haimey the Weasel Cougall was seen incapacitating Nazis with frying pan blows to the head. Remember this name, Jack Ruby, because he shows up in this story, too.

 In Chicago, Judge Pearlman reached out to Jake Greasy Thumb Guzzik, the mob’s Jewish financeier. Guzzik 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 25 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 bun 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, gathered intelligence, then came back with Jewish gangs, and as he put it, we beat them up good. In Minneapolis, the problem wasn’t the boond, it was the Silver Shirt Legion, a pro-Nazi organization with roughly 15,000 members led by William Dudley P. The city’s gambling zar was David Burman, an associate of Isidor Kid Blumenfeld, who ran an allJewish crime syndicate.

 One evening, a call came into Burman’s bookmaking operation at the Rison Hotel, tipping him off about a silver shirt meeting at the Elks Lodge. Burman called his men. Be at the office at 7 and bring everything you’ve got. 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 this city, Burman’s men charged through the doors.

 The attack lasted 10 minutes. When it was over, Burman, his suit covered in blood, took the microphone. 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. Burman and Blumenfeld paid off the police.

 zero arrests on the West Coast. Bugsy Seagull 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 bunned 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.

Now, here’s where the story reaches its peak. February 20th, 1939, Madison Square Garden, Fritz [ __ ] organized the largest Nazi rally ever held on American soil. He called it the ProAmerica Rally. Over 20,000 Bun members filled the arena. The stage featured a 30-foot portrait of George Washington flanked by swastikas.

Banners read, “Stop Jewish domination of Christian Americans and wake up America, smash Jewish communism.” [ __ ] gave his closing speech calling President Roosevelt Rosenfield and District Attorney Thomas Dwey Thomas Jwey. 20,000 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, 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, Isidor Greenbomb, 26 years old, 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 the security, and waited. In the middle of Coon’s speech, Greenbomb charged the stage. He ripped out the microphone cables. He yelled down with Hitler. The Ordnungs Deans swarmed him instantly. A pack of uniform men blasting away with fists and boots on a lone Jewish man while the crowd cheered.

 Police finally pulled him away before the beating turned fatal. They ripped his pants in the process. He was charged with disorderly conduct and fined $25. When asked why he did it, Greenbomb said he was simply an American who did not believe in Nazism. Then everything collapsed. In May of 1939, [ __ ] was arrested for stealing $14,548 from the bun’s own funds.

 The American furer was a common thief spending 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 Pearl Harbor. On December 16th, 1941, the government disbanded the German American bund. The Jewish mob had won.

 The price came later. Lis Wilman was found hanged in his West Orange home on February 27th, 1959. Ruled suicide, but police found bruises on his wrists. He was 54. Natarno 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 attending fundraisers at his local synagogue. He died August 8th, 1973 at 63. But here’s one last detail about Arno that tells you who he really was.

 In the early 1960s, the American Nazi Party held a rally in Los Angeles. Arno, now in his 50s, 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. Meer Lansky died in Miami Beach in 1983 at 80 years old with a reported net worth of $300.

In 1945, Judge Pearlman consulted with Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, chief American prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials. The man who secretly directed gangsters to beat American Nazis helped prosecute the real ones. So why don’t you know this story? That’s the question that stays with me. Jewish organizations didn’t want to publicize that gangsters had done their fighting for them.

 The mob certainly didn’t want credit for patriotism. 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. The only reason we know any of this today is because of historians like Michael Benson, who pieced it together decades later from court records, old newspapers, and the few surviving witnesses willing to talk. But think about what actually happened. While governments appeased Hitler and diplomats signed treaties they knew wouldn’t hold, a judge in New York picked up a telephone and called a gangster.

 And that gangster assembled an army of killers, boxers, and street fighters who went to war against fascism with baseball bats. They didn’t write editorials. They didn’t organize boycots. They picked up bats and went to work. Were they heroes? They were murderers and raketeers who destroyed families through their criminal enterprises.

 Were they wrong? 20,000 Americans cheered for Hitler in Manhattan. Sometimes the only people willing to do what needs doing are the ones who’ve already crossed every other line. That’s the real lesson. Not that violence solves everything, but that when civilization fails to protect its own, sometimes the most univilized 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.” If you found this story as unbelievable as we did, hit subscribe. We drop a new mob documentary every week. Drop a comment. Should the Jewish mob be remembered as heroes for fighting the Nazis? We want to hear your