One of the most remarkable facets of post–World War II American life was the sheer number of people with something they wanted to hide. The Pearl Harbor attack of December 7, 1941, changed the country’s political scene overnight, ending the debate over isolationism versus intervention for good. America was now at war, and even those who had opposed its entry rallied around the flag. Hitler’s American friends slunk into the darkness or had to face the music for their past actions. As will be seen, some had no choice in the matter. Others managed to successfully disappear from postwar history and, presumably, lived out their lives in some form of blissful obscurity.
After 1945, many Americans tried to simply forget the recent past’s more troubling aspects. With postwar economic prosperity, the baby boom, and the “American dream” arriving for many white, middle-class Americans, the late 1940s and early 1950s were seen as a time to focus on family and the future. Occasionally the veil of the past was lifted and the scarred face of the 1930s would briefly be revealed for public scrutiny once more. This could carry major consequences. The most prominent example was during the Red Scare of the early 1950s, when suddenly the clubs and associations one had belonged to, and the company one had kept, were under intense public scrutiny and could destroy present-day livelihood. Following the example of Representative Martin Dies Jr., Senator Joseph McCarthy was obsessed with tracking down communists wherever they could be found, instilling fear among those who had once cavorted with the left. But what if McCarthy’s interest had been hunting former Nazi sympathizers rather than communist fellow travelers and party members? What if the former members of America First and the German American Bund had faced the same consequences and social approbation that former communists and socialists encountered?
These are unanswerable questions, but they highlight the fact that millions of Americans supported causes and groups before the war that would have, at a minimum, not reflected well on them later. For much of the twentieth century—and even the early twenty-first—average Americans were unwittingly next-door neighbors with former German American Bund members, America Firsters, and Silver Legion fanatics. American students who studied and traveled in the Third Reich returned home to raise families and pursue successful careers. How many of them ever discussed their experiences in any depth will never be known, but it likely depended on how far their Nazi sympathies had led them. The US National Archives contains an unknown but assuredly huge number of FBI files opened on Hitler’s American friends before and during the war. Many of them remain classified and can only become available after a lengthy Freedom of Information Act review. We may realistically never know how many Americans were suspected of being Nazi sympathizers or made contributions to pro-German cause. What it known, however, is that only the most prominent of Hitler’s friends faced legal sanctions for their activities. The rest, presumably, tried to simply keep their heads down and move on with life.
The German American Bund always maintained that it was a patriotic, cultural heritage organization, but the truth about its ideological orientation was not hard to uncover. It had always been essentially a one-man show built around the dynamic Fritz Kuhn and his flair for the dramatic. With Kuhn sitting in prison and the government keeping a close eye on its activities, the Bund quickly withered. His successors did little to save the organization he had built. Notorious West Coast leader Herman Schwinn was forcibly de-naturalized in November 1940, and Kuhn’s national successor, Gerhard Kunze, resigned as Bund leader in 1941. As seen, he then fled to Mexico with the help of contacts in the Abwehr. He was eventually sent back to the United States where he was convicted of a range of offenses and ended up spending more than a decade behind bars.1 His successor as Bund leader, George Froboese, committed suicide on the railroad tracks in 1942 rather than face a grand jury subpoena.2
Kuhn himself remained in prison and, in 1943, had his naturalization revoked on the grounds that he had maintained allegiance to a foreign power in violation of his oath to the United States. After the war, he was deported to Germany and returned to Munich, initially as a free man. A year later he was arrested for questioning as a potential war criminal and held in the Dachau concentration camp. Dramatically, he managed to escape from the camp and went on the run. He was eventually recaptured and imprisoned until 1950. He died in late 1951.3 Even this fate was less grim than that of his predecessor in Friends of the New Germany. Heinz Spanknöbel had fled to Germany in the early 1930s to avoid potential prosecution in the United States and returned to a life of obscurity. During the war he ended up in the German army, was captured by the Soviets, and died of starvation in 1947.4 There were no happy endings for Hitler’s most prominent American friends.
The man who had done so much to crack open the Bund’s inner workings for both the government and the American public, John C. Metcalfe, returned to his career in journalism. During the war he worked as a diplomatic correspondent for Time and other publications. In 1948, he founded a lecture bureau and represented prominent political clients including Truman administration vice president Alben W. Barkley. In the late 1960s he returned to government service as part of the State Department’s Agency for International Development. He died in 1971.5
While the Bund never achieved the widespread popularity for which its leaders hoped and critics feared, German Americans nationwide did demonstrably become increasingly disenfranchised from the Roosevelt administration. In the election of 1940, which Roosevelt won handily, there were only twenty counties where he lost by more than 35 percent of the vote. Nineteen of those twenty were majority German-speaking, indicating a large percentage of recent immigrants or those who closely guarded their cultural heritage. Dozens of other heavily anti-Roosevelt counties also reported high numbers of German-origin residents. Four years later, entire midwestern states with high German populations, including Kansas and Iowa, flipped to vote Republican.6 While the vast majority of German Americans did not join the Bund and were demonstrably loyal to the United States, they were also not fans of their adopted country entering a second war against the fatherland.
As it turned out, Metcalfe was not the only journalist who had gone undercover among Hitler’s American friends. In 1943, Armenian-American author Arthur Derounian published a sensational book entitled Under Cover under the pen name John Roy Carlson.7 In 1939, Derounian infiltrated the New York City Bund and went on from there to join groups associated with Father Coughlin and other, lesser-known extremist organizations. His first-person account of conversations with far-right plotters hoping to eventually overthrow the US government were shocking to many and immediately made his book a best seller. Carlson showed no reluctance in naming the leaders of Hitler’s American friends, subjecting them to public attention and ridicule. Notably, he reserved special ire for the isolationist senators and representatives who became involved in America First. Among the most upset was Senator Burton K. Wheeler, who inserted attacks on the book and its author into the Congressional Record and called for an investigation.8 His outrage would have little effect. The book was heavily touted by anti-Nazi columnist and radio commentator Walter Winchell, who encouraged his listeners to pick up a copy.9 As will be seen, Under Cover was not the last exposé published about Hitler’s American friends, but it did much to make the public aware of the danger posed by groups many had never heard of previously. Wheeler’s fears about the book’s potential political impact would also prove well-founded.
Through publications like Under Cover, the extent of Hitler’s American network was gradually revealed to the public after Pearl Harbor. Yet by that time the most effective German plot had already been shut down with significant help from the British. George Sylvester Viereck’s successful propaganda and intelligence operation on Capitol Hill was the most direct assault on the US government by German agents, and while he had never been able to use his network to the maximum extent that might have been possible, it was still a serious threat to national security. Viereck himself had been arrested in October 1941, putting his operation out of business. He was convicted in March 1942 of failing to reveal the full extent of his activities as a foreign agent. The witnesses presenting evidence against him included one of the British censorship examiners who had helped intercept his letters to Germany.10 George Hill, the aide who had given him access to the congressional franking service, had already been convicted of perjury and testified against Viereck as well.11
This was not the end of Viereck’s legal battles, however. He appealed his sentence, and the case eventually ended up in the US Supreme Court. Viereck’s attorneys argued that because the Foreign Agents Registration Act had been passed when he was already working as a German agent, it could not by applied to activities undertaken before the law was passed. The Supreme Court agreed, and Viereck’s conviction was overturned in March 1943.12 This itself proved to be only the prelude to a bigger legal fight. In December 1942, a federal grand jury indicted Viereck and more than two dozen other Americans with sedition and violations of the Espionage Act of 1917. The resulting Sedition Trial, as it became known, ensnared nearly all the big names of 1930s anti-Semitism. Gerald B. Winrod was among the first to be indicted, along with fascist intellectual Lawrence Dennis, Silver Legion “Chief” William Dudley Pelley, Paul Reveres founder and red-baiter Elizabeth Dilling, Bund leaders Gerhard Wilhelm Kunze and Herman Max Schwinn, and a host of lesser names. Notably, Father Charles E. Coughlin was not indicted.13 The federal prosecutor in charge of the case was O. John Rogge, the Justice Department rising star who had been brought in to investigate Coughlin’s Christian Front in Brooklyn.
