In early March 1939, Captain Fritz Wiedemann of the Third Reich arrived in San Francisco to take up the position of consul general. The captain was “tall, dark and immaculate,” according to Life magazine, dressed “informally but well,” and wore a monocle when he read. American reporters expecting a scheming “Machiavelli” were disappointed. The captain, they quickly decided at the San Francisco Press Club, was “not worth much copy.”1 He did little to dispel this impression. “Politics are attended to by the Embassy in Washington,” he told reporters. His task would merely be building “friendly relations between our two peoples,” primarily “in the development of trade and travel.”2 Life’s flashy profile of the captain, published a month after his arrival, was replete with humanizing photos, including one of Wiedemann in his dressing gown listening to the radio in the evening.3 This was hardly the image of a hardened German army officer–turned-spy that Americans were anticipating.
Not everyone was as dismissive, however. There were a number of facts that made Wiedemann’s presence on the West Coast appear suspicious, if not outright sinister. For one, the captain’s credentials in the Nazi Party appeared impeccable. Astonishingly, he had been Hitler’s commander in the First World War, sending the future Führer to carry dispatches under perilous conditions. The shoe was now very much on the other foot. After the war, Wiedemann reentered civilian life while Hitler went to Munich to ultimately pursue politics. After Hitler became chancellor in 1933, Wiedemann joined the Nazi Party at his former subordinate’s personal insistence. Following the brutal Night of the Long Knives purge, Hitler made Wiedemann his personal adjutant and secretary. “Every important decision made in the Chancellery crossed the Captain’s desk and was handled by him with the efficiency and dispassion of a machine,” Life reported. During the Munich crisis of 1938, it was claimed, Hitler relied heavily on Wiedemann’s political instincts.4
What was this ultimate party insider doing in San Francisco? The answer was not hard to guess: Hitler had sent his trusted right-hand man to engage in some kind of intrigue, probably involving espionage. Aware of the potential danger, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover dispatched FBI agents to monitor Wiedemann from the moment he set foot on American soil.5 The director was right to be skeptical of Wiedemann’s intentions, but what he did not know was that the captain was carrying not one but two secrets. Hoover had already guessed the first. Wiedemann’s mission did indeed include more than encouraging German-American “trade and travel.” In reality, he would soon become a key player in the Nazi intelligence apparatus in the entire Western Hemisphere, overseeing operations in not just the United States but Latin America as well. As the California Un-American Activities committee described him, with some exaggeration, in its card catalog of subversives, Wiedemann was “alleged to be the most important Nazi agent in the Western Hemisphere … reportedly placed here as clearinghouse for espionage and intrigue that extends from the Pampas of the Argentine up to Washington.”6
Wiedemann had a more important second secret too, however. Not only was he nowhere near as personally close to Hitler as the press claimed, he had actually become disenfranchised from the Führer. The stories about his intervention in the Munich crisis were greatly exaggerated and bordered on falsehood. Wiedemann’s arrival in San Francisco was not just to take over a Nazi spy network but also because he had been sent from the Führer’s inner circle with a cloud hanging over him. The Captain’s frustration with his own government would soon lead him to make an audacious proposal to British intelligence. It was a betrayal so brash and outlandish that neither American nor British intelligence would be able to decide what to make of it.
The German intelligence network Wiedemann inherited in San Francisco was in a fairly disastrous state already. Most North American operations were subsumed under the authority of military intelligence in Berlin (the Abwehr) headed by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. There were three main divisions of his operation: espionage, sabotage and counterespionage. Canaris was a true spymaster and had agents all over the world returning reports and operating at his behest. From 1939 onward, however, the Admiral had significantly fewer agents than he himself believed. That year, British intelligence enacted the Double Cross System that began turning his agents for their own purposes. Not only did his requests and orders end up in the hands of British officials, but in return the British fed him false, misleading or unimportant information through his own intelligence network. It was one of the greatest intelligence coups of all time and Canaris would never know he was being played.7
The German intelligence network in the United States was not turned against Canaris in the same way, but its accomplishments were modest at best. Intelligence historian Ladislas Farago has estimated that by the late 1930s there were around fifty spies operating in the United States. This number may seem small, but the fact that some of these agents worked in the defense industry made them potentially dangerous. There is no doubt that some military secrets were passed to the Germans, including one major technical secret: the Norden bombsight. As Thomas H. Etzold has written, the German spy network acquired “plans for, or samples of, gyroscopes, bombsights, retractable landing gear, flight instruments, improved propellers and fuels, designs of new planes and naval ships, specifications of various developmental aircraft, classified maps, information about American industrial capacity, and confidential communications.”8 These were major intelligence coups, though how far they actually helped the Nazi war effort is less clear. Many of the technical secrets stolen were never put into practical use given the difficult wartime conditions in Germany, and others were simply filed away for potential future use.9
Despite these successes, there were real operational difficulties with spying in the United States. Unlike the film Confessions of a Nazi Spy, there was no organization that could easily conceal a real-life Nazi intelligence network. The Bund was under far too close surveillance and, as it turned out, had been infiltrated at its highest levels by John C. Metcalfe. After the war, Hermann Göring complained to his American interrogators that “the FBI was too observant in detecting invading spies and as a result the Nazis were never able to develop a spy network in the United States.” The Germans received more information, he claimed, from “newspapers, magazines and radio speeches.”10 This failure was not through lack of trying, however.
