On June 19, 1940, Senator Ernest Lundeen of Minnesota took to the chamber floor to deliver his latest broadside against the Roosevelt administration. As the Senate’s only Farmer-Labor Party member and a former ally of the president, Lundeen had made a national name for himself by viciously turning against Roosevelt’s efforts to aid Great Britain and institute the draft at home. The Senator consistently proclaimed he did not want to live in an America that would sacrifice its sons for the selfish interests of European powers, especially the British Empire. Despite future events, he would not personally do so. Within three months of his speech that day, and with whispers about the senator’s Nazi sympathies growing, his scattered remains would be recovered in a Virginia field. The question marks surrounding his death remain to the present day.
On that June Wednesday, Lundeen used his status as a senator to enter a stinging denunciation of Britain’s ambassador to the United States, Lord Lothian, into the official Congressional Record. The ambassador had previously been associated with the pro-appeasement wing of the Conservative Party in his home country, and Lundeen took it upon himself to point out the contradictions between Lothian’s efforts between those past views and his current effort to build political support for Britain against the Nazis. “The discrepancy between his own view [supporting appeasement] and those which, as British Ambassador he is now daily urging upon the American Government and people, cannot but recall Talleyrand’s famous definition of an Ambassador’s duty—‘to lie for his country,’” Lundeen proclaimed. “Today Ambassador Lothian must try to persuade Americans that Hitler is a monster, nazi-ism an unmitigated evil, and the German people essentially barbarous.… And that, in fact, the preservation of civilization, as we have known it, requires that American might, money, and men shall be freely offered to Britain to save her from defeat in a war which Lord Lothian, before he became Ambassador, warned his countrymen to shun.”
“Of the two souls in his lordly bosom,” Lundeen concluded with dramatic flair, “one was evidently very friendly to Germany.”1 The addition of Senator Lundeen’s speech in the Congressional Record went almost unnoticed among the other business of the Senate that day. Comparatively speaking, it was not even one of his most provocative public statements. Six months earlier, Lundeen had called for Bermuda and other British colonies in the Caribbean to be transferred to the United States—or even seized by force—to help pay off the country’s World War I debts. Months later, he demanded that the Roosevelt administration keep trading with the German government “neutrally” and declared himself to be an opponent of the “new-fangled internationalism” in the Senate.2
But Lundeen’s action that day was notable for another reason. The senator from Minnesota had a secret that was known to only a few of his fellow lawmakers and staffers. As it turned out, large sections of Lundeen’s best-known and widely publicized speeches and articles had not been written by him or even a member of his staff. They had, in fact, been at least partially written by a professional propagandist on the payroll of the German embassy and tasked with eroding support for American intervention in Europe. Senator Lundeen’s powerful and often eloquent rhetoric was coming more or less directly from Berlin through a Nazi agent on Capitol Hill.
He was far from the only member of Congress to undertake such subterfuge. From the late 1930s until Pearl Harbor, the German embassy operated an ingenious propaganda operation that used more than two dozen US senators and representatives to disseminate pro-German and anti-British invective to millions of Americans. A congressional office in a House office building became the center of this insidious plot. Sacks of printed material and preprinted envelopes arrived by the day and sat in their closet to await distribution across the country. Nearby, the congressional aide responsible for this aspect of the operation took phone calls directly from the German agent who set up the scheme. It was like a scene from a Hollywood espionage thriller, yet it was all playing for real in the halls of Congress. Even worse, many of the elected officials involved were aware of what was taking place. They willingly became accomplices of Hitler’s most effective propaganda agent in the United States.
At the center of this vast network of misinformation and propaganda sat a single mastermind: George Sylvester Viereck. Little remembered today, Viereck was once one of the most hated and feared men in the United States. The left-wing New York tabloid PM referred to him memorably as “Hitler’s No. 1 Benedict Arnold,” and he would be the first person subpoenaed to appear before Congressman Martin Dies’s House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1938, affording him a subversive status roughly equal to the FBI’s “Public Enemy Number 1.”3 Even the attention of the press and the government failed to dissuade Viereck from his mission to build American support for Nazi Germany and, above all else, keep the United States out of Hitler’s war in Europe. He was, without a doubt, the Nazis’ most effective tool for recruiting new American friends in the vaulted corridors of Washington, DC. Through it all, he made regular intelligence reports to Berlin and became the single most important source of US political intelligence for the Third Reich.
