by Duffy, Peter
A few weeks after Griebl’s flight, the New York papers reported that the FBI had lost another spy uncovered by the investigation, a German-born employee of the Curtiss-Wright aircraft factory in Buffalo who had twice testified before the grand jury. No one from the New York office was watching when Werner Georg Gudenberg boarded the Hamburg America liner Hamburg and escaped from American jurisdiction. J. Edgar Hoover was incensed, issuing a statement alleging that “the responsibility for the disappearance of Dr. Ignatz T. Griebl and the witness Werner G. Gudenberg is the responsibility of the United States Attorney and not the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” using the word responsibility twice to ensure that his (unconvincing) message was clearly understood. Hoover was reported to be traveling to New York to take personal supervision of the foundering investigation.
In his memoir, Agent Turrou admitted that Dr. Griebl probably absconded of his own volition but wondered how long he could remain “free and alive” once the full extent of his cooperation was publicly known. Of Gudenberg, Turrou theorized that “Nazi Gestapo men saw him enter to testify before the grand jury and then followed him,” he wrote. “I believe these Gestapo agents then prevailed upon him, by threats or force or other persuasion, or by a combination of methods, to flee.” It was a stunning admission no matter what became of Gudenberg, who possessed specialized knowledge of the sort that the Luftwaffe was eager to exploit. Turrou was suggesting that the FBI’s (and his) failure to provide a government witness with even a modicum of protection could well have resulted in his death. The amateurishness of the Bureau’s operation was breathtaking to behold. The vaunted G-men had been exposed to the world as unprepared to confront a peril with a proven disregard for the sanctity of America’s borders.
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In the spring, the Abwehr arranged to bring Hermann Lang to Germany to meet with officials of the Technical Office, an indication, independent of Ritter’s testimony, that the Luftwaffe understood the potential value of the Norden material. Hermann and his wife, Katherine (known as Betty), who had already been planning to spend vacation time back home, knew they would be traveling to a Nazi Germany that was on the brink of war.
Emboldened by the easy success of the Anschluss, Hitler had decided to deliver his lightning strike against Czechoslovakia, the multiethnic democracy of 15 million people that boasted large armed forces and an impressive armaments industry. He wanted to seize the country so quickly that France (a treaty-bound ally of the Czechs), Britain (France’s ally), and the Soviet Union (which was bound by a mutual-assistance pact to aid Czechoslovakia if France did) wouldn’t have a chance to intervene even if they wanted to—which they didn’t—enabling the Nazi state to plunder natural and industrial resources needed for rearmament and prevent the Czech territory from being used by a future enemy as a base for an air attack on nearby Berlin.
Hitler’s allies in this effort would be the ethnic Germans who had found themselves residents of Czechoslovakia when the nation was created following World War I. Two weeks after the annexation of Austria, Hitler met for three hours in Berlin with his chief agent in Czechoslovakia, Konrad Henlein, the führer of the Bund-like pro-Nazi organization that claimed to represent the 3.5 million Germans in the Sudetenland, the economically depressed region of western Czechoslovakia now surrounded on three sides by the Reich. A former gymnastics teacher who had risen to power through the sporting clubs that flourished wherever Germans settled, Henlein, or Little Hitler as he was sometimes called, had always sworn that his Sudeten German Party (SdP) was made up of loyal citizens of Czechoslovakia with no fealty whatsoever to the Nazi regime, which enabled him to gain significant power (including dozens of seats in the parliament) within the confines of the Czechs’ tolerant democracy. Now he was free to be himself. Hitler instructed him to go public with calls for the Czech government to grant something like Nazi autonomy over the German-majority areas, which he did in a speech in Karlsbad on April 24. “We must always demand so much that we can never be satisfied,” said Henlein in summarizing Hitler’s order to him. During the weeks leading up to local elections in late May and June, Henlein’s storm troopers, the Freiwilliger Deutscher Schutzdienst (Voluntary German Protective Service, or FS for short), launched a campaign of violence and intimidation to ensure that the Sudeten German population spoke with one voice at the ballot box. Nazi canvassers went door-to-door demanding everyone sign his or her name to the party list or face trouble “when Hitler comes,” which helped push the SdP vote to 90 percent. “Not One Single Vote for the Enemies of Sudeten Germans” and “Every Decent German Must Vote for Henlein” were the slogans.
