I’m just a friend of the Friends of New Germany, is the theme song of Frank Kelly, a familiar figure at New York Nazi meetings, which he has addressed about a dozen times.
But the Friends didn’t do right by our little Kelly on Tuesday night. After Kelly had “socked Untermyer and the boycotters” before a crowd of 4,000 ardent Hitlerites at the Yorkville Casino he discovered that he didn’t have a red cent left of the nineteen dollars he claims was in his wallet when he went to the meeting.
As he brooded over his “schnapps” and beer chaser in an Eighty-sixth street beer garden early yesterday morning, he gave vent to a surprising oath for a friend of the Friends. “The lousy Dutchmen!” he growled. “That’s gratitude!”
He touched a Jewish Daily Bulletin reporter for a dollar after Otto Boege, the proprietor, who had also attended the meeting, turned Kelly down with a mere dime. “That’s one thing I never do,” protested Herr Boege. “I never lend any money.”
REGULAR SOLDIER OF FORTUNE
Kelly, Irish and affable, describes himself as “a regular soldier of fortune.” He “went through the mill,” he says. “I made plenty and lost plenty. I’m a member of the Silver Shirts now. Sure Catholics can join them. Even a Jew can.”
With the brief biographical information that he had been in the Navy for a few years, had been to Germany in 1918, at one time had engaged in the liquor business, and was now “living’ around hotels,” Kelly contented himself. “You can get me at the Hotel Ennis on Forty-second street,” he said.
He grew vague when asked directly directly how he had come into the Nazi movement. “Ireland was persecuted for centuries,” he lamely explained, “and the Germans were the only friends they had. That’s what I told them up at the meeting. Ain’t I right, landsman?” At the same time Kelly insisted he is not anti-Semitic.
“There’s good Jews and bad,” went his stock refrain. It developed that he didn’t like the competition of Jews in the beer business during and after prohibition.
“I’m not against the Jews. I’m against Untermyer! That’s what I told that meeting.” Reflectively, Kelly leaned back in his chair and recalled his spiel before the Friends of New Germany.
WHO TOOK KELLY’S MONEY?
At this appropriate moment, Kelly produced his wallet and looked ruefully inside. “Now I had $19 when I went over there tonight, and I put my overcoat on the bench to make a speech. Now see what I get from Germany. I need a dollar for my hotel tonight.”
About Hitler, Kelly, who wears a swastika emblem in his coat lapel, was voluble and eloquent. At the meeting, where he shared the platform with Fritz Gissibl, former chief of the Friends of New Germany, and Joseph Schuster, the singing waiter from Ridgewood, Kelly put Adolf among the three greatest men alive. Who are the others, he was asked. “Why Mussolini and Roosevelt,” was his prompt reply.
Kelly is due to talk tonight at a Nazi meeting in Brooklyn, he said. He’ll tell the folks some more about the saga of Hitler. “While Adolf Hitler was at the front fighting for his cause, he was thinking of his Jewish friends who had very responsible positions in Germany, practically controlled it and all. He said if he ever returned to Germany alive, he’d fight to stop the Jews from monopolizing the German government And when he came back he organized an organization which he called the Nazis. And that’s the reason why the Jews are not as favorable as they were in the past.
“While I am not against the Jews as a whole, I am against the Jews who have the colossal nerve, or as Commissioner O’Ryan of the New York Police Department says–the monumental nerve–to try and dominate Germany’s financial and commercial enterprises. “I have some very high class Jewish friends and I think the world of them. They’re cultured and they’re educated. And I refer you to the Hon. David Oppenheim, who was honorary commissioner of public welfare under Mayor Walker.”
Another direct question failed to daunt the aggressive Mr. Kelly; “Just what do you do at these Nazi meetings?” He answered: “I tell ’em ‘the only way the Germans can succeed in the United States of America is by being united. And as George Washington said when he was fighting for the cause of independence, without unity you are lost. Therefore, my dear German friends, you got to stick. You not only have to give help, but you got to give financial help.”
Yes, sir, Kelly proudly revealed, “we must of took in $500 there to night. Next week we’re gonna meet in Madison Square Garden. You come up to Brooklyn Thursday and I’ll get you a front row seat.”
Kelly expressed surprise at the existence of a Jewish daily newspaper printed in English. “Does your father own it?” he wanted to know, “No? I’ll call you up tomorrow and give you the lowdown on this whole outfit. I know all the boys. Walter Kappe, editor of the Deutsche Zeitung, and Reinhold Walter.”
He did not telephone yesterday. At the Ennis Hotel it was-said; “We never heard of him.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
