Today in Hitler’s American Model I learned about the SS Bremen and the antifascist demonstration to tear the Nazi flag from its prow and throw it into the river, which all these years decades later even James Q. Whitman for some reason refers to as a “riot”.
The Bremen Incident occurred in New York on July 26, 1935, during a hot summer marked by diplomatic clashes and street-level violence between New York opponents of Hitler and pro-German demonstrators. That evening some one thousand rioters, characterized by police reports as including “communist sympathizers,” stormed the SS Bremen, one of the swiftest liners on the Atlantic and the pride of German engineering. Five of the demonstrators managed to clamber aboard, rip the swastika down, and toss it into the Hudson River.
The five were arrested, but a diplomatic crisis broke out that rumbled ominously for weeks. Immediately after the episode, the US State Department made an effort to calm the situation, sending a note expressing its regret that “the German national emblem should ... not have received the respect to which it is entitled”; whatever hostility to Hitler there may have been in the streets of New York, the administration was anxious, at this point in its history, to maintain good relations with the Third Reich. Nevertheless throughout the late summer the German press kept matters at a boil. The crisis reached its climax on September 6, a week before the opening ceremonies of the Nuremberg Rally, when Manhattan Magistrate Louis Brodsky ordered the release of the five arrested rioters, while delivering a fiery opinion denouncing Nazism in the name of American freedoms.