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

by Duffy, Peter

  The McCormack-Dickstein Committee—it was chaired by the Irish Catholic representative John W. McCormack of South Boston to prevent “unkind criticism by certain persons or organizations,” Dickstein said—heard testimony from an array of Nazi-sympathetic organizations and individuals, amplifying the message that German-sponsored Hitlerism was establishing a beachhead in America. Prominent figures in the public relations field, including “Poison” Ivy Lee (a well-known mouthpiece for John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil) and Carl Byoir (whose PR firm was among the biggest in the country), were shown to have received Joseph Goebbels’s money to burnish National Socialism’s image in the United States. Connections were drawn between German American supporters of Hitler and native-led Fascist groups such as William Dudley Pelley’s Silver Legion of America (the so-called Silver Shirts), which promulgated the idea that President Roosevelt was descended from a Dutch Jewish family and his real name was Rosenfeld. Testimony revealed that New York–based members of the Stahlhelm (or Steel Helmets), a paramilitary clique of war veterans that conducted bloody battles with Communists during the Weimar years, had become integral members of the Nazi movement in the city. “No,” said Bertha Ziegler, the proprietor of the F. X. Mittemeier bookshop at 229 East Eighty-Sixth Street when asked if she read the Nazi books, magazines, and newspapers she stocked in her store. “I just sell them.” Several officers of the Friends of the New Germany testified without qualm about how membership lists had grown tenfold since the beginning of the year with fifteen locals now in operation in New York City and its suburbs alone. A Friends’ turncoat told the committee that transatlantic couriers on the German liners were utilized to send messages to the Reich about those in Yorkville or Ridgewood who were unwilling to honor the legitimacy of the Hitlerites’ claim on German American loyalty, an assertion that resulted in headlines about a “Nazi spy system” operating in New York. (“Nazi Spy System Is Reported Here,” New York Times, October 17, 1934.)

  “You do know of instances, however, where they have taken it out on relatives in Germany of people here who have not obeyed orders?” asked Thomas Hardwick, the committee’s counsel and a former governor of Georgia.

  “Of course, it is an official order,” the witness responded.

  “What do they do to these relatives?”

  “They are immediately put in a concentration camp, if there are no reasons to be found, and they are investigated.”

  “They are put on suspicion and sometimes put in a concentration camp?” Mr. Hardwick asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You know that to be true?”

  “Absolutely.”

  When the Dies Committee was created as an explicit extension of McCormack-Dickstein in 1938, Congressman Dickstein wasn’t appointed as a member, which had the effect of neutering his career as a Hitler scourge and ending the secret payments he had just started receiving from the Soviet Union: the opening of the KGB archives in the 1990s revealed that he had been in the employ of the Soviet Secret Service. His code name was Crook for his incessant demands for money. John Earl Haynes and Alexander Vassiliev, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 285–87.

  “Any comment you care to”: Press Conferences of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1933–1945, vol. 11 (New York: DaCapo Press, 1972), 488–90.

  CHAPTER FOUR: TRUE FAITH AND ALLEGIANCE

  “What is America but millionaires”: Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hitler: The Missing Years (New York: Arcade, 1994), 222.

  “a sanctuary for those whom”: Thomas Jefferson, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Being his autobiography, correspondence, reports, messages, addresses, and other writings, official and private (New York: J. C. Riker, 1853–55), 7:84.

  “Don’t you talk to me”: All the Sebold quotations from this chapter are from the trial transcript.

  August Thyssen, the steel magnate: Jeffrey Fear, Organizing Control: August Thyssen and the Construction of German Corporate Management (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 396–411.

  Sebold hopped from job to: Personal Employment Record, W. G. Sebold, property of Sebold family.

  CHAPTER FIVE: WITH THE RESOURCES WE HAVE ON HAND

  “The techniques of advanced scientific”: The editors of Look magazine, The Story of the FBI (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1947), 21.

  “here was a man who”: Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, Vol. 1, the Gathering Storm (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948), 269.

