Biography
Hermann M. Schwinn was a West Coast leader of the German American Bund. He organized and spoke at Bund events in Southern California and worked closely with Hans Diebel and the Aryan Bookstore in Los Angeles. He was arrested after the United States entered World War II. He was named in the January 3, 1944 Washington indictment alleging conspiracy to undermine military loyalty under the Smith Act. The mass trial ended in a mistrial on December 7, 1944. The indictment was dismissed in December 1946; no conviction resulted in this case.
Life-date documentation
Nick Toczek, Haters, Baiters and Would-Be Dictators: Anti-Semitism and the UK Far Right (Routledge), page 40, identifies Hermann Max Schwinn, the Los Angeles Bund leader, as born in Hamburg on August 3, 1905. The indexed publisher-preview passage was available during this review, although the preview download link had expired. Book reference. Stephanie Landsem’s historical companion to Code Name Edelweiss, page 11, states that Hermann Schwinn died in 1973. The death is recorded at year precision only; no exact day or month is asserted. Publisher’s historical notes.
The original Camp McCoy roster as of 6:00 a.m. May 1, 1942 individually lists Hermann M. Schwinn as permanently interned there under serial ISN-HG-13-(Ci), transferred from the prisoner-of-war enclosure at Fort McDowell, California. This is direct evidence of administrative wartime confinement before the separate 1944 Washington sedition prosecution. The roster date is an observation of custody, not his arrest or admission date; no final discharge or measured total is established.