But the Czechs would not be as accommodating to Hitler’s territorial ambitions as the Austrians. On the weekend of May 20 and 21, in response to (probably unfounded) rumors that German troops were maneuvering toward the border, the Czech government partially mobilized its army and ordered the occupation of frontier fortifications, which escalated the conflict into an international crisis with the potential of sparking a second World War. The French reaffirmed their commitment to defend Czechoslovakia, the British sent word (in less than Churchillian language) that they “could not guarantee they would not be forced by circumstances to become involved also,” and the Nazi government was forced to tell the Czech ambassador in Berlin that Germany had no designs on his country. Humiliated by the Czechs’ successful show of force, Hitler sputtered with rage. On May 28, he told his military leaders, “I am utterly determined that Czechoslovakia shall disappear from the map of Europe.” On May 30, he ordered the armed forces to be ready by October 1, which caused his General Staff Chief Ludwig Beck (who would resign in August) to warn that “Germany, either alone or allied with Italy, is hardly in a position to meet France and England on the field of battle.” Undeterred by such defeatism, Hitler decided he needed an “unbearable provocation” that “in the eyes of at least a part of the world opinion” would provide the “moral justification for military measures,” as he told his generals. Konrad Henlein was ordered to send his thugs into the streets to cause so much trouble that the Czech militia would be required to initiate repressive counterstrikes. Joseph Goebbels filled the Nazi media with exaggerated and often fabricated stories (“Bloody Terror of Czech Bands,” “Unleashed Mob Rages through Tortured Land”) designed to prove that hateful Czechs were conducting race murder against peace-loving Germans. In a speech in Stettin, Rudolf Hess mocked Western expressions of concern about anti-Jewish measures that had been stepped up in the aftermath of the Anschluss by asking why the world stood by as “minorities have been deprived of rights, terrorized, and ill-treated,” “struck, clubbed, or shot down repeatedly only because they are not Czechs.” Hitler was building the case that he had to invade Czechoslovakia to prevent the extermination of ethnic Germans. It would be a humanitarian intervention, if you will.
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The Langs were preferred travelers during their trip across the ocean on the Hamburg America liner Hansa, permitted to move from Room 312, a small inside room, to Room 310, a much larger outside room with a view of the water. After docking, they spent a few days in Hamburg. “I was at first surprised, then disappointed, and finally angry that I was not asked to go to Berlin with him,” wrote Nikolaus Ritter. Exactly what happened in the Air Ministry building in the capital remains something of a mystery. In his later statements, given when he thought he was able to speak freely, Lang spoke of spending several days in conference with engineers and being granted the honor of meeting Ernst Udet. Ritter writes that Lang was presented with a bombsight that had already been constructed from the stolen plans, which would’ve meant that he was brought to Germany just to receive hearty congratulations.
Whatever the particulars of those sessions, Hermann Lang was in a position to provide the rapidly mobilizing Nazi state with a full understanding of America’s most prized military device. The crusade to inspire German nationals living abroad into the service of the New Germany had scored a historic victory in the quiet
action of a single devotee from the outer boroughs of New York City.
