CONFRONTING GENUINE FASCISM IN MILWAUKEE.

Last week, Federal marshals arrested a Milwaukee County judge who might have interfered with Federal immigration authorities arresting an illegal alien.

Chief Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Carl Ashley said he and his colleagues are "all concerned" about the arrest of Judge Hannah Dugan.

Dugan, 65, was charged April 25 with one felony and one misdemeanor linked to allegations that she tried to help an undocumented immigrant avoid arrest after he appeared in her courtroom. Dugan was led out of the courthouse in handcuffs.

I write "might have interfered" because although it is common practice for state or federal law enforcement personnel to arrest people in the county courthouse, as everyone entering the courthouse is screened for weapons, thus reducing the likelihood of an arrest going sideways, most such arrests take place outside the courtroom.

Federal immigration officers sought to detain the illegal alien in Judge Dugan's courtroom, while he was standing trial on a county charge.  It transpires that such an arrest requires a different sort of warrant.

In early April, Ashley signaled that he and other system partners would draft a policy to address concerns about safe access to the county’s courthouse following two ICE arrests in March and April.

Ashley told the Journal Sentinel on April 8 that the policy would be “consistent with the law and consistent with allowing people access.”

That policy is still under construction, although a legal distinction already governs.

"Obviously, we always want to make sure people feel comfortable going to the courthouse," Ashley said.

According to the criminal complaint against her, Dugan told an ICE officer that he needed a judicial warrant after learning they had only an administrative warrant.

But Ashley on Monday said "we have our limitations on what we can do."

"We also want to support our community," Ashley said. "The reality is, for my colleagues, we don't have control in the public hallways."

He said that an administrative warrant can be used to make arrests in a public hallway, but added that "a judicial warrant has more authority in going into private areas."

Judge Dugan might have been within her rights keeping the defendant in the case she was hearing out of the jurisdiction of the immigration authorities, at least until that case adjourned for the day.  Not surprisingly, her subsequent arrest has generated a lot of heat from the polemicists, left and right.

But fascism breaking out in Milwaukee?  Not hardly.

One Milwaukee businessman received an anonymous postcard with a picture of an exploding cannon on the front, and on the reverse was written: “When you ask for ads again look this over carefully.” A woman got a letter warning her to be careful about her public utterances or her relatives back in Europe “would have to suffer” for them. These threats came not from outside the German community, but from within. The German-American Bund, a fascist organization inspired by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party in Germany, hoped to convert their ethnic brethren in America to the Nazi cause. The result was the darkest period in the history of Wisconsin’s most prominent ethnic group.

In the early twentieth century, Wisconsin was perhaps the most German of all the American states. Roughly forty percent of the state’s 1930 population was either German born or first generation German-American. The Badger State was home to people from all the German-speaking parts of Europe, from Pomerania to Austria. There were Protestants and Catholics, Jews, freethinkers, and socialists of various stripes. Milwaukee, in particular, was the beating heart of Wisconsin’s Deutschtum (Germanness). It was home to some of America’s most recognizable beer brands, a place to get good schnitzel and sauerbraten, and it had a vibrant German-language press. The city had so many German cultural institutions that it earned the nickname “German Athens.” Milwaukee’s Germans were clustered on the north side of town, but could be found virtually anywhere in the city and surrounding countryside.

World War I traumatized Germans on both sides of the Atlantic – though in different ways. In Wisconsin and across the United States, war with Germany led to a wave of anti-German hysteria. Self-proclaimed “superpatriots” attacked ethnic Germans (whom they assumed disloyal unless proven otherwise) and denigrated their culture. Sauerkraut became “liberty cabbage” and hamburgers “liberty sandwiches.” Some Germans were forced to kiss the American flag to prove their loyalty, and a few were even physically accosted. In neighboring Illinois, a German immigrant was wrapped in a flag, forced to sing the “Star Spangled Banner,” then hanged. In such a hostile atmosphere, many German-Americans abandoned their ethnic ties. Milwaukee’s Deutscher Klub renamed itself the Wisconsin Club, and hundreds of ethnic Germans Americanized their names. The German Athens had become a shadow of its former self, and those who remained a part of the German cultural scene were left battered, bruised, and defensive.

After the War to End All Wars came the Cultural Consequences of the Peace.

Fascist immigrants embraced Hitler wholeheartedly, and wanted to be part of the Nazi movement. They formed the Friends of New Germany (Bund der Freunde des Neues Deutschland) just months after he came to power. Milwaukee had a chapter. The group’s connections to the Nazi Party in Germany caused a diplomatic rift between Washington and Berlin, however, and in 1936 it was rebranded the German-American Bund (Amerikadeutscher Volksbund), dissociated from the Nazi Party, and open only to U.S. citizens of German descent. Bund headquarters were in New York City, but the organization had chapters from coast to coast. The Milwaukee branch was headed by a mechanical engineer from Hannover named George Froboese, who also became the Bund’s Midwest regional leader. In southeastern Wisconsin, there were also Bund chapters in Kenosha, Racine, and Sheboygan.

Although not officially part of the Nazi Party, the Bund acted like it was. It adopted the Nazi “leadership principle” (führerprinzip), which demanded absolute obedience to superiors, and created a youth program (Jugendschaft) much like the Hitler Youth. Most chilling was the creation of the paramilitary Order Division (Ordnungsdienst), modeled on Nazi storm troopers, right down to brown-shirted uniforms and jackboots. Bund members applied Nazi racial theories to the American context. Nazi ideology taught that all Germans were united by blood, and that the descendants of German emigrants around the world should be “awakened” to their racial “duties” and support Hitler. Bundists saw themselves as loyal, patriotic Americans who were strengthening their adopted homeland and making it “cleaner.” They complained about “Negroid” cultural influences like jazz, but aimed most of their fire at Jews and communists, who – in their view – controlled the news media, spread anti-German propaganda, and stood poised to take over America. An “awakened” Germanic population, they believed, would counter alleged Jewish and communist plots and mobilize support for Nazi Germany in the United States. Froboese described the Bund as “the German element which is in touch with its race but owes its first duty to America.”

As early as 1933, German fascists began harassing Wisconsin’s Jewish community and distributing Nazi propaganda, including Hitler’s rambling manifesto, Mein Kampf. They also began to infiltrate existing German-American clubs in an effort to bring them under Nazi control.

As far as I know,  Our President's plans for trade policy are in The Art of the Deal, which is probably more readable than Mein Kampf even translated into German, and the red classic #MAGA ball caps and the more recent black "Dark MAGA" ballcaps are available to anyone willing to stump up the Reichsmarks, er, Federal Reserve notes.

America’s struggle against fascism during the 1930s and 1940s changed the nation. The events of those years forced Americans to think about what they believed their country stood for – freedom, justice, tolerance, democracy. Blatant Nazi racism repelled most Americans, yet it also exposed how the nation sometimes failed to live up to its own ideals when it came to race and religious freedom, setting in motion decades of civil rights reform. During World War II, it was the military personnel of the “Greatest Generation” who did the hard and dirty work of defeating fascism and preserving American ideals, but to some extent all Americans were part of the struggle. Wisconsin’s ethnic Germans were among the first Americans to face down the fascist threat.

Codifying the protocols for courthouse arrests, let alone finding a way for adolescent crossers to participate in high school sports, are small beer in comparison.