The legal basis of the trial was questionable from the start. Rogge recounted later that his primary concern was the case’s potential First Amendment implications. “Did not this amendment protect all manner of advocacy, even that which was part of a conspiracy to cause a violation of the law?” he reflected.14 It was a good question. Making anti-Semitic statements was not against the law, and the Espionage Act required proof of an actual plot to be applicable.15 A more applicable piece of legislation, called the Smith Act, had been passed in 1940 to combat subversion by communists and had a lower evidentiary standard. This was the path Rogge chose, arguing that the defendants intended to harm the morale of the US military because they had “unlawfully, willfully, feloniously and knowingly conspired with officials of the Government of the German Reich and leaders and members of the said Nazi Party”.16
To prove this case, however, Rogge would have to show that the defendants were all part of the same conspiracy, even if they did not know one another directly or coordinate their actions. There was, of course, no evidence to support either of these claims. As critics of the trial wrote afterward, Rogge was left to argue that “the defendants were like the Nazis because both were anti-Semitic, hence the defendants were part of a Nazi world movement to cause insubordination in the armed forces.”17 This was outlandish at best. No one was arguing that the defendants were upstanding citizens, but there was no evidence to support the idea that they were all part of an actual conspiracy to undermine military morale. There was also a distinct political risk in all this. Viereck’s operation had included some of Washington’s most powerful politicians, and the evidence against him would inevitably lead to their names being revealed in court. This was considered to be such a sensitive matter that British Security Coordination declined to make its evidence available to the court and refused to let its personnel testify at the trial, “because it would be likely to implicate a number of distinguished Congressmen and national figures.”18
The Sedition Trial finally began in April 1944. The judge was former congressman Edward C. Eicher, a Roosevelt ally and a liberal. Rogge was left to prove an almost impossible case. There was no question that the defendants had made anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi statements. Many of them were even willing to repeat those statements in court. The problem was that it was not illegal to hold and express those views, especially before the United States entered the war. To overcome this, the prosecution presented the theory that the accused seditionists had all echoed the same themes as Nazi propaganda. Using the work of propaganda expert Harold Lasswell, fourteen common Nazi propaganda themes were identified. The central ones were anti-Semitism and anti-communism. The prosecution then compared the writings and statements of the defendants to Lasswell’s fourteen themes to argue that they were all part of a pro-Nazi conspiracy even if they weren’t aware of it.19 This was outlandish and held very little legal weight. The trial itself became a circus as the defendants openly mocked the court. Some wore signs to court reading “I am a Spy” to annoy prosecutors and the judge. The entire process was quickly descending into farce.20 Yet the Roosevelt administration was convinced the alleged seditionists must be punished, and so it continued. More than eighteen thousand pages of testimony were generated and dozens of witnesses were called.21
On November 29, 1944, a former employee of Gerald B. Winrod took the stand to testify against the Kansas evangelist. As he spoke, Winrod claimed to have a prophetic vision:
While the young man was testifying, I glanced once in the direction of the Judge.… Suddenly, a heavy black shadow, like a thick cloud, a dark veil, covered his face. It seemed to drop down and envelop him. The hand of death was evidently upon him at that moment.22
Winrod’s “prophesy” was correct. Later that night, Judge Eicher died of a heart attack in his sleep. The government’s case was now in serious trouble. The defendants themselves had to be asked whether they were willing to continue under a new presiding judge. Nearly all refused to go on. A week after Eicher’s death, there was no choice but to declare a mistrial. It was an ignominious end to a quixotic legal effort. As the Chicago Daily Tribune put it bluntly, “Thus ended … the pending effort of the department of justice to prove that the defendants, including a collection of obscure anti-war, anti-semitic [sic], and anti-communist propagandists, all opponents of the Roosevelt administration, had conspired to undermine the loyalty and morale of the army and navy and set up a Nazi form of government in United States.”23 Various attempts to revive the case went nowhere, but it would take until 1947 for the government to formally abandon the case for good.
The accused seditionists felt vindicated. Fascist intellectual Lawrence Dennis coauthored a massive account of the case attacking the prosecution’s case in excruciating detail. It was published in 1946.24 Despite being legally off the hook, however, Dennis’s best days were already behind him. He never fully disavowed his views on fascism, though in the 1950s he opposed the red-baiting of McCarthyism and the arms buildup of the Cold War on isolationist grounds.25 After the war he published a new political newsletter that had some powerful subscribers in Washington, but his past associations with fascism made him politically untouchable to nearly all mainstream politicians. In 1964 he became vaguely involved in Barry Goldwater’s ill-fated presidential campaign, but the connection went nowhere. He died in 1977, never publicly embracing his African American heritage and unable to overcome the perception that he was an unrepentant Nazi sympathizer.26
William Dudley Pelley, the colorful leader of the Silver Legion, had the most successful—and strange—postwar career of the accused seditionists. Despite the 1944 mistrial, the Chief still had a substantial sentence to serve for his other convictions. He remained in prison until 1950, continuing to write and becoming a figure of sympathy for the far right. A “Justice for Pelley Committee” argued that the Chief was the victim of a communist conspiracy and called for his release. After finally getting out of prison, Pelley remained on parole until 1957 and resumed his career as a spiritualist. He again issued prophesies related to world events and published two dozen books laying out a new spiritual system he called “Soulcraft.” This was essentially a revised version of his previous mystical teachings, with added complexity that made the overall philosophy almost incomprehensible to all but the most dedicated students. He also became interested in UFOs and alleged alien abductions.