In early 1940, Hoover secretly met with a British informant and updated him on American efforts to disrupt German intelligence activities in the United States. Some of these plots bordered on the comical, including one plan that called on a male German agent to acquire information about a new American rifle by seducing two privates in San Francisco when the same information could have been obtained openly and without subterfuge. (The only result was that the soldiers were thrown into jail, presumably for their sexual inclinations rather than cavorting with a German agent.) At the end of the day, Hoover concluded, German propaganda was “clumsy” and its agents “waste a lot of time, and money.” Regardless, nearly all the German agents in the United States were under surveillance by the FBI already, he claimed. British propaganda methods, he concluded, were “better and subtler than those of the Germans,” and there was little sympathy for the German cause except for in a few parts of the Midwest.11
Hoover’s bluster was overly confident, as events would show. German spies had a number of methods they used to effectively gather information and communicate it to the fatherland, several of which the FBI would only discover relatively late in the game. Some of these were seemingly ripped from the scripts of Hollywood spy thrillers. Photographed documents were printed on microfilm that could be spooled and easily hidden any number of places. Small pieces of film could even placed under the tongue or even swallowed for later retrieval. Normal-looking matches could double as pencils writing in invisible ink. German spies could communicate with the fatherland by sending letters to prearranged Abwehr addresses in neutral countries like Portugal, much as George Sylvester Viereck had done. Seemingly innocuous letters could conceal either a coded message or information written in invisible ink that became perceptible when heated. British censorship officials in Bermuda became adept at identifying such messages and passed information about German agents to the FBI, just as they had done in the Viereck case. The most technically sophisticated spy technique was known as the microdot. This ingenious invention used a special camera and microscope to reduce an entire document to the size of a period or the dot on a lowercase i. The dots were printed and could be affixed to anything, including a letter or even the outside of an envelope. A spy knowing where to look would use a microscope to magnify the concealed document and read it.12
Unsurprisingly, the first major Nazi spy network in the United States centered around Friends of the New Germany, precursor of the Bund. In 1934, a former leader of the organization, Friedrich Karl Kruppa, testified before Congress that “Nazi propaganda was being smuggled into this country” and that there were “Nazi cells” on all German ships docking in the United States. Even more sensationally, he claimed that Heinz Spanknöbel, the first leader of the organization, had not left the United States voluntarily, but had been abducted at gunpoint from the home of a doctor named Ignatz T. Griebl and forced to board a ship to the Reich. “He was abducted because he did not obey orders from abroad,” Kruppa concluded darkly.13
True or not, this story was interesting because it mentioned Griebl. A decidedly shady character, Griebl was born in Germany and moved to the United States in the 1920s after serving in World War I. He became an American citizen shortly thereafter. In 1933 Griebl was serving as president of Friends of the New Germany and, as it turned out, also volunteering his services as a spy at the same time.14
Over the coming years, Griebl provided the Abwehr with various pieces of information he obtained from a range of contacts. In return, he received $300 a month. He cultivated a wide network of informants, some of whom managed to obtain military secrets from their places of employment. One such informant, Otto Voss, worked in a defense plant and passed along blueprints of military hardware.15 In 1937 Griebl traveled to Germany and met Canaris, who offered his personal thanks. Back in the United States, Griebl expanded his network and continued passing information to his German handlers. The scheme worked fairly well until a new actor entered the scene. He was Günther Gustav Rumrich, an Austrian American who had been born in Chicago and raised in prewar Austria-Hungary. In 1929 he moved back to America, just in time for the stock market crash. Floating between jobs, Rumrich joined the US Army, managed a promotion to sergeant, but deserted after embezzling funds. Desperate for money, in 1936 he wrote directly to the former head of German intelligence, Colonel Walter Nicolai, and offered to spy on the United States in return for cash.16
Nicolai forwarded the offer and, bizarrely, German intelligence accepted Rumrich’s services. Rumrich began passing military information he managed to obtain by posing as a current soldier and from his friends who were still in the military.17 Both the Abwehr and Rumrich quickly bungled this arrangement. His handlers demanded information that was increasingly difficult to obtain, including the plans to the aircraft carriers USS Yorktown and USS Lexington. This would have been nearly impossible to obtain without somehow infiltrating the Department of the Navy itself, or managing to convince someone to give up the plans.
