In 1935, the Nazis were only a short train ride away from New York City.
Zealous believers could hop on the Friday night Siegfried Special at 8 p.m. and step off in Yaphank, a small hamlet overrun by American Nazis covertly managing a brutal indoctrination camp in the far reaches of Long Island.
Looking back on it today, the photographic evidence is shocking. Surviving images show elegant country homes with swastikas embedded in the brickwork, street signs for a “Hitler Street” and eerie swastika-shaped shrubbery.
At first, the camp seemed innocent enough. When it opened in 1935, it was known as the Friends of New Germany Picnic Grounds, named for a pro-Nazi group that would later morph into the better known German American Bund.
“There was a lake and it was by a railroad siding. They would come from Yorkville — the German-American neighborhood in Manhattan — and take the subway to Flatbush, where they’d get on the LIRR and take it to Yaphank,” Steven Klipstein of Suffolk Community College told the Daily News.
It probably all seemed normal enough — till they got off the train.
“They were met by a phalanx of males in Hitler brown shirts giving the Heil sign. Many of them were dressed in German peasant costumes,” he said. Now — knowing what would come later — it all sounds far more sinister than it would have at the time. Then, it was just an enthusiastic greeting at a camp to celebrate German heritage.
“It was was a family retreat and it was like any other kind of ethno-centric family retreat,” said Arnie Bernstein, author of “Swastika Nation.”
“They had German folk festival kind of stuff, oom-pa-pa bands, Oktoberfest — but with a Nazi flair.”
There were speeches and rallies and gung-ho campers sang Horst Wessel around a bonfire. There were excursions for the whole family, but the focus was on the children’s camp.
“The most important thing about these places was these youth camps, where they were training the future little Aryans who they thought would run the country. On the surface it was like any kind of regular camp — swimming, athletic contests, singing, dancing — but underneath there were some really ugly things going on there.”
For one, the camps relied on child labor for construction.
“They had the children build the camp because the unions were filled with Jews,” Bernstein said.
Also, the indoctrination methods were brutal. “The children had to do marches in the middle of the night, through brambles. They got scratched up and bloody,” he said.
But the worst parts of the camp didn’t come out until years later, when a HUAC investigation targeted the Bund. The not-so-innocent camp was rife with sexual abuse.
“They were encouraging the young men and women to have relations, to produce Aryan children,” Bernstein said. They weren’t just encouraging sex, though; they were also forcing it. Afterward, horrific accounts emerged, of male counselors raping female campers.
For all its brutal methods, though, the indoctrination worked. In June 1942 a German U-boat quietly landed off the shore of Long Island, near Amagansett beach. Four men — three of whom were former Camp Siegfrieders — paddled ashore laden with explosives and cash.
They buried their Nazi uniforms in the sand, along with some of their dangerous payload. The invaders planned to sabotage the war effort, blowing up military installations.
They could have succeeded, too. Although they ran into a member of the Coast Guard on shore, he was one man against four. He couldn’t stop them, though they tried to pay him off. Despite the $260 hush money, as soon the saboteurs caught a train into Manhattan, the worried guard ran back to his superiors and told them what happened.
That wasn’t how the invaders were exposed, though. Before they’d even come close to accomplishing their mission, one of the men had second thoughts, according to Newsday. George Dasch decided to call the FBI and spill his guts, leading to the arrest of his three companions as well as four other saboteurs who’d made landfall in Florida.
Today, it might seem bizarre to envision Long Island as a Nazi stronghold. But in the first half of the 20th century, it was a very different place.
“The Ku Klux Klan was very active here and in the 1920s, one of seven males in Suffolk County was a Klan member,” Klipstein said. The American Eugenics Association was based in Cold Spring Harbor and then, of course, the Nazis were in Yaphank.
As it turns out, though, the island’s past really isn’t all that far away.
Around the time the creepy camp took root in Yaphank, two German immigrants bought land to found a Nazi bungalow community nearby. There, the streets were named after Hitler’s honchos — and the residents were his supporters, or at least sympathizers, according to Bernstein.
The land fell under the control of the German American Settlement League, a Bund offshoot that enforced discriminatory covenants governing who could own the land — all the way until earlier this year, when a federal court finally forced the league to stop, according to Newsday.
The Nazi furor wasn’t only on Long Island, though. There were similar camps scattered everywhere from Wisconsin to New Jersey. And the German-American Bund was a national group, dedicated to furthering Nazi causes in America.
At its peak, the Bund managed to fill Madison Square Garden for a 1939 Nazi rally, on the eve of war. Surviving images show the jarring juxtaposition of a giant image of George Washington, with swastika-spangled banners in front.
The Bund dissolved after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Its leader, Fritz Kuhn, was interned by the feds before getting deported — only to be imprisoned in Germany. He died in Munich in 1951.
Out on Long Island, remnants of the hamlet’s Nazi past still exist. The street names have been changed and the campers are long gone, but the clubhouse remains.
“It looks the same except there aren’t swastikas on the front anymore,” Klipstein said.