Toward the end of his life, Pelley claimed to have used his spiritualist techniques to contact the spirit of sixteenth-century French prognosticator Michel Nostradamus during a séance. Nostradamus then supposedly put Pelley in touch with the souls of famous historical figures including George Washington and Mark Twain. Accounts of these “conversations” were published in a new Soulcraft journal, and devotees were even offered the chance to buy audiotapes of the alleged discussions. It was a strange end to the even stranger career of a man who once saw himself as the American Hitler and convinced thousands of armed followers he was right. The Chief died in 1965. Soulcraft survived his death, and Pelley’s writings on extraterrestrials have been integrated into aspects of the ufology movement. His anti-Semitic writings are periodically cited on far-right websites to the present day.27
For his part, Gerald B. Winrod went back to Kansas to resume his career as a firebrand preacher. He quickly found, however, that “practically of Winrod’s friends had forsaken him,” as a sympathetic biographer put it. The sedition controversy left him with only a small but dedicated following.28 He now adopted a new and bizarre personal crusade. Winrod somehow became aware of Harry Hoxsey, a former insurance salesman who claimed to have discovered an herbal “cure” for cancer. Hoxsey had been marketing the “Hoxsey Therapy” for years and had naturally attracted the scrutiny and criticism of both the government and the mainstream medical profession. For reasons that remain opaque, Winrod now adopted alternative cancer treatments as his new cause and began touting a range of nontraditional remedies. To further the effort, he established a group called the Christian Medical Research League and began raising money to battle the mainstream medical establishment. The Food and Drug Administration was not amused, nor was the American Medical Association. The operation soon went bust. His biographer offers no explanation for the bizarre episode other than Winrod’s “deep-seated empathy for every underdog in the world” and burning distrust of the government.29
By 1948 Winrod was physically ailing but, in line with his personal views, refused to seek medical treatment. Instead he relied on one of the alternative remedies he had been pushing to the public. It would be of little help. As it turned out, Winrod was suffering from multiple sclerosis. He concealed the illness from all but his closest friends and refused any semblance of medical care until the bitter end. He died in 1957. Remarkably, the organization he had founded decades before to battle the forces of modernism and the theory of evolution, Defenders of the Christian Faith, survives to the present day and has no association with the questionable views of its founder.30
Similarly, Father Charles E. Coughlin’s reputation never recovered from his flirtation with Nazism. Silenced by his church superiors in 1942, he remained on the government’s radar for years. In late 1941 the FBI received a tip that Coughlin was in communication with far-right groups seeking to overthrow the Mexican government with the help of Nazi agents. Naval Intelligence and the FBI investigated the troubling claims. Agents were soon visiting the Shrine of the Little Flower and listening in on his sermons to find out whether he was making subversive statements. Meanwhile, Christian Front groups continued to cause trouble across the country. Nothing concrete was ever found linking Coughlin to the Mexican plot or the remaining Christian Front, but both journalists and government investigators kept digging into Coughlin’s affairs for years in the hope of finding a smoking gun linking him to money from the German embassy or other malfeasance.31
Even if there was no smoking gun to be found, the reality was that Coughlin had become rich through his rabble-rousing. In 1942, government investigators discovered a British bank account linked to Coughlin that contained a substantial $900,000 (about $14 million today). After the war, Coughlin became involved in real estate speculation and bought homes in Arizona and Florida.32 He also purchased a house in Michigan near the home of Governor George Romney.33 As his obituary in the Detroit Free Press drily noted, “Since he was not a member of a religious order, Father Coughlin was not bound by the vow of poverty.”34
For all his wealth, however, Coughlin’s political days were long behind him. He remained silent on the major issues of the day, building his personal fortune and ostensibly living the life of a parish priest. He was pushed into retirement by his church superiors in 1966 and began publishing tracts attacking the liberalizing reforms of the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican (Vatican II). Toward the end of his life he told an interviewer that he stood by his writings in Social Justice and still believed the United States should have stayed out of World War II. “If we had stayed out of the war we could have conquered the conqueror in Europe,” he said. The war, he went on, was “the greatest faux pas in the whole history of civilization, from the days of Adam and Eve down to the present.”35
Coughlin died in October 1979 at the age of eighty-eight. His obituary was carried on the front page of the Detroit Free Press, indicating his enduring local fame. The church he built, the Shrine of the Little Flower, stands to the present day in Royal Oak, Michigan. A writer in the 1970s found the basement where his staff processed incoming donations had been converted into a nursery school. The imposing tower of the church, from which the priest made most of his broadcasts, had fallen into disarray, and his former office was covered with pigeon droppings and feathers.36 It was a physical metaphor for his career: The edifice Coughlin built through his demagoguery still stood, but its interior was rotten.
Gerald L. K. Smith was more vocal than Winrod or Coughlin in his continuing devotion to the extremist cause. During the Sedition Trial he raised money to support the defendants. His biographer has suggested this was part of a ploy to attract their followers for himself in the postwar world.37 After the war, Smith became a Holocaust denier and claimed Hitler’s memory was being defamed by the “Jewish press.” He continued to rabble-rouse across the country, opposing the United Nations and maintaining his economic populism. The FBI kept close tabs on him throughout.38 Unsurprisingly, he became a supporter of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s red-baiting in the 1950s and supported segregation in the South, even attempting to run for president on the breakaway Dixiecrat ticket in 1948. Senator Strom Thurmond torpedoed his chances with the Dixiecrats by securing the nomination himself. Smith subsequently ran as the Christian Nationalist Party’s nominee but the campaign was a miserable failure.39 Smith ended up as an embittered and reluctant supporter of President Richard Nixon, despite the fact that Nixon had denounced Smith and his band of supporters as extremists in the past. He died in 1976, a prejudiced relic of an earlier time.40 Despite his undeniable oratorical gifts and the political skills he had honed with Huey Long, Smith’s career ultimately came to nothing. He was consumed by hatred and racism. After the war he was little more than a throwback to an earlier time, who maintained a following by appealing to the darkest instincts and traditions in American society. In the end, a biographer has written, “his true legacy is bigotry.”41
Hitler’s most important agent in the United States, George Sylvester Viereck, was similarly ruined. During the postwar Nuremberg Trials the US government gained huge amounts of information about the extent of his operations. He was eventually released from prison in 1947, following the final collapse of the Sedition Trial, and attempted to revive his career as a novelist and poet. Nothing landed well in the market until he published his memoirs, entitled Men Into Beasts, in 1952. The book became notorious for its portrayal of male rape Viereck had witnessed in prison, and eventually sold about half a million copies.42 Viereck died in 1962, never able to escape his reputation as a dangerous Nazi sympathizer.43
Viereck’s main ally at the German embassy had been First Secretary Heribert von Strempel. In December 1941, Strempel accompanied German Chargé d’Affairs Hans Thomsen to personally deliver the Third Reich’s declaration of war to Franklin Roosevelt. Strempel’s work as a diplomat was temporarily finished with the declaration of war, and he sat in Washington until arrangements could be made to return him in a formal diplomatic exchange. From there, he returned to the Lisbon branch of the Foreign Ministry press department. After the war, he was quickly declared denazified and took a job with the newspaper Die Zeit.44
This would have been the end of Strempel’s story, except for the existence of recently declassified CIA files. As it turns out, the agency recruited Strempel in November 1947 to act as a spy against the Soviets. Strempel, whose CIA code name was Hiawatha, was recruited as part of an operation called Alcatraz that was designed to obtain economic and political data about organizations in the Soviet sector. Strempel was chosen because “subject is strongly inclined toward the Anglo-Saxon powers” and “has innumerable good friends in the US, he still has considerable property which, although blocked now, he hopes to see again some day.”45 Strempel’s job as a journalist also meant that he required no cover or backstory.46 However, it appears that while Strempel was successfully recruited he was never actually used as an agent, and was quietly dismissed of in 1948 when his handler returned to America. The exact reason is unclear, though his agent record states he was “Too marginal a case—never used.”47 It appears he was in touch with the CIA again in 1966, but the available files are again unclear why.48 Whether the release of further information in the future will shed further light on Strempel’s postwar career remains to be seen. No trace of him can be found in American newspapers after a few mentions in 1947. He appears to have died in West Germany in 1981.
