The Family (53 page)

7.
Drew Pearson, “Merry-Go-Round,”
Washington Post
, October 25, 1946.

8.
“Huge Area Shaken, But City Escapes,”
New York Times,
September 13, 1940.

9.
“West Point Sails With Axis Agents Ousted from the U.S.,”
New York Times
, July 16, 1941.

10.
“German Newsmen Tour Army Bases,”
Information Bulletin
, September 1951 (U.S. High Commissioner’s Office), p. 72. University of Wisconsin Digital Collections, http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/History.

11.
Correspondence between Donald C. Stone and Hoffman, “Re attached report by Donald C. Stone: Implications of Mutual Security Act and Requirements for Action, October 4, 1951,” correspondence, 1951, Economic Cooperation Administration File, Paul G. Hoffman Papers, Truman Presidential Museum and Library.
“My main use…”:
Stone to Abram, undated, circa 1948, folder 21, box 474, collection 459, BGCA.

12.
National Security Council directive 10/2, quoted in Kenneth Osgood,
Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad
(University of Kansas Press, 2006), p. 39.

13.
Letter to Abram, from unknown correspondent, December 25, 1945, folder 4, box 168, collection 459, BGCA; and Grubb,
Modern Viking
, pp. 101–2.

14.
Timothy George, “Inventing Evangelicalism,”
Christianity Today
, March 2004.

15.
“I believe honestly…”
: Dianne Kirby, “Harry Truman’s Religious Legacy: The Holy Alliance, Containment and the Cold War,” in
Religion and the Cold War,
ed. Diane Kirby (Palgrave, 2003), p. 86.
Truman and MRA.
: Driberg,
The Mystery of Moral Re-Armament
, p. 92.
Truman’s meeting with Robertson:
Donald C. Stone to John R. Steelman, the first man to hold the office later known as White House chief of staff, January 23, 1948, folder 21, box 474, collection 459, BGCA.

16.
“Imperial interests”
: Gregor Dallas,
1945: The War That Never Ended
(Yale University Press, 2005), p. 581.
Carlson
: The phrase had popped up in Fellowship correspondence the year previous, but it seems that Carlson debuted it publicly and may well have coined it. In an undated memo he wrote in apparent preparation for the conference, he declares Worldwide Spiritual Offensive as the “theme” that unites church and state into a force strong enough to confront the “Red Hordes.” Worldwide Spiritual Offensive in his view was distinctly American, since only the “new race” of Americans, “conscious of its dependence on divine providence,” could confront the “alien way of life” practiced by leftists and foreigners (memo and speech). Folder 1, box 505, collection 459, BGCA.
Broger
: “Moral Doctrine for Free World Global Planning” was a presentation Broger made to a Fellowship group on June 14, 1954. No box number, collection 459, BGCA. The doctrine consisted of a study of communism and Broger’s plan for reforming society after a “global war” using Fellowship-style networking, using “indoctrinated personnel who will form nucleus groups” to implement “the highest concepts of freedom, whether socially acceptable or not.”

17.
This brief account of the NAE is derived from (and with apologies to) Joel A. Carpenter’s more sympathetic but very insightful account in “An Evangelical United Front,” chapter 8 of his excellent
Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism
(Oxford University Press, 1997).

18.
Harriet French, “To Make Christians Leaders, and Leaders Christians,” in unidentified newspaper, box 411, folder 4, collection 459, BGCA.

19.
An undated brochure produced by the Fellowship shows on its front page just such a conversation between two men walking down the stone steps of the mansion. The man on the right, dressed in light gray and a dark tie, seems to be trying to persuade his companion, an older fellow with gray hair and black brows and an impatient air. The persuader, we learn in the caption, is Commissioner Sigurd Anderson of the Federal Trade Commission; the skeptic, Howard Blanchard of Union Pacific Railroad—two men with more than Christ in common. “The Bible,” declares the brochure, “contains inexhaustible resources for the businessman fighting the economic battle in a two-fisted business world,” like a vein of coal or a pool of oil “deposited” by God, awaiting refinement into a spiritual offensive against “materialism.”

