In the years leading up to World War II, supporters of Adolf Hitler’s rise in Germany created an organization in the United States known as the German American Bund. Chapters formed across the country, including several in Ohio. A listener wrote to WOSU’s Curious Cbus wanting to know: Did a chapter ever exist in Columbus?
Reverend Mark Rich arrived in Columbus in 2021 to serve as an interim pastor at Trinity Lutheran Church downtown. While there, he learned about the history of the German immigrants who founded the congregation and helped create the German Village neighborhood.
In today’s highly divisive political climate, where comparisons to fascism and Nazism are common, Rich said he became curious about what the area looked like in the 1930s.
“The German presence in Ohio was pretty distinctive,” he said. “So that just made me wonder, perhaps there had been a chapter of the German American Bund in Columbus.”
The Bund formed in New York in 1936. It was one in a line of several German American groups that supported a strong Germany under Hitler’s rule. At its height, the organization was estimated to have roughly 20,000 members nationwide.
While that number reflected only a small fraction of the German American population, local historian Ed Lentz said the Bund maintained chapters in several major U.S. cities.
“The Bund was extremely strong in those areas where German communities were still quite large and quite well organized,” Lentz said. “Places like Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, even Cincinnati, had a relatively large, concentrated German community which was susceptible to the arguments, cultural, political and otherwise, made by the Bund.”
The organization backed Hitler and his anti-Semitic ideology and sought to combine those beliefs with American patriotism. Its members held meetings, marched with both American and Nazi flags and organized youth summer camps modeled after the Hitler Youth.
But the circumstances in Columbus were different. While Cleveland and Cincinnati had experienced more recent waves of German immigration, particularly after the economic collapse of post-World War I Germany, Columbus’ German community had taken root almost a century earlier. In the 1850s, Germans made up about a third of Columbus’ population and were concentrated largely in one neighborhood.
By the early 20th century, however, most German Americans in Columbus were second or third-generation residents spread throughout central Ohio.
“The Bund was not that strong in Columbus because by the time the Bund came into being, the German community had pretty well been assimilated and acculturated across the entirety of the town,” Lentz said. “There was no strong, organized, political cultural base.”
Columbus’ German American organizations rejected the Bund’s ideology outright. Newspaper accounts from the time show that several local groups denounced it as “hostile to the fundamental principles of democracy.”
The Bund’s public profile peaked in 1939 when it held a massive rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Archival recordings from the event captured the crowd cheering as the group introduced its leader, Fritz Kuhn, a German immigrant. Behind him hung swastikas and a towering portrait of George Washington.
Kuhn’s speech was filled with anti-Semitic propaganda. At one point, he urged citizens "of Aryan stock” to join what he characterized as a patriotic cause. His remarks drew applause from the audience and condemnation from the protesters, both inside and outside the arena.
The rally triggered intense scrutiny from state and federal authorities. Later that year, Kuhn was convicted of embezzling money from the Bund.
In Ohio, the attorney general launched investigations into Bund activities in Cleveland, Cincinnati and Dayton. Columbus, however, never saw the organization gain a meaningful foothold.
Between 1939 and 1941, the Bund declined rapidly and ultimately disbanded once the United States entered World War II.