Viereck and Strempel’s connections in Congress were completely destroyed by a combination of the franking scandal and their outspoken isolationist views. Senator Ernest Lundeen was of course long dead, but his collaborators were still in office for the time being. In 1942, journalists Michael Sayers and Albert E. Kahn published a sensationalist exposé entitled Sabotage! The Secret War Against America. As with Under Cover, Walter Winchell praised the book, and it sold more than 150,000 copies in just three days.49 Among other startling revelations, it demonstrated the extent of Viereck’s Capitol Hill machinations and named twenty politicians who had their franks used in the scheme. “These members of Congress were the political heroes of the America First Committee,” the book devastatingly concluded.50 America First had now been directly linked to the work of a Nazi agent. The key player in the Viereck-Fish scheme, Congressman Hamilton Fish III, was narrowly reelected in 1942, but the damage only got worse from there. In 1944, direct mail advertising expert Henry Hoke penned a pamphlet entitled Black Mail that focused on Fish’s involvement with Viereck. Images showing Fish speeches being directly quoted in Nazi propaganda newspapers added insult to injury.51
The political opportunity was now too great to pass up. Fish’s opponent in the 1944 election flooded the district with thousands of copies of publications highlighting the Viereck affair. Fish was duly defeated, ending his twenty-five-year tenure in Congress. As the official history of British Security Coordination noted, he blamed “Reds and Communists” for the defeat, but “might—with more accuracy—have blamed BSC” for uncovering and revealing the Viereck plot.52 Fish never ran for public office again and died at the age of 102 in 1991. He defended his isolationist views to the end, telling an audience at the age of 101, “I have always opposed war, and sometimes it has made trouble for me.… I often feel I am a voice in the wilderness. But what can one man do?”53 A similar fate befell isolationist Republican senator Gerald P. Nye. Following extensive criticism of his foreign policy views and his vocal defense of Charles Lindbergh, Nye lost his seat in 1944. His political career was over, and he died in 1971.
The same was true of Senator Burton K. Wheeler. Outraged by his defiance of Roosevelt, links to Viereck, and the devastating portrayal of him as a pro-Nazi appeaser in Under Cover, the Montana Democratic Party ousted him in the 1946 primaries. The Republicans then picked up his seat handily in November. Wheeler was convinced that Jews and communists were responsible for the defeat. “Every day that goes by proves to me more conclusively than ever that Communists are using a lot of these Jewish people as pawns to stir up racial intolerance in this country,” he told newspaper columnist and radio broadcaster George Sokolsky in 1944. “The amazing thing to me is that they would not have sense enough to realize that they were being used. You have to give the Communists credit—they know what they want and where they are going.”54 Wheeler’s reputation never recovered and he died in 1975. Both he and Nye were remembered in their obituaries as leaders of the isolationist movement. “I think I was right then and I still do,” Wheeler told a reporter two years before his death. “I said that if we got into war we’ll make the world safe for the Communists and that’s what we’re doing.”55
Hitler’s friends in the business community would soon be looking for ways to escape the consequences of their own involvement with the Reich. The key player was, once again, O. John Rogge, the prosecutor in the unsuccessful Sedition Trial. As Rogge was preparing for a potential revival of the case in 1946, he suddenly received word from a US Army captain that there was dramatic evidence being uncovered in Germany about the network of Nazi sympathizers in North America. Realizing the possible implications, Rogge traveled to Germany with a small staff and started investigating.56 What he uncovered was shocking. Obtaining interviews with the most prominent Nazis still alive, including Hermann Göring, Rogge was able to put direct questions to the people who had personally plotted to undermine US politics. Poring over captured files from various government ministries, he determined that the Nazis had a far-reaching network of sympathizers, spies, and supporters in the United States who were far more dangerous than the defendants he was currently prosecuting.
The most insidious threat, he claimed, came from the “German and American industrialists” who had conspired to undermine the country. William Rhodes Davis was on the list, but it had many other names as well. Rogge produced an extensive report outlining these findings and citing huge amounts of evidence for submission to his boss, Attorney General Tom Clark.57 The nation’s chief law enforcement officer was shocked, but not for the reasons Rogge had hoped. Rather than insist on a far-reaching investigation, Clark was appalled that his friend Burton K. Wheeler was mentioned specifically in the draft document. Clark decreed that the report would remain secret, but Rogge convinced him that it should at least be completed. When it was done, Clark asked Rogge to redact the names of the prominent Americans included in its pages. Rogge refused, and an awkward standoff between the men resulted.58
The time-honored Washington tradition of leaking to the press now came into play. Within days of the report’s completion, excerpts were mysteriously passed to political columnist Drew Pearson and published in his nationally syndicated column “Washington Merry-Go-Round.” Rogge publicly confirmed the veracity of the text, but denied leaking it to Pearson. Within days, however, he began speaking out in public and revealed some of the report’s further findings, mentioning Wheeler and others by name. Shortly after, he was approached by an FBI agent in an airport and handed an envelope. Inside was a letter from Clark firing him immediately. As it turned out, Wheeler was longtime friends with another former senator who had recently found new employment—President Harry Truman. Appalled by the appearance of Wheeler’s name in the press, the president summoned Clark to the White House and ordered him to fire Rogge. The excuse given was that Rogge had quoted publicly from his own report, which was officially considered secret.59
Rogge would not be silenced so easily, however. To Clark’s dismay, Rogge kept traveling the country and began writing articles to discuss his findings. He alleged publicly that the report was being withheld because “it names Americans who collaborated with the Nazis.” The former assistant attorney general also explosively charged that the army had shut down the FBI’s investigations into the Nazi espionage network, leading to the possibility that it might survive in the United States and fall into the wrong hands.60 FBI agents closely monitored his public statements and investigated whether Rogge might have become a Soviet agent.61 Nothing conclusive was ever found, though agents claimed to have found evidence of Rogge praising communist leaders.62
Regardless, Rogge went on to become a private practice attorney and wrote a book criticizing the FBI for violating the civil liberties of investigation targets. He later became involved in the ACLU and took on a range of First Amendment cases.63 After much lobbying, Rogge was finally allowed in 1961 to publish his report on Nazi infiltration of the United States, long after many of the key players named in it were either dead or out of office. It was the first time the American public had heard anything close to the full story of what he had discovered about Hitler’s American friends. “Where in the U.S. there was a Fritz Kuhn there is now a George Lincoln Rockwell [the head of the American Nazi Party],” a Philadelphia Inquirer reviewer reflected after reading Rogge’s book. “And, unfortunately, the merchants of hate always seem to have someone to listen to them.”64 Rogge kept up the fight against political extremism until the end of his life. He died in 1981 and was remembered as the man who had helped bring down both Huey Long’s political machine and Hitler’s American friends.65
Despite Rogge’s investigative activities, America’s corporate leaders continued to reap the rewards of their German investments throughout the war and after. Coca-Cola’s German division continued producing Fanta and amassing profits even as its trademark beverage became unavailable due to the British embargo. Coca-Cola’s American wing cleverly positioned itself with the advancing US Army, providing a taste of home to weary soldiers. As the Reich began to collapse, the Nazi state targeted Coca-Cola GmbH as a subversive company that was harming morale by reminding war-weary Germans of happier times. Its chief, Max Keith, courageously refused to change the company name despite the threat of being sent to a concentration camp. At the end of the war, Keith wired corporate American headquarters to announce the company’s survival. For his efforts, Keith was initially hailed as a hero by Coca-Cola but was soon sidelined as American managers took over his operation. He eventually managed to locate a large stock of Coke concentrate and reestablish his position in the company. Coca-Cola had successfully weathered the storm to remain the world’s favorite soft drink. In the process, it had also invented a new soda—Fanta—that remains popular to the present day.66