Viereck was no newcomer to shady propaganda operations. Born in 1884 in Munich, Viereck’s father was rumored to be an illegitimate son of the Kaiser and a famous actress. Regardless of his true parentage, the elder Viereck embarked on a literary career and migrated to the United States in 1896. There young George began a literary career of his own, working for a journal edited by his father and writing poetry. In 1910 he published a book entitled The Confessions of a Barbarian in which he argued for the merits of German culture. Special attention was reserved for critiquing the women of various European backgrounds and recounting his sexual conquests. Former president Theodore Roosevelt was among the book’s fans and invited Viereck to meet and discuss ways to build German-American understanding. At the president’s encouragement, Viereck launched a short-lived journal exploring the subject.4
With the outbreak of World War I, Viereck took a predictably pro-German stance and argued that Germany had been tricked into war by the nefarious British and the French. Launching a new publication called the Fatherland, Viereck and his collaborators vocally argued the German perspective on the unfolding conflict and encouraging Americans to remain neutral.5 However, as the American public would soon learn, these activities were not based purely in the spirit of peacemaking. Suspicious of Viereck’s German connections, the Wilson administration had placed him under surveillance. In late July, agents intercepted a briefcase full of documents that included propaganda plans and other materials from the German government. Even more damningly, the documents included letters to and from Viereck discussing the best way to conceal payments being made from Germany to the Fatherland. Rather than keep the investigation confidential, Treasury Secretary William McAdoo leaked the documents to the New York World, which subsequently published a multipart series on the subject. Since the United States was not yet at war with Germany, no prosecutions resulted and Viereck continued his work unhindered. At the same time, there was no doubt about the source of the material he was peddling to the American public.6
Viereck’s tone barely changed even after the United States entered the war in 1917. In a preview of his later tactics, Viereck launched a publishing company to disseminate anti-British and pro-German tracts. He then employed traveling salesmen to hawk the propaganda to consumers across the country.7 The American public, now in the grip of a growing anti-German frenzy, responded less tolerantly than the government had. Viereck was expelled from his athletic club in New York and the Poetry Society of America. Leaving New York to hide out with his father-in-law and family, an angry mob chased him back to the city. In June 1917, his office was raided under the Espionage Act, and he was hauled before a congressional committee to answer a battery of allegations related to the money he had taken from the German embassy. However, given that the Sedition and Espionage Acts were not in effect when he had received the money, there was no way the government could charge him with violating them. Under questioning, Viereck openly admitted that he had burned his correspondence with the German government when the United States entered the war. He claimed this was purely for his own emotional release, but it also conveniently carried the benefit of destroying most of the relevant evidence.8 Viereck had temporarily skated past any criminal consequences for his actions.
After the war, Viereck continued his pro-German agitation unabated. He campaigned against the Treaty of Versailles and denounced it as unfair to Germany. In the mid-1920s he was given a column in William Randolph Hearst’s newspaper chain and penned articles about events taking place in Europe.9 In 1923 he met Hitler and was “dazzled,” claiming that he was the rightful heir to the spirit of Germany and the man to save the country from Bolshevism.10 Inspired by Hitler’s promise, Viereck established new connections with the German consulate in New York and urged its officials to launch a propaganda operation to improve Americans’ perception of Nazism. In 1933, he arranged a contract with the German Tourist Information office and a public relations firm to publicize vacations in the country. The following year he was put in touch directly with the Foreign Ministry in Berlin. Viereck was quickly setting himself up to become Germany’s leading propagandist and one of the Reich’s most effective agents in the United States.
His timing in all this was impeccable. By the late 1930s, the British and German governments were effectively waging a war for American public opinion, with both sides knowing that the United States would play an essential role in a second war. These propaganda battles would, paradoxically, have to be carefully planned outside the public eye but simultaneously be fought on the widest possible stage. The Germans would soon base their operations around Viereck’s operation and their consulates around the country. Influencing congressmen, senators, and other elected officials was essential to this strategy, which had three major goals:
1. Convince the American public that the Allies, especially Great Britain, were doomed in the event of war, primarily through spreading rumors and disinformation in the press.
2. Ensure the American public remained opposed to the notion of entering a war in Europe under any circumstances, by pressing public officials to support neutrality and disparaging the Roosevelt administration.
3. Ensure continuing trade between the United States and Germany both before and during a war.11
Nearly all aspects of German propaganda in the United States would be directed toward these goals, and Viereck’s Capitol Hill activities were seen as essential to its success. Traveling to Berlin on one of his regular visits in late 1938, Viereck was given the task of running a large-scale anti-British propaganda campaign in the United States. Given his past experience, German officials believed he would be able to operate without arousing American suspicions or causing an international incident—and, indeed, Viereck would soon demonstrate his aptitude for circumspection.12 To complete the arrangement, Viereck was hired by the German Library of Information—a propaganda operation based in Manhattan tasked with placing favorable stories in the American press—as a writer doing “special editorial work.” Invoking his status as an American citizen, his official letter of acceptance told his German handlers that “I can think of no more important task from the point of view of fair play and the maintenance of peace between your country and mine than to present to the American public a picture unblurred by anti-German propaganda of the great conflict now unhappily waging in Europe.”13
Viereck’s plan was twofold. First, he would publish as much as possible under his own name or in publications he controlled, much as he had done during World War I. Some of these pieces would be written by him, but others would simply be translations of other propaganda publications being produced in Berlin. More insidiously, Viereck acutely realized the importance of influencing elite opinion on Capitol Hill. Perhaps reminded of his own failure to sway the Wilson administration, the second part of his plan involved lobbying lawmakers directly. For these services, he would be paid a monthly salary and be given money to further projects approved by the embassy. In total, Viereck would receive somewhere between $70,000 and $120,000 (about $1.2 million to $2.1 million in 2018) to support his activities, mostly in untraceable cash.14
Viereck’s key contact and paymaster was Heribert von Strempel, first secretary of the German embassy in Washington. Strempel was the central casting image of a German diplomat and spy. Newspapers described him as “tall and handsome” with a fashionable dueling scar across his cheek.15 He became known for attending wild parties and was seen with a progression of beautiful women, including the then-four-time-married heiress Merry Fahrney (her most recent husband had been Oleg Cassini, First Lady Jackie Kennedy’s future fashion designer, and she would go on to have four more husbands after him). Rumor had it she rejected Strempel’s effort to become husband number five after he encouraged her to embroider gold swastikas on her gowns.16 His personal foibles aside, there is no doubt that Strempel was an effective diplomat and spymaster for Hitler. His career had begun with a posting in Paris followed by Chile, where he was promoted to chargé d’affaires. He was recalled in 1934 over suspicions about his loyalties because he had not joined the Nazi Party. He then spent a few years in the press section of the Foreign Office before being sent to Washington as first secretary in late 1938.17 Strempel was only appointed to the post because he was fluent in both Spanish and English and there were no other suitable candidates available.18 He would soon prove his worth to the Reich.
