by Duffy, Peter
In the years following the war, it would be revealed that the FBI had not prevented Communist spies from infiltrating the Manhattan Project, which developed the real-life Process 97. With secrets gathered from the likes of Klaus Fuchs, a wartime employee of the Los Alamos Laboratory who confessed to his crimes in 1950, the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin was able to develop a successful atomic bomb much sooner than otherwise would have been possible.
Two months after the film opened, Sebold wrote a Christmas letter to Jim Ellsworth that mentioned nothing of the screen portrayal. “I had some spell with my shoulder again. But through the [FBI] office in San Francisco, I was recommended to some of the best doctors in S.F. The man took x-rays and found a broken right shoulder and a piece of bone that was broken off a long time ago. And surprisingly the man fixed me up and neck and shoulder pain are gone.” Sebold described his pleasure in decorating the couple’s small Christmas tree. “I get quite a kick out of doing this. That’s the second tree in Walnut Creek.” He was also full of enthusiasm for the poultry business. “The chickens are still laying and that means a lot. I improved the place some more. I bought the land which lays in back of the garage—about one acre with a lot of pine and almond trees. Now all I need is a horse to get around my place.”
At Bureau headquarters in Washington, memos were circulating about the necessity of learning the fate of Sebold’s mother, sister, and two brothers. “You will recall that just prior to the trial in this case some discussion was had as to whether William Sebold, the informant, would testify in view of the fact that to do so would in all probability endanger the position of his family still residing in Germany,” wrote assistant director D. M. Ladd. “Notwithstanding the safety of himself, he volunteered to testify and did a remarkably good job.”
In a letter to J. Edgar Hoover on December 17, 1945, Ladd delivered the FBI’s most explicit statement on Sebold’s achievement: “As you know, Sebold gave us the most outstanding case in the Bureau’s history. The ‘Ducase’ has been the basis for a terrific amount of publicity dealing with the Bureau’s success prior to and during World War II. This case opened the door to real knowledge of German espionage activities and it is impossible to describe the situation in which we might have found ourselves had not Sebold turned against the Germans in our favor. It is to be pointed out that unlike many other double agents Sebold turned against the Germans from a patriotic love for the United States and conducted himself always in absolute accord with the Bureau’s wishes. He has not sought personal notoriety and has never placed his personal wishes or fortune above the Bureau’s interests.”
Sebold’s next letter to Ellsworth, not written until the following summer, July 6, 1946, brought good news. He had independently learned that no retribution had been meted out against his family. “My mother is still alive, 74 years old. She was the only one left in the house during the war. Everyone else went to the country. She gave me quite a humorous story about it, and I had to laugh despite the drama. She went through plenty.” He said his sister Maria and brother Karl also survived. But his other brother, Hermann, and his wife were killed in an automobile accident. “They were buried on Christmas Day 1945. My Hermann was always a reckless wild boy but in a good way, a regular sportsman. I am sort of glad he was instantly killed and not crippled for the rest of his life.” Sebold told Ellsworth that he was thinking of leasing the chicken farm and going to Germany to see his mother, who was now living in the basement of her bomb-damaged home. “Besides I’m too young to bury myself in the country among a bunch of cackling chickens and griping mossbacks. It’s a nice life for a guy about 80 years old with gout in one foot,” but not for a healthy forty-seven-year-old such as him.
A month later, he wrote again, on August 9, the one-year anniversary of the Nagasaki bombing: “A couple days ago, I received another letter from Germany and my mother says she is ill. She grieves too much for her Hermann and she wants to see me.” Sebold told Ellsworth that he was considering a job with the US occupation forces. “I have the paper filled out on my desk. But I cannot come to a decision. I have everything I ever wished for, and Germany doesn’t appeal to me a bit. If only my mother wasn’t there.” He then wondered if the FBI could facilitate her relocation to the United States. “Since my doings were not recognized by the government I have no right to ask any special favors, otherwise I would write direct to Mr. Hoover or the president of the country. Now I am asking you if that would be the right thing to do. I never asked for anything. My mother could make the trip by plane at my expense. That would take only a couple of days in this advanced age. They would give her a sedative and before she knows what happens, she would land in Concord, only ten miles from Walnut Creek.” He said he was willing to “bite the sour apple” and return to Germany himself, but “if there is a remote chance to do it the other way, I would be very happy. I am only afraid that my mother can’t hack the wintertime in her weakened condition. And if she could come over here, that would give her a different outlook on life after all that misery in Germany.”
Nearly two months later, on October 1, 1946, Sebold penned his last letter to Ellsworth that survives. He acknowledged “all the trouble you went through in account of my mother,” but “things took a different turn.” He was having health problems. His stomach ulcer had recurred. “They gave me five blood transfusions, and now I cannot have my mother here. On top of that I face another operation. They discovered a broken vertebra in my spine and that has to be fixed by grafting a piece of shinbone in it. I am not able to work any more, have to be very careful.” He showed a hint of impatience with the Bureau, the first instance of it in his letters to Ellsworth. He wanted to know why notebooks taken from him during the trial hadn’t been returned. “I don’t see why the government has any more use for them and, if you think they do, they can make a Photostat of it and send the originals back to me. I waited all these years to have them returned. If I don’t get them back, I’d like to know the reason why. This is my personal property.” The correspondence ended on a warmer note: “Hoping you and your loved ones are well settled in the new house now. If you ever come this way again, Helen will cook you your favored dish.”
