Dressed in a silver-gray shirt, a military belt and black trousers, Hellmut Oberwinder is flanked by uniformed troops bearing the flags of the United States and Nazi Germany.
He marches in formation with five other men in a German social hall in Astoria, Queens, in New York City. They are undergoing a secret initiation to become full-fledged members of the Ordnungsdienst — the uniformed division of the Amerikadeutscher Volksbund, also known as the German American Bund.
Just months after joining the Bund, Oberwinder is reaching its highest levels. Standing before the flags, he extends a stiff right arm and gives the Hitler salute. The post leader shakes Oberwinder’s hand as veteran members loudly voice three “Sieg Heil!” cheers.
“I am a U.S. Nazi Storm Trooper,” the new recruit declares in a first-person essay published seven weeks later.
Herr Oberwinder is not who he says he is.
In 1937, two Chicago newspaper reporters went undercover and infiltrated the Bund, a pro-Nazi organization that organized marches and rallies, provided weapons training and ran summer camps for people of German descent and their families.
The two men — John C. and James J. Metcalfe, who were brothers — published an explosive series of stories in the Chicago Daily Times. The articles provided firsthand accounts of storm troopers marching under the swastika banner on American soil, children being taught the Nazi salute, and verbal attacks on Catholicism and Cardinal George Mundelein of Chicago.
The Amerikadeutscher Volksbund was created the year before as an organization for Americans of German heritage. The group operated youth and family training camps and was growing rapidly in 70 regional divisions across the country.
The newspaper exposé reported that Bund leaders were telling their approximately 20,000 members that communists and Jews were plotting a violent revolution to seize control of the United States. When that revolution started, Bund members would crush them. The paper quoted a Bund leader: “We will save America for white Americans.” The goal was to consolidate all fascist elements in America into a giant, Bund-led movement.
The series was reprinted in newspapers across the nation and earned the journalists the National Headliner Club award for best domestic reporting. The coverage raised alarm among readers, prompted creation of a congressional committee to investigate Nazi activity in America and heightened national awareness of events unfolding in Germany under Chancellor Adolf Hitler. The story of the Bund and the Metcalfes’ expose was recounted in a 2024 PBS documentary, Nazi Town, USA.
The Metcalfes, who spoke fluent German, joined the Bund using the names Hellmut Oberwinder and James Oberwinder.
Those were not fictional personas.
They were the brothers’ birth names — and the names they were known by during their youth as minims and high school students at Notre Dame.
The Road to Notre Dame
The Oberwinder brothers were born in Germany: Hellmut in 1904 and James in 1906. They were two of the four children of Richard Maria Wilhelm Oberwinder, a German journalist, and his American wife, Bernice Roche Metcalfe, a gifted pianist from Natchez, Mississippi. The couple had met while Bernice was studying music at the University of Dresden.
Bernice left the marriage in 1914, five months before the start of World War I, taking the three older children with her and sailing to the United States. (The youngest child, another son, remained in Germany and joined his mother and siblings in the U.S. in 1922.)
In 1915, Hellmut and James Oberwinder were enrolled as minims — grade-school students — at Notre Dame. They lived in St. Edward’s Hall and received their first Holy Communion and confirmation together on campus in May 1916.
After grade school, the boys continued as boarding students in the University’s preparatory school. Their sister, Elizabeth, attended Saint Mary’s Academy, the girls’ school at nearby Saint Mary’s College.
In March 1920, in South Bend, Bernice Oberwinder filed for divorce from her German husband. Once it was granted, she returned to court and gained permission to resume her maiden name and change the names of her children. Hellmut Oberwinder became John Charles Metcalfe and James Reinhard Oberwinder became James Joseph Metcalfe.
The brothers attended Notre Dame until 1922, then moved to Chicago. James, who had been a Holy Cross seminarian for two years, earned a law degree from Loyola University, then joined the FBI as an agent in the Chicago bureau from 1931 to 1935. He worked on operations targeting several well-known gangsters, including Ma Barker, Pretty Boy Floyd and John Dillinger, and was among the agents who ambushed and killed Dillinger outside Chicago’s Biograph Theater in 1934.
John took journalism classes in night school, then worked as a reporter for several newspapers and The Associated Press before landing at the Chicago Daily Times — the city’s first tabloid — in 1936.
Although the Metcalfes were U.S. citizens by birth through their mother, they went through the formal process to be declared naturalized American citizens on the advice of an FBI contact — in case a Nazi official might claim them for Germany.
Undercover operation
In 1937, using their German birth certificates, John Metcalfe joined the Bund division in New York City, while James Metcalfe became a member of a similar group in Chicago. Also working on the project was reporter William Mueller — who, unlike the Metcalfes, couldn’t speak or read German.
“A relatively small but rapidly growing army is preparing for the American equivalent of ‘Der Tag,’” the team reported, using a popular German toast (“To the day!”) referring to an imminent military engagement.
The men built themselves up as Nazi sympathizers and were readily accepted — attending Bund meetings where they heard calls for boycotts of Jewish businesses, drilling with Bund troops and visiting the group’s summer camps. The series, accompanied by plentiful photos, described the 20 or so Bund-run youth and family training camps across the U.S., where American children were being indoctrinated in Nazi rituals and flaming swastikas lit up nighttime gatherings like the fiery crosses at Ku Klux Klan rallies.
Founded by German immigrant Fritz Kuhn in Buffalo in 1936, the German American Bund was created to promote Nazi ideology within the United States. Bund members used patriotic imagery such as paintings of George Washington and the American flag to attract Americans of German descent.
The group’s goals, according to Kuhn, the self-styled “American Führer,” were to create a “socially just, white gentile-ruled United States” and a “gentile-controlled labor union free from Jewish Moscow-directed domination.”
The path to war
Between 1919 and 1933, more than 400,000 Germans immigrated to the United States, driven in large part by Germany’s collapse after World War I. Some considered themselves temporary refugees who would return home when the economic and political turmoil in their homeland righted itself. Bund membership was drawn largely from the recent immigrants.
After Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 and throughout the decade, Americans were well informed of happenings in Nazi Germany. U.S. newspapers and movie-theater newsreels routinely detailed events in Germany, including the persecution of Jews and the burning of books by “degenerate” authors. News reports also covered the creation of the first concentration camps in 1933 and the 1935 Nuremberg laws that stripped Jews of their German citizenship and eliminated their civil rights.
Americans were facing their own problems amid the Great Depression, with widespread unemployment and the ecological devastation of the Dust Bowl out west. The tragedy of the Great War was still fresh for many Americans, encouraging isolationist views and vows of no more foreign wars.
When the Chicago reporters infiltrated the Bund, some of the biggest events of the decade were yet to come: Germany’s annexation of Austria in March 1938; the Kristallnacht of violent pogroms against Jewish people and their synagogues and businesses in November 1938; and Hitler’s march into Poland in September 1939. (Polls conducted after Kristallnacht found that Americans overwhelmingly disapproved of the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews, but most — 71 percent — also opposed raising the quota of Jewish refugees permitted to immigrate to the U.S.)
“Hellmut Oberwinder” quickly became a trusted aide to Kuhn, who chose him as a personal representative to visit Bund chapters around the country and report back on their activities, membership and dues collections to assure they were adhering to the group’s national policies and goals.
Over the course of six months, John Metcalfe traveled 20,000 miles on behalf of the Bund leadership, secretly gathering material for the Times series. Notably, he attended a Fourth of July celebration at Camp Siegfried in Yaphank, Long Island, where the camp’s main thoroughfare was called Adolf Hitler Street.
“The downfall of the Bund would be largely brought about by one of the men attending the 1937 Fourth of July celebration,” historian Bradley W. Hart wrote in his 2018 book, Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States. “He was wearing the uniform of the German American Bund — a Hitler-style shirt and tie with the Sam Browne belt — with his hair and mustache shaped to imitate the Fuhrer’s personal styling. For all appearances he would have cut the profile of an avid Hitler admirer and, to his comrades in the Bund, he was exactly this.”
That seeming Hitler enthusiast was John Metcalfe.
Since at least 1887, when New York World reporter Nellie Bly had herself committed in order to expose the appalling conditions in an insane asylum, undercover reporting had become a regular and impactful — albeit controversial — tool in American journalism. (Today, the Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics states: “Avoid undercover or other surreptitious methods of gathering information unless traditional, open methods will not yield information vital to the public.”)
In 1938, in the aftermath of the newspaper series, John Metcalfe appeared before Texas Congressman Martin Dies’ House Committee Investigating Un-American Activities, wearing his storm trooper uniform for dramatic effect. He testified that the main focus of the Bund camps was instilling the 4 H’s: Health, Hitler, Heils and Hatred.
“American boys and girls sing hymns to Der Fuehrer and to the Vaterland they never have seen,” he told the committee. “Their youthful feet goose-step in a march of racial and religious hatred. The minds and souls of these ‘babes in the woods’ are a fertile field for the propaganda of the Bund.”
Metcalfe further testified that the primary aim of Nazi sympathizers was to establish a spy network across the United States. At one point, an entire company of Illinois national guardsmen was composed of Bund members, he said.
Fritz Kuhn called the committee’s proceedings “filthy” and denied Metcalfe’s claims.
Over the years that followed, John Metcalfe “would personally expose a range of plots by Hitler’s American friends across the country,” Hart writes. “Metcalfe quickly accomplished more than any other single individual working to unravel the threat posed by Nazi sympathizers to U.S. national security.”
In the late 1940s and ’50s, under different leadership during the “Red Scare” era, congressional committees would focus on individuals suspected of communist sympathies — leading to Hollywood’s blacklist and Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy’s crusade against federal government employees accused of communist affiliations.
After testifying, John Metcalfe received death threats, and his car was struck by machine-gun bullets in an ambush, according to a family history written by his son. He escaped unharmed.
The Bund collapsed shortly after it hosted a “Pro-American Rally” that drew more than 20,000 supporters to New York’s Madison Square Garden in February 1939. Images of Washington hung next to swastikas, and speakers denounced the “Jewish-controlled media” and called for a return to a racially “pure” America. Kuhn was the keynote speaker.
A force of 2,000 mounted police officers formed a barrier outside the hall, attempting to keep angry anti-Nazis from rushing in. Scuffles broke out on the streets and sidewalks. A few months later, Kuhn was charged with embezzlement and tax evasion, found guilty and sent to prison.
Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, marking the start of World War II. More than two years later, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, prompting the United States’ entry into the war.
Afterward
After his time as a reporter, James Metcalfe — the former seminarian and G-man — enjoyed a long career as a nationally known poet. He had started writing poetry at age 14 at Notre Dame. His popular column, “Daily Poem Portraits,” was syndicated in more than 100 American newspapers during the 1940s and ’50s and he published at least 17 books of poetry, many focused on Catholic themes.
He and his wife, Lillian, had three children. He died in Dallas in 1960 at age 53.
John Metcalfe worked as a correspondent for Time magazine and the New York Herald Tribune during World War II. After the war, he ran a lecture bureau and represented political clients. In the late 1960s, he returned to government service as part of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
John was the first of the brothers to write poems for newspapers and had published a book of poetry in 1931. After James’ death, John took over his brother’s poetry column and continued it for several years.
He and his wife, Violet, had two children. He died in 1971 in San Antonio, Texas, at age 66.
Their sister, Elizabeth, finished high school at Saint Mary’s in 1924. She entered the Sisters of the Holy Cross and became Sister Mary Noël Metcalfe, CSC. She taught for 50 years at Catholic schools across the country, then retired to Saint Mary’s, continuing a life of prayer and public service. She died in 1998 at age 92.
The Metcalfe brothers never lost their love for Notre Dame.
John returned to campus in 1940 and gave a talk about his undercover experiences, saying that communist, Nazi and fascist elements in this country were spreading hate based on class, race and religion. He urged rigid enforcement of existing laws to wipe out subversive activity, rather than new legislation. “As long as the American people adhere to the Bill of Rights, however, there will be no need to fear ‘isms’ in the United States,” he said.
James spoke to a class of journalism undergraduates at Notre Dame in 1949. A book of poetry he published that same year, Garden in My Heart, includes a poem titled “Notre Dame,” which concludes: “Her graduates may walk alone / Or they may rise to fame / But in their humble hearts they all / Belong to Notre Dame.”
Margaret Fosmoe is an associate editor of this magazine. She can be reached at mfosmoe@nd.edu.