Exhibit Documents Infiltration of ‘30s L.A. Nazi Movement : NAZI

Coming to Northridge: an exhibition of spy messages, secret documents, fake identity papers and photographs taken surreptitiously.

But it’s not about government or corporate espionage.

“In Our Own Backyard” is an exhibit about a group of Jewish private citizens in Los Angeles who organized in the 1930s to investigate Nazi-inspired groups in Southern California.

They infiltrated fascist organizations, took pictures at their rallies and, in those years before the United States entered the war against Germany, distributed information about Nazi beliefs to politicians, journalists and the public at large.

“We made a lot of trouble for them,” said Joseph Roos, 80, who served as a consultant for the exhibit, which opens Monday at Cal State Northridge’s Oviatt Library. Roos was director of the Community Relations Committee, a Los Angeles group of about 40 who were involved in battling local Nazi propaganda.

‘We Were There’

“They made a lot of big talk about what they were going to do to the Jews and so forth, but they always knew that we were there. They never knew who among them was the informer. So they were scared to try anything,” he said.

Subtitled “Resisting Nazi Propaganda in Southern California, 1933-1945,” the exhibit includes “spy reports” typed up by Roos’ informers, one of whom was so trusted by the fringe groups that he was made chief of intelligence for the Ku Klux Klan in California. There are a number of photos taken secretly at Hindenburg Park, a private park in La Crescenta where choir concerts and speeches were given from a stage draped with swastika flags. Young men and women are shown at the park standing in formation and giving the Nazi salute.

One of the most chilling photos is of an Adolf Hitler birthday celebration in a downtown auditorium on April 20, 1935, which features a group of young men in storm trooper uniforms. That photo will be shown near an innocuous-looking post card of a cafe known as the Deutsches Haus, or German House.

“It looks very innocent until you look closely at the items in the picture on the post card,” said Bobbette Fleschler, curator of the exhibit. Above the diners in the picture are plates and other items that display the swastika. “In the same building there was the auditorium where they had the birthday celebration and other meetings,” she said.

Also displayed will be examples of anti-Semitic literature of the time--including a placard that urges Angelenos to “Buy Gentile. Employ Gentile. Vote Gentile. Boycott the Movies. Hollywood is the Sodom and Gomorrah where Jewry controls vice, dope, gambling.” And there are several items that were seized during the war in police raids on businesses that sold goods such as Nazi flags and stamped metal likenesses of Hitler.

“When I was at the state archives in Sacramento, they showed me this 12-by-12 swastika flag,” Fleschler said. “I looked at it and said, ‘No, I think that should just stay in the archives.’ It was too inflammatory.”

Liberal Support

Other 1930s photos show anti-Nazi rallies sponsored by Jewish groups and veterans groups and meetings of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League organized by writer Dorothy Parker, director Fritz Lang, actor Fredric March, composer Oscar Hammerstein and others.

Roos did not want to criticize the government’s intelligence efforts at the time, but he does believe that his organization filled an important gap. “Let’s simply say that the FBI became very much interested in what the Nazis were doing after Pearl Harbor,” he said. When the United States entered the war, his group shared their files with the FBI, naval intelligence and several other agencies.

The exhibit continues until Sept. 30 and will then move to the Bernard Milken Jewish Community Campus in West Hills. Next year it will be shown at Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles.