My Amazon Review Steven Ross' "Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America"

Nazi Hunters

USC history professor Steven Ross has written a way too detailed account of how a small group of Jews set up a spying operation on Nazi activity in Los Angeles. The protagonist of his story is Leon Lewis who was a WWI vet, a founder of the Anti-Defamation League and a Chicago lawyer who moved to Los Angeles. He is assisted by Joseph Roos and Joseph Klein. Through Lewis’ involvement with veterans’ organization he was able to recruit non-Jewish German Americans to infiltrate and sew divisions within the Nazi oriented organizations operating in Los Angeles. In this activity he was extraordinarily successful. His work led to the rounding up of Nazi operatives along the west coast when the U.S. entered WW II. He was light years ahead of the F.B.I.

Los Angeles was a focus of Nazi activity in the United States because of the importance Joseph Goebbels viewed the propaganda potential of the motion picture industry. Although Hollywood was loaded with Jewish senior executives they did little or nothing to warn the American public of the atrocities committed by the Nazis against the Jews in Germany and Germany’s growing geopolitical threat. Simply put the executives feared the loss of the German market.

Enforcing Hitler’s de facto censorship of Hollywood was the German Consul Georg Gyssling. Gyssling was prominent in Los Angeles social circles in the 1930s and was very effective in promoting the “New Germany.” However his real role was to prevent a negative view of Germany in Hollywood’s films. In that task he was extraordinarily successful and as a result there were no anti-Nazi films made until 1939.

Although the Hollywood studios kowtowed to Gyssling, behind the scenes they funded Lewis’ spying operation. The key figure here was entertainment lawyer Mendel Silberberg who founded the still very successful law firm of Mitchell, Silberberg and Knupp.

Along the way we learn about the “Silver Shirts,” the U.S. equivalent of the brown shirts and we learn about the pro-Nazi sympathies in the Los Angeles Police Department which made cooperation between Lewis and the police difficult.

What is new here is that we learned that Gyssling actually had back channel conversations with Morton Klein. Further after returning to Germany Gyssling remained a diplomat and at war’s end he worked with Allen Dulles to arrange the German surrender. Simply put Gyssling was more a patriotic German than a Nazi.

What troubled me about the book is that Nazi’s knew about Lewis and viewed him as there most prominent enemy in the Jewish community. Why wasn’t he assassinated? In a footnote Ross believes they feared severe reprisals. To me that does not wash. Perhaps both Lewis and the Nazis overestimated the strength of the Nazis in Los Angeles.

Nevertheless Ross presents an interesting history of how and why all too many Americans got sucked into the racist ideology of Nazism. A scary reminder for today.

The full Amazon URL appears at: https://www.amazon.com/review/R2TDUFKDGNZ82G/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv