Jewish spies reportedly stopped Nazis getting foothold in US
New book reveals Los Angeles Jewish lawyer's networks infiltrated far-right meetings in the 1930s
Jewish spies were the reason Hitler never gained a foothold on the West Coast of the United States, according to research shown in a newly-published book.
A Los Angeles-based Jewish lawyer’s network of spies infiltrated a key meeting of about 100 Nazi sympathisers in 1933, in which details of a Hitler-inspired plot to take-over California were revealed.
The work of spies run by lawyer Leon Lewis has been revealed for this first time in a new book by Steven Ross called ‘Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America.’
One of Lewis’s spies, the German-born U.S. Army Capt. John H. Schmidt, who had blonde hair and blue eyes, infiltrated the group after spending time at the Aryan Bookstore in LA, which was popular with some of the area’s 150,000 Germans.
Schmidt later attended a key meeting of 100 Nazis in which plans to replace the U.S. president with a Nazi sympathiser were unveiled, before passing the intelligence back to Lewis.
The information led to the arrest of two U.S. Marine corporals who were selling government rifles and 12,000 rounds of ammunition to local Nazi groups.
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