SUFFOLK CLOSEUP: New Focus On Nazi Center In Suffolk County

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman 

With the opening of a play off-Broadway in Manhattan titled “Camp Siegfried,” what was a major Nazi center for Nazis in the New York area in years before World War II — Camp Siegfried, in the middle of Suffolk County—is receiving renewed attention.

It’s a fitting subject considering the role of Nazi sympathizers in the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, the rise of fascist movements in places around the world and also despotic government leaders—from Hungary to Nicaragua and, particularly, Putin in Russia. And there is also the sharp increase of antisemitic talk and incidents. 

Camp Siegfried consisted of a parade ground to which thousands of Nazis came by train and car to march in Nazi uniforms at rallies and listen to hate-filled speeches. It was surrounded by a housing settlement with roads such as Adolph Hitler Street.

The review of the play “Camp Siegfried” by Jesse Green in The New York Times noted how the play “deals with homegrown American Nazism as inculcated at a camp run by the German American Bund in Yaphank, N.Y., from 1936 to 1941. There, in [playright Bess] Wohl’s fact-based fiction, young Aryans are taught Master Race ideology….That there really was a Hitler Street in Yaphank, and roads named for Rommel and Goebells as well, gives ‘Camp Siegfried’ its big clonk of icky relevance….But Wohl…wants to do more than invoke the dread of the evil among us. She wants to expose the emotional roots of fascism that a typically political or social framing…underplays. In this case, that means looking at how right-wing radicalism can be fueled by, and feed into, hysteria…”

A Newsday piece by Verne Gay, headed “When Nazis came to Yaphank: ‘Camp Siegfried’ play explores dark chapter in LI history,” has a subhead, “How Easily Darkness Can Sneak Up On Us.” It cites “the authoritative history of Camp Siegfried by Marvin D. Miller. Miller was a longtime history teacher in Commack. He passed away in 2020. The book is, indeed, the “authoritative history” of the Nazi center and “dark chapter” in Long Island history.

I interviewed Miller after the book was published in 1983. 

Its title is “Wunderlich’s Salute” because that salute was a pivotal event in the saga of Camp Siegfried. It was 1938 and Suffolk County brought charges against six Nazi Bund leaders involved with Camp Siegfried accusing them of violating the New York State Civil Rights Law of 1923 requiring that “oath-bound” organizations file member lists with the state secretary of state. The prosecutor was Assistant Suffolk District Attorney Lindsay Henry.

Martin Wunderlich, a Bundist, was on the stand in Riverhead in a courtroom in which Judge L. Barron Hill of Southold presided.

From the exchange:

Judge Hill: “Stand up and show us how you salute the flag at Camp Siegfried.”

Wunderlich: “I salute the American flag as a member and proud member of the white race.” He then flung up his right arm in the Nazi salute.

Henry: “That is the American salute?”

Wunderlich: “It will be.”

Henry: “It will be? That is what you want to put over the United States, you and your crowd, make us salute that way. That is enough from you.”

After Wunderlich’s Nazi salute, Suffolk County won the case. Camp Siegfried was shut down in 1945. 

Hill and Henry were American patriots.

Hill was a pilot in World War I and Suffolk district attorney from 1932 to 1937 when he became a County Court judge. During World War II he organized the Suffolk County Defense Council which arranged for volunteers to be air-raid spotters and otherwise engage in civil defense. He died in 1985. 

Henry, raised in Babylon, rejoined the U.S. Navy in World War II (he had served in the Navy in World War I) and held the rank of captain. He commanded a landing craft flotilla that hit the shore on Omaha Beach in Normandy on D-Day in 1944. His actions that day caused President Harry Truman to award him the Silver Star for gallantry in action. He was elected Suffolk DA in 1947 and served until 1953. He died in 1959.

His son, named Patrick Henry, was Suffolk DA from 1978 to 1990. And he was a former Navy officer, too. He died in 2018. Lindsay Henry’s grandson, also named Lindsay Henry, is an attorney in Babylon and previously a member of the Babylon Town Board.

