US citizens provided material support to Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun with the hope that the Nazis would overthrow the US government and arrange for the production of atomic weapons using the assembly line method. This scandal, thundered in the 1950s, reappeared in the media and made many wonder: where did the Nazi supporters in the post-war United States come from?
The story about which the American edition of The Daily Beast writes in Russia will remind many of Ostap Bender, who, however, did not choose such terrible images for his false identities.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, hundreds of Americans began to receive letters in the mail signed by Adolf Hitler, Eva Braun, Hitler’s assistant A. von Boguslovsky, or number one furrier. All of them contained requests for financial assistance for the four Hitlers, who miraculously escaped from the Fuhrer bunker in May 1945 and now living in Kentucky.
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler PhotoThe plans of the Nazi leader have not changed – world domination, to achieve which he planned to raise an uprising in the United States. The organization of the rebellion needed money because the project was supposed to be expensive: with underground tunnels to Washington, invisible spaceships and nuclear bomb factories in Idaho.
Despite the 36 thousand loyal “bayonets” allegedly acquired by Hitler in America, sometimes the author of the letters asked the Fuhrer to send clothes, including women’s clothing.
A fugitive Nazi leader promised that the investment would pay off handsomely: luxurious villas, general epaulettes, diplomatic posts and even the titles of “furrier number two” or “furrier number three”. This is read since Hitler used the English word furrier (that is, a furrier) instead of the German Fuhrer with an umlaut.
Letters from him were full of spelling mistakes, but real Hitler would not have written such ones either – foreign languages were not given to him.
The news of the Nazis hiding in Kentucky quickly got into the local media. Still, it did not make much noise until the police entered into correspondence with the Fuhrer-furrier and lured the false Hitler out of hiding with insignificant amounts. “The Führer Number One” was the 61-year-old Baptist preacher, Henry Johnson. Among other things, an African American.
At the trial, he said that he worked as a private detective and exposed through the Hitler correspondence of enemies of the state on the instructions of the FBI Director John Edgar Hoover. The court did not believe and sentenced him to three years in prison. After that, the fraudster disappeared – the archives did not keep mention of him. Maybe he died in jail, perhaps he changed his name and raised money for another considerable project – now you don’t know.
But something else interests: why was he able to raise the equivalent of 150 thousand modern dollars to the idea of Nazi revenge in post-war America? It is clear that in most cases “letters from Hitler” were simply thrown out by the addressees, but there were also enough who donated considerable money to Johnson by the standards of their income. Are these people so stupid, worse, convinced Nazis?
The correct answer is a bit of everything.
In the second half of the XIX century, the United States became one of the world leaders in terms of literacy in the population structure. However, a sharp increase in the quality of education (along with equally impressive growth in the welfare of the nation) occurred in the 1950s. The times of the Great Depression, on the contrary, were accompanied by the degradation of public schools and the boom of the “yellow” press, specializing in mysticism and conspiracy theories.
Johnson’s fraud painfully resembles the famous “Nigerian letters” that appeared in the 1980s. Their authors, looking to be senior African officials or even princes, are asking for money transfers to return to their homeland, hire a lawyer, pay a bribe, or unlock a bank account. In response, the “princes” promise stone cave diamonds or a stake in the oil deal.
This type of fraud is considered one of the most common on the Internet and still collects the harvest from the narrow-minded and greedy. If so, there is nothing to be amazed at the times of Eisenhower and such Johnson victims as a bricklayer Huber from Virginia or someone Charlie Brown, who was promised a harem with Aryan virgins (Brown, by the way, was also black, but regarded Hitler’s help as a profitable investment).
Moreover, the theory of Hitler’s successful escape on the “rat path” somewhere to Argentina was very popular in post-war America and Europe. All points were placed on i a little later – after a series of examinations, which, however, some conspiracy theorists still do not trust.
In 1947, according to The Daily Beast, citing a Gallup Institute poll, 45% of Americans supported the rescue of Hitler.
Not all of them were Nazis, but there were also Nazis among them.
Before the war, Hitler’s ideas in America were to some extent shared even by iconic figures such as Walt Disney and Henry Ford (and Ford shared so much that he financed the NSDAP and received personal praise from the Führer). Events under the swastika sign gathered in the USA of the 1930s tens of thousands of people.
There are several reasons. Firstly, it is racism, which requires no explanation—secondly, anti-Semitism, also prevalent in America in those years. Thirdly, isolationism, that is, a fundamental unwillingness of part of the elite and society to participate in the Second World War. Fourth, anti-communism. Sometimes it’s all together.
One of the commanders of the American army in Europe, General George Smith Patton, was the one who terrified the German command. And at the same time those who did not consider either Jews or Communists as people.
With the entry of the United States into the war, all pro-Nazi events and movements were banned. After the victory, they were stigmatized and marginalized, and their members were associated not only with extremists but also with traitors. Hitler’s sympathizers yesterday dreamed that this period of their life would be erased from history and public memory.
Nevertheless, in 1959, George Rockwell founded the future American Nazi Party (ANP), the leader of which he urged to send American Jews into gas chambers as crypto communists. This although Rockwell was a commander (lieutenant colonel) of the US Navy and a war veteran who served in the Atlantic.
There were many organizations like ANPs, some still exist: for example, the National Socialist Movement, which became famous for participating in riots in Ohio in 2005. It is considered the largest neo-Nazi group in the United States.
However, the huge and somewhat influential fascist parties in Johnson’s time we’re gone. The idea of his “business” was predetermined by the fact that being black, he exaggerated the number of white Nazis in the USA. Along with greedy fools, they were nevertheless enough to collect a reasonably large amount of money – and this is the very case when the victims of the fraudster are not at all sorry.