Strempel’s mission in Washington was twofold. First, he was supposed to make contact with Latin American diplomats who might be friendly to the Reich. To this end he quickly struck up social relationships with counterparts from Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, though nothing significant resulted. Strempel’s second mission was far more successful: He was told to report to Berlin about American public opinion and “see that the German point of view was favorably presented in the American press,” as American intelligence summarized it.19 Viereck was a key part of this plan. Strempel paid Viereck any money he requested and, in exchange, Viereck handled the embassy’s relationship with Washington’s leading isolationist politicians. Contact with these politicians was deemed too dangerous for Strempel or his colleagues to make directly, so they used Viereck to do it through his nearly unlimited funds.20 “I felt no need to account for any money given to him,” Strempel later recalled.21 This arrangement also gave Strempel the information he needed to make reports back to Berlin. “About 90% of his information was obtained from the press or newspapermen in Washington—the other 10% from Viereck,” American intelligence concluded.22 Strempel was running the Third Reich’s most effective political intelligence and propaganda agency in the United States.
The political climate in the Washington of 1939 and 1940 could have hardly been more fertile terrain for Viereck and Strempel. Isolationist and anti-interventionist sentiment ran high, with congressmen and senators from both parties chafing at the Roosevelt administration’s efforts to provide aid to the Allies. In 1937, the administration managed to convince Congress to amend the Neutrality Act to allow the president to sell war materials to European countries in the event of war. This “cash-and-carry” clause lapsed in 1939, but Roosevelt convinced Congress to renew it after the German invasion of Poland. Following his reelection in 1940, Roosevelt campaigned to abandon this system entirely by championing a “Lend-Lease” policy that allowed military equipment to be “loaned” to the Allies without payment upfront. Each of these victories only came after vicious congressional debate between the isolationist and interventionist factions. This was the unstable political climate Viereck and Strempel hoped to subvert for their own purposes.
Viereck’s plan was in motion well before the 1940 election. His first approach was to Ernest Lundeen, who had entered the Senate in 1937. The senator was a well-established antiwar politician and there were already whispers that his sympathies might also lie in the Reich’s direction. First entering the House of Representatives in 1917, Lundeen carried the distinction of being among a handful of congressmen who voted against the US declaration of war that year. After the armistice, he became an outspoken opponent of the League of Nations and traveled the country to denounce Woodrow Wilson’s plans. These stances were so unpopular that during a congressional trip to the Western Front he was humiliatingly denied permission to visit American troops in the field. Returning home, he was once forced to flee from a Minnesota town in a locked refrigerator car when an angry mob protested one of his anti-League speeches. Faced with mounting criticism, Lundeen lost his seat after just one term. He eventually made a political comeback and was reelected to the House in 1932. Four years later he made it into the Senate after the Farmer-Labor party’s nominee died.23 It was a meteoric rise. Lundeen was passionately antiwar, undeniably isolationist if not pro-German and, above all, defiantly rebellious.24 As Viereck told him, Lundeen now had “the Senate of the United States as a forum and the world as an audience.” It was the ideal platform for Nazi propaganda.25
Lundeen quickly proved to be more than helpful to the German cause. Viereck inundated him with copies of his own books and back issues of the Fatherland for a “World War Library” the senator was assembling in his office. By June 1937, the men were “collaborating” on an article denouncing the Roosevelt administration’s “secret agreements” with the British and French.26 In reality, it was not so much a collaboration as a ghostwriting arrangement. Viereck provided the research background and most of the actual writing; while Lundeen made a few revisions, approved the finished product, and took a cut of the royalties (which Lundeen, who was in such dire financial straits that he allegedly forced his staffers to kick back part of their salaries to him, was particularly eager to collect).27 The senator’s name was the only one that showed up in the byline.28 By the end of 1937, Viereck was writing speeches for Lundeen to deliver on national radio, and the “secret agreements” piece had been bought by a Hearst paper. No doubt sensing the power he was wielding over his powerful ally, Viereck told Lundeen bluntly that “I think in the long run you will find collaboration with me, especially if we can regularize it, more profitable both politically and financially than anything that you yourself can do, loaded down as you are with work.”29 This was quite the offer, coming as it did from a man who had been a known German propagandist during the First World War.