But in the middle of 1938, the Luftwaffe’s Technical Office placed little priority in determining how Carl Norden’s innovations could be incorporated into a Reich-constructed bombsight able to function within the confines of the Luftwaffe’s twin-engine horizontal bombers, principally the Heinkel He 111 and Dornier Do 17 “Flying Pencil.” For one, the “mammoth bureaucracy, composed of mediocrities,” favored “increasingly sterile regimentation” over creative interplay with gifted designers, according to Ernst Heinkel, one of the most gifted. For another, Ernst Udet was becoming so obsessed with the dive-bomber concept that he was thinking of ending the production of horizontal bombers altogether. Third, the force had to be ready now. On July 8, Hermann Göring told German aircraft executives to increase production so exponentially that the bankruptcy of their companies might be the result. “If we win the fight, then Germany will be the greatest power on earth; the world’s markets will belong to Germany, and the time will come for abundant prosperity in Germany,” he said. “But we must venture something for this; we have to make the investment.”
His service complete, Lang and his wife returned to Queens. They moved from the apartment building at the corner of Seventieth Avenue and Sixtieth Street in Ridgewood where they had been living to a nicer residence several blocks to the southeast, a single floor of a three-story structure on Sixty-Fourth Place in Glendale, around the corner from a young shortstop just out of high school who had signed with the Yankees, Phil Rizzuto. On his second day back, Lang resumed his work as an assistant inspector on the sixteenth floor of 80 Lafayette Street. Two weeks later, he submitted his petition for naturalization, his “second papers,” affirming his desire to become an American citizen before a clerk of the federal court and two witnesses, both of them German American friends employed by Norden. He sought to blend back into the bustle of city life, just another immigrant striver hoping to achieve his share of the American dream. “I am sorry that I did not go back to Germany right away,” he would later say.
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Most Americans had few illusions about Hitler’s motives. Although polls showed the public viewed the German and Soviet systems with about equal levels of disdain, 82 percent said they would support the Soviets over the Nazis if the two ever fought a war against each other. Hitler had “resurrected tribal instincts and the mystical sanctions of a savage society,” which of necessity would lead to a fight against all inferior races on the ultimate stage of history, according to a writer for Reader’s Digest, the voice of Middle America. The Atlantic Monthly said that Germany stood “in clattering armor before the world demanding vengeance,” less interested in territory or raw materials than in fighting a war for the sake of victory to relieve the shame of Versailles. Yet while Newsweek detected an “increased backing for a sterner foreign policy” among the populace, the country was still resolutely isolationist, willing to support FDR’s $1.1 billion naval expansion plan (which passed both houses of Congress in May 1938) for the purposes of self-defense but unwilling to consider joining a distant fight. The plight of the Jews would not bring a call to arms: according to Gallup, 65 percent of Americans thought anti-Jewish persecution in the Reich was either partly or completely the fault of the Jews themselves. In an editorial about the anti-Semitic violence committed by rampaging hordes of Nazis that followed the Anschluss, the Daily News mused that a respected statesman should avoid fanfare and “slip word” to Hitler “on the matter of calling off or toning down his vendetta against the Jewish race.”
The new German ambassador in Washington, Hans Dieckhoff, was worried that the German American Bund would be just the thing to inflame the Americans from their isolationism and into a war on the side of France and England, the potentially devastating eventuality he was working so hard to prevent. He penned two long memos to Berlin suggesting that unambiguous action be taken to shutter the organization. “The tradition of the American nation, the American national ideology, is really built upon the concept of the amalgamation of races, the dissolving of racial segments into the great American whole,” he wrote. “Anything which would give rise to the impression that this development was to be stopped or completely reversed would encounter strong antagonism on the part of the government and the people.” The various functionaries in Berlin responsible for cultural outreach to Germans living in foreign countries fell in line, fully aware that the Reich was more interested at this point in keeping America out of Europe’s affairs than in developing a public movement of German Americans to prepare for any eventuality.