Ford and General Motors also paid little price for their liaison with the Nazis. The Ford-Werke plant in Cologne continued operations and received its first batch of French prisoner-of-war laborers in 1940.67 From there, the situation only got worse. In 1942, Ford produced 120,000 trucks for the German army in comparison to Opel/GM’s 50,000.68 In October 1944, the US Air Force attempted to bomb the Ford factory but hit the laborer barracks instead. By then the Allies were closing in on Cologne, and a general evacuation was soon ordered.69 The factory itself would not be occupied until March 1945. Liberating American soldiers would find freezing slave laborers from the Soviet Union and elsewhere confined by barbed wire to the facility.70
The US government predictably began exploring the connections between the Ford family and their corporate interests in both Germany and occupied countries in Europe. In 1943, an investigation concluded that Ford’s operations in France were being used “for the benefit of Germany,” and that this had been approved by Henry Ford himself.71 Despite the damning verdict, no action was taken by the US government. One reason was undoubtedly that Ford’s leadership in the United States was undergoing abrupt transition. Edsel Ford, Henry Ford’s son and heir apparent, died gruesomely of gastric cancer in May 1943 at the age of just forty-nine. Edsel’s son Benson blamed his father’s early death on the immense pressure placed on him by the family patriarch, reportedly proclaiming, “Grandfather is responsible for Father’s sickness.” Henry Ford’s wife, Clara, seems to have agreed, and distanced herself from her husband for two months after Edsel’s funeral.72 The death created the potential for a dangerous power vacuum at the top of one of America’s most powerful corporations. Two years after Edsel’s death, the aged Henry Ford recommended his grandson, Henry Ford II, be given the role of company president at the age of twenty-eight. The younger Ford quickly denounced the anti-Semitism of his grandfather and reached out to the Jewish community to begin repairing the damage incurred in the 1930s.73
Henry Ford himself died in 1947 at the age of eighty-three, his name irrevocably sullied by his association with anti-Semitism and Hitler. Neither he nor his son would face the consequences of their flirtation with the Nazis and the material support they had provided the German war effort. In 1956, Henry Ford II took the extraordinary step of offering Ford stock in an initial public offering (IPO). This was a move his grandfather had always rejected because he feared that “Jew speculators” would get ahold of the company’s shares. The Ford IPO was the largest issuance of stock in American history, and thousands of people stood in line for hours to buy shares. The biggest beneficiary was the charitable Ford Foundation, which made a sizable $640 million (around $6 billion today) from the IPO.74
One group that did not profit from Ford’s postwar prosperity were the former forced laborers who had worked the Cologne plant’s machines during the darkest days of the war. Starting in 1995, groups of former laborers began meeting, and visited the plant at the invitation of the mayor. In 1998 a former worker, Elsa Iwanowa, filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of her fellow forced laborers in New Jersey federal court.75 Ford’s lawyers argued that the court did not have jurisdiction over an international matter. At nearly the same time, German companies BMW and Siemens set up compensation programs for the victims of their own forced-labor activities during the war.76 Both Ford and General Motors quickly joined a similar program and paid millions to compensate the victims of their forced-labor practices.77 Iwanowa’s suit, however, was dismissed on the grounds that the statute of limitations for court-ordered compensation had passed.78 Ford remains one of the biggest automakers in Germany and Europe to the present day.
General Motors and Opel also fared well after the war, though many of their leaders did not. Former overseas president James D. Mooney never escaped the accusation of being a Nazi sympathizer. In 1947 he wrote a memoir recounting his rollicking experiences in the early days of the war, but was persuaded not to publish it by former colleagues who feared it would hurt GM’s reputation.79 He died in 1957 after pursuing a career as a management consultant. More dramatic controversy followed his former associate Graeme Howard. At the end of the war, Howard managed to get himself appointed as a colonel in the economics division investigating connections between German and American corporations. In April 1945, columnist Drew Pearson reported that Howard had once been in charge of GM’s German operations and was now “busy as a hound dog around the State department wanting to get back to Germany,” implying that his interests extended beyond military duty.80
Howard met his match with the arrival of James Stewart Martin, a Justice Department lawyer sent to join his investigation team. Martin was appalled that his superior officer had once enjoyed close connections with the Nazis and sent a copy of America and the New World Order to army headquarters. Howard was quietly dismissed by the army brass and sent home.81 Martin eventually resigned his own position out of frustration at the obstruction he was encountering from American corporate interests who were eager to make profits in postwar Germany.82 Among his most interesting coups was tracking down Gerhardt Alois Westrick, the German lawyer Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop had sent to the United States to whip up business sentiment against the country entering the war. Westrick had stayed in Berlin to nearly the end of the war before fleeing to hide out in a castle. He was given a token jail sentence.83
Howard’s career still had more twists in store, however. In 1948, he accepted the position of vice president and director of international operations at his old rival Ford, where he worked closely with Henry Ford II.84 The appointment caused a brief controversy in Congress when Democratic representative George G. Sadowski of Michigan accused Howard of being “the man who ‘fought most vigorously on behalf of German industrialists.’” His Republican colleague George A. Dondero, also from Michigan, leaped to Howard’s defense and accused Sadowski of “slurring … one of America’s foremost industrialists, a man of proven patriotism.”85 The war of words came to nothing, and Howard remained at Ford until his retirement in 1950. He died in 1962. Obituaries around the country highlighted his twenty-five years as a GM executive and his later work at Ford. America and the New World Order was nowhere to be found.86
General Motors itself ended up profiting modestly from its business interests in the Third Reich. US management lost touch with Opel around 1941, but its German leaders continued to cultivate connections with the Nazi regime. After losing control of the company, GM wrote off Opel as a tax loss in 1942.87 However, the Opel plant continued to operate and built trucks for the German military and aircraft components for bombers. As with Ford-Werke, the labor supply was increasingly based on involuntary labor from POWs and transported civilians from occupied territories.88 In 1944 the Opel factories were heavily bombed, and the main factory was occupied by Allied troops in March 1945. Technically, GM still owned the controlling stake in Opel and was therefore allowed to claim its property and the profits that had accumulated during the war. It emerged that these amounted to 22.4 million marks, including all the profits that had been locked in Germany throughout the 1930s. GM quietly repatriated these to the United States in 1951, but due to currency conversion rates the total amount brought back was only $261,000 (about $2.5 million in 2018).89 Decades later, Opel and GM contributed $15 million to a fund used to compensate the forced laborers who had helped generate those profits.90
The American businessman who had been closest to the Reich, William Rhodes Davis, was dead by the time the United States entered the war. The controversy over his ill-gotten gains continued after the war’s end, however. Within days of his death, the vice president of W.R. Davis, Inc. announced a gift of 5,000 barrels of oil to Great Britain that Davis had supposedly signed off on before his demise. Whether Davis had actually done so or whether the company’s new leadership realized they needed to start repairing its reputation is unknown.91 Two weeks later, executors estimated the Davis estate at between $5 million and $10 million, “or more.”92 No doubt part of the uncertainty concerned the value of Davis’s German holdings. As the war continued, more information about the extent of his connections with the Reich began to emerge. Top Nazi leaders including Hermann Göring were questioned by Allied investigators and gave full details of their dealings with Davis and his associates, derailing the political career of his erstwhile associate Senator Joseph F. Guffey, who had helped with the Mexican oil scheme.93
The US government was not done with Davis yet, however. The FBI and Treasury Department had both been keeping an eye on Davis’s finances for years and after his death filed a massive $38 million suit against his estate and corporate holdings. After years of legal wrangling, the government agreed to settle the case for a mere $850,000, or 3 percent of the original value. The settlement itself was not reported to the public until mid-1952. The turning point apparently came when the Davis estate hired the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee (and President Harry Truman’s former secretary) as their legal counsel.94 The Davis family’s connections to the Democratic establishment apparently survived even the revelation of his involvement with the Third Reich.
