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| George Sylvester Viereck's magazine, The Fatherland (1914) |
Imagine the scene outside his
father-in-law’s home, about 20 people milling around in the warm August night, shouting
that he should leave the suburb of Mt. Vernon, N.Y. and never return.
Did George Sylvester Viereck
push aside the drapes to peer out the parlor window? Apparently the presence of two policemen
guarding the front door did not reassure him of his own safety.
And so as the dog days waned
in the summer of 1918, George left his wife and two sons with her father and returned
to Manhattan. From there he would continue to edit his two magazines, The International and The Fatherland. In their pages he strongly supported Germany
throughout the Great War, which the U. S. had entered in April 1917.
Later, his work would be
labeled propaganda.
The child of a German actress
and – purportedly – one of Kaiser Wilhelm II's unacknowledged sons, George immigrated
to the U. S. at the age of 13. Known as
Sylvester or “G.S.V.,” he graduated from City College of New York with literary
aspirations, having published a small volume of verse in 1904 while he was
still a student. In 1907, George
published a second collection of poems which won national attention.
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| George Sylvester Viereck as a young man |
After college, George traveled
frequently to his native land. He developed
a particular interest in foreign affairs and became a German nationalist.
In 1915, agitated by the
debate over U. S. involvement in the war, George helped found a nationwide
antiwar group called Friends of Peace. The
group immediately demanded that the U. S. stop supplying ammunition to England
and that England lift its blockade of German ships.
Friends of Peace wasn’t really
a pacifist organization. Rather, it intended
to prevent an alliance between the U. S. and England. Its members were largely Americans of German
and Irish descent who had a natural – understandable – antipathy toward
England. They included scholars, clergy,
publishers, and business executives.
The group held rallies in
Chicago, New York, and other cities. Meanwhile,
President Wilson campaigned for a second term on the slogan, “He Kept Us out of
War.” Friends of Peace did not trust
Wilson and endorsed the Republican candidate Charles Evans Hughes (later appointed
Chief Justice of the Supreme Court).
George led a busy life. A prolific writer – novels and memoirs in
addition to poetry and international affairs – he also lectured widely. Over time he developed a reputation for being
anti-American – hence the angry neighbors outside his father-in-law’s home –
but that did not seem to bother him.
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| The Fatherland became The American Weekly (1918) |
In the early 1920s, George made
his first visit to Europe since before the war.
He stayed for eight months, scoring interviews with Hitler, Mussolini, and
the Kaiser, who was now in exile in the Netherlands.
His 1923 interview with Hitler
occurred just a few months before the Beer Hall Putsch, an attempted Nazi coup
in Munich. But the putsch failed and Hitler
was imprisoned for nine months, passing the time writing Mein Kampf.
In the course of the interview,
which did not see the light of day until 1932 when it was published in Liberty Magazine (another pro-German magazine), Hitler railed against
Bolshevism and Marxism.
“In my scheme of the German
state, there will be no room for the alien, no use for the wastrel, for the usurer
or the speculator, or anyone incapable of productive work,” he told George.
Back in the U. S., George
emerged as an unabashed supporter of Hitler and registered as a foreign
agent. He established a publishing house
that issued isolationist, Anglophobic and pro-German books. But things caught
up with him. In 1941, just a few weeks
before Pearl Harbor, a grand jury indicted George for deliberately hiding the
extent of his work as a propagandist.
He would serve about five
years in prison, during which time his life fell apart. His younger son was killed in the Battle of Anzio,
and his wife left him after liquidating all of his assets and donating the
money to Catholic and Jewish charities. He died in the Berkshires in 1962.*
In his study hung portraits
of Kaiser Wilhelm, Hitler, and Goebbels alongside those of Freud and
Einstein. “All these people I have known
and admired,” he liked to tell visitors. “The psychoanalyst, the scientist, and
the dynamic force – all have been my friends.”
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| After World War II |
*He lived out his years with his son, Peter, a professor at Mt. Holyoke College.
https://2018/08/george-sylvester-vierecks-busy-life.html
I am curious as to how he survived in the post-war years after his wife sold everything he had. Not to mention how anybody could remain a Nazi after there could be no doubt as to what the Germans did. Almost inconceivable.
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