Hitler in Los Angeles: How the Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America by Steven J. Ross (review)

Hitler in Los Angeles: How the Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America presents a detailed account of Nazi activity in Los Angeles during the 1930s and Jewish efforts to combat it. The book begins by introducing readers to Leon Lewis, the Jewish attorney who ran this resistance operation. In 1933, Lewis was the right man in the right place at the right time. Lewis had been the first executive secretary of the Anti-Defamation League during the 1910s and early 1920s, and when Nazi activity in Los Angeles suddenly emerged, Lewis was drawn back into Jewish defense work. A leader within the local chapter of the Disabled Veterans of America, Lewis recruited several veterans to infiltrate the Los Angeles chapter of the Friends of the New Germany (soon to become the German-American Bund) to find out what the group was up to.

The veterans-turned-amateur-private-eyes were immediately welcomed by the leaders of the Nazi group and gained quick access to the group’s inner circle. They soon discovered that the Friends of the New Germany’s true political objective was to lead a Nazi revolution in the United States. Their early written reports document Nazi plans to infiltrate the California National Guard, gain access to the state armory, and stage a Nazi-style revolution in the United States. Lewis was stunned by what his colleagues were learning. He gathered these eyewitness reports and presented them to local law enforcement and to federal authorities to secure support and cooperation for the surveillance operation. He also solicited leaders in the Jewish community to help finance the operation, recruiting a select group of Jewish business leaders that included the executives of the Hollywood studios and organized the Los Angeles Jewish Community Committee (LAJCC). For the next eight years, Lewis led the LAJCC’s undercover, anti-Nazi fact-finding operation. He channeled the information collected by the LAJCC’s informants concerning Nazi plots to two Congressional committees investigating “un-American” activity, to the FBI and to military intelligence to help them in their respective surveillance of these Nazi groups. Of particular note is the book’s coverage of the relationship between the Los Angeles German Consul Georg Gyssling, the Hollywood moguls and local Nazi groups, including new information revealing Gyssling’s life as a double agent.

This comprehensive narrative demonstrates just how persistent and threatening Nazism was in Los Angeles during the 1930s and how it was met with an equal dose of Jewish persistence. Drawing on thousands of pages of informant reports from the Community Relations Committee of the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles Papers (CRC Papers), Hitler in Los Angeles takes the reader on a month-by-month, year by year journey through the 1930s, detailing Nazi plots and Jewish efforts to foil them. Thus, the book documents a new episode of American Jewish resistance to Nazism in Los Angeles in the 1930s for American Jewish historians, Los Angeles historians and historians interested in the origins and evolution of the Nazi movement in the United States.

American Jewish historians may be disappointed with Hitler in Los Angeles for its lack of historiographic analysis. Ross, the son of Holocaust survivors, explains in his prologue that he wrote this book to answer questions that plagued him in his youth. “How could Jews have been so passive in the face of such evil?” “Why was there not more resistance at home and abroad?” (1). As he researched this book, Ross realized that “Many American Jews did rise to oppose Hitler, but they could not agree on the best path of resistance. A divided strategy and inability to implement a single vision is not the same as passivity or a failure of will” (2). Ironically, Ross’s thesis, “how Jews foiled Nazi plots,” requires no historiographic analysis or explication because the very fact of...