In 1938, the Rumrich’s Abwehr handler demanded he obtain thirty-five blank passports, presumably to assist the insertion of future agents. Rumrich simply phoned the New York Passport Division, claimed he was a high-ranking State Department official (some accounts say even Secretary of State Cordell Hull) and demanded to be sent the blanks at a hotel address.18 The passport official was understandably suspicious about this request and called the police. A trap was set, and Rumrich was arrested as he tried to collect the package from a boy he paid to pick it up on his behalf.19
Rumrich was interrogated by FBI agent Leon G. Turrou, who would eventually write a sensationalist book about the case. Hoping to save himself, Rumrich began to give up everything he knew about Nazi intelligence operations. The trail eventually led to Griebl, who was called before Turrou and also “sang like a canary.” He even helped the FBI arrest several associates in his own plot.20 In May 1938 Griebl manage to escape the United States on a German ocean liner, much to Turrou’s frustration. Regardless, a grand jury delivered eight indictments against the Nazi spies. Most of the accused had already managed to make their own getaways to Germany, but the indictments and subsequent trial were a press sensation. The incompetent Rumrich ended up receiving two years behind bars.21 In 1939, Turrou published Nazi Spies in America, a fanciful account of the case which would become partial source material for Confessions of a Nazi Spy. J. Edgar Hoover was incensed, partially because Turrou’s public handling of the case had arguably tipped off the defendants and allowed them to escape.22
The Griebl case was disturbing to the US government for a number of reasons. First, the FBI had no idea the spy network existed until Rumrich inadvertently blew the entire operation open through his own ineptitude. It was too much to hope that future spies would give themselves away by foolishly calling up government officials and demanding paperwork be sent to them. Second, unraveling the extent of the conspiracy had only been possible because Griebl and Rumrich had given up their associates. If they had remained silent—or themselves been compartmentalized to only one part of the operation, as was preferred tradecraft—it would have been difficult or impossible to find their coconspirators. As historian Francis MacDonnell has written, “The unraveling of the New York spy network left Americans with the unsettling possibility that this episode exposed only the tip of a Fifth Column iceberg.”23
Arriving less than a year after the Griebl case, Fritz Wiedemann must have known he was facing an uphill struggle. The shenanigans of the German American Bund and the Silver Legion were attracting press attention and being discussed by the Dies Committee and other government investigators. American perceptions of Nazi Germany were being quickly damaged by Hitler’s American friends. Hitler appointed Wiedemann to the San Francisco post in January 1939, replacing the aptly named Baron Manfred von Killinger, a brutal former storm trooper who had been convicted of killing a clergyman in Germany but served no time in prison for the crime. Evidently this fact made him unpopular with San Franciscans, as did his open support for the Bund.24 Wiedemann arrived in New York by ship in New York in early March, quietly disembarking and telling reporters that he would be making a visit to Washington before heading to replace Killinger.25
The guessing game around why Wiedemann was being sent to the West Coast started immediately. In London, the Foreign Office received a troubling report from a Dutch correspondent suggesting that Wiedemann’s task would be to “unite the German Americans, collect big sums from them and start a campaign in favour of American neutrality in the case of war at the same time a strong anti-Jewish campaign.” The main vehicle for this would be “prominent Industrialists in the U.S.A. who are in favour of fascism and they hope to get strong INDIRECT support from them.” (Foreign Office officials were unsurprised, with one remarking darkly, “At one time they [the Nazis] were basing great hopes on Mr. Ford.”)26 Life magazine interpreted his mission similarly, imagining how he must have pitched his Bay Area move to Hitler. San Francisco was “a quiet post from which he could organize isolationist propaganda and resistance to Franklin Roosevelt’s foreign policies among the powerful anti–New Deal elements of the West Coast,” it had Wiedemann telling the Führer. “The German American Bund with its crazy firebrands must be recognized and muzzled, American sensibilities catered to.”27
Wiedemann’s real mission was not far from what the Foreign Office assumed. As consul general, he was afforded a broad range of diplomatic protections that allowed him to operate on the outer margins of the law. His staff was increased from eight to nearly thirty members, and his personal duties were extended to cover all Nazi diplomats in Central and South America. This was far beyond the normal portfolio for a consul general.28 In addition, Wiedemann was placed in charge of the Orient Gruppe, an intelligence network that extended into Asia. He also became the regional head of the Foreign Organization (an organization of Germans abroad), another intelligence network sponsored by German industrial giant I.G. Farben that encouraged Germans to return to the fatherland. It was also a key recruiting tool for German intelligence. To link American businessmen to the Reich, Wiedemann created the German American Business League, an organization of a thousand small businesses that agreed to boycott Jewish companies. He made numerous trips to Mexico to keep an eye on the German intelligence network there.29 Author Charles Higham has claimed Wiedemann oversaw as many as five thousand German agents operating throughout the Americas and elsewhere.30 If true, this made him one of the key sources of German intelligence anywhere in the world. Both British and American intelligence feared that his ultimate mission was to serve as a liaison with Japanese intelligence.31
Overseeing Germany’s spy apparatus was one thing, but Wiedemann’s more pressing task was recruiting agents of his own in the United States. The FBI eventually identified more than a dozen Americans Wiedemann had apparently cultivated including a naval officer who purportedly wanted to talk about “lighter than air activity” with the consul general.32 According to the FBI, Wiedemann “from all indications is presently the focal point of German espionage and propaganda activities in that section and possibly throughout the United States.”33 The propaganda campaign supposedly included a plan to “purchase newspaper firms, especially in the industrial towns and cities in the United States” and presumably turn them into pro-Nazi organs. Rumors circulated that his first unsuccessful target had been the San Francisco Chronicle.34 In June 1940, the FBI learned that Wiedemann was preparing for the arrival of fifteen “German espionage agents” in San Francisco from elsewhere in the country. The agents were supposed to report to Wiedemann, and then depart by ship for Asia. The FBI soon ascertained from “a high German official” that the departing agents would be replaced with “harder, tougher and more violent groups” who were less known to American law enforcement. Later that month, fifty-three Germans arrived in San Francisco on a Japanese steamship. Most were technicians bound for Latin America, but three were allegedly potential agents in whom the consul general “was reported to be particularly interested.”35 At the same time, Wiedemann’s vocal dislike for the German American Bund made him seem potentially even more scheming and nefarious to the FBI. “I don’t like the Bund,” he was quoted as saying in December 1939. “I told them in Washington we could only have trouble with the Bund because the people of the Bund are American citizens. With their stupid speeches they can only give us trouble.”36
Wiedemann’s intrigues quickly encountered major difficulties. As one of the most high-profile German officials in the country, he was dogged by the press and the public wherever he went. Communist protestors followed him constantly, and respectable Bay Area hostesses canceled parties scheduled in his honor when threatening letters arrived. “What would you do, my dear, if you found Captain Wiedemann sitting next to you at dinner?” became a common conversation among “social dowagers,” Life reported.37 The captain’s social situation was about to change, however. On May 29, 1940, his erstwhile mistress, the glamorous Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe, joined him on the West Coast. The princess was a mysterious and beguiling figure, and remains so to historians today.
