Free American State (Part III)

Again, special thanks to @Bookmark1995 for writing the initial piece, and coming up with the original idea.

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By July, 1944, the once prosperous Free American State was now in ruins, as even the most basic services crumbled due to damage from the labor shortages, the increasing evacuation of civilians, and the extreme Soviet weather. The once picturesque community became a virtual dump and graveyard. Trash was no longer being collected, the streets were no longer being cleaned. Even the crematorium no longer performed to peak capacity, still having damage sustained from the uprising and lacking the workers to maintain it. The once beautiful homes were beginning to decay in the harsh Soviet summer.

With little services left and the city virtually unlivable, most of the remaining civilians fled, some attempting to surrender to the approaching Soviet-American forces, others fleeing back to Germany. Those that remained began to turn on each other, fighting for the scraps of rations that were still being sent.

The dismal conditions of the Free American State were only exacerbated by the deteriorating mental states of its founders, who reacted poorly to the news of successful Soviet-American advances.

Effinger never recovered from his gunshot wound, and was bedridden for the last few months of his life. Most of his orders were carried out by his longtime Silver Legion associate Major Dayton Dean. Dean oversaw more killings of laborers and converted POWs in response to the rebellion. Dean also began executing Catholics, feeling “Papist collaborators” were also responsible, directly defying a Nazi order.

Since the rebellion, Pelley’s own mental state had itself declined into severe depression and near-insanity. Once a dedicated administrator and taskmaster, ensuring that the community and its services ran smoothly and maintaining the veneer of Constitutional government, he began withdrawing himself from governing. He no longer bothered to meet with his puppet senators, and he forgoed the idea of “committees” approving his legislation. He spent most of his time in his “Executive Mansion”, either trying to get more resources or in bed, lamenting that he couldn’t get more resources.

When he did emerge to the public, he had noticeably gained weight and the once fiery orator would give small, barely comprehensible speeches. He attempted to maintain his asceticism, but was unable to really muster the energy. As Effinger slowly declined in health, Pelley viewed Dean as a power hungry usurper, and soon came into conflict with his own ASSB over restrictions.

Despite the horrid conditions and lack of support, Pelley continued to try to maintain the facade of a thriving community. During a cold February day, he forced the remaining civilians to march in a pro-American rally, complete with waving American flags. This haunting procession through the mostly destroyed town would be captured on the final film produced by Patriot Studios.

By now, the Germans were largely expelled from the Soviet Union, and with Comintern poised to take the region, Berlin saw the FAS as a drain. Even Ford saw no point in maintaining it, and rations became smaller and smaller. To maintain the quality of life in his own home, Pelley began increasing taxes, and even seizing property to sell off. The palatial splendor of the Executive Mansion continued to persist to the final days of the Maly Trostenets community.

By October 1944, the now triumphant Soviet and American armies were only 25 kilometers from Maly Trostenets and whatever rations were left were finally cut. By this time, the community had become an image of hell. Bodies of the dead littered the streets, victims of famine or Effinger and Dean’s crusade. Once picturesque homes were reduced to rotting death traps. The few remaining civilians lived largely like the Belarussian laborers. Pelley himself was almost permanently confined to his home, Effinger was released from care prematurely, and was confined to bed because of infections from poor care. The American population of 5,000 had declined to almost 800, with some parts being as quiet as a grave.

When news reached Pelley of the cut rations and the diversion of troops, he began making preparations for the evacuation On October 10, Virgil Effinger was found dead in his home in a pool of his blood. At the time, his murder was blamed on “Bolshevik infiltrators”. Instead of receiving an autopsy, his body was taken to the same crematorium, where it was turned to ash.

Due to the circumstances of the war, Effinger’s death has remained a mystery. Some believe he died slipping and falling, his poor health causing him to bleed out. Some believe that the culprit was Major Dayton Dean, hoping to enact his own coup to save the FAS. Others believe that Effinger had in fact been murdered by members of the SS or on the orders of Pelley, as many correspondence between Berlin and Pelley declared Effinger to be a “deranged and violent wastrel.” Some even believed one of the enslaved Belarusian maids killed him to end his terror.

Pelley blamed Dean for failing to protect Effinger, and in a show trial, had him and 2 other ASSB officers executed.

