“Mit Deutschem Gruss”

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In the spring of 2016, a private organization installed a sign at a publicly owned park in La Crescenta, California, that read “Willkommen zum Hindenburg Park” (Welcome to Hindenburg Park). Public protests soon drew attention to the fact that during the 1930s and '40s, the park, then owned and operated by the German-American League, was the site of frequent Nazi rallies, during which it was awash in swastika flags. The sign was quickly removed. It has gone unnoticed, however, that the German-American League—which signed its invitation to the opening of the park in 1934 “mit deutschem Gruss” (with German greeting, i.e., the giving of the fascist salute accompanied by the shouting of “Heil Hitler!”)—is still in existence today. In 2005, on the occasion of its one-hundredth anniversary, the German-American League published a booklet that whitewashes its Nazi past by omission and misrepresentation. The purpose of this article is to shed light on that Nazi past, based mainly on documents from the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles, Community Relations Committee Collection, and based as well on film footage of the League's 1936 German Day celebration at the park.