Shadow Warriors

by Dick Camp

  • Major Kobayashi Kazuo, staff intelligence officer with the 23rd Army stated, “I remember two remittances of money that came for the Heise office from Shanghai … that had been sent from Lt. Col. Ehrhardt.”

  • Captain Taizo Oka, a staff officer in the political department of the 23rd Army stated, “The Heise office was connected to Lt. Col. Ehrhardt in Shanghai. The office collected information about the air force from Chungking and relayed the information to their home country. The 23rd Army helped them in the gathering of this information.”

  The December 1946 SSU War Crimes Intelligence Section commended Farrell and Gray. “… Captain Frank Farrell and Sgt. Gray have done an excellent job in revealing the workings of the Canton Branch of the German espionage system operating under the Ehrhardt Bureau in Shanghai. Reports and signed statements confirm beyond doubt the operations in Canton of German espionage activity directed against America, following the capitulation of Germany, and hence conducted in violation of the surrender terms to which Germany subscribed. Interrogations of high-ranking Japanese officers of the Twenty-Third Army carried out in this area, and signed statements obtained from them, go far towards establishing the degree of relative responsibility of the various army and Gendarmerie units and individual officers for the acts of atrocity committed in the extensive area occupied by the South China Expeditionary Forces.”

  Bureau Fuellkrug

  The Heise investigation uncovered the espionage activities of the four members of the Bureau Fuellkrug in Peking who were providing intelligence information to the Japanese North China Army. In late July, Staff Sergeant Gray interviewed Hans Menien, manager and editor of the Transocean News Service, regarding an agreement to provide intelligence information to the Japanese. “Fuellkrug signed on behalf of his intelligence organization,” he said. Farrell interrogated Col. Tomiaki Hidaka, the senior Japanese intelligence officer in Peking, who testified that Fuellkrug and his subordinates, Maria Muller, August Stock, and Walter Heissig, provided important information to him at private conferences and weekly intelligence briefings. As a result of this information, Farrell had the four quickly rounded up by the Chinese police and jailed.

  Bureau Ehrhardt

  Having rolled up the Canton and Peking branches of the KO, Farrell and Gray moved their base of operations to Shanghai in an effort to prove their case against Ehrhardt and bring him and his cohorts to justice. Using the Heise organizational chart, they scoured the Shanghai area, finding that most of the individuals lived in and around the city. A few of the former Ehrhardt bureau were willing to testify against their former boss to gain clemency from prosecution; however, others stonewalled, refusing to admit any complicity in post-surrender espionage. Hans Dethleffs, a bureau member, swore, “I know that we stopped here [Shanghai] completely; with the day of the German collapse, we did not work anymore.” Another, Ingward Rudloff, stated, “I have sworn on the Gospel before Captain Farrell that to the best of my knowledge nobody of the Ehrhardt Bureau worked for the Japanese after the German surrender.” Heinz Peerschke said, with a perfectly straight face, that he “simply studied languages after the surrender, occasionally venturing out to get ice-water to take home.” Farrell, ever the hard-nosed skeptic, had them all arrested.

  Farrell expanded his search to include former Japanese intelligence officers, most of whom were waiting for transportation back to Japan in the Honam Japanese Internment Camp. “They were happy to oblige,” he explained, “hoping their cooperation might speed up their return home.” Lieutenant Colonel Akira Mori*, the senior Japanese intelligence officer in Shanghai, was one of the first that Farrell interviewed. Mori volunteered that, “Ehrhardt told me that he would continue to help us and he would pass that message on to the other members of his organization, all of whom signed a statement indicating they would help us.” Mori indicated that the Japanese High Command was particularly anxious for the Ehrhardt Bureau to continue its efforts because it was providing important tactical information on U.S. Navy operations during the battle of Okinawa, where U.S. forces were engaged in a bloody battle at sea with Japanese kamikazes—suicide pilots. Gray interviewed Kobayshi Kazuo, a staff officer in the 23rd Army, who testified that he saw a telegram in late May 1945 from Shanghai stating that Ehrhardt would continue working for the Japanese. Furthermore, he remembered two large remittances of money, in local currency, that were paid to Ehrhardt, as well as payments in small two-ounce gold bars called “peanuts” for this work.

