Double Agent : The First Hero of World War II and How the FBI Outwitted and Destroyed a Nazi Spy Ring (9781451667974)

by Duffy, Peter

  On April 30, von Richthofen arrived to inspect the carnage, noting in his diary what he apparently didn’t know previously, that Guernica occupied an important place in Basque history. He described the “complete annihilation” of the townscape, marveled at the size of the bomb craters visible in the street (“just terrific”), and groused that the Nationalist Army didn’t take better advantage of the fact that the “town was completely cut off for at least 24 hours.” But the ruins of Guernica exposed a greater problem. The Luftwaffe had failed to eliminate the Republicans’ most vital strategic installation, the bridge, because its level-flying bombers lacked an advanced “bombsight” able to guide their cargo, an analog computer with the ability to calculate the tug and countertug of gravity and air resistance that would play upon an explosive device of specific mass and shape as it was released from a particular altitude and velocity. “Germany did not possess a reliable bombsight that would allow a horizontal bomber to hit the target with any degree of accuracy,” wrote aircraft manufacturer Ernst Heinkel. The Goerz Visier 219 was useful “only in closely limited areas and after a good deal of practice,” according to a bomber group commander. The Air Ministry’s Technical Office in Berlin had to devise a way for its warplanes to destroy “choke points” such as the old stone crossing over the Mundaca River, which had indeed allowed for the escape of Fascism’s enemies. In the hours after the bombardment, G. L. Steer had watched their “long trek from Guernica to Bilbao in antique, solid-wheeled Basque farm carts drawn by oxen. The carts, piled high with such household possessions as could be saved from the conflagration, clogged the roads all night long.”

  While the attack on Guernica has come to be justly regarded as a prelude to the horrors that Nazi Germany would inflict upon innocents during World War II, the regime’s technicians saw it as further evidence that the Luftwaffe needed to augment its airborne savagery with the ability to achieve basic military objectives. They weren’t yet aware that a solution to “the bombsighting problem” could be found at a small plant in lower Manhattan that employed a high percentage of German immigrants.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE HIGHEST HUMANITY

  Having lived in the United States, subject thought to make use of some of his contacts there for the benefit of the Abwehr.

  —FBI report on Nikolaus Ritter, September 2, 1945

  In early 1937, a Wehrmacht officer with a polished manner and a healthy girth was summoned to the Berlin headquarters of the Abwehr, the division of the German armed forces assigned to conduct spy missions on behalf of the army, navy, and air force. Founded in 1921 as a counterespionage service in accord with the strictures of Versailles, the Abwehr was undergoing an aggressive expansion, creating conflict and overlap with Nazi police-state institutions such as the SS, SD (its intelligence division), and Gestapo (secret state police), which were forever eager to expand their clandestine activities beyond German borders. Quite to his surprise, the officer, Nikolaus Adolf Fritz Ritter, then thirty-eight, was assigned to found and lead a new office of air intelligence at Abwehrstelle (or Ast) Hamburg, the post with primary authority for military espionage targeting Great Britain and the Americas. Ritter would be responsible for organizing a network of agents to supply the Luftwaffe with “everything that could be procured in terms of technical and military information . . . to make up for lost time,” as he later wrote.

  Nicknamed Fatty by at least one of his future spies, Ritter was the pampered scion of an aristocratic family from Lower Saxony, his father a severe college president who exemplified Prussian ideals of honor and duty, his mother a blue-blooded eminence never seen in anything but prim dresses with ankle-length petticoats. Yet the Ritters were a playful bunch, known for marching into the picturesque countryside around the Aller River for afternoon picnics and holding actual pissing contests among the males to see whose stream of urine could fly the farthest. Nikolaus, the oldest of six children, possessed an entitled air that prevented him from taking orders from anyone he regarded as his social inferior. He was schooled at a Prussian military academy, served as an officer during World War I, went to business college after the war, and wound up as a manager of a textile plant in Silesia with 250 employees.

