The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange (11 page)

While in Idstein, he met Johanna, who lived there with her parents. Mathias had an older sister, Anne, who had immigrated to the United States. Johanna and Mathias decided to marry and immigrate there as well. Ensi, their youngest daughter, said, “My mother was crazy about America. As a girl, she thought the streets were paved with gold. I believe one of the reasons she married my father was to get to America.”

Mathias left Germany on the
Reliance
steamship and arrived in New York on March 29, 1923. He traveled to Williamson, West Virginia, and stayed with Anne, his sister, and her husband, a World War I veteran who worked as a coal miner. For two months Mathias worked in the mines with his brother-in-law. In October, Mathias went to work for the Mingo County Road Department as an engineer.

Johanna followed him to the United States later that year. On Christmas Eve 1923, Mathias and Johanna were married. In their wedding photograph, Johanna wears a knee-length, pale silk dress, white stockings and shoes, and holds a large bouquet of roses. Mathias is dressed in a double-breasted, pin-striped suit. They both display hopeful smiles and already look as prosperous as they had dreamed of becoming—the image of shiny new immigrants to America. If they worked hard, the couple believed, they would become American citizens in due time.

In the 1920s, it took Germans living legally in the United States five years to obtain citizenship. Applicants had to report every year to the Immigration and Naturalization Service and provide references. If applicants missed a step, they would have to start anew.

In 1924, a year after they married, Mathias and Johanna moved to Cleveland, Ohio. Mathias secured a job with the Cleveland Electric Illumination Company, and both he and Johanna finally felt
settled in America. They filed their applications in Cleveland to become citizens. In a signed document, they pledged their intention to “renounce forever all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign potentate, state or sovereignty and particularly to The German Empire.” With their signatures, they officially transferred their loyalty from Germany to America. The document required Mathias and Johanna to certify that they were not anarchists or polygamists, which were automatic disqualifiers for citizenship. Their pledge to the government and to themselves was “in good faith to become a citizen of the United States of America and to permanently reside therein: SO HELP ME GOD.”

But Mathias was careless about meeting the requirements for citizenship. Five years after he filed his application, he was required to file additional documents, but he failed to meet the deadline. In the summer of 1929, he and Johanna went on a prolonged trip to Germany to visit Johanna’s ailing parents. The missed deadline meant they had to start the process all over again.

The trip to Germany had other negative consequences as well. Prior to leaving America, Mathias worked as a structural engineer for the New York Central Railroad in Cleveland and earned a decent wage. When the Eislerohs returned to the United States in the fall of 1929, the country was in the depths of the Depression and he was unable to regain his former position. Mathias took a series of low-paying jobs in Cleveland, and he and Johanna lived in an upstairs room of an old hotel in the city’s downtown for $5 a week. After Ingrid was born on May 8, 1930, Eiserloh paid $50 down for an isolated property on Albion Road in Strongsville. He put up a tent on the land and moved in with Johanna and Ingrid. “With just sand and cement and a few steel bars, the cheapest material to be had, but the hardest to work with, I managed to build four walls with a floor and a roof over them to live in,” he later wrote. “But it was very primitive.”

During all these years, Mathias lived as an unremarkable new immigrant. “I was a graduated civil engineer when I entered this country, 28 years old and in prime condition,” Eislerloh explained
in his own letter to Biddle after his arrest. “My only ambition was to work hard, to live an honest and decent life, to be among my family, and give my children happiness and an education as my father gave me.”

Though they struggled financially, Mathias and Johanna were resourceful, worked hard, and built a reasonably stable life in Strongsville. Mathias was arrested only once, in 1927, when he was working for the New York Central Railroad in Cleveland as an engineer. On the way home from work, he ran a red light and did not have the money to pay the fine. He spent three hours in jail until Johanna could arrive and bring $30.

For six weeks in 1934, Mathias was unable to find work, but he received help from the local relief headquarters in Cuyahoga County. Proud, and by his own description a “stubborn German,” Mathias was embarrassed to accept charity. “I cannot and do not want to live on somebody’s sweat,” he told authorities.