  The Japanese Foreign Affairs Section of the 23rd Army outlined their use of agents and spies to gather intelligence, two of whom Farrell personally tracked down. One agent, Tam Ping Kuo, alias Bianca Tam, alias Bianca Sannino, he compared to Mata Hari, the notorious international spy of World War I. Tam was arrested for being a Japanese spy, collaborator, extortionist, perjurer, prostitute, and procuress. Tam, an Italian, the daughter of a highly respected naval family, married a Chinese officer and, after the war started, left him for the life of a Japanese agent. During that time, she lived with several men, including the Vichy French Consul in Canton, who was a notorious Japanese collaborator. Tam ended her relationship when the man either ran out of money or information. When the war ended, she tried to entice American officers with sexual favors to fly her out of China but instead ended up in a Chinese stockade after Farrell had her arrested. The other spy, Rosaline Wong, was convicted by a Chinese court and executed.

  Farrell found that those who had been persecuted by the Nazis, particularly Shanghai’s Jews, were more than happy to testify and gain retribution for past injustices. Included in this category were several diplomats who had an ax to grind because of the way they had been treated. Captain Siefken was more than willing to assist in the investigation. Ehrhardt had convinced the Abwehr to dismiss him from the KO for being a homosexual, which Siefken swore was a trumped-up charge. The disaffected officer described Eisentraeger, alias Ehrhardt, alias Count Schwerin, as a “secretive professional spy master and dedicated Nazi.”

  Satisfied that he had enough evidence for a conviction, Farrell swore out a warrant and accompanied Chinese Army officers to arrest Ehrhardt and his confederates. The arrest went without incident, almost a letdown considering the power these men had wielded during the heyday of the Third Reich. On April 16, 1946, the Mason City (Iowa) Globe-Gazette reported:

  Intelligence officers Tuesday jailed six more alleged Nazis in connection with operations of Bureau Ehrhardt which operated a German espionage network in China long after VE day in violation of surrender terms. It was announced also that seven other persons including three German officials have been held in Canton since Oct 18 1945 as participants in the Ehrhardt network or as material witnesses. Eleven alleged members of the office, including Lt. Col. Ludwig Ehrhardt, the leader, were arrested here Monday and were charged with war crimes. American officers said they carried on war against the United States after the German capitulation. The Americans are [also] holding the head the Ehrhardt network for south China, a former Captain Heise of the Germany artillery, Oswald Ulbricht, former radio expert for the Urasia German airline, and Hanz Niemann, one time radioman aboard the pocket battleship Lützow. Also in custody in Canton are Dr. Franz Siebert, German consul general at Canton, Vice Consul Herbert, and Second Vice Consul Johannes Bresan; Dr. Johannes Otto, longtime German resident of Canton and the head of the Nazi party in south China, is being held as a material witness.

  LOTHAR EISENTRAGER, ALIAS LUDWIG EHRHARDT

  Lothar Eisentraeger had been an officer in World War I and had been wounded several times. In 1932, he joined the Nazi party entering the German military intelligence in the mid-1930s, where he rose to the rank of major. As a friend and protégé of Adm. Wilhelm Canaris, the German military intelligence chief, he was offered the opportunity to head an organization in China. In 1941, he slipped across the Chinese–Soviet border posing as a businessman and set up an office in the Shanghai embassy. Irmagard Zech, an embassy secretary, said, “Ehrhardt was assigned as a special ad
viser, whose work consisted of collecting all types of intelligence in the Far Eastern and Pacific Theaters of war.” In a deposition to Farrell, Eisentraeger stated that the main tasks of his bureau was to spy on the Soviet Union, observe Japanese activities, and gather information about raw materials in the Far East. He deliberately omitted any mention of spying on the United States.

