Double Agent (37 page)

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: The quotation is taken from one of six surviving letters written from William Sebold to Jim Ellsworth generously provided to the author by the Ellsworth family.

: Henry Lee, “Smashing the Biggest Spy Ring,”

, December 1951.

: George McJimsey, ed.,

40 vols. (Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, 2001–8), 32: 34–41.

: FBI File 100.HQ.373899, Sections 1 and 2, Record Group 65, National Archives, College Park, MD. Hereafter cited as Sebold personal FBI file.

: Samuel A. Tower, “FBI’s Hidden Struggle Against Spies Continues,”

February 11, 1945.

: Sebold personal FBI file.

:

, United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, Case 16000, Record Group 21, National Archives at New York City. Hereafter cited as trial transcript.

: Sebold personal FBI file.

: Richard Suchenwirth, “Command and Leadership in the German Air Force,”

174 (Aerospace Studies Institute, 1969), 8.

: On general rearmament, Richard J. Evans,

(New York: Penguin Press, 2005), 337, 615.

: Edward L. Homze,

(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976), 98.

: Paul Preston,

(New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2009), 181; and Louis De Jong,

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 4.

: Antony Beevor,

(London: Penguin Books, 2006), 173.

Herbert Rutledge Southworth,

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 240–41, 245, 277.

: Ibid., 231.

: R. Chickering and S. Forster, eds.,

(Cambridge University Press, 2003), 288.

: Ernst Heinkel,

(New York: E. P. Dutton, 1956), 162.

: Richard Suchenwirth, “Historical Turning Points in the German Air Force War Effort,”

189 (Aerospace Studies Institute, 1969), 28.

: James Corum,

(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), 200.

: Nikolaus Ritter,

(Hamburg: Hoffman und Campe, 1972). The book was written with an uncredited ghostwriter, American author Beth Day. I rely on two main sources for Ritter’s recollections: an English-language translation of

generously provided by Ritter’s daughter, Katharine R. Wallace, and Ritter’s interrogation at the hands of British intelligence immediately following the war. Since the Ritter-related information in Ladislas Farago’s

(New York: David McKay, 1971) is often at variance with Ritter’s own account, I have avoided Mr. Farago’s version. (Mr. Farago is equally unreliable in his presentation of William Sebold’s story.) In addition, I have gained insights on Mr. Ritter through interviews and correspondence with Mrs. Wallace, who authored a book on the wartime experiences of her family: KF Ritter,

(Xlibris, 2006).

: The British investigation and interrogation of “Nikolaus Adolf Fritz Ritter, alias REINHARDT, alias VON RANTZAU: based mainly in Hamburg,” can be found in files KV2–87 and KV2–88, British Archives, Records of the Security Service, Kew, London. Thanks to Carolinda Witt for providing the author with copies of the documents.

: John Rodden and Ethan Goffman, eds.,

(West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2010), 315.

: Following Adolf Hitler’s ascension to power in 1933, Heinz Spanknoebel, a Reich citizen who had been active in Nazi circles in Detroit in the 1920s, was assigned by high officials including Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, to consolidate all local German groups in America into a national movement that could serve as an advertisement for the regime’s objectives. Within months, his Bund der Freunde des Neuen Deutschlands or Association of the Friends of the New Germany had organized more than twenty locals in German neighborhoods throughout the United States, a clutch of ideology-spreading newspapers for regional distribution, an elite Ordnungsdienst or Order Force with paramilitary uniforms and a spy branch that sought a reliable “young lady of good appearance” who would “come over on the

or

as a hairdresser” to conduct espionage, according to a letter intercepted by the Communist

, the New York newspaper dedicated like no other to smoking out the Fascist enemy.

With a mustache trimmed in the Hitler fashion, Spanknoebel stormed into the offices of the daily newspaper