In early 1935, he finally secured a job with the White Motor Company in Cleveland as an automobile body designer. It paid $45 a week, less than Eiserloh thought he deserved, but at least his family was off the dole, which lessened his shame. “The job hardly allowed me to buy the materials that I wanted but I worked hard in my spare time. “By 1937, there were five rooms in the house,” wrote Eisleroh. “It was a period of relative contentment.”

A year later, the White Motor Company suffered an economic setback and Eiserloh lost his job again. He applied for a job with the Works Progress Administration, one of Roosevelt’s New Deal projects, but he was not eligible. Only citizens of the United States could apply, a requirement that prompted Mathias to file another application for citizenship. Nine months later, on the day he was supposed to appear at the INS, he had a job interview and failed to make the appointment. For the second time, his citizenship application was put on hold. The more jobs he lost, the more setbacks he suffered, the more he felt like an outsider in America.

By September 1939, Hitler had seized power in Germany, rolled
across the Polish border, and seemed unstoppable. In response, France and Britain declared war on Germany, and America stood at the brink. As a result, the US economy had improved and companies were hiring more engineers. Nonetheless, month after month Eiserloh looked for jobs without success. As he explained to Biddle, “a certain question always spoiled my chances”—that of his nationality. “As a husband and now father of two children, I could not see why they and my wife should starve, just because I was born in Germany.” Ashamed, he took a chance. He told an employment agent that he was Swiss and his scheme worked. In the late fall of 1939, he got a job that paid $75 a week, the most he’d ever earned in America. He returned to designing bridges, his dream job, this time for the Columbia Chemical Division in Cleveland.

At work, Mathias felt humiliated by his pretense of being Swiss. “To get a job in America, without which my family would starve, I had to be something other than German. I could not help it. For me it was work or perish.” The more he saw Germans scorned as enemies in America, the more he felt like a traitor to himself and the angrier he became.

Finally, he left his job at Columbia for a lower-paying job at Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company. At the new job, he didn’t hide his German citizenship. He joined the German Technical Society and began visiting the library at the German consulate in Cleveland to read German technical periodicals. In contrast to its post–World War I financial depression, Germany’s economy was now booming. For two years, Mathias had worked in Germany on a hydroelectric power project that channelized the Isar River. Now he idly looked through technical journals and explored the idea of pursuing better paying jobs in Germany. “I wanted to learn more about a country where my labor was highly in demand and where a man fifty years old was not classified as too old,” he told Biddle.

Like many of his German friends in Strongsville, Mathias bore the immigrant’s burden. He had one foot on one side of the ocean in Germany and the other in America, which made him an outsider
in both places. By nature, identity, and personal history, he was fully German, but in his aspirations and ambition he was fully American. He would live with this dilemma all his life.

After his children were born in America, Eiserloh felt as if he, too, had a stake in America. He paid taxes and invested in his own home, but he stayed connected to his German culture. He ate German food and spoke German, as well as English. On most Tuesday and Thursday nights he drank beer with friends at the Schwarzwald Restaurant in Cleveland. He bought books in German on sale at the embassy in Cleveland. He belonged to two different German clubs—the German Technical Society, a group of engineers and scientists, and the German Nationals Club. “The clubs were purely social,” Eiserloh told Biddle.

In a peaceful world, Eiserloh’s assimilation into American life would have been smooth. With the outbreak of World War II, his close German ties aroused suspicion. In 1941, agents in Cleveland followed orders and took the next step. They interviewed Eiserloh’s former and current employers, his neighbors, acquaintances, and local businessmen in Strongsville.

In addition to Ernie and Helen Hoelscher, Mrs. McGovern, the kind neighbor whom Ingrid had sought out after her mother’s altercation with the home invader, was also an informer. When asked whether the Eiserlohs ever had loud parties or strange-looking visitors, Mrs. McGovern said, according to the FBI report, that she noticed “meetings being held at the subjects’ home on several occasions. She stated that 20 to 25 people would attend such meetings.” When asked about these “meetings” by FBI agents, Eiserloh explained that he often recruited German friends to help work on his house or listen to music on the Victrola and didn’t consider such activities disloyal.

