The Great Brown Scare: The German-American Bund of the 1930s

The Great Brown Scare: The German-American Bund of the 1930s

Peter H. Peel - Institute for Historical Review

http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v07/v07p419_Peel.html

In the feverish eight years of world history immediately preceding the entry of the United states into World War II, there streaked across the American political firmament a rather noisy meteor officially called Das Amerikadeutscher Bund, more generally referred to as the German-American Bund or simply as the Bund. In its brief lifetime, the Bund was the object of much hostility, suspicion and fear. It had an almost universally "bad press" and wild exaggerations concerning its aims. its size and its resources were uttered with patent self-interest and arrières pensées by a number of politicians, journalists and assorted public figures. Yet post-war historians usually dismiss the Bund in a sentence or two when writing general histories of the American thirties.