Born Stephanie Richter in Vienna, the princess acquired her title by marrying Prince Franz Friedrich Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfürst, a lesser member of one of Europe’s most prominent aristocratic families. There was always much gossip surrounding the princess. Two rumors were certainly true. First, she was at least half Jewish and possibly fully Jewish, though the identity of her biological father was never fully established. Second, by the time of her marriage she had acquired a lengthy retinue of male companions. This would become a recurring theme throughout her life. A US government report presented to Roosevelt uncharitably referred to her as a “gold digger.”38 How she managed to convince Franz Friedrich to marry her remains a mystery, but historian Karina Urbach has suggested that she had become pregnant by one of her husband’s more prominent relatives and he was simply ordered to marry her to save face and make the child legitimate. Either way, it was a short-lived union. After the First World War, the Austro-Hungarian empire was broken up and Franz Friedrich was faced with the decision of adopting either Austrian or Hungarian citizenship. Unlike many of his relatives, he chose to become Hungarian, compelling his wife to do the same. In 1920 the couple divorced, but she kept both her noble title and her Hungarian passport.39
Princess Stephanie now embarked on a strange career heavy in international intrigue. In 1927, she met Lord Rothermere, the owner of the British tabloid the Daily Mail, and managed to interest him in Hungarian politics. The Daily Mail suddenly began heavily covering the affairs of a country that had not even existed a few years earlier. Rothermere started to trust Stephanie’s judgment on the issues and leaders he should be covering, and began paying her a salary. In the 1930s, this assignment led to Stephanie meeting Hitler, who became personally and probably romantically infatuated with the princess despite her non-Aryan appearance (and, indeed, her at-least-partially Jewish parentage). The Führer’s wider circle naturally included Wiedemann, who essentially controlled access to Hitler at this point.40 Throughout the 1930s, Stephanie thus became the conduit for communication between Rothermere and Hitler. She also became a curiosity in upper-class British social circles, answering questions about Hitler’s regime during her visits and acting “as a link between Nazi leaders in Germany and Society circles in this country,” as MI5 (domestic intelligence) put it. Her affair with Wiedemann began around the same time.41
In the summer of 1938, Princess Stephanie and Wiedemann became mutually involved in a strange plot that would only be fully revealed decades later. While it was widely reported that Wiedemann had somehow been involved in resolving the Munich crisis that year, the true nature of his involvement was concealed. In fact, he and the princess set up a plan with Hermann Göring’s backing to travel secretly to London and make back-channel contact with the British government. The goal was to secure Göring himself an invitation to undertake direct negotiations.
Wiedemann arrived in London and met with Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary, and assured the British government that “in present circumstances the German Government were planning no kind of forcible action” against Czechoslovakia. In other words, Hitler was not intending to start a war.42 The British reciprocated the sentiment, which Wiedemann reported to Berlin. This back-channel information was well received by Hitler, but less so by Foreign Minister (and former ambassador to the United Kingdom) Joachim von Ribbentrop, who felt sidelined and became an implacable opponent of Wiedemann. The mercurial Göring soon turned against Wiedemann as well and ordered a wiretap of his office. Hitler thus became aware of his affair with Princess Stephanie and flew into a rage. Wiedemann was abruptly fired, and effectively exiled to San Francisco. The American press believed he had been sent there to act as a sinister Nazi spymaster, but instead he had simply been sent away to one of the most distant places Hitler could find.43
Princess Stephanie was in trouble too. Just as Wiedemann had fallen quickly, Rothermere abruptly fired Stephanie for reasons that remain unknown. In retaliation, she sued him for unpaid future wages and then tried to blackmail him by threatening to release his fawning letters to Hitler if he refused to pay her off. Rothermere declined, and the trial became a sensation when the correspondence were introduced in court. Stephanie eventually lost the case and fled to the United States in late 1939, where she would soon be reunited with Wiedemann. Unsurprisingly, she too was placed under FBI surveillance immediately after arriving in the United States.44 She waited months before risking a personal reunion with Wiedemann, and even then they decided to have their first meeting in the small city of Fresno, California, rather than San Francisco. The ploy failed to fool the FBI agents who tailed both of them not only to Fresno, but also the cabin in nearby Sequoia National Park where they subsequently spent the night.45
Wiedemann and Stephanie both had a few more tricks up their sleeves, however. The captain had already tried to pull one of his own before Stephanie’s arrival. It was a complicated plan, but one that might have carried huge ramifications. In 1939, Wiedemann had reunited with Felicitas von Reznicek, a German baroness and newspaper reporter whom he had known in Berlin. Reznicek was ostensibly in the United States to write a series of travel articles for German newspapers, but American authorities suspected she had ties to German intelligence. She and Wiedemann rekindled their friendship and, it was believed, became lovers shortly after.46
While staying in San Francisco, Reznicek met a British subject named Gerald O. Wootten over a game of bridge. They became fast friends, and Reznicek either took Wootten into her confidence or began telling him a series of tall tales, depending on the interpretation. Not only had she known Wiedemann very well in Berlin, she claimed, but she too had once been part of Hitler’s inner circle. She had been so well-informed about the inner workings of the regime, Reznicek claimed, that she had been the one to warn Wiedemann about Ribbentrop’s wiretapping. Reznicek even supposedly predicted the date of Hitler’s invasion of Poland to Wootten the summer before it took place.47 As the strange friendship grew, Wootten met Wiedemann socially as well.
