Fascists in Petaluma’s Past

By John Sheehy & Jack Withington

In June of 1938, with local newspapers reporting that Jews were being persecuted by fascists in Europe, news came that Petaluma’s Hermann Sons Hall on Western Avenue had been rented out to the German American Bund, a pro-Nazi group, who planned to feature a political appearance by their West Coast leader, Hermann Schwinn of Los Angeles.

Jerome Koch, a 27-year old Petaluma educator and member of a progressive group called California Federation for Political Unity, wrote an open letter in the Petaluma Argus-Courier to the Hermann Sons Lodge, denouncing the Bund as a front for terrorism, espionage, and propaganda in Hitler’s attempt to undermine American democracy. Koch demanded that the lodge cancel the event.

The letter set off a wave of protest in town, from both individuals and groups such as the American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, the AFL and CIO labor unions, the Communist Party (then a legal political party), and various Jewish organizations. In response, John Olmsted, owner and editor of the Petaluma Argus-Courier, accused Koch in an editorial of attempting to suppress free speech.

Koch responded that while he was an advocate of free speech and a free press, when it came to a Nazi organization like the Bund, he felt it Olmsted’s duty as a journalist to expose that their appeals to prejudice and ignorance were intended to instill violence and civil chaos as a means of ultimately undermining the very civil liberties Americans treasured.

Jerome Koch’s protest had a familial aspect—his father, Valentine Koch, an immigrant from Odessa who had fought for the U.S. in World War I and was foreman of the Petaluma Poultry Producers Cooperative in town, served as financial secretary of the local Hermann Sons Lodge. The elder Koch was left to publicly defend the lodge’s decision to rent out the hall, telling the Argus-Courier the Bund had requested it “supposedly for the presentation of a motion picture program.”

Lodge members quickly held an emergency meeting to discuss the Bund’s hall rental. Part of the national fraternal Order of Hermann Sons, the Petaluma lodge had been established in 1901, following a large influx of German immigrants to the area, particularly from the Isle of Fohr region in the North Sea. Dedicated to preserving German culture, traditions, and language, the order took its name from Arminius-Hermann, a German chieftain who united the German tribes against the Romans in the ninth century, ending the Roman domination of Germany.

The Petaluma lodge members decided to let the event proceed on the grounds that the rental agreement was already made. Since the lodge did not allow either religion or politics to enter into their discussions, to cancel it on political grounds would violate their political neutrality.

Their response was somewhat disingenuous, as their members were familiar with the leader of the local Bund, Fritz Kuehn, who had staged similar pro-Nazi events at the hall over the preceding three years. Just months before, Kuehn had held a rally at the Germania Hall in Santa Rosa which was advertised as a “concert and artists’ evening,” but actually featured Schwinn and his attendants dressed in full military uniform with a large swastika flag draped over the stage.

Schwinn had also appeared four weeks earlier at a Bund event in San Francisco, which generated headlines in the Argus-Courier for having attracted 2,000 anti-Nazi protestors. Finally, it was no secret to the members of the lodge that Kuehn’s Petaluma Bund chapter was one of the organization’s most active chapters on the West Coast.

Thirty-seven year old Fred “Fritz” Kuehn was controversial for other reasons as well. Having immigrated to America from Germany in 1921, he was drawn to Petaluma because his older sister Greta had settled in Cotati a decade before after marrying Otto Diestel, a chicken and dairy rancher. Kuehn set up a horsemeat slaughterhouse on a ranch he leased on Lakeville Highway, with an onsite hammer mill for crushing horse bones into bone meal for chicken feed. His operation regularly ran afoul with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA). An athlete, Kuehn also boxed as a welterweight for the Petaluma Spartan team, and served as team captain for a local polo team.

In the mid-thirties, Kuehn sold his slaughterhouse to Morris Cader, head of the B’nai B’rith Jewish Center and owner of Cader Brothers Hide Company, and moved into town, where he launched a new business, the Independent Ice and Supply Company. He also partnered in a new slaughterhouse plant, the Petaluma Poultry and Dog Food Company, on Lakeville Highway, which soon came under investigation by the SPCA.