In 2016, the Suffolk County Community College-based Center for Social Justice and Human Understanding: Featuring the Holocaust Collection (I am its vice chairperson) held an exhibit titled: “Goose Stepping on Long Island: Camp Siegfried.” Professor Steven Klipstein, who for decades has taught Holocaust Studies at the college and is the center’s Holocaust scholar, opened the exhibit by declaring: “They chose Long Island because they thought it would be sympathetic to their ideas….I shake my head with incredulity about these people being so close” in proximity. “

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books. 

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP: Steven Englebright's Loss Is A Loss For The Environment

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

A big change resulting from the 2022 election in Suffolk County was the narrow defeat of 30-year (!) New York State Assemblyman Steven Englebright—a surprise upset. 

Steve for decades has been a giant in environmental affairs in Suffolk and the state. He was elected to the Suffolk Legislature in 1983 and in 1992 initially elected to the State Assembly. He has been the leading environmental figure in the New York State Legislature. He’s chair of the Assembly’s Environmental Conservation Committee. He’s been prime sponsor of hundreds of successful measures on the county and state levels on the environment.

“Nobody has made a bigger contribution to the environment,” commented Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele, Jr. last week. “Steve has been at the forefront of all the major environmental measures. He has made such a big difference,” said Thiele, of Sag Harbor, who has served with Englebright in the county and state legislatures.

Englebright, of Setauket, is especially proud that he helped “shape” the New York State Clean Air, Clean Water, and Green Jobs Bond Act approved overwhelmingly statewide in a referendum this past Election Day. He is equally proud of his labor last year on a “prelude to it,” a “Green Amendment” added to the state constitution. It, too, was approved overwhelmingly in a statewide referendum on Election Day 2021. 

Of the $4.2 billion bond act, he said: “We are an island, after all, and we need to challenge the overheating of the earth’s atmosphere and earth’s oceans. Long Island is at the frontline. It is important to do what we can to set an example to sister states and other nations in the fight against climate change.” The Green Amendment now enshrined into New York law declares that every person has “the right to clean air and water, and a healthful environment.”

A Democrat, he attributes his reported 23,707 to 22,734 loss to Republican lawyer Edward Flood to a spillover in Brookhaven Town of votes for town favorite son Lee Zeldin for governor, and “at the end of the campaign, dark money mailings full of misinformation and accusations over the bail issue.”

Steve’s love for the environment started early. He grew up in Bayside, Queens and “I saw the last farms in Bayside developed,” he was recalling last week. He spent time in “Bayside Woods—all gone now, built on. All the open space has been lost.” What happened to his boyhood home “left an indelible imprint.” He spent summers at the vegetable farm of his grandparents in Indiana. “I always walked in their shadow.” He spoke of his grandfather “leading me out into the field and showing me how to plant,” working in “my grandma’s garden” and exploring the “stream that ran along the farm. It was a very impactful part of my early life.” 

He went to the University of Tennessee for its “great geology program” and received a Bachelor’s Degree and later a Master’s in paleontology/sedimentology from Stony Brook University. Stony Brook hired him to “curate its geological collection.” Because of his background in museums—including as a junior curator at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum and volunteer in the vertebrae and paleontology collection at the American Museum of Natural History—he was asked to launch a museum. He founded the Museum of Long Island Natural Sciences at the university.

The first exhibit concerned the Long Island Pine Barrens. Steve understood the extraordinary purity of the water beneath the Pine Barrens, how their sandy porous soil allows rainwater to migrate cleanly to the aquifers below on which Long Islanders depend for all their potable water. Underneath the Pine Barrens, Englebright knew, was the finest of our water supply. And, he comprehended the ecological import of Pine Barrens habitat which includes many rare plants, birds and animals. 

In the 1970s and early 80s, hardly anyone else on Long Island understood any of this. The Pine Barrens were considered “scrub,” “wasteland”—not important like the land along the shoreline or farmland—and were designated in government development plans for industrial use.

The first exhibit focused on the Pine Barrens where the Hauppauge Industrial Park had gone—on top of Pine Barrens. “I had watched it, basically a complete ecosystem, wiped away and transformed into buildings and parking lots,” Steve recounted. He decided it “was basically unethical to simply document the passing of the ecosystem.” So, he decided to get into politics—running for the Suffolk Legislature—and through government get environmental action. 