Viereck’s connection to Lundeen would pay major dividends to both men. By early 1938, Viereck was not only penning speeches and articles appearing under Lundeen’s byline but had also introduced himself in the corridors of Congress. His circle of contacts now included Republican congressman Hamilton Fish III of New York, a leading isolationist who often supported Lundeen’s statements opposing intervention in Europe. In the Senate, his contacts came to include Burton K. Wheeler, Democratic senator from Montana; and Senator Rush Holt, Democrat from West Virginia, both leading isolationists (Holt lost his seat in 1940, preventing him from playing a major role in the Viereck plot). Wheeler would later become closely involved with Charles Lindbergh in the America First movement. Federal prosecutors eventually identified more than twenty members of Congress Viereck managed to influence or manipulate in the course of his Capitol Hill campaign.30
From this impressive list, Lundeen and Fish proved most eager to collaborate with Viereck. Boldly, Viereck set up shop in Lundeen’s office, dictating sections of his speeches and openly calling his contacts at the German embassy on office phones to obtain new material. He was effectively dictating German propaganda directly onto the floor of the US Senate. As will be seen, Fish and the congressional staff he employed would soon take on a key role in Viereck’s propaganda operation as well. Thanks to the deep level of access he had gained to the inner workings of the American government, Viereck began filing weekly intelligence reports directly to Hans-Heinrich Dieckhoff, the former German ambassador to the United States who had returned to Berlin in 1938. The German Foreign Ministry quickly dubbed their Capitol Hill spy the Reich’s “most valuable liaison agent” for his ability to not only influence American lawmakers but also relay valuable information back to Berlin.31
These increasingly aggressive activities were starting to attract less welcome attention in Washington, however. Back in 1934, Viereck had been called to testify before the McCormack-Dickstein Committee, the precursor to the Dies Committee. At the time, Viereck admitted that he had traveled to Germany the previous year to secure funding for the German Tourist Information Office. Was the American political situation discussed in these Berlin meetings, Committee members inquired. “Undoubtedly. The topic could not be escaped,” Viereck replied, dodging the more pertinent question of whether those discussions had actually been directed at how to influence American politics.32 At the same time, Viereck maintained, all his activities were not actually propaganda on behalf on the Third Reich but rather a genuine and legal effort to convince Americans that Hitler’s Germany was not their enemy. The Committee was hardly convinced, but, much as during World War I, there was little they could legally do to stop Viereck.
In mid-1938, Viereck was summoned to appear before the Dies Committee. Viereck purported to be annoyed by the summons, telling Fish that he had “nothing to conceal and [I] have never been engaged in any un-American activities. I was against our entrance into the World War, but so were many other good Americans, and most people agree with me today.”33 There was little to worry about at this point, however. Much like the McCormack-Dickstein Committee, the Dies Committee could do little more than question Viereck about the nature of his activities, but in the absence of evidence of criminal wrongdoing there was again nothing that could legally be done to stop him.
Viereck now faced a complication in his plans, however. In June 1938, Congress passed the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). This legislation required anyone acting as an “agent of a foreign principal” (in other words, anyone working to advance the interests of a foreign country, at that country’s direction) in a public relations or publicity capacity to register with the State Department. The intention was to unmask propagandists operating exactly on Viereck’s model. Returning from an October 1939 visit to Berlin, Viereck had little choice but to register himself under the law. Given the government’s knowledge of his activities, he would have been thrown in jail immediately if he had failed to comply. At the same time, he could hardly broadcast the fact that he was taking money from the German embassy to influence American congressmen. Instead, he contrived a clever workaround. Securing himself a nominal affiliation with a Munich-based newspaper, Viereck registered himself as the paper’s American correspondent and, simultaneously, as an employee of the German Library of Information (as it turned out, his official contract was dated the day after his initial registration as a journalist). Through this clever maneuver, Viereck could plausibly claim that he had adhered to the letter of the law—he was a registered foreign agent, and had provided copies of his contracts to the State Department indicating that he was drawing upon German funds—without revealing anywhere near the extent of his activities. It was an ingenious legal dodge he would soon be grateful for having devised.34