In 1935, Kuehn became leader of the local chapter of Friends of New Germany, an American organization of ethnic Germans formed in 1933 to extol “German virtues” and promote the goals of Adolph Hitler’s Nazi party, in particular its anti-Semitism. Guided by Germany’s deputy fuhrer Rudolph Hess, members of the group were required to take an oath of loyalty to Hitler and swear they were of pure Aryan blood with no Jewish ancestry. They were also instructed to become American citizens, which Kuehn did in 1935, to demonstrate they weren’t foreign operatives.

That same year, Kuehn hosted a Christmas dinner for the Friends of New Germany at Penngrove’s Green Mill Inn, featuring a Christmas tree and a large block of ice carved in the shape of a swastika. He also staged events for the group at Hermann Sons Hall, including a birthday celebration for George Washington, whom the Nazis considered America’s “first Fascist,” maintaining that he was not a true believer in democracy. Promoted as musical performances with dancing, the events also featured lectures on Nazi developments in Germany and German propaganda films.

In 1936, the national Friends of New Germany organization dissolved in a flurry of infighting. It was replaced by a new pro-Nazi group, the German American Bund, launched by a man named Fritz Kuhn (no relation to Petaluma’s Fritz Kuehn). Aligned with the Silver Shirts, a white-supremacist, anti-Semitic group of 15,000 clustered primarily in the American South, the Bund was a paramilitary organization that dressed in the fashion of Hitler’s stormtroopers, with uniforms of black pants, gray shirts, blue overseas caps, and a black military-style Sam Browne belt.

Of the twelve million citizens of German blood in the United States at the time, the Bund could only claim 25,000 members, but they professed to have a much larger “whisper campaign” of financial donors. To indoctrinate new members, they quickly established twenty youth and training camps, as well as sixty-nine local chapters across the country. Frtiz Kuehn became leader of the Petaluma chapter.

Oral histories collected by Kenneth Kann for his book Comrades and Chicken Ranchers, which chronicles Petaluma’s robust community of Jewish chicken ranchers, many of them socialists who came to America escaping the pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe, offer testimonies of Kuehn’s local Bund chapter parading down Western Avenue from Hermann Sons Hall to the B’nai B’rith Jewish Center two blocks away.

They marched behind American and Nazi flags in their stormtrooper uniforms with swastika armbands, yelling out “Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil” as they offered the Nazi salute, right arms extended in the air. Other first-hand accounts describe barn gatherings of the Bund on farms west of town, and military training by the Silver Shirts in the hills surrounding Santa Rosa on Sunday mornings.

With the approval of the Hermann Sons Hall lodge members, the Bund’s events went ahead as planned on the evening of June 29, 1938, marked by protestors with placards picketing outside the hall. Unlike earlier Bund gatherings at the hall, attendance was low, as the bulk of lodge members stayed away. Among the films presented that night were “Rhoenwheel Sport,” a newsreel showing the takeover of the Austrian government by Hitler’s troops, and “The Aryan Bookstore,” which showcased the printing and distribution of anti-Semitic literature and German propaganda in America.

In his address at the hall that evening, Hermann Schwinn was blunt. “We have as little ill feeling against the Jews as we have against a flea,” he said. “But it takes only one mosquito to spread malaria, and when such a mosquito settles on our body we do not intend to spend much time wondering whether it is a good one or a bad one.”

In the months that followed, the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee intensified their investigation into links between the American Bund organization and Nazi Germany. Meanwhile, Nazi leaders unleashed an unprecedented wave of violence against Jews in Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, culminating on November 9th and 10th with Kristallnacht, or “night of broken glass,” a reign of terror by paramilitary forces that destroyed 267 synagogues and more than 7,000 Jewish businesses, killed hundreds of Jews, and led to the arrest and incarceration of 30,000 Jewish men in concentration camps.

The event sent shockwaves around the world. However, in Los Angeles, Schwinn threw a celebration. Surrounded by his stormtroopers, he blamed Jews for causing the massacre. “Americans are finally waking up,” Schwinn declared, “to the Jewish menace.” He predicted that within less than five years, “we will see Jews dangling from telephone posts and trees.”

On February 20, 1939, the Bund held an “Americanization” rally for Washington’s birthday in New York’s Madison Square Garden, denouncing, among others, Jewish conspiracies and President Roosevelt. The rally, attended by 20,000 supporters and members, drew large crowds of anti-Nazi protestors on the streets outside the Garden.