Steve taught me and many others about the huge significance of the Pine Barrens. He would take people, one at a time, up Danger Hill in Manorville. From the top of it, one could see the Long Island Sound to the north, bays and the Atlantic Ocean to the south, and to the west and east great stretches of green Pine Barrens. We were looking, said Steve, at “Long Island’s reservoir.” He was critical to the passage of the Long Island Pine Barrens Protection Act of 1993 which has saved more than 100,000 acres of Pine Barrens. 

“I think I have the strongest environmental record in the history of the state legislature,” Steve said last week. What a loss his election defeat is to the state and this county!

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books. 

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP: Traffic

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

Most of us have gotten adjusted, are used to, the way traffic moves on Long Island and the rest of the New York Metropolitan Area. But once I had an experience which clearly exposed how frenzied, how often danger-filled, it can be. We had stayed too long on a vacation and it was Saturday in New Mexico and we all had to return Monday. So, the plan was to drive through the day and then night to get back. 

I couldn’t do it now, but a younger me had the energy to drive through New Mexico, into Texas, across Oklahoma, up to Arkansas and as the sun set and darkness came, into the Midwest, finally crossing into New Jersey, the New York City skyline appearing as sunrise arrived, and then on to Long Island.

With the traffic flow in the west still fresh in my mind, crossing the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and encountering New York and then Nassau and Suffolk County traffic, it was so apparent how many a driver in this part of the United States can be highly aggressive.

I was thinking about this experience recently reading an article in Newsday about fatal auto accidents on Long Island. Its headline: “Deadliest roads on Long Island: Route 25 and 27 had most crash fatalities over five-year span, analysis finds.” The article said “a Newsday analysis of federal data…identified the five deadliest thoroughfares” on Long Island between 2016 and 2020. State Routes 25, also “known as Jericho Turnpike and Middle Country Road, had 62 deaths, trailed closely behind by Route 27, also called Sunrise and Montauk highways, with 61 traffic facilities, according to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data.” Those roads were followed by State Route 25A, Suffolk County Route 80 and State Route 24.

And the analysis didn’t consider the Long Island Expressway—a kind of Main Street for Long Island—which for more than four decades I’ve driven on several times a week from our home in Noyac after receiving a position as a journalism professor at SUNY Old Westbury. 

That LIE drive is among some drivers with the mistaken idea that the LIE is the Indianapolis Speedway.

I am routinely passed (and I’m not a pokey driver) by cars wildly weaving through lanes of traffic at high speed. There are police cars along the LIE and they stop some of the speed-racer weavers. But there are still many left driving recklessly, dangerously. And then there are the tailgaters. 

Most LIE drivers motor sensibly and courteously, but far from all. When I get near SUNY Old Westbury and need to move right to get off at the Route 106/107 exit, most drivers are considerate and let me change into the lane they’re in, but not all. 

As to traffic deaths, I inputted these words last week into Google: “Fatal Auto Accidents Long Island Expressway.” Displayed were a cavalcade of items with headings starting: “Long Island Expressway Deadly Crash—NBC New York;” “Update: Woman Seriously Injured in LIE Crash in Yaphank;” “89-year-old driver killed in fiery crash on Long Island” (in Melville), “Long Island Expressway crash leaves man, 39, dead—PIX 11,” and so on. 

Regarding Route 27, when it gets out to around Westhampton and the East End, some drivers hit the gas and take off, like in airplanes. Then, Route 27 at Shinnecock Hills also becomes County Road 39. Years ago, when Suffolk County government officials figured a way to expand that often traffic-clogged road to four relatively narrow lanes, they set the speed limit at 35 miles per hour. This is posted on signs all along County Road 39, and painted on the highway itself, and is completely ignored. Accidents on County Road 39 are common. 

The Newsday piece on Long Island traffic fatalities has a subhead: “Experts blame speed.” Under it was the explanation: “Perilous conditions can occur when the thoroughfares cut through shopping areas and intersections where cyclists, pedestrians and cars converge.” 

