Double Agent : The First Hero of World War II and How the FBI Outwitted and Destroyed a Nazi Spy Ring (9781451667974)

by Duffy, Peter

  It’s unclear how he spent the remainder of 1938, a period during which the actions of Nazi Germany emerged as a central issue in American foreign policy. He may have been thinking about his employment prospects when he decided to return to Mülheim in early 1939. The press was forever writing about how Hitler’s military and industrial mobilization campaign had brought full employment to Germany. He could’ve been worried about the possibility of a repressive campaign against German Americans, a concern prevalent enough to inspire Hermann Göring to issue orders following Kristallnacht giving “all possible preferential treatment such as free passage, tax exemption for one year, and so on” to those “agricultural workers, skilled artisans, engineers, and technicians” of German descent in America willing to work in the fatherland. Sebold read about the Munich Conference in the Daily News and the Journal-American, he said, but didn’t see how it mattered to him. Perhaps he chose to go back to Germany because he was having troubles with his wife, from whom he had been separated for months at a time over the past two years. Maybe he was worried about the welfare of his family—just as he was when he went home and assisted during the French occupation of the Ruhr in the early 1920s. Or he could’ve been telling the whole truth when he claimed he just wanted to relax in the warm confines of his mother’s house. “I was run-down and not fully recuperated from my operation,” he said.

  “Did you hesitate to return to the Hitler Germany?” he was later asked.

  “No, I had nothing to do with Hitler,” Sebold said.

  “Weren’t you aware of the nature of the regime?”

  “But Hitler could not touch me. I was an American citizen. I had nothing to do with the government, with Germany. My hometown, my people lived there.”

  “You knew there were critical times abroad?”

  “There always were in Europe, for hundreds of years.”

  “So that you went to Germany to take a rest, absolutely oblivious to conditions that existed there?”

  “Yes, sir. Just a rest, a good long rest.”

  “Fully confident that you were protected and surrounded by the blanket of American citizenship?”

  “Sure.”

  His passport in hand, he boarded the Hamburg America liner Deutschland on February 2, 1939, carrying a single suitcase and a package. He did not know he was walking into a trap.

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  Leon Turrou’s long-delayed articles about the infamous German spy case were published in the New York Post in twenty installments from December 5, 1938, to January 4, 1939, concluding on the same day President Roosevelt began a public campaign to bolster national defense and revise neutrality legislation, a campaign aimed directly at containing Germany. “A war which threatened to envelop the world in flames has been averted,” FDR said during his State of the Union that evening, “but it has become increasingly clear that world peace is not assured.” Congress was receptive to his plans for a military buildup but unmoved by his comment that neutrality restrictions forbidding the sale of American armaments to combatant nations “may operate unevenly and unfairly—may actually give aid to an aggressor and deny it to the victim.” On January 12, Roosevelt asked for $525 million to fund an “emergency program for the strengthening of the defense of the United States,” with $300 million to be directed to the US Army Air Corps for the purchase of a minimum of three thousand new aircraft. “I suggest that $50 million of the $300 million for airplanes be made immediately available in order to correct the present lag in aircraft production due to idle plants,” he said, which promised an increase in work for contractors involved in every aspect of a warplane’s function. The isolationists were supportive just as long as FDR was prevented from finding a way to draw America into a European fight that would allow him to assume autocratic powers. He “cares no more for what may happen to us in a war than the man in the moon,” said Senator Hiram Johnson of California. “He has developed a dictator complex.” When a newly developed Douglas medium bomber crashed in California with a French military observer aboard, an obvious breach of neutrality, the outrage was so overwrought that the entire Senate Military Affairs Committee tramped over to the White House for a private conference with the president, who stated forthrightly that the future of our civilization depended on ensuring the military strength of the Allies. “It is not a question of secrecy,” he told them. “We have just one secret, and that is the question of the bombsight, and that has not been disclosed to the French and won’t.” The thought would’ve never occurred to him that the Nazis already had it.

