- This is an American community.

We want no swastika or any other flag to fly here, but the American flag.

We want no part of this community devoted to teaching young Americans a philosophy that is contrary to ideals of democracy for which our people fought and for which we still stand today.

This is not exactly good ground for the Nazi idea.

- Following World War I, the Germans were in a bad economic position.

They couldn't rise economically, and so the Nazi group believed that the Germans were superior to every other group and they were forming groups in the United States, which were supposed to spread their influence as superior people.

- The German American Bund is a patriotic, honor bound organization of German Americans to fight and uphold the constitution and the flag of a green United States.

German American Bund is against all Communistic and Jewish international organization.

- The German American Bund had established quite a network of camps during the 1930s since their organization, which was around 1934.

- Its first name was Friends of New Germany, and that really described what it was about.

New Germany was Hitler's Germany, and this was an organization which sought to align itself and to promote the ideals of Hitler's Germany in America.

The Bund had an enrollment process.

In the enrollment process, one had to "prove" and verify that they were Aryan in order to be accepted into the Bund.

- Well, there were statements that came out of the Nazi party headquarters in Germany that said that if you were German of origin, no matter where you lived in the world, you are still considered a German.

And your first allegiance was to the Führer and the Nazi party in Germany.

- You can't swear allegiance to something that's supposing your own citizenship.

If you have an American citizenship, you are an American.

- A gentleman named Fritz Kuhn led to the leadership.

- Kuhn set himself up as America's Führer.

He was certainly well known as being one of the most public antisemites bigots in the United States.

- I guess he was trying to make everybody a Nazi.

- Across the United States, Führer Kuhn has established 25 summer camps and drill grounds where those German Americans who believe in Nazi teachings can imitate Hitler's mighty military machine.

- I found references to about 24 Bund camps that they had.

They had several in New York, they had several in New Jersey, several in Pennsylvania as far as California, long Island and the Chicago area.

- I think what history has shown is that the Bund was very quietly trying to bring the Nazi way of life and and beliefs to America and that the Northeast was a big place for them to do that.

And Southbury was very logically a good spot because it was a very small town, a quiet town, lots of farms.

They knew that they could come and really be hidden.

- The Bund bought these acres of land in the Kettletown area.

- We have a deed that was actually dated September 25th, 1937 and it was a deed to Wolfgang T Jung, who happened to be living in Stanford.

And he was the one who purchased the property in the Kettletown area.

- Wolfgang Jung, a Bund member.

His purchasing it was sort of a surreptitious act.

The Bund didn't wanna put its name up on the property.

They had somebody else purchase it.

- If you look at the property that they wanted to start the camp, it sits high on a hill, somewhat isolated, not very many neighbors, slightly south of town, but not that far to the merchants and really, really close to a railroad station, which I think would be quite attractive to a group like this, particularly if they were interested in doing any military activities.

The railroad station in Southbury stood over top of what was the village of Bullet Hill at that time.

Now they call it Depot Hill Road.

It would be the intersection of Depot Hill and Bullet Hill Road.

If you could continue on that road today, if you didn't run into IBM, it would bring you right down into the heart of the Bund Camp, not a half a mile away.

- Some of the places where the Bund had their camps, they were hotbeds of very deep seeded conservative in a time, prejudiced opinions and coming out here would be more of the same.

They did not bet at all on what would happen.

- When Führer Kuhn - with plans drawn for a New England Nazi encampment - purchases a site in Connecticut he meets unexpected opposition in a community long crowd of its tolerance.

- Southbury 1937 had a population of about a thousand people.

During the 19th century, the business center and the government center of town was really South Britain.

- By the 1930s, of course it was the depression and things were pretty slow around here.

Reverend Lindsey came here in 1929.

His salary was a thousand dollars a year.

- We could go anywhere.

We walked everywhere.

We chased cows up the hill all by ourselves.

Nobody knew where we were ever.

And not that my parents didn't, but that's the way it was then.

- But I remember one Sunday afternoon, right at after church, two gentlemen came to the house and they wanted to talk to Daddy about the German American Bund, trying to convince him that it was the thing to have in Southbury.

We called him Kunze.

- Kunze was their propaganda chief, and he was very involved high up in the organization.

- They had come to talk to Daddy to try to convince him that it would be fine to have a Bund camp.

- This is a letter from Wilhelm Kunze.

And in this letter, this was the Bund's objectives.

