(Above, left) Emily Hall Tremaine (formerly Spreckels), (right) Captain Ellis M. Zacharias, (center) FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.

Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews foiled Nazi plots against Hollywood and America (2017) by Steven J. Ross is a non-fiction, historical account written like a spy novel. It's also filled with numerous references to spy files held at CSU-Northridge.

For starters, note that Hitler never visited the US; the title refers to his influence. Below is the Amazon preview:

"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 murdering twenty-four prominent Hollywood figures, such as Al Jolson, Charlie Chaplin, and Louis B. Mayer; 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 attorney Leon Lewis and his daring ring of spies stood in the way. From 1933 until the end of World War II, 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."

+++

In the book, there is a map of where the Nazi locations were, around downtown Los Angeles and to the west. You'll also learn about Hindenburg Park (later named La Crescenta Park), with a swastika sculpture for pro-Nazi gatherings, and "Hitler's White House" in the LA area.

Why was Los Angeles and coastal SoCal of interest to Nazi Germany? The film industry (propaganda), the aircraft industry, and the naval bases. The largest immigrant group at the time was Germans, with about half supporting Hitler and the other half against him.

Captain Ellis M. Zacharias features prominently in the book as a kind of elite US Naval Intell / Nazi hunter, at times, passing on intelligence to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. (See our recent feature on Ellis and his book Secret Missions.)

Spoiler alert: The biggest find in the book is that Georg Gyssling, German Consul to Los Angeles, was not a Nazi, despite the portrait of Hitler and Nazi flags in his office. He was a kind of double agent to US military, in a very dangerous situation. He was thought to have been a demon in the film history area, but Ross talked to his daughter who remembered things as a young child.

Ross met with her. (Hear Ross talk about Gyssling in a presentation).

Research on secondary figures can be thin, exemplified by the case of Gyssling. Ross pulled Gyssling's Nuremberg file. See the surprising letter below.

Julius Klein: "This is the only testimonial I have ever given or would give to any German National who is accused of a being a Hitler follower."

Klein later became Major General Julius Klein, honored with a permanent exhibit at the National Museum of American Jewish Military History.

Gyssling's daughter's initiative, with Ross, completely turned the history of her father upside down, and it is a window into how nasty history, and historians talking among themselves, can be.

+++

Sample media coverage from divorce action in Santa Barbara, CA, (left) Daily News, (New York), p. 3; (right) Daily News, Los Angeles, December 20, 1940, p. 23.

Friends of Emily Hall Tremaine (previously Spreckels and Von Romberg) and more in Hitler in LA

Armed Forces Press readers are familiar with my research on alleged, pro-Nazi socialite and magazine publisher Emily Hall Tremaine, and the controversy over her residence right now in Madison, CT, on appeals at the Connecticut Superior Court in Meriden, CT. The scandal erupted in 2024 with about 100 articles across the state. The Architect's Newspaper ranked the situation as a top 2024 architecture world controversy (#7 after Epstein and Saudi worker deaths).

Further, it is partly Tremaine's unclear history driving my public call for the declassification of San Francisco District Naval Intelligence for Nazi-related matters. WHO has kept this classified and WHY?

My ongoing research is sort of a wrap-around version to Hitler in Los Angeles, with focus on the social / cultural set and business, entitled Nazis in California: Emily Hall Tremaine fights back (1933-45). (Listen to YouTube podcast.)

Back in late 2019, a book Tremaine Houses was published presenting, finally, a full set of pro-Nazi allegations against Tremaine (pp. 56-7), all reported extensively across the US via wire services in 1940-41.

After digging into Tremaine's archive at the Smithsonian and online, I stumbled on Hitler in Los Angeles, and ordered the court record for the shocking "He's a Nazi, NO SHE IS" divorce case (1940-41). This occurred for weeks leading up to the 1940 presidential election. Tremaine was a visible supporter of Wendell Willkie in the press, advocating for more intervention in the European War while the US remained neutral. (I wonder if Captain Zacharias was involved in this. Keep reading.)

It is important to note that Emily's husband at that time was a Spreckels, and his family's trust owned the Hotel del Coronado next to the San Diego naval base. He lived down there for some time before his marriage to Tremaine in August 1939, and he rented his house to a navy official. (The hotel was sold after WWII in the late 1940s.)

A page in Tremaine's secret deposition that I underearthed c. 2021 is missing (click through to see the missing p. 45); this is before she talked about an alleged vicious attack on her, by him, while they were staying at the hotel.

One wonders if Tremaine witnessed something at the hotel, given that Spreckels allegedly attacked her there, the missing page in her deposition, the sensitive military-adjacent location, and that she publicly declared that he allegedly was an American Nazi. The latter was reported throughout the US via multiple wire services for months.

Anyone reading newspapers then knew that the Spreckels trust owned the hotel, not only utilized by the navy, but also visiting American and international elites. (Any reader with ANY documentation about Nazi / Japanese spying activity on Coronado, 1935-41, PLEASE contact AFP and email artdesigncafe [at] gmail [dot] com, as this may help crack the case.)

+++

Six figures in Hitler in Los Angeles cross over to Emily Hall Tremaine's history, which I have been unearthing for five years. But note, Ross does not mention Tremaine. Ross was curious about Gyssling because he initially didn't seem a typical Nazi (while Manfred von Killinger, mentioned in a recent book preview about the Frome mother-daughter murders, certainly did). I had a similar feeling with Tremaine, so I pursued.

