Warren Grover spent seven years hunting Newark's Nazis and the Jewish mobsters who drove them out of town

It is a story of Jews and Germans, of Nazis and communists, of brawls and boycotts and gangsters who became "good guys" in a battle that was a prelude to World War II.

It happened not in Europe but in the streets and meeting halls of Newark, and for the past seven years its details have captivated a retired businessman named Warren Grover.

Now, his well-documented history, Nazis in Newark, is about to be published by Transaction Publishers, a division of Rutgers University Press. The book describes how Jewish organizations, including one led by mobster Abner "Longie" Zwillman, stood up to pro-Nazi German Americans who sought to import Hitler's anti-Semitism in the 1930s.

Grover approached his task with all the proper credentials. He is a Newark native and a graduate of Weequahic High School. He is a former president of the Jewish Historical Society of MetroWest, and holds seats on the boards of the New Jersey Historical Society, the Newark Historical Society, and NJ Jewish News.

Before running a direct mail marketing firm ("Some people call it junk mail," he said with a smile), the West Orange resident taught history at the Newark College of Engineering.

"I retired from the business on a Friday in 1996, took the weekend off, and the next Monday morning I was in front of a microfilm machine at the Newark Public Library, reading back issues of the Newark News to absorb local history dating back to a time before World War I when the city was dominated politically by German Americans."

Initially, said Grover, they lived in harmony with the Jews from Germany who began settling in Newark in the 1850s. "There were good feelings, even when Eastern European Jews started coming in the 1880s and moved into the same neighborhoods that German Jews and non-Jewish Germans had vacated in what was called the Hill District around Prince Street. They shopped in each other's stores and sometimes even lived in the same multiple family houses."

But terrifying events 5,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean started resonating in Newark after Germany's defeat in World War I, and a new breed of Germans fled to America and began settling in Newark, Irvington, and Springfield, where there had been "no real antipathy between Germans and Jews," said Grover.

"When the newer waves of immigrants came here, they already had anti-Semitic attitudes," Grover said. It made them sympathetic to Hitler, who rose to become chancellor in 1933 and blamed the Jews for Germany's defeat in World War I, giving the émigrés fertile ground for recruitment.

Many of Newark's 65,000 Jewish residents were aware of Hitler's potential threat.

"Right from the beginning they knew he was a terrible anti-Semite. As he campaigned for office in the early '30s, it was well documented in newsreels, and the Yiddish paper people read said he was anti-Semitic. And when he came to power, Jews were alarmed for their brethren in Germany.

"A small cadre of Nazis began spreading open propaganda in the streets of Newark and Irvington, with open meetings, anti-Semitic fliers, and anti-Semitic speakers. These open meetings soon attracted attention and a response."

Boxers and gang members

That response came in several forms. A committee led by Jewish organizations spearheaded a successful boycott of German imported goods.

But a group that borrowed its name from Paul Revere's American revolutionaries nearly two centuries earlier became the frontline troops of a Jewish-American challenge to Hitler's surrogates on the streets of Newark. They were called the Minutemen, and they were organized and bankrolled by Zwillman, a Newark-born racketeer who had made a fortune in bootlegging and gambling.

Grover says no one knows exactly how the group got started, but he believes the mob boss was "presumably approached by people worried about Nazis. Because he had an organized gang who had killed people and were used to fighting, they wanted him to protect people from Nazis who had actively tried to hurt Jews."

Zwillman, who came from an observant family and had faced anti-Semitic abuse as a teenage vegetable salesman, agreed to bankroll the Minutemen. He appointed a close aide, Nat Arno, to run the anti-Nazi action force. Arno recruited Jewish boxers and gang members who had been musclemen for Zwillman's bootlegging and gambling enterprises.

The Minutemen provided a tough counterforce almost every time the Newark Nazis tried to march, meet, or assemble. And "sometimes they were more successful than other times in breaking up the meetings," said Grover.

The groups clashed periodically between 1933 and 1940, mostly without publicity. Many of the police who came to the scene felt conflicted, according to the historian.

"Those who were Irish and German may have been covertly sympathetic to the Nazis. But since Longie's mob paid them protection, the cops probably took a neutral stance."

The Minutemen developed their own intelligence network. "Sometimes the police force would tip off Jews that the Nazis were going to meet. Sometimes, newspaper reporters would tip them off. Of all the conflagrations, only the big ones were publicly advertised. They didn't need to be tipped off. The Minutemen would come, throw smoke bombs through the windows, and then, as people would come out, they would hit them," said Grover.

People on both sides swung at one another with clubs, bats, brass knuckles, and steel blackjacks wrapped in leather.