  In a report to OSS headquarters, Farrell described Eisentraeger as “arrogant and jealous of all possible rivals to his authority … and tried hard to look and act like a Prussian officer, but it is also said that he does not quite succeed in this.” His secretary, Gerda Kocher, told Farrell that he is “a jolly fellow and he likes a good drink, good food, and to enjoy life. His house was open to everybody who wanted to have a drink and was willing to keep him company. He hated to be alone and therefore he was almost always out or had somebody at this place. He was very talkative, especially when he had drunk one too many.” Kocher could not understand how “such a man could be appointed to this job.”

  German Information Bureau/German News Service

  The Ehrhardt investigation led directly to German aristocrat Baron Jesco von Puttkamer, who headed the German Information Bureau in Shanghai, the largest Nazi public relations headquarters outside Germany. He was a friend and protégé of Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Reich minister of propaganda. Under Puttkamer, known as the “Goebbels of the Far East,” the bureau became the center of the German propaganda effort in the Far East. It operated under the German Propaganda Ministry, working closely with the Bureau Ehrhardt. The Information Bureau, located in a swanky villa in the European section of the city, produced a stream of propaganda broadcasts and leaflets, through a system of cut-outs and front organizations that targeted the British and American war efforts. Its propaganda material was sent not only throughout China but to the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies—and even North and South America and Europe. The German News Service provided a news agency for the Japanese forces in China.

  Puttkamer was an ardent Nazi, who joined the party in 1932 and became part of an economic espionage unit of the German military intelligence. Later he switched to the foreign ministry’s propaganda section. After the war broke out in 1939, Berlin assigned him to Shanghai. In Secret War in Shanghai: Treachery, Subversion and Collaboration in the Second World War, Bernard Wasserstein described Puttkamer as “A handsome, stocky man with a wide, toothy smile, he traveled through the town with his Korean bodyguard in a horse-drawn carriage.” During an OSS interrogation, Puttkamer tried to play down his role but Farrell learned from a Chinese printer named T. H. Chow that he continued his post-surrender operations. “The German Information Office sent in a printing order once or twice a month, even after the German surrender.” Chow said that when the printing was done his orders were to send them directly to Japanese military headquarters. Based on the printer’s testimony Farrell swore out a warrant and Puttkamer was arrested by Chinese authorities and taken to the Ward Road Jail, along with the three men from the German News Service—Herbert Muller, Felix Altenburg, and Alfred Romain—who continued to provide news to the Japanese after the surrender.

  The Spokesman-Review of Seattle, Washington, reported on April 17, 1946:

  WAR CRIMES INTELLIGENCE REPORT, 15-31 DECEMBER 1945

  Regarding the Germans, only a handful of the SS, NSDAF, Gestapo, and espionage and propaganda agents have been interned and against them no formal war crimes charges have been announced by the Chinese or the United States Governments. [However] SSU/CT continues to amass evidence on war-criminal and collaborationist activities and is already well prepared to implement any concerted Allied war crimes progress should such a program be authorized.

  Marine Capt. Frank Farrell New York who led an investigation of Bureau Ehrhardt said von Puttkamer was appointed by propaganda chief Joachim von Ribbentrop to head the German information bureau which propagandized the far east in hopes of splitting the United States from China and dividing the Chinese government and communist leaders. The “master propagandist” was said to have received a salary of $2,500 monthly as head of the German Information Bureau which propagandized the Far East in hopes of fermenting dissension between the US and China. It continued to produce propaganda right up to the Japanese surrender.

  Time to Pay the Piper

  In October 1946, the United States Military Commission in Shanghai brought the men to trial. In all, twenty-seven German nationals were prosecuted as a result of Farrell’s investigation, of whom twenty-one were convicted. Ehrhardt was sentenced to life imprisonment, von Puttkamer to thirty years at hard labor, and the remainder received terms from five to twenty years.

