German American Bund

Oh, does that sound vaguely familiar? The America First movement was anti-immigrant, anti-Jew, anti-getting into World War II.

And it was supported by a group in the United States called the American Bund.

And the American Bund were Americans of German descent who supported Nazism.

And now and don't let this be lost on you, because this happened in 2024.

Trump held his final rally for election at Madison Square Garden, where the.

Nazi American Bund held their last rally before World War II with banners of George Washington on one side.

I shit you not, Google it yourself.

You can watch the videos, right? American Nazis Madison Square Garden.

Pretty much.

So yeah, and again, going back to real life, the Friends of New Germany were a real Nazi group in America before the, I think the American Bund, they called it, was the follow-up group, the follow-up kind of American Nazi group.

they were a real group and uh and they were involved in this and you know speaking to octavius and working together um but yeah he's a part of that and we learned that he's the guy getting uh all the test subjects for octavius is the crime master in the sandman Um, and yeah, so he's a, he's a kind of a non-entity, but they use that idea quite well in his own kind of psychology in this, that he, he is nothing.

He's just another stooge, another idiot, uh, without the mask.

They were collecting for German war relief in the lobbies of the German movie theaters there.

And the German-American Bund, which was the big uniformed Nazi, pro-Nazi group in America, had meetings down the street.

So there was that element, the knowledge that you had enemies in the world.

and also the knowledge that you were socially set apart from Christian American life, but not in any threatening way.

Well, looks like I'm gonna go to work tomorrow and start building it back up." That was what Yockey was doing [laughs] in 19- in 1948.

Like, people think, like, all of a sudden he was political in 19- No, he, he was doing work with the Silver Legion, with the, uh, German American Bund, with the America Firsters under Lindbergh.

Like, like, it, at that time prior to, it really seemed like America was gonna go in a more traditional direction, in a more genuinely right-wing direction.

He was working with all of them, and all of that was just crushed.

It was very eerie working on especially the Gotham at War stuff, the 1933 to 1945 stuff from the period of 2011 to its publication in 2025, because there were threads that I was, you know, I've read a lot.

There were threads that I was just completely unaware of, like the existence of street fascism in New York City, Proud Boy type stuff, right? The Christian Front and Christian Mobilizer in the 1930s, and the now famous Madison Square Garden German-American Bund rally.

No one had heard of that stuff when I read it in 2011, the idea that there was real hardcore Nazism in New York City.

People were vaguely aware of it, but he really brought out those threads.

[instrumental music plays] Two years before FDR's election in 1932, the country was really struggling with the Depression.

There was a fair amount of, uh, support for fascism in the United States by the American Bund and, um, a, a lot of support for communism.

Like, what's...

Like, democracy's not working for us.