Shortly after World War II officially began with Hitler’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, the German-American Bund fell apart. The U.S. government seized many of its assets, and Fritz Kuhn was imprisoned as an enemy alien for embezzlement until the war ended, after which he was deported to Germany.

Deportation proceedings were also initiated against Schwinn for providing fraudulent information on his citizens application. On December 9, 1941, two days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor officially drew America into the war, he was jailed by the FBI as an enemy alien suspected of anti-government activities.

Koch, who ignited the 1938 Petaluma protest of the Bund, led a successful workers strike against Petaluma Poultry Producers before leaving Petaluma to become a successful magazine writer. In 1943, he joined the Poultry Producers and was assigned to manage their operation in Auburn, California. Five of his brothers enlisted in the U.S. military to fight in World War Two. One of them was shot down over Poland, and held in a prisoner of war camp until the end of the war.

As for Kuehn, his life began to unravel after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Designated in the local newspapers as Sonoma County’s Bund “Fuhrer,” he was stripped of his citizenship for having made a “false oath of allegiance” in his citizens application. Deemed a danger to military security on the Pacific Coast, Kuehn was banished to restricted quarters in Chicago. After the war, he returned to Petaluma, and appealed to have his American citizenship reinstated. In a case that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, his appeal was denied.

In the 1950s Kuehn became part owner of the Rathskeller Restaurant, a popular German eatery in the basement of San Francisco’s Teutonic California Hall, which had been built at the corner of Polk and Turk streets when the city’s Tenderloin District was occupied primarily by German immigrants. Kuehn’s two partners in the Rathskeller, John Pauls and Fritz Schmidt, were both past national presidents of Hermann Sons Lodge. Pauls, a former chicken rancher, had also been president of the lodge in Petaluma when Kuehn was banished to Chicago.

Fritz Kuehn quietly passed away in Petaluma in 1984.

SOURCES:

Press Democrat: “Let Inquiry Be Thorough,” Press Democrat, September 11, 1937; “U.S. Opens Quiz of Nazi Activities,” September 10, 1937’ “County Fuehrer on Stand in Bund Trial,” September 24, 1943;

Petaluma Argus-Courier: “Humane Officer is Investigating, June 5, 1934; “Friends of New Germany Meet at Dinner,” December 21, 1935; “German Films Enjoyed Here,” January 24, 1936; “Friends of New Germany in Fete,” February 26, 1936; “Germans ‘Heil’ Swastika at Meeting of Nazi Bund,” November 23, 1937; Jerome Koch Letter to the Editor, June 27, 1938; “Bund Conclave at S.F. Hits Discord,” May 27, 1938; “Intolerance Met by Intolerance,” June 28, 1938; “Protests may Balk Petaluma Bund Meet,” June 29, 1938; “Bund Meeting to be Held as Scheduled,” June 29, 1938; “Picketing Fails to Halt Meeting of German Bund,” June 30, 1938; “M. Cader Retires as Head of Synagogue,” October 27, 1938; “Petaluman Order to Leave Coast,” October 15, 1942; “County ‘Fueher’ On Stand in Bund Trial,” September 24, 1943; “Mothers of Prisoners of War Meet,” July 29, 1944; “Fritz Kuehn Loses Appeal,” July 29, 1947; “F. Kuehn is Denied Review by High Court,” December 8, 1947; “Valentine Koch,” February 17, 1958; “Golden Wedding Observed with Diner at Cotati,” March 7, 1963.

Petaluma Morning Courier: “Order Hermann Sons,” September 16, 1901.

Oakland Tribune: “Deckhoff Denies Envoys Aid Bund,” September 30, 1938; “S.F. Police Ordered to Guard Bund Rally,” May 30, 1938.

Salinas Morning Press: “Coast Bund Leader May be Deported,” December 15, 1938.

Los Angeles Times: “Bund Leader Schwinn’s Citizenship Cancelled,” June 23, 1939.

Jack Withington, “Dark Days of the 1930s,” Sonoma Historian, 2019 #2, pgs. 8-9.

Correspondence from Barbara Scoles, niece of Jerome Koch, February 2, 2021.

Federal Bureau of Investigation, Freedom of Information/Privacy Acts Release, German American Bund, October 15, 1941.

Thanks to Katie Watts for editing assistance.