The 1939 outbreak of war quickly put Viereck’s plans into full swing. Lundeen and Fish were firmly entrenched in his propaganda apparatus, and dozens of other congressmen were seemingly friendly to his anti-interventionist and anti-British message. Lundeen personally requested a list of every reference to the United States in Hitler’s Mein Kampf, no doubt to argue that the Führer had no designs on North America. Viereck was only too happy to oblige, passing him a series of extended passages from the book and extending the senator and his wife a personal invitation to stay at his home in New York during their next visit to the city.35
This was all undoubtedly pleasing to Viereck’s superiors, but it was nowhere near as broad an audience as the Germans needed to reach. Viereck had secured a base of power in Washington, but now he intended to use his influence on a much larger scale. Armed with his unlimited funds from the embassy, Viereck purchased a German-American-owned publishing house in New Jersey called Flanders Hall that would become an important aspect of his mission. As Strempel described it, the Flanders Hall operation was simple:
The manuscripts of certain books came from the Foreign Office in Berlin in the diplomatic pouch or otherwise, and then went to the German Library of Information. Viereck selected from those manuscripts those which he thought might criticize and unmask British propaganda and egoistic British foreign policy, and which could easily be sold in the United States.36
Flanders Hall publications looked and felt cheap, carrying a standard brown cover and a simple nameplate. The content was almost always anti-British and isolationist, directly in line with Nazi propaganda goals. One publication, crudely translated from the original German and bearing a false byline, was a vicious indictment of British policy in India, while other texts criticized Britain’s policies toward Ireland.37 One of Lundeen’s speeches criticizing Lord Lothian found its way into print this way (combined with a foreword by Viereck, writing under a pseudonym), as did an account of the outbreak of the war that held the British exclusively responsible. Republican congressman Stephen A. Day of Illinois published one of his own works with the press, heavily influenced if not ghostwritten by Viereck himself.38
For each book published by Flanders Hall, the German embassy advanced Viereck whatever amount of money he requested to publish it, in “lump sums of 5 or 10 thousand dollars,” as Strempel put it.39 If the book did well, Viereck pocketed the profits and kept the German subsidy. Most of the books were profitable, Strempel recalled, Lundeen’s book on Lord Lothian exceptionally so. Books about Ireland also did well, no doubt because they sold well in the Irish-American community.40 Advertisements for Flanders Hall tracts ran in a wide range of newspapers including the New York Times, heightening their legitimacy and assuredly boosting their sales. Flanders Hall swiftly became the predominant publishing platform for Nazi propaganda in the United States, reaching a large audience and simultaneously boosting Viereck’s coffers. He also received assistance in this venture from William Griffin, the virulently anti-British publisher of the New York Enquirer. Griffin was a diehard isolationist who had once sued Prime Minister Winston Churchill for libel in a spat over Britain’s First World War debt to the United States.41 According to Strempel, Griffin ran large ads for Viereck in the Enquirer and personally sold copies of Flanders Hall books to Irish-American groups. He had been given these books for free and pocketed the profits, providing him a direct financial benefit from Viereck’s activities. “Viereck and Griffin were working—how do you say it—hand in glove,” Strempel told his postwar interrogators.42
The final phase of Viereck’s plan relied on combining his various operations into a single propaganda campaign. By early 1940 he had launched an ingenious scheme to distribute his anti-British and anti-interventionist propaganda for free—at least free for him. Under prevailing precedent and federal law, congressmen and senators were able to obtain official reprints of speeches from the official Congressional Record at a heavily reduced cost for distribution to their constituents, interested third parties, or merely their own records. The bulk of the cost was borne by taxpayers. Further, it was (and is) possible to insert large portions of text into the Record without the actual words being spoken on the floor of the House or Senate, effectively allowing any member to insert statements for the historical record with minimal oversight. This was the method that Lundeen had used to insert many of his most virulently anti-British sentiments into the official record without having to actually face his fellow senators on the floor of the upper house.
Members of Congress also enjoyed (and still enjoy) another important privilege called franking. Dating back to precedents established in the British Parliament, franking allows federal officials, including members of Congress, to send official mail for free. The original intent was to allow elected officials to correspond with their constituents without suffering a financial penalty, but over the decades it had been subjected to a variety of abuses and subsequent reforms. By the late nineteenth century congressmen and senators had lost most of their franking privileges. Mailing out copies of the Congressional Record, however, was explicitly protected on the notion that citizens should be able to receive copies of congressional proceedings for free.
