Ultimately it was the people who Hitler hated the most – and who he would do his best to exterminate in a gulag of extermination camps – who thwarted the plot: the Jews.
The man behind the plan was one Dietrich Gefken, a veteran of Hitler’s paramilitary Brownshirts who took part in the failed 1923 putsch against the Bavarian government that saw the future Fuehrer thrown in jail.
Hitler in Los Angeles; How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America, by Steven Ross, details how Gefken sought to capitalise on American admiration for Hitler in the early days of his regime.
People like Charles Lindbergh, the first solo flyer of the Atlantic, and Henry Ford the automobile mogul, sang the praises of the Third Reich after Hitler came to power in 1933.
Gefken spent the early 1930s travelling the US, working as a cook and spreading Nazi propaganda, before settling down in LA where he became the leader of a local branch of Friends of the New Germany (FNG) – a Nazi front group whose ultimate aim was the conquest of the United States.
Gefken became a National Guard member in San Francisco and noted its reserve of weapons. He made contacts with sympathisers in the US Navy willing to sell FNG members arms and ammunition.
FNG fighters trained in remote desert locations were intended to “launch spontaneous uprisings in San Francisco and San Diego. American army officers were to be corralled using machine guns,” writes the author
“Nazis would confer with captured American troops. Those willing to pledge their loyalty to Hitler would be taken into the storm troopers. Those who refused would be killed on the spot.”
Mr Ross says the plot was no idle fancy.
Nazis had established strongholds and support in LA, including within the LAPD, whose chief, James Davis, once defended Hitler to a Jewish lawyer.
The plan was foiled by German-born US Army Captain John H. Schmidt – himself a mole for Jewish lawyer who ran his own network spying on the FNG.
He sought out non-Jews to infiltrate the FNG with Schmidt as his first operative.
“Had Lewis not taken it upon himself to stop the Nazis, LA in the 1930s could have been a much more frightening place,” says the author.
Schmidt soon became part of the FNG’s inner circle and funnelled information to Lewis.
Two Marine corporals “who were selling government rifles and 12,000 rounds of ammunition to local Nazi sympathisers” were arrested and the plot began to unravel.
Government intelligence agencies would later discover far-reaching plans to topple the government of FDR and replace him with a pro-Nazi figure.
“From August 1933 until the end of World War II, with few resources at their disposal, Lewis and his courageous undercover operatives continually defeated a variety of enemies — Nazis, fascists and fifth-columnists — bent on violence and murder,” Mr Ross writes.
“Without ever firing a weapon, they managed to keep Los Angeles and its citizens safe.”