Over the next several years, he continued to suffer physical debilitation, which led the FBI to provide him with financial assistance that he never requested. The files also indicate that five or six agents from the San Francisco office donated blood to assist in his ulcer recovery. In order to supplement his limited income from the chicken business, Sebold rented out three apartments on his property and took occasional jobs, working as a janitor at the Walnut Creek Post Office and “as a clean-up man at the rest room and bar of the Club Diablo.” He left the first position because of a disagreement with the postmaster and quit the second because he “found this job of the very lowest type.” Although he succeeded in patenting his own invention, an air-conditioning unit that kept eggs from reaching the germinating temperature of 68° Fahrenheit, Sebold failed in his attempts to make much money from what he called the Eggmaster.
During a talk with an agent in May 1949, Sebold “mentioned in passing that the motion picture company which produced The House on 92nd Street, which was based on his experiences, no doubt realized a good profit from this film. He felt that this was excellent publicity for the Bureau and was glad they could have it, but mentioned that while he did not know whether the Bureau received any revenue from this film, someone certainly did.”
In January 1950, he quit poultry farming because “it has developed that the bottom has literally dropped out of the chicken business in California which has left the informant in an unfortunate position,” according to the Bureau.
Two months later, he told the San Francisco office about a letter he received from his brother in Mülheim. “I will not neglect to inform you that you must be careful,” wrote Karl Sebold. “About a year ago a customer said to me, ‘We will dispose of him.’ What this means I do not know.” Bill Sebold “felt in reading between the lines that t
he Nazis were still interested in finding him for the purpose of revenge. He indicated that he would be careful in his dealings with any strangers.”
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Within just a few years of the end of the war, the leading spies started to leave prison. After serving her sentence in the women’s facility in Alderson, West Virginia, Lilly Stein was deported back to Austria, a survivor of the Holocaust who owed her life to the power of her sexual allure. According to the story told by her American relatives, she was last heard from working at a luxury resort near Strasbourg. “Maybe in charge of men’s special entertainment,” quipped one of her cousins.
During his first years behind bars, Ed Roeder requested an information bulletin from the US government, “How Inventors Can Aid National Defense.” He sent along a number of ideas, some of which bore a close resemblance to what he’d delivered to the Germans, but none were ever accepted. He also authored a book, Formulas in Plane Triangles, which contains little prose and is impenetrable to anyone but a specialist. Released on July 6, 1950, he lived in Milwaukee and then Peoria, Illinois, working as an engineer and firing recreational weapons until his death in 1955. When the Justice Department asked him in a 1952 questionnaire to name his former espionage supervisor, his response was “William Sebold.”
Fritz Duquesne spent World War II in Leavenworth, composing letters to the newspapers about how he was “framed up by a dirty German punk that got $20,000 for the job.” His attempts to establish contact with his girlfriend Evelyn Lewis, who was released from custody in 1942, were rebuffed. “The tragedy and suffering which his activities and connections in this war have brought upon me and my family have been almost beyond repair,” Lewis wrote to the authorities, “and any thought of any future connection is quite impossible.” By early 1945, the once-dashing soldier of fortune was suffering from such mental and physical debilitation that he was transferred to the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri. Yet the old charm remained. “I would certainly like to know more of the details of this man’s life,” wrote a prison official to the warden in 1952. “If you can encourage him to write his exploits and adventures, I wish you would do so.” After Duquesne was released in 1954, he returned to New York. He died an indigent at City Hospital on Welfare Island a few years later, but not before giving one last lecture to the Adventurers Club. The title was “My Life—in and out of Prison.”
Initially incarcerated at Leavenworth, Hermann Lang was transferred to the federal prison at Milan, Michigan. As part of his efforts to win early release, he sent a handwritten letter to Senator William Langer of North Dakota on April 2, 1948, describing “the irresponsibility and untrustworthiness” of “this man Sebold,” who threatened to “bring harm to my relatives in Germany” unless Lang revealed the Norden secret, which he refused to do. Lang told the staunchly anti-Communist senator that Judge Byers had barred a witness who knew of Sebold’s “Communistic activities” from testifying. It isn’t “a pleasant thought to consider” that he was sitting in jail “on the basis of evidence given by a person whose political ideas and allegiance run so completely counter to the established principles of our government—a man of the political ideology which today is the subject of penetrating inquiries.” Lang was playing to his audience. The House Un-American Activities Committee was entering its second, more famous phase of its existence. Joseph McCarthy had just been elected the junior senator from Wisconsin. And J. Edgar Hoover was utilizing powers granted to him during the Nazi scare to become a colossus in the fight against the subversive ideology he always loathed above any other.