20.
FDR has long been a problematic figure for American fundamentalism, and not just because of his impossible-to-ignore leadership in World War II. On one hand, the New Deal benefited too many in both the populist rank and file of fundamentalism and at the elite level of Dixiecrat politicians for the movement to condemn FDR altogether. On the other hand, the avant-garde of fundamentalism was born in 1935 in response to FDR’s perceived godless socialism. What is to be done with this historical paradox? William J. Federer, an accountant-turned-historian who has become a best-selling fundamentalist historian, attempts to resolve the dilemma with
The Faith of F.D.R.
(Amerisearch, 2006), a compilation of every banal piety Roosevelt ever uttered. Federer hopes the book will cement FDR, war-president, into the fundamentalist pantheon.

21.
Grubb,
Modern Viking,
p. 105.
“Nominal membership”
: Otto Fricke, J. W. E. Sommer, Georg Reichel, Professor Landon Bender, Paul Orlamunder, Friedreich Wunderlich, to Abram, August 26, 1946, folder 4, box 218, collection 459, BGCA.

22.
J. F. Byrnes, “Restatement of Policy on Germany, Stuttgart,” September 6, 1946. http://usa.usembassy.de/etexts/ga4–460906.htm accessed August 20, 2006.

23.
“You are God’s man”
: Abram to Fricke, August 29, 1947, folder 4, box 218, collection 459, BGCA.

24.
Michael H. Kater,
Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany
(Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 49.

25.
Hans Spier,
From the Ashes of Disgrace: A Journal from Germany, 1945–1955
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985), pp. 31–32.

26.
Hans Kempe to Abram, February 5, 1948, folder 5, box 218, collection 459, BGCA.

27.
Peter Grose,
Operation Rollback: America’s Secret War Behind the Iron Curtain
(Houghton Mifflin, 2000), pp. 2–6.

28.
“Meeting Agenda,” in folders 46–50, box 585, collection 459, BGCA.

29.
Most of this money came in individual donations raised by Abram’s prayer cells (see Gedat to Abram, January 14, 1951; Abram to Gedat, April 18, 1951, folder 7, box 218, collection 459, BGCA), but some apparently came from the Mellon Foundation, as well. Gedat to Abram, March 26, 1950, folder 5, box 218, collection 459, BGCA.

30.
In
The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919
–
1945
(Cambridge University Press, 2003), the historian Richard Steigmann-Gall delivers conclusive evidence that settles the debate over whether or not Nazism conceived of itself as anti-Christian: not at all. In fact, much of the top leadership, Steigmann-Gall documents, considered the cross and the swastika two different symbols for one great idea.

31.
“Directive to Commander-in-Chief of United States Forces of Occupation Regarding the Military Government of Germany,” April 1945 (JCS 1067). Available online from the U.S. Embassy to Germany at http://usa.usembassy.de/etexts/ga3–450426.pdf.

32.
“Asiatic nihilism”
: Dr. H. O. Ahrens to Abram, November 10, 1949, folder 5, box 218, collection 459, BGCA. Ahrens was a vocal and effective lobbyist for German industrialists determined to avoid the dismantling of factories used for military production. At the time of this letter, he was taking one of Abram’s American operatives, William Frary von Bromberg (who claimed the title of baron, perhaps falsely) on a tour of such properties.

33.
Abram to Fricke, September 21, 1949; Fricke to Abram, October 17, 1949; Abram to Fricke, November 2, 1949; folder 4, box 218, collection 459, BGCA. Gedat quoted in Inge Deutschkron,
Mein Leben nach dem Überleben
(Dtv, 2000), p. 130.

34.
The involvement of Abs, Schmelz, Rohrbach, and Speidel is reported in “The Highlights of the ICL Conference at Castle Mainau, Germany, June 14–17, 1951,” an account by the ICL employee Wallace Haines, and an undated, untitled report on the same conference by a German ICL employee, Margarete Gärtner (herself a former prewar propagandist for German expansion), folders 10 and 11, respectively, of box 218, collection 459, BGCA.

