Hollywood Anti-Nazi League

and his wife Florence with Helga and Hubertus zu Löwenstein (far right), cofounder of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, July 1936 In 1936, the CPUSA allegedly ordered Otto Katz to raise funds and to found the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League (HANL). To kick off his work, Katz held a hundred-dollar-a-plate fundraising dinner, which was attended by, among others, Irving Thalberg, Jack L. Warner, David O. Selznick, and Samuel Goldwyn. John Joseph Cantwell, Archbishop of Los Angeles, was on hand to bless the proceedings. Actress and artist Gloria Stuart was also involved in the League's founding. Katz and his cofounder, Hubertus zu Löwenstein, held an organizational meeting at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles. At the meeting, screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart and author Dorothy Parker, fellow members of the Algonquin Round Table, were named respectively chairman and honorary chairman by acclamation. There was, in fact, friction between the League and other organized Jewish groups in Los Angeles. For instance, The Community Relations Committee, a group which served as a "political instrument of wealthy Los Angeles Jews", seemed, according to screenwriter and League activist Hy Kraft, to use most of the energy it spent interacting with the League trying to convince them to change their name to the "Hollywood Anti-Nazi Anti-Communist League". == Leadership and membership ==

Although the HANL was a communist front organization, its membership spanned the entire political spectrum. Stewart, Herbert Biberman, Robert Rossen, Francis Edward Faragoh, and Ring Lardner, Jr. were party members. By 1937, the board of directors of the HANL included Jack Warner and Carl Laemmle, as well as the head of the Hollywood division of the CPUSA, John Howard Lawson. The famous members of the League, whose names appeared on its letterhead and in its publications, didn't have much to do with the actual operations, though, which were left in the hands of lesser-known CPUSA members. == Activities ==

) in 1937, around the time that her visit to Los Angeles was boycotted by the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League The League inaugurated its founding with a huge party at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles in October 1936. In attendance were Irving Berlin, and Gale Sondergaard. Los Angeles mayor Frank Shaw gave a speech, as did Eddie Cantor who, perhaps having had let his passion get the better of him, claimed that Nazi agents had tried to prevent his attendance. By 1937, the League was running two radio programs on Los Angeles station KFWB, mostly scripted by Donald Stewart and Herbert Biberman. The HANL also organized boycotts of German products and picketed meetings of the Los Angeles chapter of the German American Bund. The League also protested Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl's visit to Hollywood in November 1938. The HANL again took out ads in Hollywood trade papers calling on the industry to "close its doors to all Nazi agents". The admonition was somewhat successful, and Riefenstahl issued a statement about the advertisement saying that she was surprised that the League had attacked her personally and that she was not an agent of the Nazi government. The League also attempted to convince the studios to produce an anti-Nazi film, but they were hindered in their efforts because the Motion Picture Production Code decreed that movies should be apolitical. They also accused the studios of changing the ending of The Road Back, a film by James Whale based on a novel of the same name by Erich Maria Remarque, in order to "'glorify' Hitler". ==Investigations==

The HANL was one of the first groups targeted by HUAC when it was taken over by Conservative Democratic Congressman Martin Dies, who said that the group was "under the control of the communists". In summer 1940, Los Angeles County District Attorney Buron Fitts convened a grand jury to investigate "a Communist objective to overthrow the government and assassinate leading industrialists who refuse to 'play ball.'" A former CPUSA organizer testified to the grand jury that the party had set up the HANL in order to raise funds from wealthy members of the film industry. He testified that "because of Hitler's anti-Semitic program, the Communist party conceived the idea of playing on the fears of the Jewish people and getting them into the Communist party by selling them on the idea that the party, being an international organization, was the only agency in position to effectually combat the influence of Hitlerism and afford protection to the Jews". ==End of League==

After the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was signed in August 1939, guaranteeing neutrality between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, communist-backed organizations were no longer allowed by the Comintern to oppose Nazism. to the American Peace Mobilization. == References ==