The Bund in its camps will teach in the philosophy of Adolf Hitler, the German language, admiration for Hitler, oneness of German blood loyalty to the American flag, respect for the swastika distrust of communism, socialism and Judaism.

It will not drill or give military training.

It will have uniformed guards, but they are not a private militia.

- Apparently one day in November in 1937, some, a big black car pulled up - A black Mercedes with swastikas on the hood was not a regular site in New England farming town.

- It was a car with a lot of men in it, large men.

And they were, they wanted to know where daddy was and daddy wasn't there.

And so when they said, you know, go talk to his daughters, I had already had the experience of the Sunday afternoon and I told Joan, she said, come on, run.

We've gotta hide from these people.

And so we ran.

I was frightened.

It was frightening.

We ran and ran behind the church.

- There is a store here, a general store here in South Britain, McCarthy's General Store.

- It's where the Mitchell Insurance Company is now located.

And they were placing orders for very large amounts of food that they were going to be needing to feed the ones that they thought would be coming there to work.

- They went down to a gas station in Southbury and apparently right at that gas station, there was a reporter from the Waterbury Republican who recognized Fritz Kuhn.

And that's how the word got out.

- My mother kept wonderful records of what went on at the time.

The article about an American Führer organizes an army.

- What people got in their mailboxes was a flyer saying the Bund was in town and a piece documenting how Kuhn sought to become America's Führer.

- My father wanted people educated on any subject so that they could make up their own minds.

- That helped create the stir, which then propels the story on to I think one of the great moments here in Southbury, which is the events which happened at the South Britain Congregational Church.

- Back there, the church was the center of people's lives.

In the thirties, remember, we're coming out of the Depression.

A lot of people are still in the throes of the Depression.

When the church got together and got talking about life, it would make sense that they would talk about issues confronting the community.

- What they thought carried a lot of weight, - Both Reverend Manley and Reverend Lindsey are Yale Divinity School alumni.

I think that the education well equipped them.

- On the Sunday before Thanksgiving, Reverend Manley and Reverend Lindsey both spoke out against the Bund.

- I remember Reverend Lindsay as being a very kind, wonderful minister.

- He got along with everybody.

I don't care what their religion was, he got along with everybody.

- I think if you read Lindsay's sermon, I think he saw it as an evil.

And I know Manly saw the same.

- These are from the newspaper about the Reverend Manley and Reverend Lindsey's sermons.

And Reverend Manley, and I'll quote, "This Nazi camp is planned as the training station for young Hitler youth who will stretch their hands in Nazi salute and Heil Hitler with all that it implies."

And from Reverend Lindsay's quote, I shall argue that the connection between the German American Bund is such as to warrant the claim that it is a Nazi movement.

I shall remind you that this same Bund proposes to establish within our town a camp similar to those established elsewhere, which are, but a replica of those established in Germany by Hitler in the early days of the Nazi movement, - We tend to forget that words really do matter.

And what they did was establish a sense of understanding, grounding how the town might act and doing so, and in linking that to their sense of patriotism and their sense of faith.

So it's an extraordinary act.

- This was also the same year that the land for the Southbury Training School was sold to the state of Connecticut.

And that was a huge residential campus for developmentally disabled people.

And so to me that says that it was not just xenophobia, it wasn't just, we don't want people we don't know in our town, but it was specifically against this Nazi threat.

- My mother was German, but she didn't want the Nazis in here building camp for guns and all that.

- Both pastors speak.

Obviously, it had an effect.

Those words had an effect on their congregants that morning.

That effect is amplified because it's front page news.

The next day in the newspapers.

Among the things which the press sees in the story is on the one hand you have Nazis seen as an agent of a foreign government.

On the other hand, you have the New England Yankee spirit.

- The Lewis family's been here it since the 1600's.

And this house right here was the original old homestead.

- These were small town Yankees and people in small towns are like that.

They're thick headed.

- So on the Tuesday, then after the Sunday sermon, they had a meeting at the town hall, which is was in South Britain at the time.

It's this very small building still there.

- The crowd that was there was so large, they were not able to fit into the room that they had in the town hall for town meetings.

- This was South Briton Road and it was a dirt road.

That brown house right there, that was the Reverend Lindsey's house.

- Our yard was right across the street.

I remember them walking from the town hall up to the church.

- They just walked up the dirt road.

They didn't have to worry about anything, maybe a horse or two.

- I remember them walking up and they said, they're going up to the church.

