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How a Network of Citizen-Spies Foiled Nazi Plots to Exterminate Jews in 1930s Los Angeles
(Los Angeles Times) Steven J. Ross - On July 26, 1933, a group of Nazis held their first public rally in Los Angeles, wearing brown shirts and red, white and black armbands with swastikas. The Nazis belonged to a growing movement of white supremacists in L.A. that included the Ku Klux Klan, the Silver Shirts, the American Nationalist Party, the Christian American Guard, and the National Protective Order of Gentiles. Leon Lewis, a Jewish lawyer and World War I veteran who had helped found the Anti-Defamation League, decided to investigate the anti-Semitic hate groups. He recruited four mostly-Christian World War I veterans, plus their wives, to go undercover and join every Nazi and fascist group in the city. They repeatedly heard fellow Americans talk about wanting to overthrow the government and kill every Jewish man, woman and child. Lewis' spies uncovered a series of Nazi plots. There was a plan to murder 24 Hollywood actors and power figures, including Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn, Charlie Chaplin and James Cagney. There was a plan to drive through Boyle Heights and machine-gun as many Jewish residents as possible. There were plans for fumigating the homes of Jewish families with cyanide, and for blowing up military installations and seizing munitions from National Guard armories. The writer is a professor of history at USC and author of Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America.