35.
Hans von Eicken, a leader with Gedat and Fricke of the German division of the Fellowship, wrote to Abram on July 11, 1951, to tell Abram that the German Fellowship’s advocacy on behalf of Pohl and another war criminal, Otto Ohlendorf—an influential economist who’d boasted at his trial of having overseen the murder of 90,000 Jews and other non-Aryans—had helped soothe the concerns of those in “important circles” who felt that the German Fellowship was the “cleverly engineered product of an American power group.” Folder 7, box 218, collection 459, BGCA. On October 12, 1951, von Neurath’s daughter had written Abram a letter begging for help with the case of her father. He’d been treated well by his American guards, she wrote, but persecuted by the Soviets who ran the prison in tandem with the United States. She was outraged that her father, one of the seven “Major War Criminals,” suffered from bad dentistry. “It was difficult for him to talk,” during her last visit to him in prison, “as his artificial set of teeth—put in about a year ago at Spandau—was fitting very badly.” Abram opened a file on the case. “Can we do anything about this?” he wrote in a note to one of his aides. “Maybe [Congressman O. K.] Armstrong should see this.” Von Neurath won his release as a medical parolee in 1953 (Arieh J. Kochavi,
Prelude to Nuremberg: Allied War Crimes Policy and the Question of Punishment
[University of North Carolina Press, 1998], p. 245), but besides this letter, the file Abram opened is lost, leaving us uncertain whether Abram’s intervention played a part in von Neurath’s good fortune. Winifred von Mackensen (née von Neurath) to Abram, folder 1, box 218, collection 459, BGCA.

36.
“Church Group Votes, Elects 17 from Congress,”
Washington Post
, January 14, 17, 1945.
“Panty-waist diplomacy”:
Grose,
Operation Rollback
, p. 6.

37.
Lance Morrow,
The Best Year of their Lives: Kennedy, Nixon, and Johnson in 1948: Learning the Secrets of Power
(Basic Books, 2005), p. 128. Jack Powers,
South Bend Tribune
, February 24, 1991.

38.
Address to the United States Senate, February 5, 1946. One can find extensive excerpts from the speech on a number of Holocaust revisionist Web sites, including, as of 2006, http://www.sweetliberty.org/issues/wars/witness2history/21.html.

39.
Spier,
From the Ashes of Disgrace
, p. 27.

40.
Lecture to the Frankfurt chapter of International Christian Leadership, August 9, 1950, folder 11, box 218, collection 459, BGCA.

41.
Von Gienanth to Wallace Haines, ICL “Field Director for Europe,” March 29, 1952, folder 1, box 218, collection 459, BGCA.

42.
Abram to Ropp, October 6, 1953, folder 3, box 218, collection 459, BGCA. Ropp was himself an admirer of Merwin K. Hart, the anti-Semitic American fascist whom Abram had welcomed into the Fellowship’s inner circle. Ropp to Wallace Haines, August 12, 1952, folder 1, box 218, collection 459, BGCA.

43.
Frances Hepp, April 23, 1947, folder 4, box 218, collection 459, BGCA.

44.
Haines to Abram, June 23, 1951, folder 8, box 218, collection 459, BGCA.

45.
This account of the meeting at Mainau is drawn from K. C. Liddel, “Notes on Mainau Conference,” June 28, 1951, folder 8, box 218, collection 459, BGCA; Wallace Haines, “The Highlights of ICL Conference at Castle Mainau, Germany,” folder 10, box 218, collection 459;
Christian Leadership News
, September 1951, collection 459; Margarete Gärtner, “Newsletter,” July 30, 1951, folder 10, box 218, collection 459; undated reports for Abram by Margarete Gärtner in folders 10 and 11, box 218, collection 459. Gärtner’s past as a propagandist is referred to in John Hiden and Thomas Lane, eds.,
The Baltic and the Outbreak of the Second World War
(Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 126. The U-boat commander was Reinhard Hardegen. The fascist editor was Benno Mascher. Bishop Wurm’s anti-Semitic remarks can be found in Wolfgang Erlich,
And the Witnesses Were Silent: The Confessing Church and the Persecution of the Jews
(University of Nebraska Press, 2000), p. 201.