Hitler in Los Angeles
How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America
ISBN10: 1620405636
ISBN13: 9781620405635
Paperback
432 Pages
$18.99
CA$24.99
Pulitzer Prize Finalist
No American city was more important to the Nazis than Los Angeles, home to Hollywood, the greatest propaganda machine in the world. The Nazis plotted to kill the city's Jews and to sabotage the nation's military installations: plans existed for hanging twenty prominent Hollywood figures such as Al Jolson, Charlie Chaplin, and Samuel Goldwyn; for driving through Boyle Heights and machine-gunning as many Jews as possible; and for blowing up defense installations and seizing munitions from National Guard armories along the Pacific Coast.
U.S. law enforcement agencies were not paying close attention—preferring to monitor Reds rather than Nazis—and only Leon Lewis and his daring ring of spies stood in the way. From 1933 until the end of World War II, attorney Leon Lewis, the man Nazis would come to call "the most dangerous Jew in Los Angeles," ran a spy operation comprised of military veterans and their wives who infiltrated every Nazi and fascist group in Los Angeles. Often rising to leadership positions, this daring ring of spies uncovered and foiled the Nazi's disturbing plans for death and destruction.
Featuring a large cast of Nazis, undercover agents, and colorful supporting players, Hitler in Los Angeles, by acclaimed historian Steven J. Ross, tells the story of Lewis's daring spy network in a time when hate groups had moved from the margins to the mainstream.
Reviews
Praise for Hitler in Los Angeles
"A remarkable tale, one that pits a secretive, chess-playing Jewish spymaster—attorney Leon Lewis—and a group of courageous German-American war veterans that he recruited as his spies against a cast of villains straight out of a classic Warner Bros. film . . . Mr. Ross has a novelist's eye for characters and detail."—The Wall Street Journal
"Hitler in Los Angeles . . . is part thriller and all chiller, about how close the California Reich came to succeeding."—The Los Angeles Times
"A history book that doubles as espionage thriller with a cast of characters that includes movie stars, studio moguls, entertainment lawyers, diplomats and pols, all of them quite real . . . Remarkable . . . Now that anti-Semitic chants recently have been heard in the streets of Charlottesville, Va., Hitler in Los Angeles must be seen as much more than an accomplished work of historical scholarship."—Jewish Journal