Scout's Honor

April 21, 1938: A troop of Padvinders, Dutch-American Boy Scouts head up from Greenwich Village to Yorkville to sell cookies. It's a fundraiser to buy tickets to a Broadway show. Led by Mr. Minuet, who is mostly absent, they encounter boys who are members of the youth organization of the local Nazi organization, The German-American Bund. The day before, Hitler's birthday, a Bund rally was busted up by Jewish Gangsters, members of the Jewish Veterans of Foreign Wars. Yorkville, a neighborhood on Manhattan's Upper East Side, was a multi-ethnic neighborhood populated by Germans, Austrians, Hungarians, Czechs, and Jews from Central Europe. The German-American Bund tried to foster pro-Nazi ideas while pretending to be part of the American tradition. Although this story is fiction, many of the details in the book are historically accurate, such as the radio programs and some of the events referred to in the story.