  But in the wake of a hyperinflation episode of such phantasmagorical severity that a single American dollar was worth 4.2 trillion marks before it crested, Ritter decided to leave behind the instability of the pre-Nazi Weimar Republic and move to the United States at age twenty-four in 1924. He claimed that after a period of youthful escapades (a cross-country trip with friends in an old Dodge included an extended visit to the Menominee Indian Reservation in Wisconsin) he knuckled down to a “steady, work-filled life” in New York, an assertion that would’ve been challenged by his wife, an auburn-haired schoolteacher from the backwoods of southeast Alabama whom he wed in 1926. Aurora Evans Ritter, who came from hardy, Bible-preaching stock, worked long hours as an English-language instructor in metropolitan-area schools and minded their two children of American citizenship (Klaus and Katharine) while he supped in private clubs in Manhattan with a circle of eccentric reactionaries who welcomed the rise of Nazism because they were “utterly convinced that Communism was the greatest threat to America and, on that score, they totally agreed with Hitler’s policy,” he wrote in his 1972 German-language memoir. Mrs. Ritter would recall to her children in later years how he “loved parties and glamour,” never sat down to a meal in less than coat and vest, and positively reveled in the image of himself as a lead player in the center of a drama. “He simply could not resist the temptation of adventure,” said his daughter, Katharine.

  After twelve years during which he developed a near-perfect grasp of idiomatic American English, Ritter returned with his family to Germany, apparently at the invitation of Hitler’s military attaché in Washington, Friedrich von Boetticher, who told him that the foreign office of the Armed Forces High Command was interested in his services. Ritter was impressed with Hitler’s rise to power, believing that the German people were at last able “to breathe freely because, after so many horrible years of subjugation and unemployment, order and work had returned.” By the autumn of 1936, he was living with his wife and children in Bremen and serving as a staff officer for the Wehrmacht. Soon after his surprise assignment to the Abwehr, he was promoted to captain and transferred from the army to the air force. On or about February 1, 1937, he entered the squat gray structure on Sophienterrasse that housed Ast Hamburg and was shown to an office that contained a desk, a chair, a typewriter, and “an empty cupboard,” as he later said during a postwar interrogation with British intelligence. He was so disheartened that he immediately asked to be sent back to Bremen, only to be told “to stay and do my best, for I would find it most interesting and satisfying work,” he said. A fellow spymaster took pity on him and dropped a gift into his lap. He told him about a man known as Pop, a New Yorker who had sent over technical documents that the Luftwaffe wasn’t able to decipher. Pop’s package included a note that “assured us that the blueprints were of the utmost importance and that it would be well worth our effort to send somebody over to establish personal contact,” Ritter recalled in his memoir.

  But any potential mission to America was put aside during the spring and summer of 1937 as Ritter immersed himself in the espionage trade. He was schooled in the latest microphotography techniques to create tiny reproductions of documents and in less cutting-edge “invisible ink” methods to disguise secret messages within ostensibly routine letters. He combed English-language newspapers and magazines for news on the aircraft industry (an often fruitful source of information) and took research trips to Luftwaffe installations to learn about the latest advancements. Posing as a glad-handing businessman with an international clientele, he began meeting with potential recruits, first in Germany and then (using fake passports for each country) in Belgium, Holland, and Hungary, and succeeded in finding a handful of individuals to infiltrate England. Ritter sought “Germans or people of German origin, alt
hough here again we had to be cautious because they were not only a suitable target for us, they were also in the crosshairs of the counterintelligence service of the country in which they lived,” he wrote. To his contacts, he was known variously as Dr. Rantzau, Dr. Renken, Dr. Weber, Dr. Rheinhardt, Dr. Leonhardt, or Dr. Jantzen. By the fall of 1937, Ritter was given a larger office and a second secretary to handle his increasing volume of work.

  As he settled into his new routine, his eyes fell upon one of his clerical assistants, Irmgard von Klitzing, who was just twenty-four, from a prominent lineage that appealed to his grand sense of himself, and a member of the Nazi Party. She, too, was smitten. He “looked so American” as he “shook hands with everybody” and “raced through the hallway in his light-colored raincoat and frightfully bright-gray Stetson hat,” she later recalled. Ritter often brought Ms. von Klitzing home for dinner at the family residence on the Alster Canal, and Mrs. Ritter found that she quite enjoyed the young lady’s company, oblivious to the fact that she was hosting her successor. The marriage was doomed, not least because Ritter, who was coming to like his new life of glamorous subterfuge, knew he couldn’t be comfortable in the military hierarchy while married to a foreigner. His explanation in his memoir was that “as an American” his wife had “no understanding for my kind of work nor for the extraordinary stress to which I was exposed as a result of my duties.” When the divorce was “delivered” on November 11, 1937, according to court documentation, it was on the legal grounds of “sexual incompatibility.”