  On January 27, Random House released Turrou’s Post series in a swastika-bedecked hardcover under the title Nazi Spies in America. The public seemed receptive to the former G-man’s self-glorifying account of how he “grilled” various evildoers until they “broke” under the pressure of his investigative brilliance, although the book revealed little more (and sometimes less) about the workings of the spy ring than had already been broadcast at trial. “There is evidence that for every spy we exposed, dozens more lurk hidden here,” he and his uncredited coauthor (David Wittels) wrote in the concluding pages. The book quickly sold out its first printing. A British edition was released as The Nazi Spy Conspiracy in America. The New York Times raved that Turrou’s “intensely interesting” tale served as a warning to the country that “the business of spying is not finished, by any means!” while the Los Angeles Times worried that “hysterical accusations” would only cause us “to grow blind to our immediate danger from foreign agents.”

  The hysterical accusations—Dr. Griebl’s fraudulent assertion that the German espionage system had embedded agents in every armament factory and shipyard in the United States—inspired the title of the film that Warner Brothers was rushing into production, Confessions of a Nazi Spy, which the studio’s bosses intended as a new kind of Hollywood movie. It would be a pseudodocumentary exposé that would serve the dual function of performing well at the box office while delivering a propagandistic broadside against an actually named menace. In the first American film to utter the words Adolf Hitler, the foe would be identified as Nazi (pronounced “nazzy”) spies who spoke in cartoonish accents, traveled on German passenger liners, plotted in an unidentified German neighborhood in New York, listened to raving speeches at “Nazi Bund” rallies and summer-camp outings, stole secrets from US defense installations, and didn’t obsess about the Jews, whose plight goes unmentioned in apparent deference to audience sensibilities. Edward G. Robinson, who had become famous playing Italian American mobster Caesar Enrico “Rico” Bandello in Little Caesar (1931) but was born Emanuel Goldenberg in Bucharest, begged one of the producers to cast him in the “international spy ring story you are going to do.” Robinson said, “I want to do that for my people.”

  As filming began on a soundstage in California, Bundesführer Fritz Kuhn was in the midst of planning for the last great act of public Nazism in the United States. He hoped a “Mass Demonstration for True Americanism” in Madison Square Garden would inspire the anti-Semites of America to join a German-led fight to end the Jewish defilement of the nation’s ideals. Denied the right to represent the whole of German America, he offered himself as the leader of a multiethnic Fascist movement that pledged itself as loyal to one country and one country only. “The Bund is an Organization of American Citizens unequivocally committed to the Defense of the Flag, Constitution, and Sovereignty of these United States,” according to a handbill promoting the event, “and therefore to the Defense of the right and duty to proportionate representation in the conduct of the Nation of the more than 100,000,000 Aryan (WHITE GENTILE) Americans, as being the ONLY means of preserving the Independence and the Christian Culture and Civilization of this our Country!” The message was directly aimed at the Nazis’ newest ally on the streets of New York, the followers of the country’s most prominent non-German supporter of Hitler’s racial policies, the noxious radio priest Father Charles Coughlin (pronounced “cawg-lin” or “cog-lin”). The Christian Front was a thug
gish band of (mostly) Irish Americans from neighborhoods in upper Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, an anti-Semitic hate group that shouted slurs at highly trafficked intersections, picketed Jewish-owned businesses, aggressively hawked copies of the priest’s 250,000-circulation weekly newspaper, and looked to start fights with anyone who dared challenge them.

