Suffolk Closeup: Nazis of Long Island

“Nazis of Long Island: Sedition: Espionage & The Plot Against America,” a book authored by Christopher Verga, a professor at Suffolk County Community College of courses in History of Long Island and Foundations of American History, was published last week by The History Press, a division of Arcadia Press.

Arcadia describes itself as “the largest publisher of local and regional history and culture books in the United States.”

The book’s cover features a photo of“a bungalow in Camp Siegfried”— a large swastika above its front door. Camp Siegfried was in the middle of Suffolk County, in Yaphank, and a major center for Nazis at which marches and other events were regularly held and there were facilities for Nazi indoctrination and a settlement of houses.

“The roads traversing the camp,” Verga writes, “were named after members of the Nazi high command such as Adolph Hitler Street, Joseph Goebbels Street and Hermann Goering Street.” His book contains many photos, including of rallies at Camp Siegfried which attracted up to 50,000 people.

The Long Island Rail Road ran a train “known as the Siegfried Special.”

The book opens with a strong report: “Around midnight on June 13, 1942, a dense fog rolled in off the shore of Amagansett” and “twenty-one-year-old Coast Guardsman Jack Cullen” encounters four men in “a rubber raft” having landed “carrying canvas seabags.” One of them insisted that they were “fishermen from Southampton who ran aground.” It turned out they were members of “two teams of four … trained by the Abwehr (Nazi military intelligence) and by the Nazi high command for a commando-style raid. All four men had lived in or visited America before the war and had a basic understanding of transportation lines and local communities.” They were all subsequently arrested, six executed and two receiving 30-year prison sentences. Verga, of Bay Shore, details in the book Nazi “spy rings” and how they “infiltrated communities on Long Island, Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, posing as housewives, engineers … or even your neighbor next door … German Bund meetings” including at “Camp Siegried became prime locations for Nazi officials to recruit the next wave of spies.”

One was the Duquesne Spy Ring. Among those in it, Verga cites Everett Roeder of Merrick who was “embedded in” and “a top engineer at Sperry Gyroscope Company in Garden City. His projects included bombsights, long-range guns for planes as well as cutting-edge autopilot technology.”

The leader of this ring was Frederick Joubert Duquesne from South Africa who “was a veteran of the Boer Wars. His hatred of England derived from his service in a Boers Commando unit,” writes Verga. “Duquesne built a spy ring of thirty-three agents who worked in New York City’s largest ports and companies such as Westinghouse Electric, Pan American Airways, Sperry Gyroscope Company” and others.

Roeder was arrested in 1941 and sentenced to 16 years in jail, Duquesne to 20 years.

About Camp Siegfried, Verga writes: “The initial reception from the community was welcoming due to the economic boom from the influx of visitors. Local businesses not related to the Bund that were looking to cash in as merchants for food and displayed signs in their front windows that read ‘D.K.V.’ … German Consumer Association …. As the development of the camp expanded, Bund-related companies began to appear along the outer edges of Camp Siegfried.”

“As the resistance against the Bund intensified” in the late 1930s as “Nazis expanded their territory in Europe” and “news of their atrocities made headlines. Locals who viewed Siegfried as a harmless summer camp became concerned about the paramilitary exercises.”

Gustave Neuss, who served on the Brookhaven Town Board from 1933 to 1937,“took on the Bund,” Verga writes, including by rejecting “any construction or zoning permits for the camp…. Zoning approval was essential to generate revenue for the Bund through sales of summer cottages and year-round housing.”

As a response, says Verga, “In a press release, Ernst Mueller, head of the German American Settlement League, fed into the racial biases of greater Long Island, stating, ‘The town board has to stop picking on us. If they want a fight, they can have it. We will sell the property to the lowest bidder — a Negro group. How would you like to have Father Divine here? This will ruin the sales and values of the surrounding area.”

Fritz Kuhn, bundesführer of the German American Bund, then “ordered its members to register as voters in Yaphank to vote out Neuss.”

Neuss in a “re-election speech” declared: “They are going to punish me for daring to criticize an organization that I insist has no right to exist in the United States. Every veteran should be insulted.” He lost his bid for re-election in 1937.

Meanwhile, “the fight with Neuss attracted outraged members of the Disabled War Veterans of America to mobilize for a fight. Roy Monahan, leader of the Disabled American Veterans of the World War, New York State branch,” arranged for a member who also was a New York Journal-American reporter to go “undercover to Camp Siegfried to inquire about joining the German American Settlement League.” He was told that to do this he first had to join the German American Bund and this, says Verga, “required taking an oath. However, according to the New York Civil Rights Law … any organization that requires an oath must file a list of its members with the New York State secretary of state. New York State enacted this law in 1920 to combat the influence of the Ku Klux Klan.”

This led to a trial in 1938 at which Suffolk County District Attorney Lindsay Henry posed a question to Bund member Martin Wunderlich on the stand asking him “to demonstrate the standard Nazi salute given at Siegfried.” Wunderlich threw up his arm in the Nazi salute “and Henry asked: ‘Is that the American salute?’” Wunderlich replied, ‘No, but it will be.”

The jury after fifteen minutes returned with guilty verdicts for the six defendants.

I wrote the Foreword to Verga’s book and co-authored with him the 2021 Arcadia — History Press book “Cold War Long Island.”