Since his US citizenship had been revoked back in 1943, Lang was deported to (West) Germany following his release on July 25, 1950, which meant that he served less than half of his eighteen-year sentence. Three years later, he was hailed in the pages of Germany’s popular newsweekly Stern, which presented the Sebold investigation as a morality tale in which Lang was a national hero who suffered the Wagnerian stab in the back, the Dolchstoss, from a perfidious turncoat who was only pretending to love the fatherland. Lang “accomplished something tremendous for Germany, which would secure him a place of honor in the history of the Luftwaffe,” the story said. But along came Sebold, who used “tricks and deceptions” to lure loyal servants of the German state into the clutches of the FBI. Tried in an atmosphere of “hatred and contempt,” Lang maintained his innocence even after serving hard time in prison, where he was forced to perform chores “that the negroes refused to do.” To this day, the magazine wrote, he wouldn’t confess to his role. “I was sentenced without being guilty,” Lang was quoted as saying.
A principal source for Stern was Nikolaus Ritter, who left the Abwehr following the revelations of the spy trial in 1941 and spent the remainder of the war on active duty with the Wehrmacht, concluding his service as a brigade commander in the Harz Mountains. After the Nazi surrender, he was imprisoned by the British military at Bad Nenndorf, where he underwent extensive interrogation about his espionage activities. In reference to Ritter’s spy work during 1940 and 1941, the British War Office’s Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre concluded that his “activity and ability in that period earned him not only notoriety, but also a certain respect.” Following his release in 1947, Ritter returned to Hamburg, where he eventually found work as an export merchant. It took Stern’s reporters “several exciting weeks” to locate him. “He was not a spy within the meaning of this unsavory word,” Ritter told them of his greatest recruit, Hermann Lang. “He was a German who selflessly wanted to serve his homeland. Nothing else.” Ritter, who would die in 1974, reported in his memoir that Lang “initially found it difficult to get settled. With the help of other comrades and some connections, I was able to help him get recognized as a returnee.” Lang found a good position in industry and lived out his years in southern Germany.
Sebold was appalled by the magazine’s attack on his integrity. On July 22, 1953, he wrote to the San Francisco office, describing the articles as “completely distorted in favor of Ritter and Lang and G. W. Herz, Lang’s defense lawyer, a resident of New York.” The letter reflected the fact that Sebold had rebounded from his difficulties and found a good job as a criminal investigator at the Benicia Arsenal, where he was responsible for looking into such matters as the disappearance of a pair of binoculars. “The motive of publishing the story could be as follows,” he wrote as if filing an assessment for a law enforcement agency. “A: Smear propaganda against the judicial branch of the United States. B: An effort by certain clique (Nazis) to whitewash themselves before the German people and C: As a side issue to ruin my people socially and economically.” He said he was contemplating writing an article for the Frankfurter Illustrierte, a magazine for “thinking Germans,” which he would submit free of charge under the stipulation that the issue’s proceeds be donated to the German Red Cross. “Since everybody had his say about me, I think the time has come that I will tell my story also, and in the place where it hurts most—in Germany.”
On August 4, 1953, he wrote a second letter to the Bureau about the Stern article. He had learned from his mother that his brother Karl had twice “received visitors from Hamburg, who demanded to see her for the purpose of obtaining a photograph of me. My brother refused to give them a picture and showed them the door.” Since the magazine’s characterization of him as a disloyal German “had caused a lot of bad reflections on my relatives,” he was thinking of providing Stern with a copy of his US citizenship papers, which would prove that he was not a Reich subject at the time he was forced into the Abwehr. “The German people will then understand my loyalty to America, and by exposing the real Ritter as a liar and opportunist, I would make him one of the most ridiculed men in present Germany.”
But Sebold did not write the article for the Frankfurt magazine nor contact Stern’s reporter. While the Bureau initially agreed to assist him in his campaign of vindication, it soon recommended that he ignore the matter altogether. He complied.
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p; By the end of 1953, he’d lost his job at the arsenal. “It is noted that while Mr. Sebold is sincere and conscientious, he seems to have the faculty of being a little overbearing at times and may have not followed instructions given him by his superiors as they would have him do,” the Bureau reported. He again complained of stomach problems but his doctor testified that he was largely free of physical ailments. “The whole picture as to Sebold is related to tension,” said Dr. Frederick Pellegrin. “He has a tendency to brood over lack of work or other inactivity.” And Helen’s “constant nagging” didn’t help, Sebold complained. Playing marriage counselor, an agent “suggested to Mrs. Sebold that at the present time Sebold needs her encouragement and that any cheerfulness and encouragement on her part would be appreciated by him.”
On September 22, 1954, Sebold summoned an agent from the San Francisco office and told him about a sleeping pill–induced haze that led him to imagine he had gotten out of bed and driven toward the Benicia Arsenal to see his former boss. “He thought perhaps in his subconscious mind he had been headed for Mr. Walter C. Roy and intended to harm him,” wrote the agent. Later in the discussion, Sebold brought up the spy case. “It appeared that Sebold just wanted to talk to someone. He explained that he did what he did for the country rather than for the FBI. He pointed out that following the trial he did not take advantage of making money from his story or from radio or movie because he felt he had done what he did for the good of the country.”