Viereck and his congressional allies soon saw the potential to use this system to their advantage. Lundeen, Fish, and Republican congressman Jacob Thorkelson of Montana devised a plan in which they would deliver speeches on the chamber floor (or simply insert the speech into the Congressional Record appendix) and then order huge numbers of official copies from the congressional printing office. One of Lundeen’s secretaries would later testify that she personally arranged for one hundred thousand copies of a speech to be delivered to Fish’s office on Viereck’s request. The German agent then made arrangements for the copies’ distribution, using the senator’s office phone and with him standing nearby.43 On another occasion, Viereck requested an astonishing six to seven million copies of a speech from isolationist Republican Senator Gerald P. Nye, who showed better judgment than some of his colleagues by refusing the request. Viereck then simply acquired a smaller number of copies through one of his front organizations.44
The genius of this plan was not in the acquisition of the Congressional Record offprints, nor in the fact that Viereck was effectively writing the speeches being printed. It was in the distribution. One of Fish’s secretaries, George Hill, managed to acquire huge numbers of unaddressed franked envelopes from a variety of congressional offices, sometimes with the permission of the congressmen but other times unwittingly.45 These were as good as gold for Viereck, who now had the ability to mail out unlimited amounts of propaganda for free and with the legitimacy of a congressional return address on the envelope. Hill arranged for the huge stacks of mail to be sent out quietly by requesting trucks to arrive directly at the office where it was being held. It was a clever and almost undetectable scheme. Hamilton Fish’s mail room in the Cannon House Office Building—Room 1424—was reputedly stuffed with bags of unaddressed envelopes and speeches.46 The cover letter included with one such speech by Fish asked the recipient to pressure their own member of Congress to support isolationist legislation and help keep America out of the war. Further copies of the speech, the letter concluded, “are available for distribution to interested individuals and groups, already inserted in franked, postage free envelopes which will require only addressing and mailing. Requests to me [Fish] will receive prompt permission.”47
Between his activities with Flanders Hall, the congressional franking scheme, and his growing power on Capitol Hill, Viereck had easily proven his worth to Berlin. In addition to congressional speeches, Viereck also authorized the mailing of more than a million postcards mocking Roosevelt and urging support for isolationism. Many such cards were sent out using Wheeler’s congressional frank, despite being seen by Strempel as being a “cheap type of propaganda.” Viereck required permission from no one to proceed and simply went ahead with the mailings.48 In addition, Viereck began acquiring lists of addresses belonging to Americans who had expressed sympathy for isolationist views, or belonged to prominent anti-intervention groups, in an effort to better target his mailings.
By late 1940, millions of Americans had received unsolicited mailings from a German propaganda agent carrying the return address of prominent congressmen from across the country. The Flanders Hall press was pumping out anti-British and anti-interventionist tracts as quickly as they could be produced, some of which were selling large numbers of copies. The profits from these, combined with the money Viereck could command at a moment’s notice from the German embassy, gave him the ability to instantly finance nearly any propaganda he desired. A 1941 report from the Office of Naval Intelligence in San Diego to the FBI referred to him as “the paymaster” behind a wide range of propaganda efforts, including, it was eventually suspected, Charles Lindbergh and the America First Committee.49
Viereck’s work with Lundeen also continued apace. From their surviving correspondence, it is clear that Viereck viewed the senator as his most important ally in the Capitol. He was certainly the most receptive to Viereck’s message and the most willing to use his speeches. By August 1940, the two men were collaboratively working on a major speech focusing on “German-American contributions to our national life.” This was intended to be a major campaign address touching on the merits of German culture generally and, possibly, including praise for Hitler himself. Viereck undoubtedly looked forward to printing and distributing it on a mass scale. The initial draft manuscript of background information ran at more than one hundred pages and included contributions of several of Viereck’s “collaborators,” probably from the German embassy. Lundeen intended to deliver the first version during a Labor Day event in Minnesota. Viereck duly provided a finished copy for him on August 30.50
The afternoon of August 31 was a tumultuous one in Washington. The weather seemed to suit the political atmosphere as a tremendous thunderstorm gradually made its way across Virginia toward the capital. A Douglas DC-3 operated by Pennsylvania Central Airlines sat on the tarmac of Washington Airport waiting for conditions to clear. Its destination was Pittsburgh, but most of the twenty-one passengers on board, including Lundeen, were planning to transfer to other flights from there. After a twenty-six-minute weather delay the flight took off to the northwest, climbing to six thousand feet and passing near the town of Leesburg before nearing the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Then it flew directly into the blinding storm the plane had been delayed to avoid.
What happened next was never fully established to anyone’s satisfaction. Witnesses on the ground claimed to hear an explosion. Federal investigators would discount this possibility and conclude that the aircraft was most likely struck by lightning. Whatever the exact cause, at around 3:40 p.m. the plane plunged into an open field near Lovettsville, Virginia, at full throttle, killing Lundeen, its other twenty passengers, and four crewmembers instantly. The impact was so destructive that the plane’s engines were buried fifteen feet in the ground. The victims’ bodies were scattered over a twenty-five-acre area, and first responders to the grim scene were unable to determine how many fatalities they were looking at. It was the nation’s worst commercial air disaster to date.51 The FBI agents sent from Washington who finally identified Lundeen’s body found the copy of Viereck’s speech in his coat pocket, ready to be delivered at the end of a journey the senator would never complete.52
The nation was shocked, and Lundeen’s death dominated the headlines. It was only a matter of days before rumors began to spread. It soon emerged that the dead included two FBI employees, a stenographer named Margaret Turner and a newly appointed special agent named Joseph Pesci. Were Pesci and Turner trailing Lundeen? Was one of the country’s best-known isolationist senators under federal investigation? And—to be even more conspiratorial—was there perhaps something sinister about Lundeen’s death? Full answers are still unclear decades later. At the time, both Attorney General Robert Jackson and FBI director Hoover argued that the presence of the FBI employees was pure coincidence. “No inquiry into the affairs of Senator Lundeen has ever been instituted or contemplated, either by the Federal Bureau of Investigation or by any other agency of the Department of Justice, and any statement or report to the contrary is untrue,” Jackson told Lundeen’s widow in the months after the crash.53 A subsequent investigation into the crash led by Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada met with a similar denial from the FBI.