Between November 3-7, 1944, Pelley and the remaining members of the community began the evacuation with scorched earth policies: buildings destroyed to spite the enemy, evidence of war crimes burned, the fanatical committing suicide and also murdering their own families, and any surviving civilians either shot dead or brought along the retreat to be enslaved or imprisoned in a death camp.

By December 10, when Americans and Soviets arrived, they found little more than mass graves and burnt out homes, a sight that many had sadly become desensitized to.

Jack Kirby, one of the troops to have initially explored the town, recalled:
“I remember entering one of the homes. The smell was just overwhelming. I think it might’ve been the rotting food still in the kitchen, or the dead commander lying on the table. Rats were swarming around. I picked up a shattered photo of the commander and his family. I wondered what happened to his wife and son.”

The remaining Belarusians had a mixed reception to the arrival of American troops. Some had instinctive fear owing to their experience with the exiles, while most remembered the heroism of American POWs during the rebellion or their show of solidarity throughout the occupation.

The news that a group of Americans had taken over a Belarusian village and turned it into a perverse vision of American Exceptionalism through the lens of Nazism was something of a morbid shock to the RevCom, who only had vague reports up to that point of an exile government being set up in Maly Trostenets and had built a town. The location was thoroughly excavated and catalogued, survivors interviewed, and the civilians forced to dig graves or provide whatever food they had left for the Belarusian survivors.

Any remaining guards found in the vicinity of the town were killed.

The famed journalist and author Vasily Grossman, one of the first to penetrate the FAS, later wrote in his wartime novel Red Soil : “The leaders of the Free American State sought to both resurrect the demons of America’s bourgeois past and infuse it with a Nazi mysticism. That perverted combination awoke some strong feelings amongst the American comrades.”

His crimes preserved and recorded for the ages, William Dudley Pelley was issued an arrest warrant by the Soviet Union in December, 1944. By then, Pelley had fallen out with most of the NSDAP leadership over his failure and the waste the FAS ended up being. Still, his longtime friend Henry Ford took pity, and gave Pelley a Ford-GmbH dealership in Lubeck, Germany, where he could run the FAS, with his remaining Congress as salesmen. Despite his loss of power and prestige, Pelley still remained devoted to his demented cause. He continued to run the Free American State from the dealership with his “workers”, speaking as if he still controlled an entire community. A common theme in his conversation was his delusional belief that he would “retake Washington from the Reds.”

But as German cities were pounded by British and American bombers, even his delusions were shattered, especially when his apartment and dealership was destroyed by an air raid on September 10, 1945. By then, Ford was already captured by the Yugoslavs and the Comintern and the Allies were slowly closing in on Germany. The Nazi leadership had no desire to help Pelley any further.

Pelley, finally realizing the cause was lost, attempted one final gambit: using a fake ID, he would travel across the border into Switzerland on September 21. His hope was to get a fake passport and hopefully head to Cuba where whatever followers he had left there could shield him (he understood he was unwelcome in Cuba, so kept his identity discreet).

However, when he reached the Cuban embassy, he was told to wait by an embassy employee. Unbeknownst to him, his passport photo had been flagged. Within hours, Pelley was escorted out of the building by security, and deported back to the American occupation zone of Germany.

Beyond his initial run-in with MacArthur in 1934 and subsequent exile, Pelley’s involvement with the Silver Legion scandal of 1941 had permanently soured the Americuban establishment regarding him. Following his declaration of war, MacArthur declared that any Cuban-American citizen who had fought for “the Axis or its allies” would be charged with treason and have their citizenship revoked. Pelley was placed on a list of “blacklisted individuals”, who could not enter Cuba, and would be flagged if they tried.

On September 29, 1945, Pelley arrived back in Maly Trostenets, where he was put on trial as a collaborator. Following a short trial, he was sentenced to death for his crimes. He was discovered dead in his cell the following day, having taken a cyanide pill.

But even after the death of Pelley, the ghosts of the Free American State would continue to haunt the world for decades. In 1945, Anthony Schmidt, the POW who escaped during his attempted conversion, published Maly Trostenets: Hell on Earth a few weeks after Pelley’s death, detailing his experiences in the FAS, giving a firsthand account of some of the personalities.