In 1935, Ross talks about then-national guardman Julius Klein encouraging author Rupert Hughes to give a talk on George Washington at the Deutsches Haus, where the feral Nazis were based. This was to slam them in the speech. Around this time, Tremaine had Hughes designated as her chairman of awards for California writers at her Apéritif magazine (1934-36). The magazine has a light anti-Nazi slant and even a then-young Jewish man contributing illustrations, and more. (See samples at bottom of webpage, here).

In 1937-38, Ross talks about the attempt by a British Nazi, a brother of a then-famous actor, to extort Philip Chancellor, and use that money for the assassination of over 20 Hollywood Jews. Philip's wife, Elza, was Tremaine's close friend at that time, and also friendly with Tremaine's sister. (Listen to YouTube podcast.)

Tremaine also appears to have had contact with the British Nazi that tried to extort Chancellor (but that has yet to be confirmed with that court record out of Los Angeles). So, four persons crossing over.

The fifth crossover is Captain Ellis Zacharias. Tremaine was reported publicly to be socializing with Ellis and his wife on some occasions after the crazy divorce attempt in 1941. Further, Tremaine's sister's husband worked directly for Zacharias partly during this time. So, this raises interesting questions. Was Tremaine an informal spy for Ellis?

To get to the definitive bottom of all of this though, after the eventual declassification of the Nazi files in San Francisco District Naval Intelligence, is an expensive and time-consuming undertaking. This involves pulling documents out of a small number of US intelligence archives, with paid researchers to assist in multiple locations. Then there is documentation in intelligence archives in Germany and Britain to get the full picture.

In a once-thought secret deposition of Emily Hall Tremaine, it gets going midway, she mentioned Gyssling (the sixth crossover), Philip's wife, and a scandalous event for Hitler ally / British royal, Karl Eduard (multiple spellings), the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in April 1940.

There also is Gyssling's consular report about the LA-Santa Barbara leg of the Duke's trip, with mention of Tremaine hosting an event for him. In Santa Barbara, the Duke was noted in this declassified document as staying at Tremaine's mother-in-law's Samarkand Hotel. Her name was Alma Spreckels, a San Francisco philanthropist.

If you have visited San Francisco, you probably saw her former mansion on Washington Street, a block or two away from the later German Consulate before the consuls were expelled. She also was the model for the female figure on top of the column in Union Square.

But while Gyssling's history has come forward— his daughter helped correct his history, via Ross, and you can imagine the emotions of that for a devoted daughter— Emily Hall Tremaine must continue to wait.

Sadly.

+++

Hitler in Los Angeles is a truly important book here. It helped me to quickly understand the Nazi / anti-Nazi battle and dynamics in California, buried in American history. One also gets a feel for what it was like on the ground, with Nazi threats, and people unable at times to speak openly. It also shows us heroes Leon Lewis, Julius Klein, and Ellis Zacharias in action. For the still-developing history of Emily Hall Tremaine, it provided context and leads of value far beyond any elite Pulitzer Prize-finalist designation, which Hitler in Los Angeles received. The audio-book version is excellent too.

+++

Also see:

-* Johnson & Tremaine Associates, Ridgefield’s Martha Dodd Featured In Hitler’s Aristocrats: The Secret Power Players in Britain and America Who Supported the Nazis, 1923–1941" (Connecticut Centinal), last summer's shocking six-part series. The book starts with a list and description of historical figures of the key elite social set and business players in pro-Nazi American and British history, with elite German Nazi figures. For the most part, these figures' histories got buried after WWII as the Cold War quickly emerged and the "forgive and forget" period set in.

-* WATCH: On German Consul Baron Von Spiegel In New Orleans (1937-41); A Fuller Account Of Pro-Nazi Activity In US, Incl Social Elites, Must Come Forward. And What About The Victims? (Armed Forces Press)

-* Recent Report Based On Declassified Sources in 2000s Shows Nazi Spying In US Was More Effective Than Previously Thought (Armed Forces Press)

-* Book Preview: "Beverly Hills Spy" Draws On De-Classified UK, FBI & US Naval Intelligence; About The British Double-Agent War Hero Who Helped Japan Attack Pearl Harbor (w/ VIDEO) (Armed Forces Press)

-* Info About US Bad Actors & Nazi Looted Art? A Call To Declassify The Nazi-era Naval Intelligence For The San Francisco District (1933-42): How You Can Help (Armed Forces Press)

-* US Elites Behaving Badly: The Shocking Tour Of A British Royal / Hitler Ally Across America In Spring 1940 (Armed Forces Press)

-* Who Wanted To Become "The American Hitler" In c. 1934? A Curator At NY's Museum Of Modern Art, Today An Elite Left Bastion. See His Shocking Declassified FBI File (Armed Forces Press)

-* SUMMER READING: "Secret Missions: The Story Of An Intelligence Officer" By Captain Ellis Zacharias (1946) For Nazis In California, JP, And More (Armed Forces Press)

-* Podcast: Nazis In California: Emily Hall Tremaine Fights Back (YouTube)

-* Podcast: Nazis In California: Santa Barbara Museum Of Art Opening, 1941 (YouTube)

-* SHOCKER: Hitler’s Aristocrats (2023), The Museum Of Modern Art, New York, And The "NaziMoMA" Strand (Connecticut Centinal)

-* SHOCKING: Even Mt Vernon Staff Unfamiliar With Genocidal Nazi Duke's History & Tour Of America In Spring 1940; He's Listed As A "Famous" Visitor On Their Website! (Armed Forces Press)

-* SUMMER READING: The Unsolved Mother-Daughter Double Murder, Nazis In Calif And Texas, 1938. Can You Solve The Case? (Armed Forces Press)