Storm Track Infiltration: That Was Then – And This is Now

I’ve tried to show in my blog with the categories I use the correlation between what’s happening now and what happened in the 1930s before the gathering storm erupted into a full blown hurricane that swept millions to their deaths.

As the theme of my blog implies, it’s happening again.

Two examples of the type of infiltration our Nazi enemies used in the 1930s in this country spring to mind. Camp Siegfried in New York and Camp Nordland in New Jersey. Both ostensibly were summer camps for German-American youths. Both were indoctrination camps to turn American boys into good little bundists.

First Camp Ziegfried.

In 1936, a seemingly bucolic Yaphank retreat makes Nazism a homegrown concern. Ostensibly a summer camp, its true intentions were suggested in a brochure promising ``You will meet people who think as you do.''

Located on a wooded lakefront near the mid-Suffolk village, the camp was ostensibly a summer place for youngsters and a weekend campground for adults. In reality it was more dangerous -- a project sponsored by the German-American Bund, which had been established to promote Hitlerism in this country.

At first, Long Island merchants reacted happily to the influx of potential customers, and many businesses took out ads in the bund's national newspaper. One farmer turned his fields into a parking lot for 500 cars, at 25 cents a car. Visitors were even invited to march through the village on the way from the Yaphank station to the camp. The scene, at first, was more bucolic than bullying. When the lakefront campsite opened in mid-1935, it was known, innocuously enough, as the ``Friends of New Germany Picnic Grounds,'' sponsored by the so-called German-American Settlement League.

Even the streets in the nearby German development called German Gardens had names like Hitler Street, a Goering Street and a Goebbels Street. But the street names live on in the archives of Suffolk County.

Read the rest at The Gathering Storm.