In response to Dieckhoff’s concerns, a directive of two sentences was released to the German news agency, DNB, which instructed Reich citizens who were members of the German American Bund to “immediately give up their membership.” Since German nationals represented the core of the organization, Bundesführer Fritz Kuhn saw the order as “tantamount to the destruction of the Bund.” But Yorkville’s Little Hitler had no intention of relinquishing his rightful place at the head of the Nazi movement in America. He had become a genuine celebrity, a boldfaced name in an era of tabloid excess who frequented non-Teutonic hot spots in midtown (Leon and Eddie’s, El Morocco, Kelly’s Stable) with pretty fräuleins while his loyal hausfrau minded the two children in their top-floor apartment in a brick-fronted row house in Jackson Heights, Queens. He was determined to remain the unchallenged proprietor of a handful of Bund entities that were collecting dues from members and allied businesses, selling newspapers and pamphlets, hosting celebrations in the city and in the pure air of the country, and soliciting donations to pay increasingly sizable lawyers’ fees necessary to fight charges brought by municipalities looking for any legal pretext to take down those damn Nazis. To his followers, Kuhn delivered the fraudulent news that he had spoken with Göring and Goebbels and both had assured him that his rule was smiled upon favorably by the regime. In defiance of Berlin’s directive, he established auxiliary divisions that were open to “any worthy Aryan” who expressed solidarity to the Bundist cause “by paying regular donations of money.”
US congressman Martin Dies, a racist and xenophobic Democrat from the hill country of east Texas who had turned against Roosevelt and the New Deal, took advantage of the headlines about Hitler’s bellicosity to introduce legislation to restart a tribunal (the Special Committee on Un-American Activities Authorized to Investigate Nazi Propaganda and Certain Other Propaganda Activities) that had examined mostly domestic Nazis for a few months in 1934–35. By a vote of 191 to 41, the House of Representatives removed the reference to Germany and set up the Special Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities and Propaganda in the United States. Although Martin Dies’s committee would make its name with innuendo- and insinuation-laden expeditions to prove that the Roosevelt administration and its allies in labor unions, Popular Front groups, Hollywood, and New Deal agencies were serving the Communist agenda, it couldn’t help but slip in testimony every once in a while against the German American Bund, which was seeking to establish “a powerful sabotage machine” and “a vast spy net,” according to testimony. Two weeks after the creation of this early version of HUAC, Congress followed up by passing the Foreign Agents Registration Act (or FARA), which strengthened a 1917 law that required anyone engaged in political activities on behalf of a foreign power to register with the State Department. Congressman John McCormack said, “The spotlight of pitiless publicity will serve as a deterrent to the spread of pernicious propaganda.”
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With the explicit intention of rousing the American people to accept a more confrontational stance toward the Nazi danger, the US government announced its plan to salvage the espionage investigation that had been filling the papers for months now. With approval from the highest reaches of the Roosevelt administration, the US attorney in Manhattan decided to conduct a kind of democratic show trial, designed not solely to convict the four spies still in US custody but to lay before the public the f
ull extent of the German government’s efforts to infiltrate the US defense establishment as uncovered by Special Agent Leon Turrou’s interrogations.
On Monday, June 20, 1938, a federal grand jury issued indictments against eighteen individuals, fourteen of whom were little more than names (or aliases) on a press release, which allowed all the papers to write front-page headlines focusing on “Nazi Spy Chiefs” while devoting less attention to the fact that only one agent of real significance would actually be in the dock (the Seversky technician). “The important point is that the American public must be made aware of the existence of this spy plot and impressed with the dangers,” US Attorney Lamar Hardy said. Duly shaken, the country would then lend its support to the creation of “an efficient counterespionage service to protect us against such vicious spy rings as this,” he said.
To spread the message to the widest possible audience, the indictments were announced two days before the Aryan superman Max Schmeling was to enter a Yankee Stadium ring against the pride of (a racially segregated) America, Joe Louis, in a feverishly anticipated bout that was already being seen as a symbolic clash between two antagonistic ideologies. It was a telling fact, wrote a young Richard Wright in the Daily Worker, that the fight was occurring in New York, “where a foul nest of Nazi spies has just been routed.”