Five years ago, Leslie K. Barry of Tiburon, Calif., heard an unfamiliar family story at a party. A cousin asked her mom, “Do you remember when your brother Harry would go out and beat up the Nazis?”
Barry knew her uncle, Harry, was a Golden Glove boxer in Newark, N.J. But who were these German-American Nazis who Harry fought?
As a genealogy buff and former entertainment industry executive, Barry couldn’t resist pursuing the story. And indeed, an American wing of the Nazi party had been operating since the 1920s. The leader, Fritz Julius Kuhn, styled himself as the American Führer, and the organization recruited thousands of members across the country. The party even developed a youth division and distributed weapons and the infamous “brown shirt” uniforms.
“The government’s hands were…