In 1948, John Henry George, the Nazified guard who had been convinced to rape his female comrade, was caught in Spain attempting to flee to Portugal. His court-martial (charged with treason, desertion, and war crimes) became publicized due to the hitherto unseen defense of “intense psychological coercion” (later compared to brainwashing following the Horn War, though this interpretation has been heavily criticized by those familiar with the case) George would be convicted on all counts and hung.

Accounts of the FAS rose through the 50’s and 60’s as part of the general trend of Holocaust survivor literature. Aleksandra Ulicionak*, a “house slave” in the home of a senator, released her memoir, The Last Train in 1953, describing a rare insider view of the FAS elite. After interviewing George during his trial and many survivors and even participants, historian Arthur Schlesinger released The Yanks are Coming in 1958 , detailing the history of the Free American State, from its antecedents in the Golden Circle and Fordlandia, to Pelley’s own long career as a right-wing provocateur, to the brutality of its wartime existence. It received generally positive reviews, though some survivors criticized the overt focus on the American influences and none on the Nazi influences.

In 1965, the Soviet documentary Inferno explored the story of Maly Trostenets through the survivors. The film was used as the basis for the controversial 1968 American film, Glorious Attack about the rebellion. The depictions of violence, both physical and sexual, caused an uproar, particularly in contrast with its more action-adventure tone.

In 1961, Heidi Glockner, the daughter of a German American Senator in the FAS and a member of the ASSB female auxiliary, was suddenly caught in a London suburb and deported for beating Belarusian and Jewish laborers. She would be sentenced to life. This trial is less known than the subsequent Mengele trial, but it and Schlesinger’s book described a guard named “John the Baptist”, who combined excessive torture with religiosity, including forcing laborers to kneel for hours in prayer or baptizing people in boiling water. Though fictional, combining stories of John Henry George and Pelley himself, the guard inspired Newt Gingrich’s 1972 thriller The Eichmann Papers , about a group of Nazi hunters hunting John, and its 1977 film adaptation.

The 1970s saw genre fiction take on the FAS. Kurt Vonnegut’s The Children’s Crusade and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow both reference the FAS and Pelley as symbols of Nazi and White American hubris. Kirby would use his experience in the ruined FAS and hearing stories of Pelley to craft the character Glorious Godfrey and his America themed “Happyland” in the Marvel Comics series The New Gods. The 1972 television series Moonbase 2000 featured an episode detailing a Nazi American underground colony attempting an attack on the titular moonbase. An early Harry Turtledove story, Nighttime in Picketsville, was an alternate history spy story set in a surviving Nazi Germany, with a rebuilt FAS now in occupied Hungary. In 1974, Ira Levin’s Fordlandia featured Pelley as a secondary villain, and the revamped Fordlandia was heavily influenced by the FAS.

In 1987, Amerika , a Franco-British television series starring former James Bond Sam Neill as Pelley, was released to generally positive reviews.

In 1993, Richard Heinz was finally caught, living under an assumed name in Toronto for over 40 years. His capture restarted interest in the FAS, including a French documentary Maly Trostenets in 1996, drawing on several years of interviews (starting before the Heinz capture), and Ram Singh’s The Patriot , based directly on the Heinz case.

2007’s Patriot Films, a documentary from West Germany, intersplices survivor testimony with surviving films from the FAS’ propaganda Patriot Films, exploring how the films emphasized the prosperity, in contrast to the brutality it was built on, as a commentary on Western European propaganda. 2014’s Amerikan Life interviews one of the last surviving children of the FAS, the son of a German-American who was an engineer at the crematorium.

Bigger than any media, Belarussian authorities preserved the remaining portions of the FAS, if only to use their utilities in the immediate post-war period and to show anti-capitalist exhibitions. In 1972, the portions were opened as a monument to be preserved, with some of decaying houses refurbished and part of the Capitol and Pelley’s White House restored, and an daily show meant to tell the story for tourists

In 1990, a museum was opened in the body of the Capitol, “The Museum for Maly Trostenet” with artifacts donated by survivors and museums across the world, with sites like the crematorium and the camp restored. It was deemed a “World Heritage Site” by UNESCO in 1999. In 2004, William Clay Ford, Jr., the great-grandson of Henry Ford, visited the site and apologized on behalf of his family and the Lincoln Motor Company. *[WPA]: Works Progress Administration *[NBI]: National Bureau of Investigation