Sometime in March 1940, Wiedemann erroneously received word from Berlin that he was going to be imminently recalled. According to Wootten, Wiedemann feared for his life if he returned to the country. Through Reznicek, he allegedly asked to be put in touch with the British ambassador, with the hope “that he might be permitted to come to England in the event of his dismissal.” In exchange, Wiedemann offered to undertake “political action with a view to the replacement of Hitler’s administration by one of more moderate policies.” In other words, Wiedemann was offering to defect to the British and join the war effort against Hitler.48
Wootten conveyed this strange story to the British consul general in San Francisco, P. D. Butler, who in turn contacted the British ambassador in Washington and the Foreign Office. Questioned a second time, Wootten verified that the offer had come from Wiedemann personally. As a gesture of his displeasure with his former boss, Wiedemann had even refused to transmit a required birthday greeting to the Führer.49 If Wiedemann was being genuine, this was a startling offer. US military intelligence believed everyone involved, including Wootten, was suspicious and could not be trusted. The skepticism was understandable. On the other hand, the possible payoff from Wiedemann’s defection would assuredly have been large, especially given the key role he was suspected to play in the German intelligence network.
Remarkably, the Foreign Office seems to have given this offer almost no consideration before rejecting it. “We do not think the Baroness’s messages need to be taken seriously,” the Foreign Office told its Washington embassy. If Wiedemann were truly in danger, it continued, “he can surely stay in America. There is no reason why we should take him here. He has neither the qualities nor the prestige to be of any use against the present regime, even assuming that this account of his political sympathies is correct.”50 One official was even more blunt, scrawling on an official minutes sheet, “This looks to me like a rather transparent attempt to get Wiedemann into this country. I see no earthly reason why we should give him asylum.”51 P. D. Butler was ordered to do nothing, but he seems to have refused to give up so easily. Sending a transcript of a Wiedemann speech to the Washington embassy later in the year, Butler remarked pointedly, “This speech, I think, removed any doubts which may have existed as to Captain Wiedemann’s outstanding abilities. A man who could make such a speech … evidently has diplomatic gifts which could profitably employed in a sphere far wider than that afforded by San Francisco.”52 The Foreign Office still took little notice.
Why were the British so reluctant to offer Wiedemann asylum? The Foreign Office’s suspicions of him were certainly justified, but the potential payoff from such a high-profile defection might be huge. For one, Wiedemann would have known extensive details about Nazi espionage throughout the Western Hemisphere. Even if his importance as a spymaster was exaggerated, he presumably would have had significant information to offer in exchange for protection. Indeed, after being arrested by American authorities in 1945 he willingly provided lists of German agents in the United States and elsewhere.53 At a minimum, he would have been able to offer sophisticated psychological portraits of Hitler’s inner circle. As the Führer’s former commanding officer he might even hold propaganda value.
There are no clear answers, but surviving Foreign Office files offer some hints. Generally speaking, the British seem to have underestimated Wiedemann’s role in German intelligence and viewed him more as a propagandist rather than a spymaster. Even if Wiedemann did have knowledge of the Nazi spy network in Latin America and the United States, the British had more pressing concerns at hand in April 1940. They also undoubtedly feared Wiedemann’s potential as a double agent if allowed into wartime Britain. Finally, the Foreign Office may well have worried that if he were allowed into the country, Princess Stephanie might try to follow, and they had only recently rid themselves of her. It is telling that during his first interview with Wootten, the British consul general specifically asked whether he had met Stephanie (the answer was negative). Perhaps the British also simply didn’t believe Wootten, who seems to have been a shady figure, though Butler thought he was telling the truth.54 There may have even been a feeling that offering Wiedemann asylum in Britain would protect him from the consequences of his past actions. Regardless of the exact reason, the Foreign Office gave up the opportunity to crack open Hitler’s intelligence network in the United States.
