The first Nazi rally in Los Angeles took place in the summer of 1933, a few months into Adolph Hitler’s chancellorship, at a downtown biergarten nicknamed the Brown House, after the Nazi Party’s offices in Munich. It was here (now an America’s Best Value Inn) that the Jewish spymaster known as L1 sent his first undercover operatives, a husband-and-wife team of Christian German émigrés, with instructions to infiltrate the Fascist underground.
“Today people are marching and saying, ‘Jews will not replace us,’ ” Steve Ross, the author of a forthcoming book, “Hitler in Los Angeles,” which documents the rise of anti-Semitic hate groups and a covert Jewish-led resistance, said the other day. “In the thirties, they’re saying, ‘Kill the Jews.’ All it takes is one crazy person. People say, ‘It can’t happen here,’ but it is happening here. Once you have the Fascist takeover of the government, all the other things can happen.”
L1 was Leon Lewis, an unassuming lawyer who had served in the First World War and helped found the Anti-Defamation League. The Nazis called him “the most dangerous Jew in Los Angeles.” He worked independently; the F.B.I. focussed its scant resources on the Communist threat, and many on the city’s police force were Klansmen or American Fascists, or at least sympathetic to the anti-Jewish attitudes of the Hitlerites. By the time Pearl Harbor was attacked, Lewis’s agents had disrupted elaborate efforts to spread Nazi ideology in the United States, revealed fifth columnists and saboteurs inside the Douglas aircraft plant, and foiled two murder plots whose targets included not only the spymaster but also Jack Benny, Samuel Goldwyn, Charlie Chaplin, and Louis B. Mayer. “The Nazis saw L.A. as more important than Jew York, as they called it,” Ross said. “La Guardia, who was half Jewish, had the ports closely watched, whereas in L.A. they were able to bring in propaganda, money, everything they wanted, without a worry.”
Los Angeles locations used by Nazis, Fascists, and the spies who worked against them.
Map by Mike Glier
Ross, an effusive professor in his sixties, was standing in the lobby of the Roosevelt, an imposing building downtown carved into apartments owned by professional athletes and millennials, where Lewis had his law office in the thirties and forties. “This was spy central!” he said. The Nazis and Fascists, knowing that Lewis had agents inside their organizations, posted their own outside the Roosevelt. He pointed toward other buildings, some extant, some ghosts. “Fascist, Fascist, Nazi, Klan,” he said. “He was surrounded.”
Ross has dedicated his book to his mother and his late father, both of whom survived the Holocaust, and to his in-laws, who fled. At Dachau, an acquaintance told his father to volunteer for the bakery: he’d always be warm and fed, and he would live. After the war, in New York, Ross’s father started a bakery with another survivor; they supplied strudel and Russian coffee cake to Balducci’s and Zabar’s. “I have come full circle, wondering how could Jews have let this happen? How could they have been so complacent? But they weren’t. The government was complacent!” Ross said.
Los Angeles’s Nazis and Fascists, some of whom were taking orders directly from Hitler and Goebbels, were preparing for what they saw as an inevitable Nazi take-over of the United States. Anticipating that day, Norman and Winona Stephens bought a fifty-acre piece of land above the Pacific Palisades, and started to build a fortress that would serve as Hitler’s West Coast White House, halfway between Tokyo and Berlin. “This was going to be the equivalent of San Clemente for Nixon, or Mar-a-Lago, only more convenient,” Ross said.
Another day, Ross hiked up a fire road leading toward the Nazi ruins. He found a gap in the fence, and began to descend a steep concrete staircase. “This is a lo-o-o-ng trip down,” he said.
Inside the compound, Ross led the way to a dazzling spray-painted building, the remains of a powerhouse. Catching sight of a “Fuck Trump” tag, he said, “Quite the opposite of Nazis!” The Stephenses, who spent some seventy million dollars in today’s money on the project, installed, in addition to generators, a huge water tank, a diesel fuel tank, and a meat locker, and erected a stable. Plans included meeting rooms, twenty-two bedrooms, and a pool: a luxurious and private place for Nazis to make war plans. “They were going to have a totally self-sustaining compound,” Ross said. Lewis’s spies warned him that there were Nazis in the hills, coaching sympathizers in marksmanship, urban warfare, and hand-to-hand combat. (Members of a clandestine Storm Trooper unit insisted that their militia-training exercises were a Sportabteilung, a club devoted to hiking and drilling for parades.)
“Hitler was hoping first to conquer more of Europe, and then turn his eyes to America,” Ross said. “If Japan had not bombed Pearl Harbor, we would have remained neutral a lot longer. The thinking was, by the time America woke up it would have been too late.” ♦