  Findings and Sentences

  The following were sentenced to the terms of imprisonment indicated:

  Lothar Eisentraeger, alias Ludwig Ehrhardt: life

  Ingward Rudloff: ten years

  Bodo Habenicht: ten years

  Hans Dethleffs: ten years

  Heinz Peerschke: five years

  Mans Mosberg: twenty years

  Johannes Rathje: fifteen years

  Walter Richter: ten years

  Hermann Jaeger: ten years

  Jesco von Puttkamer: thirty years

  Alfred Romain: thirty years, reduced to twenty years by the Reviewing Authorities

  Franz Siebert: five years

  Erich Heise: twenty years

  Oswald Ulbricht: five years

  Hanz Niemann: five years

  Felix Altenburg: eight years

  Herbert Mueller: ten years

  Siegfried Fuellkrug: twenty years

  Walter Heissig: twenty years

  August Stoc: five years, reduced to two years by the Reviewing Authorities

  Maria Muller: five years, reduced to two years by the Reviewing Authorities

  LEGION OF MERIT EXCERPTS

  For exceptionally meritorious service in the performance of duties of great responsibility during the period 7 September 1945 to 15 November 1946 … as members of a two-man team, Capt. Farrell’s record is especially noteworthy for the unusual productivity and resourcefulness displayed in investigating enemy espionage activities in the Far East after the formal surrender of Germany. Of paramount importance to the Allied Governments was the discovery by Capt. Farrell and his co-investigator of conclusive evidence that a German espionage ring, known as the Bureau Ehrhardt, had continued operations and assisted the Japanese … it was substantially proved that this ring operated from Manchuria to Java, centering its activities in Peiping, Shanghai, and Canton, China. … Their extensive knowledge of the backgrounds of witnesses, the sources of information, and the framework and history of the Nazi Government organs and operations in China rendered invaluable assistance in securing [convictions]. The resounding success of the investigation and prosecution of the trial lent much prestige to the American war effort in China and reflects great personal credit upon Captain Farrell and the Army of the United States.

  Six of the accused were acquitted: Herbert Glietsch, Johannes Otto, Wolf Schenke, Ernst Woermann, Wilhelm Stoller, and Elgar von Randow.

  Farrell and Marvin Gray were awarded a Legion of Merit, a singular honor as this award was normally presented to very senior officers. The accompanying citation noted his especially noteworthy performance in securing information necessary for the war crimes trials and the resourcefulness he displayed in carrying out those responsibilities. The Chinese government awarded him the Breast Order of the Cloud and Banner, Seventh Grade, one of their highest military decorations.

  On 5 March 1947, Farrell received orders home and demobilization, having carried out one of the most demanding independent assignments for any officer of his rank and experience in the annals of the Marine Corps. Operating independently for two years, he almost single-handedly broke up and brought to trial a major enemy spy ring. He interrogated more than a thousand witnesses, examined an even greater number of documents in various foreign languages, literally covering most of the five thousand Germans in Chin
a. Arriving home, he picked up where he left off, going on to become a celebrity in his own right as a columnist with the New York World Telegram, a talk show host, and a colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve.

  * Mori was charged with “Stealing POW food” and using harsh “collective punishment” against the POWs.

  Bibliography

  Alcott, Carroll. My War with Japan. (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1943).

  Alexander, Joseph H. Edson’s Raiders, The 1st Marine Raider Battalion in World War II. (Limited Edition by Joseph H. Alexander).

  Alsop, Stewart, and Thomas Braden. Sub Rosa : The O.S.S. and American Espionage. (New York: Harcourt, 1964).

  Atkinson, Rick. An Army at Dawn, The War in North Africa, 1942–1943. (New York: Henry Holt Company, 2002).

  Averill, Gerald P. Mustang: A Combat Marine. (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1987).

  Blankfort, Michael. The Big Yankee: The Life of Carlson of the Raiders. (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1947).

  Brown, Anthony Cave. Wild Bill Donovan: The Last Hero. (New York: Times Books, 1982).

  Chambers, John Whiteclay. OSS Training in the National Parks and Service Abroad in World War II. (Washington: U.S. National Park Service, 2008).

  Christ, James F. Battalion of the Damned: The 1st Marine Paratroopers at Gavutu and Bloody Ridge. (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2007).