It seems unlikely Wiedemann informed Princess Stephanie of his defection plan, especially since it integrally involved another woman who may have been a romantic rival. In October 1940, Stephanie enlisted Wiedemann in an outlandish scheme of her own. Hoping to broker some kind of peace deal between Britain and the Third Reich, the pair contacted Sir William Wiseman, a former British intelligence agent who had maintained his government ties. Meeting covertly with Wiseman, Wiedemann and Stephanie told him there were opposition figures in Germany who would be willing to negotiate with the British, and even offered some names. Wiedemann told Wiseman that his instructions from Berlin were to “separate ‘decent Americans’ from Roosevelt,” but that Hitler was “ignorant and contemptuous of America” and “under-estimates their military importance.” He closed on a plaintive note. “We are in a most difficult position,” he told Wiseman. “We are loyal to our country but we know that this will end in the worst disaster that will ever come to the German people.”55
Wiseman relayed the messages to London, but was quickly warned off further discussions with the pair. Wiedemann and Stephanie’s final attempt at recreating their success in 1938 was not to be, and neither was their relationship. In December 1940 they split up for good. In March 1941, Stephanie was detained by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) for overstaying her visa. Remarkably, she then managed to seduce the commissioner of the INS, Lemuel B. Schofield, and the two began a torrid, booze-soaked affair that was carefully monitored by the FBI.56
Wiedemann found himself in increasingly hot water as well. The same month as Stephanie’s arrest, Alice Crockett, a former actress and the ex-wife of an army colonel, sued the consul general in federal court. Crockett bizarrely claimed Wiedemann had asked her to take a $5,000 trip to Germany to meet Hitler, Göring, and propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and quietly gauge their opinions on Wiedemann’s job performance. She told the court she had taken the trip but was never paid, and now demanded $8,000 in expenses and salary. The captain had access to a purse of more than $5 million available for “espionage activity,” she went on, and employed many agents for this purpose. Wiedemann had also allegedly bragged to her about working closely with Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh, and talked about stockpiling ammunition in New Jersey for future use by the Bund. It was all explosive, if implausible, testimony. Wiedemann admitted to knowing Crockett “slightly” but called her allegations “bunk.” A spokesman for Ford dismissed it as a “publicity stunt.”57 The case was soon thrown out by the judge, who noted that Crockett was admitting to espionage if her claims were true. Any contract between her and Wiedemann was therefore “tainted with illegality.”58
Wiedemann’s strange charade came to an abrupt end in June 1941. Tired of the obvious espionage being carried out his nose, Roosevelt ordered all German consulates in the United States closed, and all consul generals expelled. Wiedemann had until July 10 to leave the country. He hastily burned many of the consulate’s papers and left for Berlin. Before he left, however, the future head of OSS, “Wild Bill” Donovan, asked President Roosevelt whether it might be desirable to try to cultivate Wiedemann as an American agent if he had indeed changed his views toward Hitler. After further discussion it was decided that nothing should be done on the matter.59 The chance to bring Wiedemann over to the Allied side was lost a second time. From Berlin, Wiedemann was sent to Argentina, Brazil, and Japan. He ended up as consul general in Tientsin, China, where he sat out the war at the center of the German regional intelligence network.60
While Wiedemann had been busy intriguing against his former associates in Berlin, Hitler’s American friends continued to their own schemes on behalf of the Führer. In the summer of 1941, FBI director Hoover made a stunning announcement. For more than a year, he reported, an FBI double agent had infiltrated a major German spy ring on the East Coast. The agent, William Sebold, had been born in Germany and moved to the United States in 1921. For the next decade he worked in a variety of manufacturing facilities connected with the defense industry. During a visit to his German mother in 1939, he was approached by the Gestapo and prevented from returning home until he agreed to become a German agent. If he refused, the Gestapo warned him, nothing good would happen to his family members in the Reich. Sebold agreed, but managed to tip off the American consulate about the plan. After attending espionage training in Germany, Sebold sailed for the United States under the alias Harry Sawyer. He arrived in New York and made contact with a network of German spies being run by Frederick Duquesne, a South African who had worked as a German saboteur during World War I.61
As it turned out, Duquesne had assembled an impressive operation. His network of more than thirty agents, at least one of whom was a former Bund member, provided information about defense technology, ship movements, and cargo leaving New York docks. This intelligence was transmitted to Germany via shortwave radio. Most of the spies were immigrants from Germany and naturalized American citizens. The most impressive feat was the theft of the sophisticated Norden bombsight by Herman W. Lang, an employee of the manufacturer who copied secret blueprints and passed them on to his handler for smuggling to the Reich. He later traveled to Germany himself and helped reconstruct the device for the Luftwaffe before returning to his job as if nothing had happened. It was a remarkable intelligence feat that demonstrated huge blind spots in American counterintelligence, but it proved to be of limited short-term utility to the Germans. The sight allowed bombs to be dropped with much greater precision than before but, ironically, Lang’s subterfuge turned it over too late to be of use to the Luftwaffe during the bombing campaign of the Battle of Britain.62 No doubt Allied lives were lost because of its acquisition, but the impact of this intelligence coup was relatively limited in the short term.