  On February 19, the rally’s eve, a note was delivered to City Hall warning that three time bombs would be detonated if the Nazis were allowed to speak, which led to security sweeps within and around the Garden, then situated at its third location on Eighth Avenue between Forty-Ninth and Fiftieth Streets, just to the west of the bustle of upper Times Square. In the hours before the event, a NYPD deployment that would grow to 1,745 cops, said to be the largest in the city’s history up to that point, began closing off streets immediately surrounding the arena. “So strict were the police that even persons living and working within the guarded area were banned unless they could convince the police of their identity,” wrote one reporter. “This caused some grumbling among residents of the area. Many spurious press cards were torn to pieces by the police and their bearers escorted back to the police lines.” With Mayor Fiorello La Guardia out of town, acting mayor Newbold Morris took to the radio airwaves at 6:00 p.m., urging the citizenry “to shun this assemblage as one would a pestilence.” All told, about ten thousand protesters gathered for an evening of picketing and sloganeering that included several attempts to break through barricades manned by cops who were unafraid to use physical force.

  Upon entering the hall, spectators were greeted by a thirty-by-fourteen-foot likeness of George Washington behind an elevated speaker’s platform that was flanked on either side by star-spangled banners and swastika-adorned Bund flags with the letters AV (Amerikadeutscher Volksbund) on a red background. Large signs decorated the upper decks: WAKE UP AMERICA—SMASH JEWISH COMMUNISM; 1,000,000 BUND MEMBERS BY 1940; and STOP JEWISH DOMINATION OF CHRISTIAN AMERICANS. The evening began with a color guard parading down the aisles and up onto the stage accompanied by a fife-and-drum corps playing the “Badenweiler March,” Hitler’s traditional entrance theme. A young woman identified in the program as Marguerite Rittershaus sang the American national anthem. By the time the main part of the evening began, the Garden was filled to its capacity of nineteen thousand customers, who paid forty cents for the cheap seats and $1.10 for the ones closer to the spittle. The addition of three thousand “ushers” of the uniformed Ordnungsdienst (OD) pushed the attendance figure to twenty-two thousand, according to the Times’ estimate. In the rhetorical manner of Adolf Hitler, the speeches grew progressively more extreme as the evening went on. Talk of “the moral erosion and subsequent disintegration of our national unity” soon turned into paranoia about “the oriental cunning of the Jew Karl Marx-Mordecai!” Boos were heard at the mention of “President Rosenfeld,” “the international Rothschilds,” and “the Jewish Federal Reserve System.” Hitler, Mussolini, and Father Coughlin received loud cheers. When one Nazi spoke of the “Golden Rule to treat all human beings with a human face,” journalist Dorothy Thompson burst out in loud and sustained laughter, which caused angry Bundists sitting near the press box to demand her removal. “I was immediately seized by two policemen, whose salaries as a New York taxpayer I help to meet, and I was also set upon by a husky uniformed storm trooper, whose movement is following the detailed instructions of a foreign power,” she wrote. “I was roughly hustled to the door.”

  Dressed in his Bund uniform with Iron Cross prominently displayed on the lapel, Fritz Kuhn delivered a belligerent keynote in broken English. The speech included a long disquisition on the history of Jewish crimes against America, beginning with the perfidious wire-puller who, he said, was responsible for Benedict Arnold’s treachery and ending with the perfidious wire-puller (financier Bernard Baruch) who was “set to drive the United States into a European war on any old pretext.” Near the end of the address, a young man in civilian clothes leapt from his seat and made a mad dash for the platform. “Down with Hitler!” shouted Isadore “Izzy” Greenbaum, a twenty-six-year-old plumber’s assistant from Williamsburg, Brooklyn. “Down with Nazism!” He came within a few feet of the Bundesführer before OD men tackled him, delivering a beating convulsive enough to tear his clothes from his body and cause a microphone to fall from the lectern. After a handful of NYPD officers carried him from the premises (“I’m no Communist!” he yelled on the way out), Kuhn described the nine items of the new Bund charter (which pledged to remove Jewish influence from various quarters of American life) and exhorted white gentiles of good character, patriotic zeal, and Aryan stock to consider filling out the membership application on an inside page of the program. “Free!” he thundered. “America!” the crowd responded. The chant was repeated two more times in imitation of the “Sieg”-followed-by-“Heil” routine indigenous to the Reich.

