It’s 1940. The Nazis have just embarrassed the British at Dunkirk. Adolf Hitler appeals
to Britain to step down otherwise what will happen, “will be the destruction of a great
world empire - the destruction of which was never my wish or aim.” Soon after Dunkirk,
the Germans march into Paris. Hitler calls this the most “glorious victory of all time.”
Hitler says Britain will fall, and so will the Soviet Union. As for America,
he states, “I don’t see much future for the Americans…it’s a decayed country.”
Hidden in an elaborate compound somewhere in the Santa Monica Mountains,
the LA Nazis are screaming for joy. The Nazis, they say, will defeat the US, and Adolf Hitler
will rule from his palatial Hollywood HQ. We guess some of you are now thinking the
Infographics Show is high on drugs. Or, more likely, you think that this is one of our
fictional scripts. It’s not, but we will forgive you for thinking that. Little do
most people know that at one point in time, there were the LA Nazis, and they really believed their
mustached lunatic of a savior would arrive in the US and praise them for their service.
This is how it all came to be. Before the US entered the Second World War on
December 7, 1941, many Americans had been deadest against their country fighting in Europe. In May
1940, after the Germans had blitzkrieged through Belgium, the Netherlands, and France, a poll was
taken about joining the war. 93% of Americans said this is Europe’s fight. We should stay well away
from that holy conflagration. Leave ‘em to it. This wasn’t because the vast majority of
Americans supported the Nazis, far from it. It was because they didn’t want to send young men
over to Europe to die. That had already happened in WWI. Did Americans really want more body bags
coming back from Europe? No, is the answer. Still, there were many people who were behind
President Franklin Roosevelt when he said in March 1941 that the US would become the
“great arsenal of democracy.” This is when Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act. It meant
that the US could supply the British with weapons, planes, ships, and ammunition.
But there was more going on in terms of American machines and tools being used in Europe.
The giant American car companies Ford and GM were both later accused of helping the
Nazis. Ford was said to have served as “an arsenal of Nazism.” GM said it lost control
of its car plants in Germany, but there are those who have good reason to be skeptical.
Some years before this, when Adolf Hitler was not yet at war but was enthralling Germans with
his bellicose speeches, General Motors World's publication covered an event he
spoke at. The story applauded this supposedly great man, saying things such as how wonderful
he was with kids. Part of the multi-page story said, “By nine, the streets were full of people
waiting to see Herr Hitler go meet the children.” As for Henry Ford, he was no doubt an antisemite.
After all, he was behind the publication of “The International Jew: The World's Problem.”
Ford talked and wrote about the so-called Jewish problem. This impressed the Nazis.
Hitler said Ford is “a single great man.” He once told a journalist in Detroit, “I regard
Henry Ford as my inspiration.” He even had a portrait of Ford hung in his office in Munich.
When Hitler hit the age of 50, Ford in Germany gave him 35,000 Reichsmarks as a gift. Some
years later, when the US Army liberated the Ford plants in Cologne and Berlin,
they discovered company documents talking about the “genius of the Fuehrer.” That’s
not surprising when you hear that the only American person talked about in a positive
light in Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf, is Henry Ford. Was there rampant antisemitism in the US during
the time of Hitler? Is the Pope Catholic might be the best response to that.
In the same book, Hitler talked about the need for racial purity and how he thought he could make
that happen through eugenics. This would later become the Nazis' extermination program. In the
book, Hitler said the German people should “occupy themselves not merely with the breeding of dogs,
horses, and cats but also with care for the purity of their own blood.”
But let’s remember who was a world leader in eugenics: the USA. Hitler admired the US for
this, and he very much liked that the US still had a ban on interracial marriage.
There were plenty of people in the US in the 1930s and 1940s who agreed with Hitler when
it came to racial purity. Hitler knew this. He once told a fellow Nazi, “I have studied
with interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people
whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock.”
He was, dare we say, proud of the US after it introduced sterilization laws. Hitler knew he
could do the same to prevent untold numbers of non-Aryans from ever being born. In fact,
in 1934, Joseph Dejarnette, the superintendent of Virginia's Western State Hospital, complained
in the Richmond Times-Dispatch newspaper that “The Germans are beating us at our own game.”
That same year, having seen how many people the Germans were sterilizing,
a California eugenic leader named CM Goethe praised Hitler and the rest of the Nazis for
their “epoch-making program.” All this is important when we consider the LA Nazis.
