NEW YORK: Trouble

No great shakes as a chemist was simple, earnest Fritz Kuhn. But he had a hero. One man he honored above all men: Mein Fuhrer.

Settled in a strange, silly, democratic land, what could Fritz Kuhn do to show his devotion? With great energy and great devotion but not with great success, he did what he could: he collected $2,300 for Reich relief, had a Golden Book signed by 6,000 loyal U. S. Nazis, and carried the book to Hitler. Mein Führer received the gifts and—what was more—let Fritz Kuhn be photographed with him.

Back to the U. S. with greater devotion than ever hurried Fritz Kuhn. Nobody knew better than he what a tough job he was in for. Those Jews were everywhere. Recruits came, but there was no stampede to jump on the Bundwagon. And everywhere the Gottverdammt Jews made trouble: Fritz was arrested for traffic violations, for drunkenness; attacks in the courts, in the press, in the seat of the pants.

He was called away to Philadelphia on an investigation on five minutes’ notice. “They are terrible after me,” wrote Fritz. “I am the public anemi No. 1.” When he spoke in Schenectady there was more trouble: the Jews and the C. I. O. and the Communists held a meeting; he thought he heard a shot fired. Shaken but triumphant after his speech, he decided: “They driving me crazy—you know, I think this Jews are beginning to be afraid of me.” But Fritz Kuhn was human: not only did he get angry, want some philosophy that made sense of his troubles—Fritz Kuhn also wanted sympathy, and not just from the Führer. And not just from quiet, patient Mrs. Kuhn.

Last week in a Manhattan courtroom, Fritz Kuhn’s troubles came to a climax. Day after day his dreary trial had unfolded. For two weeks the jury had listened to the story of how the U. S. looked to a man who loved his Führer and thought the Jews were everywhere. They had heard how Fritz Kuhn had been arrested, not for his beliefs, but on a charge of forgery and theft from his own Bund. They heard young Herman McCarthy, Tom Dewey’s assistant, build up a long, involved case about Fritz Kuhn taking $717.02 to pay for the shipment of a woman’s furniture—not his wife’s. They heard the judge ask: “Was she your mistress?” and they heard Fritz Kuhn roar, “She was not!”

The defense scored heavily; the prosecution’s auditor admitted an error in calculations of the alleged thefts; all but five charges against Fritz Kuhn were dismissed. The jury heard Bund members testify that under the “leader principle” Kuhn could spend the money any way he liked—but not on a woman, said one Bundster, either vacillating or jealous. They heard Tom Dewey, summoned as a defense witness by Kuhn’s lawyers, who hoped to show that malicious prejudice brought about their client’s indictment. Said Dewey, asked if he hated the Bund: “It is really very difficult to call it hatred, when it is really merely contempt.”

But mostly they heard of Fritz Kuhn’s love letters and Fritz Kuhn’s search for sympathy. Pretty, brown-haired, brown-eyed Mrs. Virginia Overshiner Patterson Stark Seeger Gilbert Kahn Cogswell, “The Georgia Peach,” 32 years old, seven times wed, winner of an Atlantic City beauty contest, was one from whom Fritz Kuhn sought sympathy. But next came honey-haired, plump Mrs. Florence Camp, and the climax of Fritz Kuhn’s courtroom distress.

He denied that he had asked Mrs. Camp to marry him, said that Mrs. Camp was too much of a lady to take a proposal after a few days’ acquaintance. Mr. McCarthy whipped out a Kuhn letter: “Florence : I am terrible in love with you. I beg you to become my beloved wife. I will always be true to you. . . .”

While Fritz Kuhn’s heavy features were screwed up in an agony of embarrassment, the impassioned letters were read:

“Did you see your other boy friend witch bothers you so much—see darling your understand, if I want to know this things because you can imagine how much I am interested.”

“You’re my soul—my wife and my everything—I thank you so much for your letters. . . . again I thank you for everything—I kiss you until you tell me to stop —I kiss your hands and everything. . . . Right after I got finished talking to you I went out and got a map of the U. S. A. and found Reno. I really did not know where it was located—I heard about it…. I found it was very far from Los Angeles and I think—my beloved darling—that you should not go there alone.”

On & on ran the torrential expressions of Fritz Kuhn’s feelings. Wrote the Daily News’s owlish reporters: “[The letters] were the masterly efforts of the man of action who—although in the throes of passion—remembers that life is real and life is earnest. In one passage he wrote Florence that he loved her with his whole soul and body and was about to have his teeth fixed.”

The reading over, Fritz Kuhn reconsidered his estimate of Mrs. Camp. “I considered Mrs. Camp a very fine lady,” said he, “but now I find she is not.”

While patient Mrs. Kuhn said she would stay by her husband, while the trial nodded on again, it was plain for all to see that loving the Führer in a foreign land had caused Fritz Kuhn a lot of trouble. Introduced as evidence were two notes by Mayor LaGuardia and Tom Dewey, written before Kuhn’s arrest:

LaGuardia: “Dear Tom: You can have him.”

Dewey: “I don’t want him either. I guess the ashcan is the best place for him.”