Download Wunderlich's Salute: The Interrelationship of the German-American Bund, Camp Siegfried, Yaphank, Long Island, and the Young Siegfrieds and Their Relationship with American and Nazi Institutions. eBook

good

Good Book on local history for me.

A photograph shows a train called the "Camp Siegfried Special" as it pulls into Yaphank station at the German American Bund camp in Long Island, New York. People standing outside of the train greet it with the stiff-arm salute.

It is another example of how America's early stiff-arm salute was spreading outside of its origin in the Pledge of Allegiance, and was even becoming a general greeting.

The train would pull out of Penn Station at 8 a.m. every Sunday, carrying thousands of bundists from the greater New York area and other cities.

The author Marvin D. Miller has written a book on the topic. The short title is "Wunderlich's salute." The longer version of the title, before the book is opened, raises a red flag about overuse of the shorthand N-word, and about widespread ignorance of word's actual meaning: National Socialist German Workers Party.

It makes an interesting comparison to the work of another writer, America's leading authority on the Pledge of Allegiance (and the author of "Pledge of Allegiance Secrets") showing that the swastika was used as overlapping S-letters for "socialism" under the National Socialist German Workers' Party. The work also shows that the early Pledge of Allegiance (written by a National Socialists in the U.S.) used a stiff-arm salute and that it was the origin of the salute adopted later by German National Socialists.

Ernest Mueller, president of the German-American Settlement League, was indicted with five others in Riverhead on charges that the League and Camp Siegfried were part of the bund, which required members to swear an oath of allegiance to the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party. The state contended, therefore, that the German-American Settlement League had violated state law by failing to file its list of members, who had sworn loyalty to a foreign power.

Mueller and the others went on trial in Riverhead, where a witness named Willie Brandt testified that he had sworn his "loyalty and obedience"' to the German National Socialist leader. Then, a 45-year-old shipping clerk named Martin Wunderlich took the stand and demonstrated the stiff-armed salute used at the camp.

"That is an American salute?" asked the prosecutor Lindsey Henry.

"It will be," Wunderlich said.

That response is said to have sent "chills" through the jurors, who returned a guilty verdict. Chills can be difficult to see or verify, and the description seems exaggerated due to the fact that stiff-arm salute was an American salute, even at that time. The dramatic story more likely springs from the imagination of someone who does not know that the salute originated in America via an American National Socialist, and was the origin of the salute adopted later by German National Socialists. Knowing the truth about the American salute also puts an entirely different spin on the prosecutor's question.

The socialist dogma led to the Wholecost (of which the Holocaust was a part): the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 60 million people slaughtered; the People's Republic of China, 50 million; and the National Socialist German Workers' Party, 20 million.

Mueller's court decision was later set aside and never taken to the State Court of Appeals. But by then, the issue was moot. In the summer of 1939, the camp had lost its liquor license and many of its followers. Then, the National Socialist German Workers Party joined as allies with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in a pact to divide up Europe and they invaded Poland together in September 1939. The woodland campground was deserted and out of business.

In Camp Siegfried's heyday, bundists paraded with their hakenkreuz banners. Fritz Kuhn, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Germany, and head of the Bund, spoke of the camp as part of "Germany in America."

In the end, Kuhn spent the war in a detention camp (in Texas) with about 40 Siegfrieders.

Then, in 1945, he was deported to West Germany.

If you are at all interested in following the journey of the Nazis from Germany to the present, the Long Island connection is an essential turning point. Marvin D. Miller discovered this connection and reports here a treasure trove of documentation and trial transcripts that clarify, as much as possible, who is responsible for what, when and why; or what the excuses were when persons were acquitted. It helps to know the area and the people involved (which I don't). Characters cannot be fleshed out in a document like this, and I had a difficult time keeping track of who was whom. Still, if you are trying to track specific individuals, this is definitely a good place to look.

Was the Bund a harmless American-German organization or a Nazi bridge to the future? The book leaves it for you to decide, and possibly raises more questions than it answers. Still, the answer doesn't matter until the right question is asked. A powerful, important and difficult-to-find treasure. I just wish it was written with more of a readable flow.