While Mrs. McGovern was suspicious of Mathias, she defended Ingrid. “Ingrid is a very nice girl,” Mrs. McGovern told FBI agents. “She never talked about Germany or wanted to go there. The trouble on the school bus was started solely by the other children.”

One of the troublemakers was Mrs. McGovern’s own son, Pat, who when interviewed by the FBI agents accused Ingrid of always “taking Hitler’s side.” That, according to Pat, was what prompted the taunts on the bus. Ingrid was slightly older than Pat, and she sensed that he wanted to be accepted as a part of the pack but meant her no real harm. Perhaps the boy thought he was doing his civic duty. At any other time, his harassment would have been mild annoyances, but these manufactured charges against Ingrid became part of Mathias’s FBI files.

So did her father’s anti-Semitic views. As a teenager, Ingrid knew that he shared the extremist view in Germany that Jews, especially Jewish bankers and merchants, were to blame for the country’s many economic woes. During the FBI’s investigation, Marguerite Dassel, a neighbor who owned a lunch stand in Strongsville, reported that Mathias complained to her about Roosevelt’s Jewish advisers, such as the Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter. Mathias claimed that “the president’s true name is Rosenfeld, not Roosevelt, and he’s Jewish,” a remark that led Dassel to believe that Eiserloh was not only anti-Semitic but a Nazi spy.

Mathias’s German military service hadn’t landed him on the FBI’s official list of security risks, but during the FBI investigation of 1941 it was another mark against him. It didn’t help his case that in 1935 a German official in the Cleveland consulate had taken the time to discover that although Eiserloh had earned the Iron Cross for his service in World War I, he’d never received it. The official came to the Eiserloh home in Strongsville and gave him the medal. Mathias hadn’t claimed the medal because he didn’t want to be reminded of World War I. His children said the Iron Cross was meaningless to him, but he accepted it. Ensi remembered, “My father hated war. He never picked up the Iron Cross when he lived in Germany and didn’t want it. But he felt it rude to reject the representative of the consulate.”

On January 14, 1942, only six days after his arrest, Eisleroh was taken from his jail cell in Cleveland and appeared before a local
board, administered by Edward Ennis, director of the Alien Enemy Control Unit within the Department of Justice. All over the country, thousands of enemy aliens like Eisleroh were summoned before these boards, made up of citizens. All of the proceedings were in secret, and most lasted less than fifteen minutes. None of those arrested were allowed lawyers. They were not informed of the charges against them and had no opportunity to challenge evidence or confront their accusers. The verdict of the alien hearing boards could not be appealed.

At the hearing, Eislerloh was asked if he’d told his neighbors that he objected to his children taking the oath of allegiance to the American flag in their school. “I merely said that I did not think that children of so young an age could understand what the oath of allegiance would mean,” he replied.

Most of the case against him came from a fellow employee at work, who was not present at the hearing, but told FBI agents that Eiserloh was pro-Nazi. The anonymous accuser described Eiserloh as “hotheaded” and said he boasted at work that Germany would win the war. “He said that United States armaments would be obsolete
by the time they got to the front and that Germany would have new and better armaments,” the source told the agents. Confronted with the charge, Eiserloh said that a “good deal of ill feeling” existed between himself and his accuser. He admitted that he might in anger have made inimical comments about the United States but that he had meant no harm. “I am completely loyal to the United States,” he told the board. “My children are citizens of the United States. I only want to make a good and decent life for them.”

Eiserloh was not asked about the other accusations made to FBI agents by his neighbors in Strongsville, and he never learned of them. They were a part of his FBI file, but he did not know of their existence and could not refute evidence that was never revealed to him. His brother-in-law John Weiland was present at the hearing and spoke on his behalf. Weiland’s own loyalty to the United States was not in question. Weiland had fought with the American
Army of Occupation in Germany during World War I. Weiland said that he’d never heard Mathias make an un-American statement and urged the board to parole him. Initially, the board agreed with Weiland and recommended that Eiserloh be paroled and released on a $1,000 bond under the condition that he not be employed by any company that had anything to do with national defense.