- So Reverend Lindsay, who was also the moderator of this meeting, invited everyone right here to this church.

All they talked about was establishing a zoning board, - Zoning laws, zoning ordinances at that time were really something people in Southbury were against.

So to start to say that government had a role in saying what could and couldn't be done for a lot of people, that was a tough pill to swallow.

- So they created a zoning commission with five members.

They closed that meeting and then reopened an open public meeting where the Nazis were discussed, which was also facilitated by Reverend Lindsay.

At that meeting, A proposal and petition was made by George Holmes and also by Jenny Hinman.

- Everybody called her Miss Jenny around town.

So she was sort of well known, I think.

She was a direct descendant of Colonel Benjamin Hinman, the revolutionary soldier.

She is a daughter of the American Revolution and a daughter of the Cincinnati.

There were a lot of strong characters all down through the line.

There were a lot of stories about Hinmans from start to finish, and many of them were feisty like that.

She was a dominating force, but there would be no doubt in my mind that she would be very effective at a meeting like that.

- Mr.

Holmes was active in this and he got involved in a lot of not, he wasn't a great political man, but he got involved in any discrepancies in the town.

He was very active in that.

He was very bright as my father was.

And they, you know, they would converse about things.

- We have no qualm with what we term the older order of German people, but we do object and we do protest against the insidious, treacherous activities of Nazi agents masquerading as American citizen.

- Those petitions are to President Roosevelt.

And it's another defining moment for the town and for the town's people to affix their names to a document in which they are committing themselves on record to sharing the revulsion to the prejudice, which the Bund represents.

- Mr Chairman, two of my great-great grandfathers and four of my great-grandfathers fought for liberty.

So did the other people of this town.

I call upon all of you here to keep the Nazis out.

- This is a phenomenon not happening elsewhere.

How should a town deal with this issue?

And there was a variety of opinion.

The Waterbury Minister's Association looked at all of this and said, they're not gonna take a stand.

The New York Times says if the Nazis wanna come and and rally here and have a good Aryan time, let 'em.

The people of Southbury saw that there was something far more pernicious.

- I don't think it was just southbury.

I think it was widespread around the whole country that there was real patriotism and love of country and there was not all this polarization and division that we have now.

And you elected people to go to Congress and they actually accomplished something.

- Southbury adopt zoning; town folk assail Nazi camp.

Crowd packs church resolutions passed meeting ends with prayer and singing of the Star-Spangled Banner.

- The zoning laws were gonna take a few, a few weeks if not longer, to actually implement.

And meanwhile, up on the hill on the property, trees were being cut, people were working.

There was an effort underway by the Bund to get this camp built.

- They see that there's this burgeoning distress within the community about it, and they just figure they'll, they'll work things and try to create facts on the ground as quick as possible.

- My father always believed in working within the law and therefore did this in a manner which was acceptable to the law and could not be questioned.

- So they decided to invoke the blue laws.

- The blue laws apply to a lot of states in New England that basically said, Sunday is the Sabbath and you're not allowed to do work on the Sabbath.

- It was a day of peace, of peace and rest.

A number of constables from town went up to the site and arrested two men for working on Sunday.

- The Bund is incredulous when they are told that they cannot work.

- And my father and his brothers were putting a cement floor down on the barn.

We were playing over here on the corner and we saw all the commotion of the cars and the guys with guns.

And of course my father and his brothers stopped working.

And they sat there in the barn watching them go by.

- Why'd they stop working?

- They're not supposed to work on Sunday!

- They arrested them for working on Sunday.

- They brought them down to be arraigned by the judge, judge Hicock.

So they took them to the judge's house but the judge wasn't there.

They had to go find the judge who was working in his garage.

- He and his father didn't observe Sunday.

They, they worked on cars every day of the week.

- The Bundists pointed this out because the judge had working on his car and prior they had said, well, what's the difference?

Why is one acceptable and the other not?

And he said that he had a legal, the judge said he had a legal exception.

- One theory is that the whole thing was really designed to prevent them from working.

During this time when the zoning regulations were being put together - In December 14th, 1937, they had another special town meeting.

And that was for the people to adopt the regulations that they had been able to put together - In those zoning regulations.

It's very clear that the Bund was somewhere in people's minds.

- These are the original zoning regulations of the town of Southbury.

So the thing of real significance is number nine here, the military training or drilling with or without arms, except by the legally constituted armed forces of the United States, - No military activity was to be allowed.