Declassified bureau files suggest a different story. A 1942 FBI report concerning the publication of a “tell-all” book discussing the Lundeen-Viereck connection noted that all the information contained in the publication had “come to the attention of the Bureau previously” and that there was little to be learned from its revelations. Whether Lundeen himself was actually under direct investigation is unclear, but there is no doubt that the FBI was keeping a close eye on Viereck by this point.54
Regardless of whether Lundeen had been the subject of FBI investigation, his dramatic death marked the beginning of the end for Viereck’s scheme. Just two weeks before the crash, the New York newspaper PM had published an exposé on Viereck that referred to him as “Benedict Arnold” and linked him to the German Library of Information. More dangerously, however, it briefly referred to the Congressional Record plan, though not to Lundeen by name. Writing to Lundeen, Viereck assured him the article was merely a “witch-hunt” and a “curious mix of falsehood.”55 The truth could only remain concealed for so long, however. After the crash other reporters jumped on the story, fueled by increasing speculation about Lundeen’s death. The Viereck connection was quickly discovered, as was the appearance of Lundeen at events attended by members of the German government and other officials. A press frenzy began. By October, columnist and radio commentator Walter Winchell had jumped on the bandwagon and suggested in his column that Lundeen had been under investigation at the time of his death.56
Tactlessly writing to Lundeen’s widow Norma just weeks after the crash, Viereck begged to be given the chance to “discuss ways and means of meeting these outrageous attacks upon Ernest.” He received no reply for months.57 In reality, Norma Lundeen was facing an onslaught of her own. In the midst of her mourning, she was appalled by the revelations being made about her husband’s involvement with Viereck and the German embassy. More conspiratorially, she began to receive letters suggesting that the senator had been assassinated. “Stranger things have happened to still a ‘voice crying in the wilderness,’” one such letter read. “British fifth columns are here, too.”58 There was, of course, no proof for this claim, but there was increasing evidence that the senator had cultivated a circle of questionable associates. Norma Lundeen refused to back down, however, and made it her mission to defend her late husband’s reputation. Talking to the NBC Blue Network in May 1941, she claimed that the senator had an “imperishable record of true Americanism.” The suggestion that Viereck had written her husband’s speeches was “a deliberate falsehood—designed to mislead … He was fully capable of writing his own—and he wrote his own.” At the end of the day, she said, “He knew but one patriotism and that was for America.”59 Norma Lundeen’s defense of her husband’s memory was perhaps understandable, but it was also based in falsehoods. She must have known that Viereck had written her husband’s speeches because—as later emerged in court—she asked his staff to remove all the letters between the men from his office archive and place them in her possession after he died.60 This was a deeply suspicious act for a woman who supposedly had nothing to hide.
Viereck’s days as a propagandist were numbered. While he had been able to bat away the Dies Committee and evade the FBI so far, he was less successful escaping British intelligence. The critical flaw in his plan surrounded the reports he was filing with Berlin. Like most German agents in North America, his usual technique was to mail these to German intelligence contacts at prearranged addresses in Europe (usually in neutral countries, to evade suspicion). As army intelligence discovered after the war:
The reports contained clippings from American papers and articles, the opinions of citizens in Capitol Hill, interspersed with “inside tips” on future Presidential policy, what notables had been received at the White House, and notes on industrial development and production bottlenecks. Only the latter items were of value.61
Valuable or not, the Germans had an agent on Capitol Hill who was feeding them information. Ironically, it would not be the FBI that took the lead in shutting this threat down, but William Stephenson’s British Security Coordination agents. This fact was a long-concealed secret of wartime intelligence operations. Key files opened at the UK National Archives in 2013 prove conclusively that BSC agents were not only aware of Viereck’s scheme before the FBI, but also took critical action to shut it down.
