Revisiting the “Temple of Liberty”: Nazi Germany and the Czechoslovakian Pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair

By the time the Czechoslovakian Pavilion opened at the New York World’s Fair in May 1939, the exposition grounds in Flushing, Queens had become the only place where the country still existed. Led by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, the campaign to open the Czechoslovakian Pavilion was championed by officials and everyday New Yorkers alike, and ultimately raised enough support to maintain the pavilion across each of the exposition’s two seasons in direct defiance of Nazi Germany. Following its annexation of Czechoslovakia one month before the 1939 World’s Fair opened that spring, the Third Reich demanded that the World’s Fair Corporation destroy any and all exposition material suggestive of Czechoslovakian sovereignty. Through analysis of archival records from both the Mayor’s Office in New York and the Federal Foreign Office in Berlin, this paper will explore the impact of the popular support afforded the Czechoslovakian delegation in New York and what role it might have played in either curbing or accelerating the Reich’s overtures to ethnic Germans and Nazi sympathizers within the United States, namely those affiliated with the German-American Bund. It will also, however, consider the impact this popular support had on more official channels by turning to the papers of Secretary of State Cordell Hull and his consular staff in order to better understand the tension between the American diplomatic corps and the political will of the Third Reich in the weeks before the outbreak of the Second World War. Although Nazi Germany reneged on its commitment to erect its own national pavilion in New York in the eleventh hour, this paper makes clear that the regime still attempted to exploit the World’s Fair as a medium through which it could assert itself as a hegemonic force in geopolitical as well as cultural terms.