Hollywood Anti-Nazi League

The Hollywood Anti-Nazi League (later known as the American Peace Mobilization) was founded in Los Angeles in 1936 by Otto Katz and others to organize members of the American film industry to oppose fascism and Nazism. Although it was a communist front organization, run by the American popular front, it attracted broad support in Hollywood from both members and nonmembers of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). Like many such communist front groups, it ceased all anti-Nazi activities immediately upon the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939.

In 1936 the CPUSA ordered Otto Katz to raise funds and to found the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League (HANL). To kick off his work, Katz held a hundred-dollar-a-plate fundraising dinner, which was attended by, among others, Irving Thalberg, Jack L. Warner, David O. Selznick, and Samuel Goldwyn. John Joseph Cantwell, Cardinal of Los Angeles, was on hand to bless the proceedings. Actress and artist Gloria Stuart was also involved in the League's founding. Katz formed the HANL under the auspices of the "mother of all front groups," the American League for Peace and Democracy.

Katz and his cofounder, Hubertus zu Löwenstein, held an organizational meeting at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles. At the meeting, screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart and author Dorothy Parker, fellow members of the Algonquin Round Table, were named respectively chairman and honorary chairman by acclamation.

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