As it turns out, the British first detected Viereck’s activities in early 1940 when they discovered that Americans on the mailing list of a publication called Facts in Review were also receiving isolationist speeches reprinted from the Congressional Record mailed with the congressional frank. Facts in Review was a Nazi propaganda rag published by the German Library of Information—Viereck’s nominal employer. British agents verified the connection by inserting fake names and addresses into the library’s mailing list. Before long, those names began receiving isolationist propaganda without specifically requesting it. There was clearly a link between the German Library and whoever was mailing the material from the halls of Congress. “The volume of this mail and the frequency of it soon made it clear that there must … be some guiding genius directing the distribution, planning the insertion of the propaganda into the Congressional Record so that it could later be mailed out in franked envelopes, arranging for the ‘dummying’ of the various mailing pieces, and planning to get the pieces ordered and distributed to all those people and organizations who finally addressed and mailed the franked envelopes,” a secret British intelligence report concluded in 1941. The genius behind it was, of course, Viereck.62
British agents on Capitol Hill quickly determined the broad outline of his plan. “Without any doubt George Hill, Hamilton Fish’s second male secretary, is the purchasing agent and the guiding control of the franking ‘racket’ in the United States,” they reported. “George Sylvester Viereck is the ‘big shot’ who remains in the background.”63 The weak link in the scheme was obviously Hill. The British soon placed “a very capable feminine operator” to extract information from the divorced Hill (as the British discovered, he was known for having “many girls” in the Washington area and for spending opulently to impress them). The British operative quickly convinced Hill to give her a full account of the franking scheme using methods that remained unspecified in the official report. From there, British agents discovered Hill was personally embezzling some of the money he received from Viereck and intended to “retire at an early age” from his earnings.64 The British had all they needed to make a move on Viereck. BSC agents leaked Hill’s involvement in the scheme to the Washington press, causing a minor scandal. “Most of the stories printed in the newspapers about this particular case have only been partially true as we only gave them sufficient [information] to drag Hill’s name before the public and the appropriate Washington authorities,” they told London.65 Through these strategic leaks, the British dropped the scheme on the laps of both the FBI and federal prosecutors.
The British had another source of secret information about Viereck’s activities as well, and it was even more sensitive than BSC’s Capitol Hill intelligence network. After the outbreak of war, British intelligence began directing ships carrying mail intended for Europe to a secret censorship facility in Bermuda, where the mailbags were offloaded and their contents inspected. Mail deemed sensitive or likely to reveal military secrets was inspected and censored while less threatening mail was allowed to continue to its destination, but the contents of anything interesting were noted and sent on to London. This was obviously a very delicate and secretive operation given that it meant interfering with the private mail of American citizens.
From at least mid-1941, if not before, the British intercepted Viereck’s reports to his handlers in Berlin and sent summaries of their contents to both London and the FBI. While it would have been possible to cut off Viereck’s connection to the Reich by intercepting the letters, MI6 advised that the reports should be allowed to reach their destination uncensored so they could continually gather intelligence from them.66 Viereck was allowed to continue sending information he thought was going directly to Berlin while in reality he was handing British intelligence the means to unravel his wider plot.
Both Viereck and Hill soon found themselves in dire legal straits. In September 1941, a Washington grand jury opened an investigation into Nazi propaganda activity and subpoenaed Viereck to appear. But, just as in World War I, could he actually be indicted? Had a crime been committed? It was not illegal to disseminate propaganda, and it could easily be argued that Viereck had simply been exercising his First Amendment rights. There was no evidence that he had passed on classified material to the German government, nor had he attempted to subvert the US military. He had also registered with the State Department under FARA, as required.
On the other hand, had he registered properly and complied with the spirit of FARA? His official FARA declaration listed him as a journalist and author, but he had not reported his other activities related to the Flanders Hall press. Were these not also actions being taken to further the interests of a foreign government? This omission provided the government the legal opening it needed. In October 1941, Viereck was indicted on five counts related to his failure to report the Flanders Hall operation, his use of false names on publications, and his activities with the Congressional Record on his FARA declaration. None of these activities had been properly revealed, the government argued.
Viereck was arrested and released on bond. For the rest of the war he would be embroiled in a complicated legal battle that would eventually find its way to the Supreme Court.67 One of the key witnesses against him would be the British censorship examiner who intercepted his reports to Germany. The examiner, it turned out, held the only direct evidence of his contact with the Nazi government.68 Hitler’s most effective propagandist in the United States had finally been put out of business. A few weeks later George Hill, the congressional staffer who had proved so useful, was called before the grand jury himself. Asked directly if he knew Viereck and other key figures in the plot, Hill answered that he did not. He was immediately indicted for perjury.69 He ended up being sentenced to between two and six years behind bars.70 With his arrest, Viereck’s operation on Capitol Hill was effectively shut down.
What had Viereck been able to accomplish? Certainly, he was able to disseminate a huge amount of pro-German and anti-British propaganda to the American public. Yet there is little evidence he convinced a large number of people to view the Third Reich positively. Instead, Viereck’s value lay in his ability to manipulate political elites. His relationship with Lundeen, Fish, Wheeler, and other isolationists on Capitol Hill undoubtedly steeled their resolve in opposing the Roosevelt administration and gave them a larger platform for spreading isolationism. Opinion polls showing a majority of Americans opposing entry into the war were no doubt to some extent influenced by the “respectable” voices in Washington endorsing and pushing these views. In addition, Viereck’s reports to his superiors at the German embassy and in Berlin offered valuable firsthand information about what was taking place within the corridors of power in Washington.
There would be stark consequences for the congressman who helped Viereck achieve these aims. Many would further tarnish their names by becoming involved with the America First Committee after his arrest. This was far from the extent of the Nazis’ involvement with American politics. Heribert von Strempel was not just the paymaster for Viereck; he was also responsible for another aspect of the German government’s plans against the United States. This would involve convincing American businessmen to not only oppose Franklin Roosevelt but directly attack his 1940 reelection campaign. Strempel would soon end up helping one of Hitler’s key American friends in a bold attempt to unseat the president.