From the day of Sebold’s early 1940 arrival in New York, the FBI had Duquesne right where they wanted him. FBI agents set up Sebold in an office that was completely bugged and allowed them to see every meeting he attended with the spies. In May, the FBI built a shortwave radio station in Long Island according to instructions Sebold received from Germany. Agents quickly established shortwave radio contact with the German radio station on the other side and began feeding disinformation directly to the Reich.63 Sebold also passed much of the information he received from Duquesne to the FBI before it was transmitted to Germany so the most sensitive aspects could be removed. With the Duquesne network essentially at his mercy, Hoover simply bided his time and waited to discover the extent of its tentacles. In late June, the FBI moved in. Agents arrested thirty-three spies from his network and a less effective ring based in the Bronx. In the ensuing espionage trial, nineteen agents pleaded guilty and the remaining fourteen were convicted a few days after Pearl Harbor. Duquesne and Lang both received eighteen years in prison.64 It was a major disaster for the Abwehr. Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop darkly warned Admiral Canaris that he would be held personally responsible if the United States entered the war because of the fiasco.65
The FBI quickly announced another major coup. In March 1941, a German intelligence captain named Ulrich von der Osten had been hit by a cab in Times Square. He died in the hospital the next day. Von der Osten was using the assumed identity of “Julio Lopez Lido” and had arrived in the country on a Spanish passport to make contact with Kurt Friedrich Ludwig, an American-born German spy who was passing on information about American convoys heading for Europe. Ludwig was walking with “Lido” when he was struck by the car, and foolishly aroused suspicion by picking up the injured man’s briefcase, which was full of intelligence material, and shouting something about “the Jews” as he fled the scene.66 This strange behavior was followed by a series of cryptic phone calls to the hotel where “Lido” had been staying, asking whether his luggage could be collected. The hotel called the police, who in turn called the FBI. Further detective work led to Ludwig, who fled New York for the West Coast after the breakup of the Duquesne ring. The FBI picked him up in Washington State and quickly rounded up his accomplices.67 Ludwig received twenty years behind bars. His “pretty blonde” seventeen-year-old secretary, Lucy Boehmler, was brought to trial for her own role in the plot, which included touring army bases and passing along information for a reward of $25 a week (about $400 in 2018).68 Her other duties involved riding around in a car with Ludwig and enticing hitchhiking soldiers to get in so he could question them “about Army posts, equipment, training, for the benefit of his own bosses in Germany.”69 She told the court she knew what Ludwig was up to and “found espionage lots of fun.” Her testimony helped convict the rest of the spy ring, but she still received five years behind bars.70
This heavy pressure from the FBI was pushing the German spy network to its breaking point. With its consulates shut and diplomats like Wiedemann no longer in the country, it was difficult to conduct large-scale operations or pay off agents. Hitler was outraged when Admiral Canaris informed him that there were no longer functional intelligence networks in the United States following the FBI roundups. Ranting and raving at the Abwehr chief and the head of its sabotage division, Erwin Von Lahousen de Vivremont, Hitler demanded dramatic action.
Canaris and Lahousen had one more card to play against the United States, and it integrally involved the Führer’s American friends. Operation Pastorius, as it was code-named, was an outrageous scheme to take the war directly to the United States through a series of violent terrorist attacks on dams, power stations, manufacturing facilities, train stations, and bridges. Agents would arrive on U-boats and land on the American coastline armed with explosives. After melting into American society, they would scout their targets and eventually blow them up in a way that would maximize disruption and casualties. It was a bold and bloody plot. Planning began in late 1941 and was run on the German side by Werner Kappe, a German-American former newspaper reporter and a onetime Bund member. Kappe recruited ten fellow German Americans to take part in the scheme, at least one of whom had also been in the Bund. Some were naturalized American citizens, and had spent significant time in the United States. Several had been convinced to return to Germany by the Foreign Organization that Wiedemann once helped run.71
Kappe eventually reduced the team to eight conspirators who would operate in two teams. They would be delivered to American shores by U-boat, deposited on beaches with their explosives, and later make their way to the appointed targets. One of the two team leaders was George John Dasch, a former New York City cook who had decided to return to Germany at the outbreak of war. He would later claim to have been anti-Nazi and opposed to the Bund during his time in America.72 The saboteurs attended a training school in Brandenburg, near Berlin, where they learned about explosives, fuses, timing devices, and basic methods to conceal their identities. In the event of the mission’s failure, the agents were given German marine uniforms so they would be treated as prisoners of war rather than spies. If they could manage to escape they were told to head for Argentina or Chile.73 All these instructions would turn out to be unnecessary.
The eight men were given false names and identity papers. To enhance their credibility, their civilian clothing had been made in America and had labels indicating such. The Abwehr provided nearly $200,000 in cash ($3.2 million in 2018) for expenses (oddly, much of the money could not be used because the bills were an older out-of-circulation version of the currency, while others had a red Japanese marking on them, indicating how the Abwehr had obtained them).74 Explosives were packaged in chests for easy delivery on the American shoreline. In late May, Dasch’s team boarded U-202 and headed for New Jersey. They were rowed to shore by sailors from the U-boat and landed on the night of June 12–13, 1942. Things immediately went wrong from there. On the beach, the four men encountered a young Coast Guardsman who began asking questions about why they were there in the middle of the night. Thinking quickly, Dasch told him they were lost fishermen and offered him $260 in cash to leave. The Coast Guardsman took the money, but immediately told his compatriots the strange story when he got back to his station. Meanwhile, the German sailors had slipped back to their U-boat without taking away the German marine uniforms and other incriminating items. Fearing detection, the saboteurs buried their chests of explosives and other items for later retrieval and slunk into the night. They caught a train to New York a few hours later and split into two teams from there.75 A few hours later, the Coast Guardsman led his colleagues to the spot of his strange encounter. They soon discovered where the chests of explosives were buried, along with the German uniforms. Their next call was to the FBI. Agents knew they had a serious case on their hands, and a large-scale manhunt began.76
By this point, Dasch was sweating bullets in New York. His partner there was a former Nazi storm trooper named Ernest Peter Burger—a one-time Michigan National Guardsman before moving back to Germany—who was also skeptical about the plot’s chances for success. Coming clean with the FBI was their best chance of survival, Dasch calculated. He told Burger to stay put and called the New York FBI office to turn himself in as a German saboteur. He was laughed off the line by the agent who answered the phone. Hours later, the bureau became aware of the explosives discovered on the beach alongside German uniforms and realized that perhaps the caller had not been a jokester after all. Meanwhile, events elsewhere were moving quickly. On June 17, the second team of saboteurs landed in Florida from U-107 and, unlike Dasch’s group, successfully buried their explosives and proceeded to melt into the civilian population.
