What Happened to American Nazi Sympathizers?

On a February night in 1939, 20,000 people packed Madison Square Garden to cheer for George Washington banners flanked by swastikas. A giant portrait of Washington hung between American flags and Nazi symbols while the German American Bund’s leader, Fritz Kuhn, ranted about “Jewish-controlled” media and “true Americanism.”

Less than three years later, those same symbols were on the helmets of men shooting at American soldiers. So what happened to the people who had cheered in that arena once the United States entered World War II in December 1941?

American Nazi sympathizers did not all meet one fate. Some were arrested or interned. Some slipped back into ordinary life. A few doubled down and tried to help the enemy. Others quietly reinvented themselves as patriots. The Madison Square Garden rally is often remembered as a shocking one-off, but the real story is what came after, when a fringe movement collided with wartime reality.

Here are five concrete ways their lives changed once the U.S. went to war with Hitler.

1. The German American Bund collapsed and its leaders went to prison

First, the obvious target: the organization behind that Madison Square Garden rally. The German American Bund was the main pro-Nazi group in the United States in the late 1930s. It ran summer camps, parades, and rallies, and tried to package Nazism as 100% compatible with American patriotism.

The Bund’s leader, Fritz Kuhn, is the clearest example of what happened when the war arrived. Even before Pearl Harbor, he was in trouble. In 1939, New York district attorney Thomas Dewey prosecuted Kuhn for embezzling Bund funds. Kuhn was convicted and sent to Sing Sing prison. After the war, he was stripped of his U.S. citizenship and deported to Germany, where he died in 1951, politically irrelevant.

By late 1941, the Bund as an organization was already crumbling under legal pressure, bad publicity, and internal fights. After the U.S. declared war on Germany, the federal government finished the job. The Bund dissolved itself in December 1941, trying to avoid being formally banned as an enemy organization. Its property was seized or sold off, its camps closed, and its leaders either jailed, deported, or forced into silence.

The rank-and-file members, including many who had attended that Madison Square Garden rally, largely escaped formal punishment. The FBI investigated thousands of suspected Nazi sympathizers, but membership in the Bund by itself was not a crime. Many were questioned, watched, then left alone so long as they did not engage in sabotage or espionage.

The collapse of the Bund mattered because it removed the main public platform for American Nazism. After 1941, there was no large, legal Nazi mass movement in the United States. Anyone who wanted to keep sympathizing with Hitler had to do it quietly, without uniforms, rallies, or big arenas.

2. Some were arrested or interned as “enemy aliens”

While most sympathizers were not hauled away, a smaller but significant group did lose their freedom. After Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government used existing laws and new wartime powers to arrest and intern people considered dangerous, including some Nazi sympathizers and German nationals with suspect ties.

A concrete example: the FBI’s December 1941 “Custodial Detention” program. Within days of the Pearl Harbor attack, federal agents arrested hundreds of German, Italian, and Japanese nationals on pre-made lists. Some had clear Nazi or fascist ties, such as involvement with the Bund or open support for Hitler. They were held in camps like Fort Lincoln in North Dakota or Crystal City in Texas.

Unlike the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans, which targeted an entire ethnic group regardless of loyalty, the internment of German and Italian nationals and a handful of German American citizens was more selective, though still often arbitrary. Estimates vary, but roughly 11,000 people of German background were interned in the United States during the war. Among them were some who had attended Bund events or expressed pro-Nazi views.

One telling case is that of Hans Diebel, a German-born resident of New Jersey who had been active in Bund circles. He was arrested shortly after Pearl Harbor, interned, and later repatriated to Germany in a prisoner exchange. His fate shows how quickly “loud sympathizer” could turn into “enemy to be removed” once war began.

This wave of arrests and internments mattered because it drew a legal line between opinion and perceived threat. Being a Nazi sympathizer was not automatically illegal, but if the government thought you might act on it, you could lose your liberty without a normal trial.

3. A few became spies and saboteurs, and paid for it

Most American Nazi sympathizers did not become traitors in the legal sense. A small number did, and they are the ones who show up in the history books.

The most famous case is Operation Pastorius in 1942. Eight German agents were landed by U-boat on Long Island and in Florida. Several had lived in the United States before the war and had been exposed to pro-Nazi circles. Their mission was to sabotage factories, railroads, and power plants. One of them, George Dasch, lost his nerve, turned himself in to the FBI, and exposed the plot. Six of the eight were executed in the electric chair. Two, including Dasch, had their sentences commuted and were deported after the war.