Ironically, the Democratic Party itself was not done with the Davis family either. In 1952, Davis’s son, Joseph Graham Davis, moved to California with his wife and son of the same name. Joseph Graham Davis Jr. entered state politics in 1974 by unsuccessfully running for state treasurer.95 Universally known by his nickname Gray, he became chief of staff to Governor Jerry Brown and was elected to the State Assembly in 1982. From there he became state controller, lieutenant governor and, in 1998, was elected governor with 58 percent of the vote. A controversial governor, Gray Davis was recalled by voters in 2003 and replaced by former actor Arnold Schwarzenegger who, in another twist of fate, was originally from Austria.96 The younger Davis never knew his controversial grandfather, who had died before he was born, and was estranged from the alcoholic father who had abandoned the family in the early 1960s.97
William Rhodes Davis’s most important political partner in 1940 had been labor leader John L. Lewis. By siding with Republican Wendell Willkie against FDR, Lewis not only harmed his credibility with the labor movement rank and file but had also been forced to resign as head of the CIO. Yet he still remained the head of the powerful United Mine Workers (UMW), which severed its ties with the CIO in 1942. Still, Lewis was increasingly isolated and his political clout steadily decreased.98 After Pearl Harbor he pledged his loyalty to the war effort but by 1943 was leading a series of controversial mining strikes that irked the White House.99 Legal battles resulted, culminating with Lewis and his associates being convicted of contempt of court and fined.100 National opinion had turned against the UMW, which was seen as unpatriotic and obstructionist by holding strikes during the war and afterward. Lewis held on as the controversial head of the UMW until 1960, and died in 1969.101
Lewis was always extremely private if not outright secretive. Even his cause of death was never publicly revealed, and there was no public funeral despite his larger-than-life image and continuing fame.102 He refused to meet with reporters and historians during his last years and kept a low profile.103 As a result, historians have had difficulty piecing together the exact nature of his relationship with Davis and the Nazis. Did Lewis know that Davis was setting him up to run for president, and did he know that the scheme was supported by the German embassy? How much did he know about Davis’s dealings with the Germans? Why did he so dramatically break with Roosevelt when he must have known that the decidedly antilabor Nazis would benefit from the president being unseated? No doubt the personal differences between Roosevelt and Lewis played a major role, but this still fails to explain Lewis’s willing association with Davis and his continued involvement after it should have been clear that the oilman was up to no good. The full story will probably never be known, but Lewis’s reputation never recovered from the fiasco.
Charles Lindbergh’s reputation would never recover from his actions before the war either. After Pearl Harbor, the aviator tried to volunteer for the Army Air Corps but was blocked by the Roosevelt administration as a defeatist. “I’ll clip that young man’s wings,” President Roosevelt reportedly told senators.104 Lindbergh ended up working for his old friend Henry Ford on aircraft engine improvements. In early 1944 he was finally permitted to fly test planes in the Pacific theater and, eventually, took part in combat missions against the Japanese.105 By this time, however, the American public was in no mood to revive Lindbergh’s reputation or even hear from him further. A 1942 poll found that just 10 percent of voters had a favorable view of Lindbergh, and 81 percent unfavorable.106
After the war, Lindbergh’s old plane, the Spirit of St. Louis, ended up on display in the new National Air Museum (now the National Air and Space Museum) in Washington, DC. The man who had flown it in 1927 would be much less publicly venerated. Lindbergh spent many of his later years writing relatively successful memoirs and other books documenting his experiences in the heady days of the 1920s.107 In the 1950s and 1960s he worked as a government consultant on a variety of projects, including environmental policy issues for the Nixon administration.108 Toward the end of his life he became involved in a variety of conservationist causes, including the World Wildlife Fund, and spent most of his time in Hawaii. He died in 1974 and was buried near his home on the island of Maui.109 The man who had come closest to uniting the American far right never overcome the consequences of becoming Hitler’s key American friend, whether he intended to or not. Yet as the scars of those years have faded, Lindbergh’s reputation has undergone a sort of renaissance. Two decades after his death, a poll found that 54 percent of Americans regarded Lindbergh as “a hero” while 36 percent disagreed.110 This was a result Lindbergh could never have expected to see in his lifetime. The appeal and charm of Lucky Lindy’s story has never lost its appeal for the American public, despite the ignominious chapters of his career.
Many of America First’s—and Lindbergh’s—most vocal supporters had been found at American universities. As already seen, the organization’s original founder was Yale law student Robert Douglas Stuart Jr., who moved on to become its national director. Students at universities across the country formed their own local chapters of the group, particularly in its midwestern stronghold. University of Nebraska students, for instance, formed a campus chapter in October 1941, less than two months before Pearl Harbor. The group’s faculty adviser described its aims as “keeping out of foreign wars, preserving and defending democracy at home, keeping American ships out of war zone [sic], building an impregnable defense and supplying the peoples of occupied countries with food and clothing.”111
The question of war and peace was more than just political for the country’s university students and young people generally. In the event of war, there would be little choice but to either face combat or join the war effort in other capacities. It is impossible to know how many of the American students who studied in the Third Reich, joined America First, or harbored sympathies for Germany ended up dead in the war they had opposed. It is, however, possible to trace the fate of some.
For his part, Stuart entered the army after Pearl Harbor as a field artillery officer. He survived the war and embarked on a sterling corporate career befitting his family background. His first employer was Quaker Oats, the company his father had helped found. Now the son followed in his father’s footsteps and eventually rose to become company president in the mid-1960s and, later, CEO. Even in the midst of his high-flying corporate career, Stuart remained interested in the legacy of America First. In 1963 he corresponded with former America First chairman Robert E. Wood and publisher Henry Regnery, the son of a leading America First member, about the prospect of commissioning an official history of the organization. Stuart’s primary concern was that the author of such a book not “be one of those who were instinctively critical of our efforts.”112 Nothing seems to have come of the plan, though books about America First began showing up regardless. (Ironically, Regnery had declined the opportunity to publish one of the first and most famous books on the subject back in 1951, claiming it would not be financially viable.)113
Stuart remained a diehard Republican throughout his life and eventually served as Ronald Reagan’s Illinois campaign finance chair. Reagan rewarded him with an appointment as US ambassador to Norway in 1984. After returning to the United States in 1989 he obtained appointments from Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton to serve on the Defense Base Realignment and Closure Commission tasked with evaluating post–Cold War military facility closures. Stuart died in 2014 at the age of 98. His creation of America First featured in many obituaries, but only as a minor part of his lengthy career.114 At the time of his death, he appears to have been one of the last surviving leaders of America First. His much older colleague, America First chairman Robert E. Wood, died in 1969.