Indeed, we live on Noyac Road in Noyac. When we first moved to Noyac nearly 50 years ago, we figured it would be a wonderful road for bicycling. However, for long stretches, the shoulders of Noyac Road on which cycling might be done are but a few inches in width. It can be cycling suicide. So, we forgot about using our bicycles on Noyac Road, now busier than ever with cars and trucks, many moving at high speed. 

On Long Island, beyond the behavior of a lot of drivers, there is the additional complication of how it is car-dependent, thanks largely to public works czar and roadbuilder (including the LIE) Robert Moses who never drove a car but worshipped the auto. Thus, transportation forms are very limited. European countries such as Holland have a wide array of transit options—trams, safe bicycle routes, trolleys, a profusion of local and long-distance trains, a wide variety of bus routes and even, yes, set-aside walking paths. That’s all so needed here.

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books. 

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP: Suffolk County's Cyberattack

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

Suffolk County government’s computer network was struck on September 8 by a massive cyberattack, and last week—three weeks later and hoping it was over—the county began what a spokesperson termed a “rolling restoration” of computer operations. 

The county government’s websites, email and other online systems were taken offline immediately after the cyberattack. Still, last week, most county computers remained shut. 

“Anything we have done has had to be manual,” County Comptroller John M. Kennedy, Jr. of Nesconset told me last week. 

Suffolk government has had to go back to using paper.

Its Information Technology division is involved in dealing with the cyberattack and the FBI has joined in.

Meanwhile, the hackers leaked county documents including details about businesses that have had contracts with the county and county records containing personal information of people including sensitive information such as their addresses and dates of birth. 

County government advised residents to periodically check their credit reports from one of the national credit reporting companies and look for “suspicious” activity.

The hackers have been threatening to leak more if Suffolk County government did not pay an amount of money that has not been publicly disclosed.

The website DataBreaches.net which publishes information about data breaches—and under its title has the line “The Office of Inadequate Security”—has been providing details about Suffolk government hacking.

One dispatch from DataBreaches.net, dated September 16, was titled “NY: Suffolk County struggles to recover from BlackCat ransomware attack.” It stated: “Suffolk County on Long Island joined the ranks of those hit by a ransomware attack, and the results and impact are not surprising. One headline on September 13 somewhat said it all: ‘County IT systems crippled, with websites, email down, five days after discovery of cyberattack.’” (That headline was on the website RiverheadLocal.)

DataBreaches.net continued that “county officials were working to send out paper checks to pay county vendors” and “nonprofits contracted to perform social services were a high priority for payment.”

“Then a ransomware team stepped out of the shadows to claim responsibility for the attack,” said DataBreaches.net. “Variously called ALPHV or ‘BlackCat,’ they issued a post on their dark web leak site.”

The ALPHV or BlackCat post, according to DataBreaches.net, was: “The Suffolk County Government was attacked. Along with the government network, the networks of several contractors were encrypted as well. Due to the fact that Suffolk County Government and the aforementioned companies are not communicating with us, we are publishing sample documents extracted from the government and contractor network.”

“The total volume of extracted files exceeds 4TB,” it said. TB in computer terms stands for terabyte. “A terabyte (TB) is a unit of digital data that is equal to about 1 trillion bytes,” explains the website Techtarget.com. 

The post from the hackers went on: “Extracted files include Suffolk County Court records, sheriff’s office records, contracts with the State of New York and other personal data of Suffolk County citizens. We also have huge databases of Suffolk County citizens extracted from the clerk.county.suf. domain in the county administration.”

“The post,” added DataBreach.net, “was accompanied by screencaps of various files that appear to have been exfiltrated from county systems.” Some of those files are then displayed in screen shots and thus are now accessible online.

The Suffolk County Police Department called upon the New York City Police Department for help and it sent 10 operators to assist the Suffolk department’s Communications Section. “While operations have continued, our emergency call operators had been operating around the clock and unfortunately had to go back to our old system where call details were recorded by hand,” said Suffolk Police Commissioner Rodney Harrison. The county’s Traffic Agency has been unable to process outstanding tickets. Civil service exams were postponed. 

