The rejections came one after the other for a good five months until, in May 2011, an editor at St. “We got fabulous rejections,” Bernstein jokes. Months went by during which all Bernstein or his agent heard was one rejection after another, most of them in the vanilla “it’s not a fit for us” vein. “The proposal had to be perfect.”īut getting to a perfect proposal didn’t force open the gates of publishing.

The Bund had a national presence, but also powerful enemies, including politicians, newspapermen, Hollywood figures, and members of the Jewish underworld.Īfter winning over his agent with that one-line pitch, Bernstein spent about a year researching and writing the book proposal. The book tells the true story of Fritz Kuhn and the rise of the German–American Bund, a pro-Nazi group in the 1930s. Swastika Nation, which published September 3, was several years in the making. “I’ve been incredibly lucky,” he says with a shake of his head. In fact, it was such a good story that Bernstein sold it to a literary agent on a one-line pitch. “I was looking for a story,” he says, and the story he relates in his latest book, Swastika Nation, found him. Coupled with a long-standing interest in extremist groups after having witnessed the controversy surrounding the would-be Nazi march in Skokie in 1977, Bernstein knew he had something special on his hands. Watching a fictionalized account of Jews hunting down Nazis during WWII got him curious: What were the real stories of Jews who fought back during the Hitler era? His research uncovered the forgotten story of an American pro-Nazi movement of the late 1930s. In 2009, when Bernstein saw the Quentin Tarantino movie Inglorious Basterds, he had no clue his life was about to change. ARNIE BERNSTEIN HAD NO WAY OF KNOWING that such a good story was about to land in his lap.

Bath Massacre by Arnie Bernstein