As you know, Pearl Harbor happened, and before you could say schadenfreude,
the US was fighting the Axis of Evil on the side of the Allies. This didn’t mean everyone in the
US was happy about that. Not only because of the inevitable bloodshed but as you’ve seen, plenty of
people in the US sympathized with Nazi ideology. Since 1936, there had been the German American
Bund, which was essentially an American Nazi Party.
Some of these people were desperately looking for scapegoats on which to blame their woes. Many of
them blamed Jewish people for the economic crash that had caused so much hardship in
the US. They also blamed immigrants for things such as the usual refrain, “taking our jobs.”
They wore the Nazi insignias and did the Nazi salute. They marched in the streets,
and the memberships grew at an alarming rate.
These nationalists were buoyed by the fact that a real American hero was on their side. He was the
famed aviator Charles Lindbergh, undoubtedly one of the USA’s most celebrated national
treasures of that era. He was against American intervention in the war. He spoke at rallies
held by the isolationist group America First. He was the life and soul of the isolationist party,
and the Nazi Party was quite fond of him, too. Hermann Göring even decorated Lindbergh
with the Service Cross of the German Eagle. Was Lindbergh really a Nazi sympathizer, though?
That’s hard to say. President Roosevelt once told one of his officials, “If I should die tomorrow,
I want you to know this, I am absolutely convinced Lindbergh is a Nazi.” He said to another official,
“When I read Lindbergh's speech, I felt that it could not have been better put if it had
been written by Goebbels himself.” Still, at times Lindbergh seemed to
criticize some aspects of Nazism. He was definitely anti-communist,
but he was also very fond of talking about white Euro-Americans' racial strength and
the threat of its “dilution by foreign races.” Lindbergh once told his many adoring American
fans, “Europe, and the entire world is fortunate that a Nazi Germany lies,
at present, between Communistic Russia and a demoralized France.” At the same time,
he told them the fake news and propaganda was being used by the war agitators, “the British,
the Jewish, and the Roosevelt administration,” to get America involved in the war.
And we are not talking about a small following here. Lindbergh’s fanbase certainly can’t
be compared to some monstrous far-right groups we have nowadays that hide in the
far reaches of the Internet, incessantly going on about their racial superiority.
This was a guy that drew huge crowds when he talked. Sure,
many of his supporters just didn’t want to see young American men getting chewed up
on the battlefields of Europe, but a lot of them, and we mean a lot,
thought the white race was superior. Some of them sympathized with the Nazis when the Nazis
were talking about the so-called Jewish problem. It should be noted that these Americans didn’t
yet know about gas chambers and torture under what the Nazis called the Jewish solution.
But as you know, eugenics was fine for many people. Racism was still rife in
America. There was racial segregation in the South. There was racism on TV.
As you can imagine, that most hateful group, the Klu Klux Klan, wasn’t exactly against the
Nazi ideology. These brainless lynchers and pathetic cross-burners would have felt at home
in Satan’s toilet, sharing it with Hitler. Few books have been written on the subject
of the Nazis and the southern racists, but one we found said they “did indeed praise Nazi Germany.”
As the young black college student, Henry E. Banks said back then, the Nazi regime is
bad but are we in the US “guiltless of this sin.” The thousands of members of the racist
Nazi-supporting paramilitary group called the Silver Legion would have said there was no sin.
Theses guys were totally on Hitler’s side. Their leader, aka, The White King,
once said, “The time has come for an American Hitler.” They went around saying that the land
of the free couldn’t ever be free until it was rid of Jews and blacks, and other
minorities. They were even against the Irish coming over to the US.
We guess these folks never spent much time looking at their ancestry and its history of
immigration. Nor the fact that, at the end of the day, we ALL have the same ancestors
despite genetic evolution giving us different shades of skin color as our ancestors crossed
the globe. The Silver Legion wasn’t exactly clued up when it came to evolutionary theory.
Anyway, now you’ve heard all this, are you really that shocked that high in the hills
over the Pacific Palisades, there was a group of Nazis hiding in a secret compound waiting for the
day that Hitler marched into the US and started doing the things he’d been doing in Europe?
LA was, by that time, no stranger to Nazi sympathizers. In the summer of 1933,
when Hitler had just become chancellor, a bunch of American fascists held a joyful event at a
downtown Biergarten called the Brown House. This was the same name as the Nazi Party offices in
Munich. They had no idea that a spy named L1 had sent someone to watch over events. Later
the Nazis would found out about L1 and called him “the most dangerous Jew in Los Angeles.”
