LITMIR.BIZ

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my life, my mom and her family told us stories about growing up in Newark, NJ through the Depression and War years. We indulged them so many times that the images felt familiar yet foreign at the same time. But it wasn’t until her ninetieth birthday reunion, that the stories became vivid, especially one in particular.

      At the party, I gulped as she told the story about her older brother Harry, a prize-fighting boxer. I had long read the newspaper article and seen the picture of my uncle winning the Golden Glove at Madison Square Garden in 1936. But the questions she answered that night about him beating up Nazis who were taking over America during the Depression caught me off guard. The family exchanged tales about the secret militia he belonged to, which had been set up between the FBI and the Jewish mob to stop the rise of fascism. She called my Uncle Harry a Newark Minuteman and said all the boxers were Minutemen fighting under the Jewish Mob Boss Longie Zwillman. For the first time, I really listened. Hitler’s party in America? During the Depression? Before World War II? My first reaction was the story could not have been true. We had never learned about this in school.

      I was determined to understand. I spent hours and hours asking her to describe her life during this time—her brothers, the house, where they bought food, how they took out the trash, how they talked to relatives overseas. I transported myself back to the Great Depression, well before World War II, to understand who, what and why. My mom remembered everything, some things like it was yesterday, and others took clearing the cobwebs. She laughed, she cried, and she sighed through the months we spent unpacking the story. She talked about her brothers running numbers for Longie in his hideout behind the candy store, how Longie was adored like a Robin Hood, and how she wrote up the power of attorney for his trial. She explained that during the Depression, the mob took care of the neighborhood when the government couldn’t. I started to unpuzzle the role of the mob, their relationship with the FBI, and the unorthodox systems of rules and power propping up America during this teetering decade.

      Reconnecting her big family brought forward a whole new life for my mom. They were part of a generation that gave up everything to come to America. She was part of a family that was connected to horrors, escaped concentration camps, and worked for the Underground. They were survivors and fighters. So it made perfect sense that the family was also a part of saving America from the same threats. Around the same time, I reconnected with my oldest cousin, Bruce Levine, who is very close to my mom. He became fascinated with the family stories and started researching with me. He found videos about President’s Day in 1939 at Madison Square Garden when the Nazi leader, Führer Fritz Kuhn, filled the Garden with his Nazi uniformed soldiers and twenty-five thousand supporters. Kuhn called out to take over the country and Make America Great. American-Nazis marched and saluted Heil Hitler while 200,000 protested outside. It was then we put the pieces together. My uncle was part of the FBI-mob militia that went out and infiltrated the rising Party that was being ignored by others.

      We visited my mom’s family. We corroborated her story. Her four brothers worked with Longie Zwillman. One cousin, Pauline Levine, lived next door to the Mob’s hideout, which was behind the candy shop. Pauline’s father Irving was Longie Zwillman’s barber. She told me how Longie helped relatives and others escape from Europe. We also learned about the Nazi youth camps set up across America to train and indoctrinate German youth and worse. My mom went to Weequahic High School, along with many of the Jews from the area. My cousin, Bruce, went there as well and reached out on their alumnae site to gather stories about the Newark Minutemen. We received many anecdotes.

      The story pulled me into a time in our country that has been forgotten. This is NOT another WWII Nazi story, nor a dystopian story where Hitler wins. This is a real-life, forgotten, fictionalized American story about waking up to the enemy sitting on our doorstep. Wherever possible, I have included factual information based on historical first-hand sources, including FBI and Senate hearing documents, interviews, testimonies, archives, diaries, timelines, newsreels, radio announcements, and news articles. However, because of the death of so many characters by the time the story was captured, the overshadowing of the horrors of the second World War and the secretive nature between the mob and the FBI, I have constructed scenes and dialogue where missing pieces arise or where it makes sense to combine characters. I have compressed events to best work for a novel and have dramatized events that were abridged accounts. But much of Newark Minutemen is true.

      Führer Fritz Kuhn was the American Führer, the self-professed American Hitler. He managed and unified tens of thousands of American-Nazi Bund members into hundreds of cells and managed twenty-five Nazi youth camps across the U.S. These camps indoctrinated youth with Nazi ideology, culture, and military training. Kuhn’s six-company corporation generated millions. He exploited U.S. resources like the NRA and National Guard to equip his army with guns and training. The FBI tracked millions of dollars in leading banks to Germany, which proved ties between the American Bund and German Nazis. Many of the Nazi Americans became leaders for the German Nazis. Many Germans tied to Camp Siegfried were later tried and found guilty for espionage. Newark Minutemen went to war.

      The protagonist, Yael, embodies John C. Metcalfe, Chicago Times undercover reporter who became a Nazi Stormtrooper to uncover the threat of Nazism in America, testified for the Senate hearings and FBI, and consulted on Confessions of a Nazi Spy movie. I had the pleasure of speaking with his son and reading John’s undercover diaries. The heroine, Krista, embodies Helen Vooros, who testified for the Senate hearings and FBI that she was raped in American Hitler Youth camps. In America, Jews were bullied, even hung with swastikas carved into their chests.

      The story of Newark Minutemen is a real-life story that is relevant today—racism that embraces dehumanizing language (such as immigrants infesting our country, politicians called animals), normalizes militant Neo-Nazis, and ignores rumors about ISIS cells buried in our soil. Fascism is on the rise globally, and our ground is fertile for its rise. The warning signals include the blurring between real and fake news, the dangers of surveillance, resistance to cede power after losing elections, offering nationalism as a solution to inequality and poverty, and the simmering xenophobia. Newark Minutemen is a message about fighting the greatest threat to freedom of all—complacency.

      NEWARKMINUTEMEN.COM provides information, the speeches from 1939 President’s Day, full FBI documents, confiscated videos, photos, diaries, links, and more.

      PROLOGUE

      February 20, 1939

      YAEL:

      Madison Square Garden. New York, USA

      If we fail today, we might as well throw in the towel.

      My ears hammer against the roarin’ crowd. We must stop the rallying call for a Nazi Party in America. The last thing we need in the middle of the Depression is a fascist party here to support the one the Nazis are building in Germany. Everyone’s still nursin’ their wounds from the Great War.

      I catch the cold iron bar—the one I spent all night sawin’ off with my hacksaw—on the first bounce. But the clank it makes between Sieg Heil chants signals our death warrant. My heart freezes as I scan forty-thousand blinkin’ eyes around the arena. I wonder which ones have read through my fake salute? Blood thrusts through my veins like water loadin’ in a fire hose. I almost vomit. Dangit! I’m my own worst enemy.

      The pumpin’ in my body mounts like a geyser ready to blow. Right here and now, maybe I should grab my fellow fighters and exit the Germandom defiling the Garden. Yes. Madison Square Garden. New York City, USA. The last time I was here I was sixteen and my best pal, Harry Levine, knocked out another heavyweight to win the 1936 Golden Glove. Now, just three years later, the Bund’s American Führer, Fritz Kuhn, is celebrating Der Tag—The Day—on Washington’s birthday in the most iconic American arena we have.

      Another cheer goes up and shakes the ceiling rafters. The heat from heiling bodies curdles my stomach as if I’d swallowed gasoline. I fume when I think about how Kuhn is bastardizing our American symbol into a red, white and blue Nuremberg Rally on our sacred President’s Day, February 20, 1939. Today, the stainin’ of an American symbol, tomorrow our country could be consumed by a brewin’ dictatorship

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