  Flying back to London: Michael Burleigh, Moral Combat: Good and Evil in World War II (New York: Harper, 2011), 37.

  “German air strength is greater”: Max Wallace, The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the Rise of the Third Reich (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003), 174.

  “A war of destruction against”: Corum, Luftwaffe, 256–57.

  The Luftwaffe had about: Wesley K. Wark, The Ultimate Enemy: British Intelligence and Nazi Germany, 1933–1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 245.

  Luftwaffe’s medium bombers had no: Irving, Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe, 64.

  “execute a gigantic production program”: Ibid., 67.

  mass production of two planes: The two planes were the Heinkel He 177 and the Junkers Ju 88 “wonder bomber.”

  Yet Ernst Udet insisted that: Irving, Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe, 65.

  Orders were issued to develop: McFarland, America’s Pursuit of Precision Bombing, 82.

  “It is comparatively easy to”: “Norden Aide Says Nazi Bombsight Is ‘Cumbersome,’ ” Chicago Tribune, April 13, 1943.

  When asked by reporters about: Press Conferences of President Roosevelt, 12:145–47.

  espionage report to President Roosevelt: Homer S. Cummings to President Roosevelt, Memorandum, October 20, 1938, Box 100, Attorney General Personal File, Homer S. Cummings Papers, Alderman Library, University of Virginia.

  “special legislation which would draw”: “An Analysis of FBI Domestic Security Intelligence Investigations: Authority, Official Attitudes, and Activities in Historical Perspective,” October 26, 1975, an FBI-prepared report submitted to the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (known as the Church Committee), 563–66; and Batvinis, Origins of FBI Counterintelligence, 56–57.

  According to a memo Hoover: “Analysis of FBI Domestic Security Intelligence Investigations,” 566–67.

  “to serve the American Public”: U.S. v. Karl Schleuter, et al., US District Court for the Southern District of New York, Record Group 21, National Archives at New York City.

  “The foreign press is very”: Saul Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 1:298–99.

  “a vote of condemnation so”: Maria Mazzenga, ed., American Religious Responses to Kristallnacht (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 2.

  “A new regiment of field”: John Buckley, Air Power in the Age of Total War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 122.

  “A battle was won in”: H. H. Arnold, Global Mission (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949), 177.

  “perfectly amazing job in this”: Press Conferences of President Roosevelt, 12:288–90.

  CHAPTER SIX: TO LEAD AN ORGANIZATION THERE

  According to his service: Personal Employment Record, W. G. Sebold.

  “all possible preferential treatment such”: Documents on German Foreign Policy, series D, 4:651–52.

  “It is not a question”: Keith D. McFarland, Harry H. Woodring: A Political Biography of FDR’s Controversial Secretary of War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1975), 189.

  “international spy ring story you”: Michael E. Birdwell, Celluloid Soldiers: The Warner Bros. Campaign Against Nazism (New York and London: New York University Press, 1999), 70.

  After a handful of NYPD officers carried: Izzy Greenbaum’s beating at the hands of Bundist thugs was the highlight of newsreel footage, which was pulled from movie theaters after two days beca
use of the commotion it caused. “You say many women and children might have been killed or injured,” Greenbaum told a city magistrate who gave him the choice of spending ten days in jail or paying a $25 fine for disorderly conduct. “Your honor, do you know how many children and innocent persons will be killed if the persecution they were speaking of last night were kept up?” He was freed after a Yiddish-language newspaper, Der Tog, offered to pay his penalty. “With him in court were his baby son and wife, Gertrude, who said her husband is ‘kind and gentle’ and ‘no troublemaker’ for all his clambering on to the speaker’s platform in the middle of the tense rally,” the Brooklyn Eagle wrote of the hometown hero. “He is all a person could wish to find in another,” young Mrs. Greenbaum told the paper. “He is strong-willed, determined, proud. Didn’t he work days as a plumber and nights waiting tables when the baby was born so that I could have everything?”