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  On the same day the judgment was issued, Nikolaus Ritter strolled onto the deck of the SS Bremen, one of the thirteen ocean liners operated by the North German Lloyd and Hamburg America steamship companies that arrived every few days from Nazi Germany into the busiest port in the world, and “joined other passengers along the railing and admired the always breathtaking silhouette of New York,” he wrote. He was gazing upon a truly international capital that was intimately connected to the great conflict between Fascism and Communism. On the far left of the political spectrum, New York was home to the headquarters of the Communist Party USA (35 East Twelfth Street), which boasted about thirty thousand local members who were the organizational energy behind emergent labor unions such as the Transport Workers Union and an endless list of Popular Front organizations (everything from the nationwide American League for Peace and Democracy to the local West Side Mothers for Peace), skillfully fashioning a broad-based coalition for progressivism at a time when the Soviet Union was a nightmare of show trials, purges, and mass shootings.

  The streets of the city (or at least some of the streets) resonated with the sounds of the anti-Fascist message. Outraged by Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, Imperial Japan’s continuing assault on China, and the proto-Axis onslaught against the Popular Front government in Spain, activists bellowed from soapboxes in Union Square and key intersections in several (usually Jewish) neighborhoods of Brooklyn and the Bronx and during parades, demonstrations, and picket lines that seemed to be organized anew every day. “The essential thing for a street corner speaker is to work the back-and-forth relationship, the give-and-take, because the audience in a street corner is not one that just stands quietly,” said Irving Howe of his days as a young Socialist in the East Bronx. “It participates. It joins in. It heckles.” About fifteen hundred volunteers from the city went to Spain to fight for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade at a time when the country was growing more isolationist in response to the instability abroad, leading the US Congress to pass, and President Roosevelt to reluctantly sign, neutrality legislation that forbade the sale of armaments to countries at war, which reflected the now-prevalent belief that America had been pulled into the World War by the greed of weapons manufacturers and international bankers. Yet broad support for the far left was hard to come by even in New York. The Irish working class, proud bearers of a revolutionary tradition that still had unfinished business in Northern Ireland, was generally repulsed by the idea of replicating a dictatorship that was murderously opposed to the Church, a position hammered home by steady coverage in the Irish and Catholic papers about atrocities committed by leftists against priests and nuns in Spain and Mexico. In the municipal elections held nine days before Ritter’s arrival, the four Communist candidates for City Council were all defeated. When a teenage Joseph Papirofsky, later the theater director Joseph Papp, shook a can of coins seeking donations for radical causes on the subway, he was invariably told by impatient straphangers to “go back to Russia!”

  On the farthest right, the picturesque activities of the pro-Nazi Amerikadeutscher Volksbund, or German American Bund, composed almost exclusively of German-born immigrants with less than two decades in the country and presided over by the burly figure of Bundesführer Fritz Kuhn, were on prominent display during the summer and fall of 1937. Reporters were dispatched to write up the “swastika waving, heiling and Hitler praising” engaged in by ever-larger assemblies at its local summer gathering spots, Camp Siegfried in Yaphank, Long Island, and Camp Nordland, at Andover, New Jersey, with Kuhn insisting that the camps were not “maintained for military training and the promotion of subversive aims,” but for “the recreation of youngsters of German-American parents and to a lesser extent for the recreation of the parents themselves.” In September, the Chicago Daily Times published a spectacular series of articles that sought to expose this statement as a lie, detailing how the Bund’s true aim was to unite Germans and other Americans of Fascist sympathy into a militaristic front to prepare for the inevitable day when it would be necessary to take up arms against the Jewish-Communist revolutionaries intent on seizing America. The series claimed that the Bund had twenty thousand members in sixty chapters throughout the country, “at least” fifteen summer camps, about a hundred thousand fellow travelers willing to appear at Bund functions, a Nazi-centric indoctrination program for children, and a hard core of “former German army officers . . . expert machine-gunners, aviators and riflemen, some of whom wear on their shirts Iron Crosses awarded for bravery in the World War.”

