Camp Siegfried
Camp Siegfried, also known as the German Gardens, was a 45 acre German American Bund recreational camp located 60 miles east of New York City near the town of Yaphank on Long Island.[1] The namesake was was Siegfried, the Dragon Slayer, a legendary hero of Germanic heroic legend, who killed a dragon—known in some Old Norse sources as Fáfnir—and who was later murdered. Richard Wagner used the legends in his operas Siegfried and Götterdämmerung.
Each summer, an estimated 40,000 visitors came to the camp which was open to the public ($5 per week). Streets were named after Hitler, Himmler, etc. A legal entity called the "German American Settlement League" headed by Ernst Mueller owned and operated Camp Siegfried as of 1936.[2]
History
Camp Siegfried began in 1935, when the Friends of New Germany bought the old Coombs farm on the west side of Upper Lake. Then called Swezey's Pond, the lake is still there just north of the Long Island Expressway off Exit 67, along with the dam that created the pond in the 1700s.[3] In the summer of that year, over 2,000 visitors celebrated the grand opening of the children's camp. The camping hotel, the 14-room manor of the former estate, was managed by Freda Winter. All of the food of the camp was purchased by local farmers, making the Bund even more popular within the community and region.
- In 1935, children of German heritage came out for summer camp to canoe, swim, and participate in sports and enjoy the forest/lakes setting, just as others came to the Girl Scout camps, Boy Scout camps, Greek heritage camps along the lakes for years. Then more families started to arrive, and spend time here on weekends originally enjoying German culture, music, and food, and they started building small summer bungalows along the lake. The crowds grew on Sundays, with trains full of people coming from the city to spend the day here and they supported the local farms and shops and restaurants on the lakes which had been hurting since the depression and the decline of the mills- the village economy was helped with their buying beer, ice cream, lunches and picnic food, and no one thought anything of it.
In 1936, before the the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, the German American Settlement League purchased Camp Siegfried from the Friends of New Germany for $10,000. The camp was surveyed for further construction on 22 October 1936. The summer opening of the camp took place in spring, on 23 May 1937. Fritz Kuhn, standing on a newly-built 100 foot bandstand, proclaimed the camp an "Aryan paradise" and a "part of Germany in America". Emphasis was put on the fact that the Bund was to bridge German tradition with American culture. The children were told to become proud, patriotic Americans, but never to forget their German roots.
On 4 July 1937, Italian Black Shirts led by Josef Santi marched there with members of the Bund.[4] On a typical weekend, 6,000 visitors arrived and an average of 5,000 dinners and 260 barrels of beer were served. During the week, Camp Siegfried reverted back to a children's campground. Henry Hauck (born in Germany in 1894), a German officer and WWI veteran, teacher and Yaphank volunteer firefighter, ran the inn and restaurant at the camp until October 1938 together with his German-born wife. Around the inn flowers were planted in the shape of a giant swastika while a large photo of Hitler decorated a wall of the restaurant. Henry Hauck, from the Jamaica Unit of the Bund, Hugo Weiss, Carl Bregler, Rudolf Markmann and Karl Flick were later "denaturalized" by the US government which they appealed in 1946.[5]
Demise
With the demise of the German American Bund due to anti-German sentiments on the threshold of WWII, Camp Siegfried became Siegfried Park. Before an official war declaration, the camp stayed active under first amendment rights. The U.S. government's Alien Property Custodian had seized both the camp and the adjoining development called Linden Park (now German Gardens) in 1941. There are no plaques or markers indicating what was once here in this hamlet of about 6,000 people. The only sign outside the original Camp Siegfried now reads "private" and the main street through the old camp, later owned by the German-American Settlement League, is called Private Road.
See also
External links
Videos
References
- ↑ As America Has Done to Israel, by John P McTernan, p. 48
- ↑ "Long Island Nazis: A Local Synthesis of Transnational Politics" Long Island History Journal Volume 21, Issue 2, Spring 2010
- ↑ When Nazis came to Yaphank: 'Camp Siegfried' play explores dark chapter in LI history
- ↑ House of Representatives Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States, page 1210
- ↑ United States v. Hauck, Circuit Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, 2 April 1946