Another example is the case of Herbert Haupt, a U.S. citizen of German birth who had lived in Chicago. He had been part of a German American community where sympathy for Hitler was not unheard of. Recruited by German intelligence while visiting Germany, he returned as part of the Pastorius group. His American citizenship did not save him. He was executed in 1942.

There were also smaller spy cases. The FBI broke up various German espionage rings, some involving German nationals, some involving American citizens who had been impressed by Hitler in the 1930s. These people moved from being sympathizers to active agents of an enemy power, and the law treated them accordingly.

These spy and sabotage cases mattered less for their military impact, which was small, and more for public perception. They helped cement the idea that Nazi sympathizers were not just cranks but potential traitors, which made open Nazism politically radioactive for decades.

4. Many quietly reinvented themselves as loyal Americans

Here is the part that frustrates anyone looking for a neat moral ending. A large share of those who had flirted with Nazism in the late 1930s simply changed the subject once the war turned against Hitler.

There is no master list of everyone who attended the 1939 Madison Square Garden rally, so historians have to work from scattered biographies, FBI files, and local reports. What emerges is a pattern. People who had worn Bund uniforms, sent their kids to Bund summer camps, or cheered speeches about “Americanism” with a Nazi accent did not, for the most part, stand up in 1945 and confess error. They stopped talking about it.

Take the example of Bund member Gerhard Wilhelm Kunze. He had been a national publicity director for the Bund, then fled to Mexico in 1940, was extradited, and sentenced to prison for failing to register as a foreign agent. After serving his time, he faded into private life. He did not become a public defender of Nazism. He also did not become a public penitent. He just disappeared from politics.

On a smaller scale, local Bund leaders and rank-and-file members did the same. Some enlisted in the U.S. military once war came, either out of genuine change of heart, social pressure, or a desire to prove loyalty. Others worked in war industries. Neighbors who remembered their prewar activities might gossip, but there was no systematic purge of former sympathizers from ordinary jobs.

This quiet reinvention mattered because it meant that American Nazism did not end with a dramatic reckoning. It ended with silence. That made it easier for people to rewrite their own pasts and for their children and grandchildren to never hear about the time grandpa went to a Nazi rally in New York.

5. After 1945, open Nazism became taboo, but the ideas did not vanish

By the time the war ended, the word “Nazi” was politically toxic in the United States. Photos from liberated concentration camps and newsreels of Nuremberg trials made sure of that. Publicly calling yourself a Nazi after 1945 was social and political suicide.

Some former sympathizers tried to adapt. A few moved into more “respectable” far-right politics, dropping the swastikas but keeping the antisemitism and racism. Others turned to groups like the Christian Nationalist Crusade of Gerald L. K. Smith, which pushed conspiracy theories about Jews and communists without explicit Nazi branding.

There were also attempts to revive explicit Nazism in fringe groups. George Lincoln Rockwell founded the American Nazi Party in 1959. He attracted a small following, some of whom had been children or teenagers in Bund families in the 1930s. That continuity is hard to trace person by person, but the ideological thread is visible: the same mix of racism, antisemitism, and admiration for authoritarianism, just in a postwar setting.

At the same time, mainstream America used the memory of Nazism as a moral boundary. Politicians accused opponents of being “soft on communism” or “un-American,” but almost nobody wanted to be associated with Hitler. The 1939 Madison Square Garden rally became a kind of historical embarrassment, proof that “it happened here” but also a story people preferred to treat as a weird anomaly.

This postwar taboo mattered because it pushed Nazi sympathies out of public respectability. The ideas did not disappear, but they were driven into smaller, more marginal spaces. That is why the Garden rally feels so shocking today: it is a glimpse of a moment before the taboo, when thousands of Americans could cheer for a movement that, a few years later, would be synonymous with mass murder.

So what happened to the people in that arena?

There is no single answer to what happened to everyone who filled Madison Square Garden in 1939. Some were hardcore believers who ended up in FBI files, prison cells, or deportation proceedings. A few crossed the line into espionage and died in the electric chair. Many more went home, kept their heads down once war came, and later told themselves they had just been “against Roosevelt” or “for America,” not for Hitler.

The U.S. government crushed the organized pro-Nazi movement, but it did not run a mass reeducation campaign. That left a lot of unfinished business at the level of memory and responsibility. When people today ask what happened to American Nazi sympathizers after 1941, they are really asking whether there was a reckoning. The honest answer is: for some, yes. For many, no. They simply moved on, and the country, eager to focus on victory and the Cold War, mostly let them.