  During an interview in 2011, one of Greenbaum’s children, Bobbi Ott, said her father attended the rally with no intention of causing trouble. “He never planned anything in his life,” she explained. Overcome by the moment, he rushed the stage not to injure Fritz Kuhn but to snatch his microphone, she said.

  “He told me he actually got more hurt from the German doctor in the emergency room who, my grandpa told me, intentionally poked a needle in his back when he heard what my grandfather did,” said Mr. Greenbaum’s grandson, Brett Siciliano. “The needle incident hurt him for many years after.”

  Greenbaum moved to California in 1970 and became a fixture at the Newport Beach Pier, where he was known as “Pops.” His fishing spot was called “Pops’ Corner.” According to the Los Angeles Times obituary published upon his death in 1997, “Along with his bait and tackle, Greenbaum decorated his corner every day with an American flag and photos of himself with people he met on the pier.” Said another obit: “Near his displays he kept fishing poles with fish on them—if passersby picked them up, he’d take their photo and send it to them in the mail.” The articles made no mention of his flamboyant act of anti-Nazi resistance.

  “They show the clip on the History Channel,” said Ms. Ott of the Madison Square Garden moment. “My mother would call me and say, ‘Your crazy father is on TV again.’ ”

  the pages of Musical America: Musical America, May 22, 1915.

  Elmer Sperry, who had founded: Thomas Parke Hughes, Elmer Sperry: Inventor and Engineer (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971).

  “my robot,” which was “uncanny”: “Wiley Post Tells of Faith in Robot,” New York Times, July 16, 1933.

  most advanced versions of each: “Sperry: The Corporation,” Fortune, May 1940.

  an antiaircraft-gun-directing system: David A. Mindell, Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing Before Cybernetics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 88.

  Nazi Germany’s highest-paid agent: These details are gleaned from the voluminous FBI file on the Duquesne case, or, as it was known to the Bureau, the Ducase. The file is 65-1819. Hereafter cited as Duquesne case FBI file. In his 1953 interview with the German newsweekly Stern, Nikolaus Ritter says that during his 1937 visit to the United States he met with Everett Roeder. At that point, Roeder had been supplying materials to “Sanders” at Ast Hamburg for more than a year. In his memoir, Ritter doesn’t mention Roeder but tells a fanciful tale about meeting with a Sperry employee he calls Burger, who was married to a “hotblooded and domineering” Puerto Rican intent on having Ritter arrested. (“ ‘You damned German,’ she hissed at me and did not even try to get herself under control,” Ritter wrote. “ ‘I hate you. I hate you all. My husband told me everything, and he was stupid enough to think that I would help. Anybody else, yes—but never a German! You—spy!’ ”) In fact, Ed Roeder was married to a Sullinger from the Bronx who never made an attempt to inform on him. Following Ritter’s visit, Roeder began sending intelligence to “Dr. Leonhardt,” one of Ritter’s aliases, at Rothenbaumchaussee 135, Nikolaus Ritter’s new address in Hamburg.

  “Well, when I arrived at”: The diary of Special Agent James C. Ellsworth, courtesy of the Ellsworth family.

  CHAPTER SEVEN: IN THIS SOLEMN HOUR

  “The Führer had to come”: Marvin D. Miller, Wunderlich’s Salute: The Interrelationship of the German-American Bund, Camp Siegfried, Yaphank, Long Island, and the Young Siegfrieds and Their Relationship with American and Nazi Institutions (Smithtown, NY: Malamud-Rose, 1983), 134.

  “frontiers we had proposed to”: Churchill, Gathering Storm, 307.

  “The first B-17 was due”: David Zimmerman, Top Secret Exchange: The Tizard Mission and the Scientific War (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), 36–38.

  “In times like these, there”: New York Times, March 24, 1939.

  “Where does he get his”: Bernard F. Dick, The Star-Spangled Screen: The American World War II Film (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985), 51.

  “into cases involving actually or:” “Analysis of FBI Domestic Security Intelligence Investigations,” 568–69.

