“The global struggle against Nazi Germany began on the deck of a German luxury liner docked at Pier 86 on the Hudson River waterfront.”

By Peter Duffy

LATE IN THE evening of July 26, 1935, two-and-a-half years into Adolf Hitler’s reign and more than four years before the start of World War Two, a small band of unlikely protagonists delivered the first international blow against the Third Reich.

The entire effort represented a resonant act of guerrilla theatre on a luxurious passenger liner, the SS Bremen, a “floating palace” and the pride of the German fleet. The crew and guests were in the midst of a top-hat-and-tails gala prior to the ship’s midnight departure from a pier on the West Side of Manhattan.

Present for the occasion was the new U.S. ambassador to Norway, Anthony J. Drexel Biddle Jr.; Hollywood movie star on contract to MGM, Elissa Landi; a Catholic humanitarian (currently under consideration for sainthood) named Dorothy Day; George Howard Earle III, the governor of Pennsylvania; a young Communist who would later be famously executed for spying for the Soviets, Julius Rosenberg; and the two-year-old grandson of the President of the United States, William Donner Roosevelt.

The instigators were a handful of merchant seamen of radical sympathies — many of Irish birth or parentage — who slipped aboard pretending to be drunken revellers seeing off relatives bound for Europe.

The roughhewn leader of the team, an iron-jawed son of Hell’s Kitchen named William “Bill” Bailey, fought his way to the prow of the ship. After ascended the ladder and leading to the top of the bowsprit, he reached for the swastika flag bathing in the glow of a spotlight beaming down from the bridge. A roar went up as he hurled the rag into the polluted waters of the Hudson River.

In the chaos that ensued on the top deck, an undercover NYPD detective fired a gunshot into the groin of one of Bailey’s co-conspirators.

Global opinion was swift in its censure of the emblem’s desecration. The German government howled. According to the diary of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, Hitler was livid. State Department records reveal that FDR played a central role in drafting the apology that was promptly delivered to the Reich.

Bailey’s stirring deed couldn’t achieve full expression without a second act drama, one that unfolded in the un-Supreme confines of what was then referred to as “police court.”

The defence team was lead by a tack-sharp U.S. Congressman, Vito Marcantonio, the dashing young star of American leftist politics who represented the poor Puerto Ricans and Italians of East Harlem. He argued that the six defendants were the modern successors to the colonial patriots who tossed tea, a representative item of oppressive governance, into Boston Harbor in 1773.

The trial of the Bremen Six, as the defendants came to be known, provided a forum to contemplate the dilemma facing the international community in the years leading up to World War Two. Should the world take the path of our heroes and challenge the well-publicized injustices of the Third Reich? Or should nations follow popular opinion and appease—no, collude with—a foreign despot who made no secret of his malignant intentions?

The matter was left in the hands of the judge, Louis B. Brodsky, a Jewish magistrate and moderate Democrat in the Tammany Hall machine with an established flair for setting aside the letter of municipal code if he thought it conflicted with an ethical framework of higher standing.

With pince-nez eyeglasses perched on his nose, Brodsky read a 14-page verdict that included one of the greatest denunciations of a foreign tyranny ever issued from an American judicial tribunal, in this case the Seventh District of the City Magistrates’ Courts, Borough of Manhattan.

In dismissing (nearly) all of the unlawful assembly and felonious assault charges brought against the Bremen Six, Brodsky declared that the young men had every right to regard the swastika as “the black flag of piracy,” words soon to be emblazoned across newspaper front pages from Stockholm to Melbourne, from Dar es Salaam to Topeka.

The judgment was delivered on Sept. 6, 1935. It was 10 years before the liberation of the death camps. Six years before the Final Solution began in the execution pits of the occupied Soviet Union. Five years before Winston Churchill became Great Britain’s wartime prime minister. Four years before the Nazi invasion of Poland launched World War Two. Three years before the capitulation at Munich was followed by the pogrom of Kristallnacht.

The two-part broadside was the defining accomplishment of a forgotten crusade to persuade the world that Adolf Hitler had to be challenged. In the early stages of Nazi rule, a dogged minority emerged like the coastal watchmen in the Book of Ezekiel — impelled by God to “blow the trumpet and warn the people” upon first sight of the “sword upon the land.”

The U.S. government had no time for such destabilizing prattle. More horrified by Judge Brodsky’s ruling than the original incident on the ship, the FDR Administration scrambled to craft an obsequious response, sending memos and telegrams bouncing from Washington to Albany, from New York to Berlin.

The resulting apology, read aloud in the Tennessee drawl of Secretary of State Cordell Hull, represents the humiliating nadir of our diplomatic annals. Polite opinion was fully supportive, believing that the government had acted wisely in distancing the country from anything that might disrupt friendly relations with Hitler. Even Supreme Court justice Benjamin Cardozo, the second Jewish member to serve on the nation’s highest court, harrumphed about Brodsky’s “shameful” breach of “standards of judicial propriety.”

The Führer could not be mollified, even while praising his allies in the U.S. government who acted “loyally” on his behalf. The insolence of the seamen and Judge Brodsky struck too adroitly at the core of his derangement: He understood the magnitude of their crime.

In explicit response, Hitler ordered the nation’s parliament, the Reichstag, to convene at the annual party gathering in Nuremberg, a multi-day convocation that represented the height of Nazi self-celebration. His rejoinder to the New York controversy was codified in the first of the notorious Nuremberg Laws, a milestone occasion that christened the National Socialist conquest over the remilitarizing German state and established the anti-Semitic framework for annihilation.

The Reich Flag Law—which transformed the swastika of the Nazi Party into the national colours of Germany—came into effect during an austere ceremony in the Hudson River, an Act III denouement on the very liner where the whole affair began. Pharaoh’s decisive suppression of the uprising was sealed with the unquestioning obedience of upraised arms. Protection was provided by the police force of America’s greatest city.

But the battle had been joined. The global struggle against Nazi Germany— which would conclude when a “Grand Alliance” of armies and air forces converged on Berlin in an unimaginable time—began on the deck of a German luxury liner docked at Pier 86 on the Hudson River waterfront.

Our earliest enlistees were nuisances, the kind of public actors whose impolite advocacy inspired eye rolling in the salons of conventional wisdom. Yet they wouldn’t have to issue apologies, explanations, or evasions as so many others have since the end of World War Two. They understood the threat. They saw the future. And they issued a call to action. They deserve the honour of history.

About the Author: Peter Duffy is the author of The Agitator: William Bailey and the First American Uprising against Nazism. The New York-based journalist has written three books of historical non-fiction: The Bielski Brothers; The Killing of Major Denis Mahon; and Double Agent. His journalism has appeared in The New York Times, New York magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, the New Republic, and many other publications.