Two of the Nazi organizations – the Berlin-sponsored Friends of New Germany and, later, the homegrown German American Bund – always had uniformed guards to protect the Nazis from attackers. There were some severe injuries, but no one ever died. And the long antagonism was never resolved.

The ACLU weighs in

A charismatic leader named Fritz Kuhn helped recruit many German Americans to the Bund. The organization even opened up two successful summer resorts. One was based in Yaphank, Long Island; the other was Camp Nordland in Andover, a rural area in Sussex County.

The Bund reached its peak in 1938 after Nazis in Germany trashed Jewish homes and shops on Kristallnacht and German troops marched into Austria and Czechoslovakia.

"The Bund was at its height," said Grover. "They'd be strutting through Yorkville," the biggest German American neighborhood in Manhattan – 10,000 strong, dressed in Nazi regalia. The FBI and state agencies all turned their attention to the Bund.

In 1939, a New Jersey law was passed outlawing people from wearing military uniforms from foreign countries. Some localities tried to outlaw hate speech. Lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union Ñ many of them Jewish – worked diligently to defend the Nazis' rights.

As Grover studied this part of the story, the trail of his research led him on a two-year search for an ACLU secretary named Nancy Cox, who, he said, was "so far from being Jewish that she was a direct descendant of the only female child born on the Mayflower."

Cox spent her childhood years in Maplewood, graduated from Columbia High School, and spent 1937 visiting Europe and "seeing Nazis and Fascists in action," said Grover.

When she returned to New Jersey, the ACLU enlisted her as a test case for a law that prevented people from distributing handbills. She was arrested in the town of Edgewater for handing out pamphlets that contained the Bill of Rights, and the ACLU won her case.

More than 60 years later, Grover said, "I figured there was a very good chance she was alive. I tracked her down through reading her father's obit. I learned she had a house in Martha's Vineyard. I called the house and they gave me Nancy's number in Santa Barbara, Calif.

"The biggest thrill I had in writing the whole book was when I made that call and a woman with a distinguished voice said she was Nancy Cox."

Within two days he was on a plane to Santa Barbara.

The historian had an easier time tracking down aging ex-members of Newark's Communist Party. A majority of them were Jewish. At first, they were active in opposing Nazis. But they muted their criticism during the years of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. They then changed gears once again to aid the American war effort after Hitler breached the detente and sent troops to invade the Soviet Union.

Grover said the Internet became his most helpful tool in his hunt for eyewitnesses to history. But in one case, it was a classified ad in NJJN that paid off.

"I put an ad in the paper looking for Ruth Miller, a communist who had demonstrated in Irvington against the very first Nazi meeting in Essex County. She was arrested.

"I got a call from a gentleman who told me he had information on the period, Jack Gipfel. I found him in a senior citizens home in East Orange. He was a communist activist throughout the entire period and his recollection was excellent."

So pleased was Grover with his discovery that he invited Gipfel and his former comrades to his West Orange home

"I had his 90th birthday party right here. We had about 12 people sitting around the dining room table. It was like a communist cell meeting. They fought about things that happened maybe 50 or 60 years ago, arguing just as passionately as they did then. But most of them had given up on the Communist Party."

Grover said he was less successful at locating and gathering information from ex-Nazis.  After a yearlong manhunt he located just one, a man named Walter Rayelt.

"He was living in Union. I interviewed him twice and got nothing out of him. He said 'I had nothing to do with it. All I cared about was helping a German home for the aged.' I said, 'In 1933 you were only 16.'"

Grover said Rayelt was the head of a "Nazi front" that had planned to have a special dedication ceremony for its new flag.

"The Minutemen picketed the ceremony. They wanted to stop it, but they couldn't because it was in Springfield, and Springfield was off-limits because it was so heavily a German-American town."

Grover said he tried to get details from Rayelt – and failed. "I was in his house. He was having a good time, even though he was 90 and he knew what I was there for. He didn't dismiss me out of hand. He was a lonely old man. He lived alone. He knew he wasn't going to tell me anything, but he had a good time leading me on."

But the historian's private satisfaction with his work far outweighed his disappointment as he sat talking at his kitchen table in front of two computers, a desktop where he stored years of research, and a laptop where he did the actual writing.

"When I typed 'The End' at the bottom of the last page, that was the biggest relief I ever had. The second biggest was finishing the book," he said.

As he waits to see Nazis in Newark on bookstore shelves, the author said he is now "worried about my next project."

Grover isn't ready to talk about it yet, other than to say he is mulling over three ideas for a new book. And yet he offers one hint:

"It will be about Newark."

Robert Wiener can be reached at