Successful, though far less high-profile, careers awaited several of the students who had been so adamant in their praise of the Third Reich during their time at Columbia University. Henry Miller Madden, the PhD student who turned his affinity for Germany into anti-Semitism and embarked on an extended European trip before the war, ended up in the US Navy. As already seen, he had attempted to convince the military that he was a conscientious objector, evidently to no avail. After a series of training assignments, he was sent to join the staff of Vice Admiral Robert L. Ghormley in occupied Berlin. His task there was to help negotiate a tripartite agreement with British and Soviet representatives and determine the fate of the surviving German navy. As a lifelong Germanophile, Madden must have recognized the irony in the fact that he was now part of a foreign military occupying his beloved Berlin.115
After the war, Madden returned to his academic career and finished his PhD but struggled to find employment as a professor. In 1949, he changed careers and accepted a job as a librarian at Fresno State College. In a twist of fate, he was relocating to same small California city where Fritz Wiedemann had covertly reunited with Princess Stephanie a few years earlier. Madden remained in the post for nearly the rest of his life. Unexpectedly, he appears to have abandoned many of his earlier views to become an outspoken supporter of academic freedom. In 1957 he was elected president of the California Library Association. “Books contain our record, both good and bad,” he told a student group in 1964. Perhaps with his own example in mind, he concluded, “Books look in silence from their shelves at our antics and our follies, at our acts of creation and our acts of destruction.… Books are mirrors of the age in which they were written, and it is only through them that one can develop a sense of the appropriate.”116 Madden remained in his post until 1979 and dramatically extended his library’s collections, in part by traveling to his old stomping grounds in Europe and purchasing rare books using the linguistic skills he honed decades earlier. He died in 1980, and the library was named in his honor the following year. The Henry Madden Library remains one of the largest public libraries in California to the present day and serves as an unexpected legacy for a man who once considered himself one of Hitler’s American friends, however briefly.
Madden was not the only onetime Nazi-sympathizing student to find success in later years. His onetime correspondent at Columbia, William Oswald Shanahan, went on to an academic career of his own. Completing his PhD in history, Shanahan worked as a professor at Notre Dame, Cornell, the University of Oregon, and Hunter College. In 1963 he was invited to West Germany to report on the status of history instruction in the country, indicating the level of prestige he obtained in the field. He died in 1990 and was remembered as a well-respected historian and teacher.117
Neither Madden nor Shanahan seem to have been significantly impacted in their careers by their onetime views toward Hitler. Whether these views could be attributed to youthful indiscretion, or reflected deep-held prejudice that became unacceptable to express in public later, remains unclear. These were, after all, private opinions that undoubtedly influenced personal conduct, but never seem to have become a wider issue even at the time. Perhaps both men’s views were changed by the war and the passage of time. Alternatively, it is possible they became caught up in the tenuous political atmosphere at Columbia and fed off the views they heard around them. If so, their example serves as a strong indictment of the university administrators and faculty members who cultivated a Nazi-friendly atmosphere at Columbia and other universities at a critical moment. Perhaps they were even taken advantage of by Hitler’s propaganda network in the United States, just as John C. Metcalfe had warned the Dies Committee was taking place. Regardless, Shanahan and Madden followed the example of so many Americans and seem to have simply moved on with life and changing times after the war. Much the same was undoubtedly true for most of the young people who became temporarily enmeshed with Hitler’s American friends.
Hitler’s spy network in the United States was almost completely shut down well before the war’s end. The failure of the 1942 Nazi sabotage operation was humiliating for Hitler, and ended with the execution of six saboteurs and the imprisonment of the other two. The Nazis would never again attempt such a bold and foolish plot in the United States. The two saboteurs who were spared, George John Dasch and Ernest Peter Burger, had their sentences commuted but still faced decades behind bars. In 1948, however, President Harry Truman abruptly ordered both men released from prison and deported to West Germany. By showing clemency, Truman hoped he could convince other plotters against the United States to turn themselves in and cooperate with authorities.118
Burger soon adopted a new identity and embarked on a career as a businessman. Dasch could not escape his past so easily, however. He wandered the country facing harassment and death threats from former Nazis when his past became known. At one point he contacted the German Communist Party in the hope of setting up a new life in the East. Party officials suspected that Dasch might be an American spy, and he was warned to return to the West while he could.119 In 1959 he published a memoir of his experiences but was still denied the presidential pardon he had allegedly been promised decades before.120 Throughout the 1950s and 1960s he requested admittance to the United States but was consistently denied at the personal request of J. Edgar Hoover, who resented the idea of anyone but the FBI getting credit for breaking up the sabotage plot. However, the end of Dasch’s story remains somewhat uncertain. A 1980 investigation by the Atlanta Constitution discovered that Dasch’s voluminous FBI file cut off abruptly in 1966, but there was no record of his death. No recent trace of him could be found in official documents, and an obituary search turned up nothing. Family members and former associates claimed they had no idea what had become of the missing man. A former FBI agent suggested it was possible that Dasch had been quietly allowed to enter the United States and was living under an assumed name. Some authors have claimed that Dasch remained in Germany—presumably living under an assumed identity—and died around 1992. No conclusive proof either way has seemingly ever been revealed. For all intents and purposes, Dasch simply disappeared from history.121
The same was true for many of the agents who served the Third Reich. The FBI has publicly identified around a hundred Nazi agents who were convicted of various offenses during the World War II period. Most were American citizens and many had been born in the United States.122 While lengthy sentences were given to the most prominent spies and ringleaders, most convicted agents received modest sentences of a few years to a decade behind bars, and were presumably released from prison at some point after the war. Many appear to have changed their names and tried to start new lives. High school student Lucy Boehmler, for instance, was just nineteen when she was sent to prison for five years for her involvement in the Kurt Friedrich Ludwig spy ring. She would have only been in her early twenties when released, yet a newspaper archive search shows no trace of her in the postwar world.123 Presumably she chose to disappear into obscurity and as much normalcy as could be managed. While it is unlikely that any of Hitler’s agents are still alive at the time of writing, many probably went on to live normal and full lives after the war’s end.
A grimmer and more abrupt end met their Abwehr boss in Berlin. As it turned out, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris and his sabotage chief, Erwin von Lahousen, were secretly leading double lives throughout the Third Reich. While ostensibly doing the Führer’s bidding, both men were opposed to the regime and became members of the resistance. On July 20, 1944, German officer Claus von Stauffenberg planted a suitcase bomb in a room in Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair headquarters in East Prussia. The blast was intended to kill Hitler and decapitate the regime, but instead only wounded him. Believing the Führer was dead, Stauffenberg and his fellow conspirators tried to take control of the government but were overpowered. In the wake of the assassination plot, thousands of army officers and political leaders of the Reich were arrested. Lahousen was already fighting on the Eastern Front and had been involved in the plot, possibly by helping supply the bomb itself, but managed to conceal his involvement. He would survive the war and go on to testify against his former associates in the Third Reich in the Nuremberg Trials. He quietly lived out his days in his native Austria and died in 1955.124
Canaris was less lucky. He had already been under Gestapo surveillance for months before the Stauffenberg plot and was swiftly arrested.125 The admiral was imprisoned for months and in April 1945, with the Reich collapsing, was convicted of treason in a summary trial. Facing certain death, Canaris requested the honor of death in combat against advancing Soviet troops. The request was denied, and hours later he was brutally hanged with piano wire on a meat hook. It took half an hour for the Abwehr chief to die.126 Three weeks later, Abwehr agents blew up the Overseas Message Center that had been used to communicate by shortwave radio with its agents in the United States, to prevent it falling into Allied hands.