You might wonder why the Nazis thought about LA at all, but the US, being as powerful as it was
back then, was always under the Nazi radar. The Nazis also understood the power of film,
and Hollywood, of course, was the movie-making Mecca of the world. Film was, and still is,
entertainment, but it’s also a great tool of propaganda. You’d be surprised how many movies
you like that have been influenced by the CIA! Hitler thought a lot about LA and Hollywood. He
even once sent one of his own filmmakers to the studios of the up-and-coming Walt
Disney. The filmmaker remarked after her visit that it was “gratifying to learn how
thoroughly proper Americans distance themselves from the smear campaigns
of the Jews.” Disney himself used to attend meetings of the German American Bund, which,
as you will remember, was the American Nazi Party. Did Hitler want a power center in LA? Sure,
he did, if he could. The Nazis said this city was even more important than New York. That’s
why they were in regular contact with the LA Nazis. Hitler and Goebbels were often on
the phone with them, issuing direct orders, according to an article in the New Yorker.
Two of these Nazis were Norman and Winona Stephens. Norman was a wealthy mining engineer,
and Winona was an heiress to a small fortune. One of her main interests was “metaphysical
and supernatural phenomena,” so when she was told by a guy only known as “Herr Schmidt”
that he’d seen in a vision that Hitler would soon rule the USA, she took it seriously.
This wealthy couple was now sure the Nazis would win the war, and one day they would arrive in
the US, so they decided to build a palace for them. They spent a whopping four million bucks
making this palace, which is about $85 million in today’s money. It’s thought they might have
gotten much of that from the Nazi Party. They got to work on the landscaping first,
which included creating vast gardens, a terraced hillside, water facilities,
and a power station. Huge electronic gates were constructed at the entrance of the ranch.
The main house was to be a four-story mansion decked out in the best furniture
money could buy. This was hidden down a hill about 650 steps from the gate.
The reason for this placement was to ensure if anyone attacked the house,
they’d see what was coming at them first. The only way in was through the gate,
and there was a gatekeeper’s house with a direct line to the main house. Also hidden was another
small house just for the chauffeur. The plans were drawn up by one of LA’s famed architects,
Plummer, Wurdeman, and Becket, who were also behind the design of the Pan-Pacific Auditorium.
The gardens that surrounded the plot were purposefully built to accommodate a range
of vegetables. There was an irrigation system to ensure the plants didn’t die. There was a diesel
fuel tank, a great big meat locker, and generators all over the place. All this was so that the
occupants of the house could live there for as long as they wanted and remain self-sufficient.
The New Yorker called the place “Hitler’s West Coast White House,” adding that it
was to be what San Clemente was for Nixon or what Mar-a-Lago is to Trump.
Hitler’s house was to have 22 bedrooms, a swimming pool, a dining hall, exercise spaces, a dairy,
a library suite, a music room, a laundry, maids' quarters, and the piece de resistance,
a large meeting room where Hitler and his guys could talk war planning. In the foyer was to be
a fountain surrounded by the 12 signs of the zodiac. All around the ranch in the hills,
American Nazis would act as stormtroopers, each trained in marksmanship and hand-to-hand combat.
Just to give you an idea of what it looked like at the time, this is what one of the
visitors to Hitler’s planned utopia said: “A guard was also employed who unlocked the
gate to admit me. The entire property was surrounded with a chain link fence topped
by barbed wire. A few people were present on the grounds. Goats, sheep, and cows were kept on the
flatlands at the bottom of the canyon.” The construction was moving along fine
for a while. They had the gardens ready and the basic infrastructure laid down,
but they hadn’t quite started on the main house when things suddenly changed. That was when Pearl
Harbor was attacked by the Japanese, and the US found itself embroiled in war all of a sudden.
The day after, the FBI arrived at their plot and arrested everyone. In all, about 50 people.
That was the end of the dream. No building happened after that. If you go there today,
you can still see parts of the project, the rusty pipes, and the smaller house, but not much else.
As for what happened to the mysterious Herr Schmidt, an LA Times article titled “Trouble
for Traitors,” dated June 30, 1940, seems to suggest he existed, that he’d fought in WW1,
and was known to US Naval intelligence. And Norman and Winona Stephens, it seems they were
released after a while. In 1948, they sold the plot to the Huntington Hartford Foundation to be
used as an artist colony. The colony shut its doors in 1965, and later in 1975, the City of
Los Angeles bought the plot. It was only in 2016 that most of it was partly demolished,
and some of it secured, due to too many kids venturing down there and getting hurt. We imagine
many of them had no idea they were wandering around a place designed for Adolf Hitler.
Now you need to hear more about Hitler’s secret life in “The Dark True Story of
Adolf Hitler.” Or, have a look at “What If Japan Was Never Hit By Nuclear Bombs.”