The Stairway to Our Nazi Ruins

The writer Gay Talese once remarked that the pull of a great city arises, in part, from its power to pose mysteries. You can spend your entire life in such a city, walking its streets, only to turn a corner one day and encounter something you had never noticed before, something new and enigmatic.

Why did that church become a nightclub? What’s the story with the old mansion tucked between the office towers?

Stuff like that. Talese, of course, was talking about his native New York. But to me, Los Angeles contains as many mysteries per square block as any place on the face of the earth. And the mysteries have only increased as the city has grown older, entwining its earlier civilizations around the new.

*

The intrigues can happen anywhere. Take last weekend, for example. A few of us were strolling along a trail near the top of Rustic Canyon. Far below, we could see the canyon bottom covered in oaks and sycamores.

A nice enough stroll. Then someone noticed, at the side of the trail, a concrete stairway leading down into the brush. You don’t usually find concrete stairways in the wilderness, even Southern California wilderness.

So we took it, of course. Someone predicted it would lead to an abandoned cabin.

It didn’t.

The stairway just kept going, down and down. No turns, no handrails, just straight into the canyon for hundreds of feet.

Three-hundred steps, five-hundred, six-hundred. Still it went down. Everyone stopped talking, absorbed in the enigma. Finally, the stairway stopped at the bottom of the canyon.

And we discovered ourselves in a bigger mystery yet. The stairway had deposited us in the midst of ruins. They were everywhere. Very old ruins, now covered in vegetation like a Mayan village.

We walked down a crumbling paved road to the remains of a wrecked house. Then another house. The road kept going.

Everyone began to theorize. “It’s an abandoned estate,” said Martha. “These were caretaker houses. We just haven’t found the big house yet.”

But there was no big house. Instead we found the ruins of more medium-sized houses, orchards gone wild, destroyed greenhouses, steel garages and a concrete power station with walls a foot thick.

“Estates don’t have power stations,” said Henry. “This was a community of some kind. And they had lots of money.”

It looked, in fact, like the archeological remains of a utopian community that had used wealth to create self-sufficiency--all within a mile of the streets of Pacific Palisades.

But what community? We were sitting on a stone fence trying to picture the builders and their sweet canyon life when more walkers came along.

Could they answer the mystery? They said yes. Everyone knew the answer. The builders were Nazis.

“American Nazis,” one said. “They built this place before the war. They planned to hole up in the canyon until Germany won the war, then emerge and take control of Los Angeles.”

A little bell went off in my brain. Urban myth, I thought. And a great one! Somehow it seemed perfect that Los Angeles would invent Nazis to populate its past.

I asked how they knew. “Randy Young,” one answered. “He knows everything about Pacific Palisades.”

*

The next day I called Young. He turns out to be a serious amateur historian, and he believes the Nazi stories.

The canyon property, Young says, was owned by Norman and Winona Stephens. They had plenty of money and fell under the influence of a fascist sympathizer known only as “Herr Schmidt.” The couple spent $4 million on the community before the FBI arrived the day after Pearl Harbor and carried Herr Schmidt away.

Young admits the historical evidence is thin. No court records have been found for Schmidt. Indeed, Young says “Schmidt” was probably an alias.

But many neighbors attested to the Nazi leanings of the Rustic Canyon crowd before and after the arrest, Young says. And, he adds, the L.A. Times carried a story on the bust.

Actually, it didn’t. A search through the archives turned up no stories on the Stephenses, “Herr Schmidt,” or the Rustic Nazis.

Which is not to say that Young is wrong. After all, the ruins do exist. Someone built that community at the bottom of Rustic. Perhaps they were Nazis. Or perhaps something else.

What we have is a mystery. One day, perhaps it will be solved. Until then, it remains a gift of intrigue from a city that has many such gifts, if only we are alert enough to receive them.