Knowing he was running out of time, Dasch headed to Washington and took a room in the famous Mayflower Hotel. On June 19, he called FBI headquarters again and asked to speak directly to J. Edgar Hoover. He was not put through to the director, but convinced the FBI to send agents to his hotel room.77 He was then taken to FBI headquarters, where he eventually met Hoover in person as he told his story. Dasch eventually produced more than $80,000 in cash from a suitcase in his hotel closet, convincing any remaining skeptics in the bureau that he was telling the truth. Over the next few days Dasch cooperated with the FBI. Within days, his entire sabotage team was in custody.78 The Florida team was picked up after Dasch managed to identify the conspirators from his recollections about them from training, linked to records about their pasts in the FBI archives.79 Dasch understandably expected to be rewarded for his help, but instead the FBI arrested him too. It later emerged that FBI agents insinuated that he would eventually be given a presidential pardon in exchange for ongoing cooperation and for pleading guilty to the ensuing charges.80
Hitler’s final scheme using his American friends had been foiled without a single explosion or drop of American blood being shed. The Führer was incensed when he learned of the arrests, weeping and ranting about the loss of such fine young Nazis. “Next time,” he told Admiral Canaris and Lahousen, “you can send Jews and criminals.”81 As everyone realized, the fate of the captured saboteurs would be grim. Roosevelt and Hoover, eager to dissuade the Germans from undertaking similar plots, threw the book at the captured agents. They also threw an unexpected one. Rather than try the conspirators in a normal courtroom, Roosevelt appointed a military tribunal on the grounds that the saboteurs had violated the rules of war. This was a highly unusual legal step that had not been used since the trial of the conspirators involved in Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. Four of them, including a woman, had been hanged as a result.82
The Nazi saboteurs now faced a courtroom of military officers and were given military rather than civilian legal counsel. The only defense offered was that the men had supposedly only joined the plot as a way to get out of Germany and back to the United States. No one was convinced. All eight men were convicted and sentenced to death. The appeals process proceeded rapidly and, in late July, the US Supreme Court took up the case, called Ex parte Quirin after one of the defendants’ last names. On July 31, 1942, just a month and a half after the saboteurs landed on American shores, the court ruled that the military tribunal had possessed the legal authority to try the men because they were non-uniformed “enemy combatants” and offenders of the laws of war.83 The death sentence was upheld. Days later, all but Dasch and Burger went to the electric chair and were buried in unmarked graves.84 The surviving plotters were informed that the president had reduced their sentences on the grounds that Dasch had helped the FBI unravel the plot and Burger had not stood in his way. Dasch would now face thirty years in prison and Burger a life sentence.85 Hitler’s last plot involving his American friends had come to an end.
Throughout the 1930s and early years of the war, Hitler’s supporters in the United States passed a huge number of secrets to their handlers in the Third Reich. While many of the technical secrets probably had little impact on the war itself, lives were undoubtedly lost because they had been revealed. An unknown but assuredly substantial number of Allied sailors went to their graves thanks to the information that slipped from American ports and ended up with U-boat commanders in the Atlantic. The famous American propaganda poster reading “Loose lips might sink ships” was hardly exaggerating. Hitler’s spies were motivated in their dastardly work by a variety of factors. Some felt an affinity for the fatherland and were undoubtedly radicalized by their past association with the Bund and other groups. It was no accident that at least one spy network was more or less based in the Bund and run by one of its leaders. Some who had immigrated to the United States had retained their loyalty to Germany. Others were motivated by money and some, like the teenaged Lucy Boehmler, were probably just bored and excited by the opportunity to do something seemingly glamorous. Regardless of their motivations, the damage they did to the war effort will never be fully known.
Yet it could have been far worse. Hitler’s spy network was severely hindered in its mission by the diligence of local law enforcement and the FBI. Once Hoover became fully aware of the danger, his G-men did extraordinary work breaking up the Nazi intelligence network. Several times they simply got lucky, as when von der Osten was mowed down by a cab in the middle of New York, but this does not detract from the agency’s overall accomplishments. There was another factor at play as well: Fritz Wiedemann’s own position as a reluctant spy living in forced exile likely reduced the effectiveness of the Nazi network on the West Coast, where it might have been able to do significant damage by coordinating with the Japanese. Instead of serving the fatherland, the captain seemed to have been more concerned about trying to arrange his safe passage into an Allied country. With the United States not yet in the war he could not expect this treatment from Roosevelt, and therefore the only option was the British embassy. Ironically, his overtures were rebuffed, missing an opportunity to gain major insights into the inner workings of the Third Reich and the Abwehr’s network. He and Princess Stephanie Hohenlohe serve as fascinating illustrations of the complexity of the period. While the FBI and the American press believed they were intended to become Hitler’s key American friends, in fact they appear to have conspired against the Führer as much if not more than they conspired against the United States. As with many of Hitler’s other spies, their full stories remain opaque even decades later.
The legacy of Hitler’s spy network was grim. Pain, suffering, and death were visited upon both the spies themselves and their victims. The outrageous sabotage plot of 1942 compelled Roosevelt to make an example of the captured agents and push the boundaries of the law to make sure they were executed swiftly. It worked, and the Nazis never again attempted such a violent and brutal terrorist plot. Hitler’s American friends had finally been shut down completely, but the consequences of their actions would persist far beyond the end of the war.