  “Anti-Spy Work Centered Under”: Also: “1,000 Spy Cases Under FBI Scrutiny,” Washington Post, June 16, 1939.

  “no investigations should be”: “Analysis of FBI Domestic Security Intelligence Investigations,” 570.

  “document identification, electrical equipment and”: FBI file of Special Agent James C. Ellsworth, 317.

  “The contents of the letter”: Details of Sebold’s coercion into the service of the Abwehr come from the Duquesne FBI case file and the trial transcript.

  “German houses broken into with”: Evans, Third Reich in Power, 696.

  “My Dear Mr. President”: PREM 4/25/1. British Archives, Records of the Prime Minister’s Office, Kew, London.

  scored direct hits on a blasting device: Cajus Bekker, The Luftwaffe War Diaries: The German Air Force in World War II (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2001), 26–27.

  Yet the most lethal of: Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (London: Vintage, 2011), 119.

  “all local law enforcement officers”: “Analysis of FBI Domestic Security Intelligence Investigations,” 571–72.

  “to protect this country against”: Tim Weiner, Enemies: A History of the FBI (New York: Random House, 2012), 83.

  Nearly two hundred acts: Jules Witcover, Sabotage at Black Tom: Imperial Germany’s Secret War in America, 1914–1917 (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1989), 321.

  “apprehended plotters and prevented consummation”: Emerson Hough, The Web: A Revelation of Patriotism (Chicago: Reilly and Lee, 1919), 59.

  The other great explosion of the violent campaign occurred on January 11, 1917, when four hours of blasts destroyed the Canadian Car and Foundry Company plant in Kingsland, New Jersey, which manufactured artillery shells for Britain and Russia. One man perished in an attempt to escape from the chaos.

  The American decision to join the war as a combatant nation on April 6, 1917, was made in response to unrestricted submarine warfare against American shipping in the Atlantic Ocean and the publication of the so-called Zimmerman Telegram, which revealed a German government attempt to persuade the Mexicans to invade the Southwestern United States with the help of the Japanese. But President Woodrow Wilson explicitly pointed to German-sponsored actions within the boundaries of the United States, and conducted with the assistance of some of its residents, as one of the “extraordinary insults and aggressions of the Imperial German government” that “left us no self-respecting choice but to take up arms in defense of our rights as a free people and of our honor as a sovereign government.” In his Flag Day speech of June 14, 1917, Wilson said that Germany had “filled our unsuspecting communities with vicious spies and conspirators” and “sought by violence to destroy our industries and arrest our commerce.”

  Upon American entry into the war, the government acted quickly to impose what President Wilson called “a firm hand of stern repression” against anyone deemed too sympatheti
c to the other side. Most German saboteurs took this opportunity to flee to Mexico or farther south of the border. The president issued two executive orders that sought to restrict the activities of “enemy aliens,” noncitizens born in the Central Powers nations, with the second requiring them to register with federal authorities or face imprisonment (as sixty-three hundred eventually did), a process overseen by a Justice Department law clerk who was always willing to work late, John Edgar Hoover. Within nine weeks of the war declaration, Congress passed the Espionage Act of 1917 and strengthened it the following year with the Sedition Act of 1918, which abridged the First Amendment by making it a crime to “utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States, or the Constitution of the United States, or the military or naval forces of the United States.”

  Gripped by a wartime panic of such determined ferocity, the nation sought to purge itself of anything that smacked of Germanness. Town and street names were changed (out with Berlin or Germantown, in with Lincoln and Pershing); Beethoven, Wagner, and Strauss were stricken from the repertories of symphony orchestras; German-language books were burned during patriotic rallies; the frankfurter became known in common parlance as the hot dog, inaugurating its journey to the quintessence of American cuisine. The same state legislatures that were passing laws that sought to ban the speaking of the German language in public were also voting in favor of the proposed Eighteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which, when ratified in 1919 and adopted into law in 1920, prohibited just the sort of “intoxicating liquors” that were being produced in large quantities by German Americans with names such as Pabst, Miller, Anheuser, and Busch.