The two people who had once called themselves Hitler’s friends and then changed their minds fared somewhat better. After being detained for overstaying her visa, Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe started a relationship with the married commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Lemuel B. Schofield. Its days were numbered, however. Princess Stephanie was arrested immediately after Pearl Harbor as a potential threat to national security. Ironically, she was held in a prison block full of avowed Nazis who regarded her as suspicious because of her Jewish appearance. Her usual machinations failed to gain her release, and she remained behind bars until May 1945. Remarkably, she then reunited with Schofield and spent the next decade living the high life off his income. He died in 1955.127
Princess Stephanie then reinvented herself yet again. As it turned out, she had a distant connection to the wife of political columnist Drew Pearson, who had broken many of the stories related to the Viereck propaganda operation. The pair had met decades before, and now Pearson offered to help her enter the Washington political scene. Over the next twenty years Stephanie wrote articles for German magazines and newspapers using Pearson’s access and network of contacts. Remarkably, she even scored an interview with President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and several with President Lyndon B. Johnson. She died in 1972, colorful as ever in her old age and with her name still showing up in the papers.128
Her onetime lover and coconspirator, Fritz Wiedemann, was arrested by the Allies in Tientsin, China, at the end of the war. He was interrogated by OSS officers who found him helpful and willing to answer their questions about German intelligence operations. He was soon taken to Washington for further questioning, and cooperated again. Asked what should happen to his former associates in the Third Reich, he told interrogators that the worst war criminals deserved the death penalty. He later served as an official witness at the Nuremberg Trials and was officially denazified by paying a 2,000 deutschmark (about $6,000 in 2018) fine in 1948.129 He and Stephanie eventually reconnected, and she helped him write and publish his memoirs. Wiedemann lived out his days as a “Bavarian gentleman farmer dressed in lederhosen,” as a 1968 newspaper article put it.130 He died in 1970. The opulent mansion that served as his consular headquarters in San Francisco—and the center of his international spy network—still stands at the corner of Laguna and Jackson Streets. After the war, it served as the first permanent headquarters of the California Historical Society.131
There was another aspect to Wiedemann’s story that only emerged later, however. During the Nuremberg Trials, a German-American woman living in New York named Kate Eva Hoerlin provided a startling deposition. In 1934, she recounted, she and her first husband, a well-known newspaper music critic, were living in Munich. One evening, four men in SS uniform arrived to take her husband to Dachau, mistaking him for a local SA leader they were intending to shoot as part of the Night of the Long Knives purge. After desperately seeking information about his fate for days, Hoerlin was told he had been shot “by accident” in Dachau. Hoerlin and the prominent owner of her husband’s newspaper both contacted the Gestapo to ask why her husband had been killed. Remarkably, the Gestapo admitted that the shooting had been a mistake and offered Hoerlin money to drop the matter, which she refused. As the Gestapo became more persistent, Hoerlin went to Nazi Party headquarters, where she encountered Wiedemann.
Hearing her terrible story, Wiedemann arranged for a personal apology from Reich Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess, along with a formal letter stating her husband had not been guilty of any crime. He also managed to secure her a pension equivalent to her late husband’s salary. In 1937, Hoerlin and her children moved to New York, and became American citizens in 1944. She never forgot the unexpected kindness she received, telling investigators, “In fairness I should state that Captain Wiedemann, formerly an influential member of the NSDAP, was at all times genuinely sympathetic with my case; and I feel that I owe more to him for having protected me from the Gestapo than to any other individual.”132 This turned out to not be the only compassionate act Wiedemann had undertaken in the Reich. In 2010, historian Thomas Weber revealed that the captain personally helped several Jewish former members of his (and Hitler’s) First World War unit survive the Holocaust.133 Despite his history as one of the führer’s closest confidants, in some instances he had more compassion than anyone at the time could have imagined.
The failure of Hitler’s friends ultimately stands as a testimony to the resilience of the American political system. President Roosevelt repeatedly showed great foresight in pushing the FBI to investigate right-wing subversives when J. Edgar Hoover himself wanted to focus on other priorities. The president’s backdoor cooperation with British Security Coordination allowed the disruption of major German intelligence and propaganda efforts, including Viereck’s Capitol Hill operation. Without British intelligence assistance, particularly in the key 1940–1941 period, German success in subverting the United States would have been much more likely. Prime Minister Winston Churchill and William Stephenson both deserve credit for allowing politically risky intelligence operations to be undertaken at this critical moment. Given the dire military situation, the British had little choice but to take risks, and in this case it paid off handsomely. American public opinion did not immediately swing toward intervention in the European war, but it did progressively allow Roosevelt a freer hand to aid the British.
Despite his Committee’s questionable techniques, even Martin Dies Jr. deserves credit for helping bring down the Bund and the Silver Legion. “When we began our work, the Bund and a score of Nazi-minded American groups were laying plans for an impressive united front federation—a federation which would be able to launch a first-rate Nazi movement in the United States,” Dies told Americans in a December 1940 radio address. “By our exposure of these plans, we smashed that Nazi movement even before it was able to get under way.”134 There was an element of truth to this. Dies would go on to a controversial postwar career and become associated with the excesses of McCarthyism, but for a few critical years he was a major thorn in the side of Hitler’s American friends.
Finally, credit must be given to America’s two political parties for their own discipline in this critical period. The Republican Party nominated the interventionist Wendell Willkie in 1940 rather than an isolationist. Neither party’s leaders seriously considered nominating Charles Lindbergh, the only man who would have been able to unite the far-right factions under the banner of America First. Kansas Republicans disavowed Gerald B. Winrod at the key moment he might have become Hitler’s most powerful political friend in the country. Both parties kept their distance from the likes of Gerald L. K. Smith and Father Coughlin. After the war, most of the isolationists who had been involved in Viereck’s propaganda scheme saw their political careers end abruptly.
These were undoubtedly difficult calls for politicians to make. Attacking members of one’s own party and alienating current or potential supporters is never easy. Lindbergh might well have been able to capture the White House for the Republicans in 1940, especially if he had been backed with the millions of dollars supposedly stashed in the German embassy for William Rhodes Davis to dispense. The prospect of a charismatic celebrity taking an isolationist foreign policy platform all the way to the White House was by no means impossible.
But at what cost? Twentieth-century American history would have pivoted in a completely different and unknowable direction, with vast consequences for millions of people around the globe. For whatever their flaws then and now, America’s political parties and leaders rose to the challenge presented by this moment in history. In many cases, politicians made the difficult decision to act on principle and patriotism rather than out of political expediency and the pursuit of victory at any price. The far right could never find its American Führer, and the country’s political parties ensured that none of the leading candidates, ranging from outlandish options like Fritz Kuhn or William Dudley Pelley to more plausible options like Father Coughlin or Charles Lindbergh, would ever get the chance to make a bid for the position. The American political system survived a series of major existential threats at a moment when the fate of the free world hung in the balance. In the face of such courageous stands by America’s leaders, Hitler’s friends never stood much of a chance.