https://vocal.media/theSwamp/anti-fascist-role-models-joe-the-mighty-atom-greenstein
In 1939, according to Cracked, Greenstein was just going about his business in New York City. While he was walking he saw a sign out front of a building which proclaimed No dogs or Jews allowed.
Greenstein wasn't going to put up with that bullshit.
Deciding his course of action, he fetched a ladder, and a bat. He returned to the building, climbed the ladder, and ripped down the sign. Something that the twenty or so Nazis who'd come outside to see what all the commotion was were less than pleased about.
Said Nazis decided they were going to inform Greenstein of their displeasure... and that was a serious miscalculation on their part.
Perhaps they assumed his height meant he was weak, or it was because he was dressed in street clothes rather than his performer's costume, but none of Greenstein's assailants had any idea the storm of fury that was coming their way. A trained martial artist and wrestler, in addition to being one of (if not the) strongest men in the world at the time, Greenstein took the Nazis apart like something out of a Captain America comic book. Legs were splintered, noses smashed, heads busted... it was legendary.
Greenstein was, of course, arrested. When he stood before a judge, the man in the black robe asked if these were all of the individuals involved in the incident. He was, of course, informed that not everyone who'd been part of the brawl was there... at least half the Nazis had been too badly beaten to leave the hospital. When the judge was then further informed that it was the gang of men who had attacked Greenstein simply because he was Jewish, the case was ruled self-defense and dismissed.
Greenstein went on to live a full life where he performed, taught, and fathered 10 children, dying in the 1970s of cancer (perhaps just to spite the doctors who'd given him the TB diagnosis). One of the most important legacies he left behind, however, is a very simple lesson too many of us have forgotten.
"Always punch Nazis."