and demanded, on authority from Berlin, that the publication cease printing “pro-Jewish articles,” even though it carried no criticisms of Nazism. Bernard Ridder, who was copublisher of the newspaper with his brother Victor, said he told the visitor, “All I can tell you, Spanknoebel, is to get the hell out and stay out.” Spanknoebel had greater success forcing his way onto the board of directors of the United German Societies of Greater New York, which included seventy organizations that represented the breadth of German life in New York, everything from Alte Bronxer Carneval Ritterschafter, (the Old Order of Bronx Carnival Knights) to the Bund der Sudeten-Deutschen in Amerika (Association of Sudeten Germans in America), from the Damenchor des Baeckermeister Gesangvereins (Ladies Choir of the Bakers’ Singing Society) to the German-American Athletic Club of East Eighty-Second Street. He promised that the Nazi regime would bring punishment on the “parents or other relatives” of anyone in the group who stood in the way of his plan of Nazification, a boast that carried significant weight coming from a credentialed agent of the Reich. The story broke into the open when Mayor John P. O’Brien, a Tammany hack in the midst of a reelection campaign, said he would refuse to allow German Day festivities starring Spanknoebel to be held at a city-owned armory. He said the “occasion would be utilized by aliens to sow seeds of Hitler’s intolerant and intolerable religious prejudices in New York, where we have no room for the bigotry of anti-Semites, Ku Kluxers, or other principles of spite and hatred.” Carefully crafted to appeal to Jewish, Irish Catholic, and black voters, the message didn’t prevent Mayor O’Brien’s loss to the reformist energy of Fiorello La Guardia, the half-Jewish Italian Episcopalian with a fed-up-with-it bravado and visceral hatred for Hitler (a “perverted maniac,” “the brown-shirt fanatic”) who was destined to become the colorful personification of New York’s civic life in the 1930s, the inimitable “Little Flower.”

Within days, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York announced he was conducting an investigation into Spanknoebel for violating a federal law passed in 1917 that required representatives of foreign governments to register with the State Department. At this point, Hitler’s conservative diplomatic corps, which wanted above all to

the image of the Reich in America, distanced itself from the whole affair, and some Nazi officials began considering the need for more subtle methods of persuasion in a country like the United States, where “the opposing elements are in every respect all-powerful.” His assignment canceled, Spanknoebel was confronted by an operative from Berlin in an apartment just off Park Avenue where he was hiding from a US arrest warrant. The man put a gun to Spanknoebel’s chest and escorted him to the waiting

, which carried him back to Germany and, according to one story, a successful career with the SS.

In the meantime, Samuel Untermyer, a seventy-five-year-old Wall Street lawyer and Jewish civic leader, was gaining notice for his call to “undermine the Hitler regime and bring the German people to their senses by destroying their export trade on which their very existence depends,” a resonant issue in a city that was populated with 2 million of the world’s 15 million Jews. During an address over WABC radio, Untermyer said his boycott campaign (opposed by some Jewish organizations as too provocative) targeted “German-made goods” and “German ships or shipping” but also “any merchant or shopkeeper who sells any German-made goods or who patronizes German ships or shipping,” which located the matter directly on the streets of New York. Noisy sidewalk demonstrations soon convinced major department stores such as Saks, Hearns, Straus, Gimbels, and Woolworth to drop their business with Hitler’s Germany.

The “jüdischen Boykott” would be the rallying cry in a renewed effort to bring German America under the umbrella of the Friends of the New Germany. The vehicle would be an auxiliary organization called the German-American Business Committee, known by its German-language acronym of DAWA, launched to “boycott the boycotters” by urging adherents to “buy German” and “patronize Aryan stores only,” according to the language of its handouts. Within a month of its formation in early 1934, the DAWA published a “trade guide” that listed 750 member businesses, including more than 200 in Yorkville, each of which paid a sliding-scale registration fee for the privilege of placing a blue eagle sticker in their window, a physical mark on the city’s landscape that denoted either support, acquiescence, or fear of Nazism. The

reported that “several large establishments” in Yorkville didn’t display the eagle and only joined DAWA “in order not to offend the Friends of the New Germany” but that the proprietors of “delicatessens, groceries, and fish markets” were “enthusiastic about the blue DAWA eagle,” saying it increased business, which was probably what really interested them about it. The next step could’ve been predicted: in short order, “dozens” of Jewish businesses in the neighborhood “had their front windows marked with large swastikas,” including an optical company, a cut-rate drugstore, a bakery, and two furniture stores, according to a Jewish newspaper. Some Jewish merchants in Yorkville were so fearful that they sought membership in DAWA in order to save businesses dependent upon German patronage. “I sent two letters, one of them registered, to the DAWA offices,” said one. “They did not respond.”

Anti-boycott sentiment appears to have done wonders for Nazi recruitment efforts by stoking the same resentments that had enabled Hitler to gain popular support back home. In a scene that was replicated in all the major German American auditoriums in the metropolitan area, more than two thousand people gathered on March 17 at the rustic Schwaben Halle on the Brooklyn side of Ridgewood, located in what today would be referred to as the Bushwick neighborhood. In between bursts of martial music, a succession of speakers demanded support for the DAWA campaign by shouting that “Jewish economic masters” were seeking the impoverishment of all German Americans. A reporter for a Jewish newspaper noted that only a dozen hands were raised in stiff-armed salute as the first notes were struck of “Deutschland über Alles.” “After one verse it swung into the