And if you think that that was one of the reasons why the Bund changed their mind and abandoned the thing, it makes you question what their true motives were.

If it was for hunting and fishing or for other things, - Probably 35, 40 years since I've been in the woods there.

We used to hunt all over this whole area through here.

And when we came through here, my dad pointed out that this was where the German Bund camp was.

And he showed me this fireplace over here and told me that that's where the main part of it was.

And this is where they were when they came and picked them up for their violations.

It might have been different if they got a foothold, but I guess they didn't waste any time.

- Yeah, I think they saw the resolve of the town of Southbury.

This was not gonna happen.

And you know, yeah, they could have fought it, but that also would've put them in a position where it would've become even more public.

And I'm not sure in 1937 that the Bund movement wanted to be as public.

There were newspapers that were already showing that this group was, you know, trying to bring their beliefs to this, to this small little town.

And the small little town in Connecticut was saying, no, we don't, we don't want that.

- Should they have allowed them to practice their free speech?

They saw that this was a lot more than free speech.

- Well, you're freedom of speech and freedom of religian has to stop at the point where it infringes on other freedoms.

And the welfare of the total people is more important than pushing your particular desire for freedom.

- They didn't want to follow the direction of the Bund, which is to create a Nazi version in America.

They didn't want to totalitarianism, they didn't even want zoning, but they accepted zoning as a way to try and preserve a vestige of a changing world.

- Freedoms meet each other and oppose each other.

And therefore you can't have, you can't say freedom is endless.

- During this time, my father was sent a lot of letters and my sister has one to read from people who had had personal experience in Germany.

We can't put our names on these letters because our family back in Germany will suffer.

- I read with much pleasure and understanding of your courageous stand against the invasion of the murderous Nazis.

My father, God bless his soul, was a Protestant minister in Frankfurt, Germany.

He was brutally thrown into a concentration camp.

Two sisters, 15 and 17 years old, were taken by the storm trooper Officers' barracks to satisfy their degenerate, be still desires.

Such news you never get outside of Germany.

But it is true, it is the fate of all daughters whose parents do not bow to the pervert Hitler.

My young brother, nine years old, I never saw again.

There are many good, honest Germans here who swear allegiance to the United States, not to Hitler.

We have to meet in secret.

Every Nazi in America has to sign and swear to bear arms against US for Hitler.

Warn your friends in other parts of your state, Connecticut, not to let the Nazis gain a foothold.

It will mean the beginning of the end.

My dear Reverend Holiday, greetings from the sons and daughters of the true Germany for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Please do not mention my name to anybody.

My life would not last long.

And then daddy has scratched out his name on the letter.

- Obviously, world War II starts in 1939, death camps, Auschwitz, 6 million Jews died.

Millions upon millions of people die in that at a time where others were still hadn't come to terms with, with what Nazism, the German government, the German American Bund, so fully represented.

Southbury had already intuited this.

And so it, that's the remarkable part of the story is what Southbury was doing in 1937.

- Knowing if you're on the right side of history is one of the things that we all have to keep asking ourselves.

You're never, always working with perfect information and sometimes you have to go with your gut to say what's right here and what's wrong.

We all are are faced with that challenge.

Now, it's always nice when you look back in hindsight and say, we were right, but the important thing we all have to do is use our moral convictions to say, you know, I've gotta make a stand.

- I have been so captured by this story and am so proud to be a pastor in this church where this really blossomed, where this happened in this very room.

- These people were patriots really, by historical inheritance and attitude, don't you think in this town?

Absolutely.

It was that kind of a town.

- I think they're the ones who saved Southbury in many respects.

- Truthfully, I believe Southbury is better for his being here.

Yes.

- I'm very proud of my father to have been involved in this and that they all worked together and accomplish this.

And I'm very proud of that.

And I think it's a fine moment in American history.

- You can stand up, you can say no to hate.

And if you have the opportunity, you should do it because, not just because you'll be the only community, but you'll be part of a whole group of communities that'll say no.

- Nobody else did it.

We were so, so with it, maybe, you know.

- As a Jew saying thank you, it also for me reminds me that I have an obligation to not only to say thank you, but to live in the same manner as they lived.

So that when we see prejudice and we see bigotry, we're gonna give it no quarter.

Just as they gave it no quarter.

- Well, Abraham Lincoln could put it on the people, by the people and for the people.

That was an entirely new concept of citizenship and therefore it's part of a very big place in history.