PBS visits ‘Nazi Town, USA’

Exploring a dark chapter in American history too broad and resonant to cover in one hour, “American Experience” (9 p.m., PBS, TV-14, check local listings) presents “Nazi Town, USA.”

The documentary doesn’t dwell on one particular burg, but discusses a time in the 1930s when openly pro-Hitler groups were organized in towns and cities across America. At the time, German Americans and those with mixed German ancestry composed the largest ethnic group in the country. While only a fraction of German Americans joined such groups, they were conspicuous in German communities in Manhattan’s Yorkville neighborhood, sections of Long Island and towns and summer camps in northern New Jersey.

In the years before World War II, Hitler’s appeal was not limited to American Germans. After the ravages of World War I and the calamity of the Great Depression, many feared that democracy itself had grown unequal to the task and that a strong man was needed. When Mussolini came to power in Italy in 1922, he was admired by many powerful industrialists and those who liked that he “made the trains run on time” and restored pride to the land of the ancient Roman Empire.

As many of the historians interviewed here emphasize, all of this took place before the war and before the revelations of the Holocaust and other barbarities at the hands of such “strong men.”

But not everybody remained silent. “Nazi Town” cites journalist Dorothy Thompson, who appeared to be accurate about the Nazis even before Hitler came to power in 1933. Considered “the first lady of American journalism,” her criticism of Hitler earned her the notoriety of being the first American expelled from the Reich. She was not the last. Even before the anti-Jewish violence of Kristallnacht of 1938, she strongly argued that Nazi racial rhetoric was not a mere pose and that they would follow through on their policies.

Historians here also make the strong, if disturbing, point that Nazi rhetoric was hardly out of place in America in the 1930s. At the time, racial segregation was very much the law of the land, and the Immigration Act of 1924 had essentially limited newcomers to those of “Nordic” extraction. The pseudoscience of eugenics and master race ideology was very much an American phenomenon. So it’s not that surprising that Nazi ideology found fertile ground in a society fearful of war, depression, economic inequality and startling disruptions brought about by rapid technological change.

And the country’s Nazi sympathizers were not alone. Millions more looked up to the USSR’s “Man of Steel,” Joseph Stalin.