  It was quite a showing. “There can be no doubt that the German-American Bund has by this massed demonstration scored a considerable success as regards organization,” wrote Hans Borchers, the Nazi consul general in New York, in his report to Berlin. “It has been to the advantage of the Bund that it has understood how to make good use of the general trends of thought of the American people, such as, for instance, Coughlinism, to further its aspirations, although, as a result of this, the former far more exclusively volksdeutsch character of its meetings has been not a little modified.” So appalling was the Bund’s triumph that the American public was nearly united in its condemnation. “There isn’t any sense in having these bunds in the country,” said Senator John Gurney, a Republican of South Dakota. “I don’t think we ought to allow it.” From the other side of the aisle, Senator John Bankhead, an Alabama Democrat, suggested establishing “concentration camps for those trying to spread un-American propaganda.” Martin Dies announced that the next session of his committee would devote renewed attention to the Bund. Even Father Coughlin distanced himself, suggesting that any of his followers who attended probably went out of curiosity’s sake. “The meeting was held,” said Mayor La Guardia upon his return home. “That’s that.” The mayor neglected to mention that he had devised a plan to take down Fritz Kuhn. He instructed his Department of Investigation to determine whether the Bund had paid all applicable sales and business taxes. At the same time, Manhattan district attorney Thomas E. Dewey, the mustachioed thirty-seven-year-old who was such a preternaturally gifted scourge of racketeers that he was seen as a serious contender to challenge President Roosevelt in 1940, ordered his own investigation into the Bund’s fiscal affairs.

  Within three months, Dewey’s office had charged the Bundesführer with six counts of first-degree grand larceny, four counts of second-degree grand larceny, and two counts of third-degree forgery. Kuhn was accused of embezzling $14,548.59 in Bund funds, including $8,907.35 raised by the Madison Square Garden rally.

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  For all its elements of farce, the Turrou investigation had succeeded in destroying the Nest Bremen part of Germany’s spy operation in New York, forcing its most experienced couriers off the Atlantic route and causing the flight or imprisonment of valuable in-country figures. The German passenger liners were livid at the besmirching of their reputation in the eyes of paying customers, who were less willing than ever to be associated with the swastikas flying at the West Side piers. The Foreign Ministry was predictably incensed that the task of keeping Americans from taking sides against the Reich had been made even harder. Nest Bremen’s spymaster was able to convince Admiral Canaris that he didn’t deserve to be punished for the debacle, but his career directing operations against the United States was effectively over. “The Nest was reduced to making a fresh start with new couriers buying magazines and newspapers in New York,” according to the British postwar report.

  The Abwehr’s principal operation in the city was in the hands of Nikolaus Ritter, who, as the head of Ast Hamburg’s office responsible for procuring air force intelligence, boasted a small cadre of agents whos
e most important members were Hermann Lang at Norden; “Colonel” Fritz Duquesne, the South African–born fraudster and veteran spy who was posing as a “consulting aeronautical engineer” under the banner of a front business, the Air Terminals Co.; and a high-level engineer at the Sperry Gyroscope Co. of Brooklyn who had been supplying technical data to Nazi Germany for nearly three years.

  Everett Minster Roeder, forty-four, grew up as the brainy delinquent of an old-line German American family from the Bronx, a gun enthusiast and poker player who horrified his relatives by driving his pollution-emitting motorcycle into the kitchen, according to family legend. His father was Carl Roeder, a celebrated piano instructor who kept a studio at Carnegie Hall, taught at the Juilliard School of Music, and could be found every Sunday behind the organ at the Alexander Avenue Baptist Church. Young Everett did not have the musical precocity of his sister Dorothy, who was hailed in the pages of Musical America (“Piano Teacher’s Young Daughter Surprises Hearers by Exceptional Talent”) when she was nine years old. Instead, his ability lay in the intricacies of a draftsman’s blueprints.