And this was just part of the cyberspace mess being faced.

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books. 

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP : Rising Sea Level Is A Problem For Long Island

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

“The water is coming—there’s no longer much doubt about that,” began an article in The Washington Post this month. A just-issued analysis, it reported, done by Climate Central, a Princeton, New Jersey-based non-profit research group, determined that “hundreds of thousands of homes….and other properties” would “slip below swelling tide lines over the next few decades.”

That increased sea level rise is already happening.

And, the Climate Central researchers found, said The Post, that “nearly 650,000 individual, privately-owned parcels across as many as 4.4 million acres of land” along the coastlines of the United States “are projected to fall below changing tidal boundaries by 2050. The land affected could swell to 9.1 million acres by 2100.”

Long Island will be among the areas heavily affected.

Indeed, the East Hampton Town Board this month, in a unanimous vote, approved a Coastal Assessment Resilience Plan (CARP), “in recognition of the need for proactive planning to address its vulnerabilities to sea level rise, shoreline erosion and flooding.” CARP, an analysis put together over two years, flatly warned that the projected range of sea level rise “will transform East Hampton into a series of islands with permanent submergence of low-lying areas as early as 2070.” 

It says: “Rising sea levels and increased intensity of coastal storms undoubtedly will have an impact on nearshore homes and communities.”

CARP proposes a “retreat” of waterfront development away from the shoreline.

And that is a breakthrough for this area.

Perhaps “retreat” isn’t the best word to use. In a prescient talk in Suffolk County in 2013, titled “Alternatives for Protecting Our Dunes and Beaches,” Dr. Robert Young, director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University and co-author of the then recently published book, The Rising Sea, said “I don’t say ‘retreat’ anymore.” That’s because Americans, he said, don’t like to talk about retreating. Said Young: “No, we say relocate.”

Whether it’s called “retreat” or “relocate”—that is what is needed in the face of rising seas largely caused by melting glaciers caused by global warming.  

Still, despite the realism out of East Hampton, all over Long Island, says Kevin McAllister, founder and president of the Sag Harbor-based organization Defend H20, in an effort to ostensibly protect houses built along coasts, what’s now happening is a “rapid transformation of natural shorelines” with the placement of steel and vinyl bulkheads, geotextile sandbags and giant boulders.” 

This effort at “armoring” shorelines, says McAllister, “if left unchecked will erase walkable beaches and critical shoreline habit”—and also lead to more coastal erosion as armoring, in fact, ends up accelerating coastal erosion.

In a number of states, the folly of coastal armoring is being recognized. Stateline, the web publication of Pew Charitable Trusts, published an article last year about Virginia and Washington having “recently enacted laws to discourage armoring structures and promote ‘living’ shorelines which use natural elements to slow erosion and maintain habitats.” 

Stateline said “seawalls and bulkheads…known collectively as shoreline armoring, can block the natural flow of sand and sediment down the coast and multiply the forces of waves onto nearby shoreline—accelerating erosion elsewhere.”

The New York Times last week reported on how “a little-noticed section” of recent climate legislation passed by Congress and signed into law by President Biden marks “a shift by the federal government toward funding nature-based climate solutions.” It said: “Escalating climate threats have prompted a continuing debate among policymakers and experts about how best to guard against devastating damage, between those who prioritize building manmade infrastructure like sea walls—sometimes called “gray infrastructure”—and those who favor nature-based solutions, or so-called green infrastructure.”

Long Island is far from alone. A headline this month in USA Today: “Oceans rise, houses fall. The California beach home is turning into a nightmare.” Its story said: “Tens of thousands of people who live along California’s coast may be forced to flee in coming decades as climate change leads to rising seas and makes swaths of the state’s iconic coast uninhabitable.”

Harmonizing with nature and relocating structures built in the teeth of the sea, both are essential as seas rise. Still, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation is allowing armoring all over Long Island with “permissive permitting,” says McAllister. And many local boards, he says, aren’t doing much better. 

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books.