  On the Saturday before Election Day in 1937, nine hundred Bundists paraded down East Eighty-Sixth Street, the bustling, neon-lit commercial strip running through the Yorkville neighborhood on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the more prominent of the two large German enclaves in the city. Wearing steel gray shirts with black ties, Sam Browne belts, and black overseas caps, they goose-stepped past the European-style nightclubs, rowdy beer gardens with singing waiters clad in lederhosen, Viennese cafés, Apfelstrudel-dispensing bakeries, and German-language movie houses that made Yorkville a Germanic hub of sybaritic consumption and unrepentant capitalism that didn’t seem to conform to the grim vision of National Socialism. The New York Herald Tribune reported that “thousands of spectators lifted their arms in the Nazi salute, a few raised clenched fists in Communist salute, and others saluted by raising the right hand with fingers outspread and placing the thumb to the nose.” The Times said “the heils reached a loud crescendo” at the corner of Eighty-Sixth Street and Second Avenue, the geographical heart of the neighborhood, but “the boos were predominant” by the time the marchers reached Eighty-Sixth and Lexington at the western edge of the German colony.

  The Bund officially claimed 17,000 members in the city, a small minority of the 237,588 German-born and 127,169 Austrian-born residents, but anti-Nazi sentiment in the wider German American community was hard to detect outside a small core of Socialists and Communists. A more typical viewpoint was expressed in an op-ed published in the Hitler-neutral New Yorker Staats-Zeitung in November, which took care to praise certain unnamed “Reich Germans” for seeking “to make German-Americans understand the new Germany better” before cautioning them to “not forget that they are guests in a foreign land, whose institutions and laws offer them protection as well as cultural and material advantages.” A general “Nazi feeling” existed in outer-borough Ridgewood, which was home to a hundred thousand German Americans and straddle
d the unmarked Brooklyn-Queens border roughly along the path of the elevated subway lines. It “comes from pride in the way Germany has regained a dominant position in Europe,” a neighborhood leader told the New York Post. “How many do I estimate are really Nazis? Five percent. Not more than 5 percent here are radicals—Nazis.” The Chicago Daily Times reporter found that outspoken talk about Hitler was generally avoided in the tourist-friendly clubs along Eighty-Sixth Street in Yorkville because “bartenders want to avoid fights,” but that in the shadowy Bierstuben under the el on Second Avenue, neighborhood joints with sawdust on the floor, a lone musician on the piano, and chopped-meat-and-Swiss-cheese sandwiches on the menu, locals were louder in their praise. “Oh, those Germans argue over Hitler every night,” a waitress named Juliana who worked at St. Pauli’s near Eighty-Seventh Street said. “You don’t dare say anything against them, no matter what you think. When those guys get talking about Germany and drink toasts to Hitler and against the Jews, they’re plenty tough. Nearly all of them that come in here are for Hitler.”

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  Nikolaus Ritter had launched his great mission traveling under his real name and using his actual German passport. As far as the US government was concerned, he was a textile engineer with many years’ experience in the country looking to tie up some business before returning back to Germany; this contained truth if not all of it. He was told by his Ast Hamburg overseers to stay away from Nazi diplomats at the embassy and/or consulates and avoid spies affiliated with the other Abwehr post conducting work in the city, Nebenstelle (or Nest) Bremen, which was based out of northern Germany’s second city. But keeping Abwehr spy efforts on separate tracks was not easy, particularly since both Ast Hamburg and Nest Bremen relied on some of the same couriers, employees of the German passenger liners who spent their few-day stopovers involved in the whole range of pro-Nazi activity in New York, everything from transporting the latest propaganda publications to associating with secret-police organizations such as the Gestapo or SD, which were rumored to have a surreptitious presence in Yorkville and Ridgewood. “We called them undercover men, you see,” said a Bundist of the mysterious figures seen lurking in the meeting halls and beer gardens. “They do a lot of work, but you do not know what they do.” What was undoubtedly true was that a single German spy ring existed in New York, with several overlapping and mutating strands of official, pseudo-official, and unofficial provenance that together reached into the entirety of the Nazi-supporting community.