by Duffy, Peter
On the last day of the month, the SS orchestrated a series of fake raids against German outposts along the border in an attempt to convince the world that the actions of “Polish insurrectionists” necessitated a monumental act of German self-defense. Before dawn on the next morning, more than fifty divisions of upward of 1.5 million men crossed the frontier with instructions to show no mercy upon enemies they had been taught to regard as subhuman, launching a “lightning war” or “blitzkrieg” exemplified by fast-moving panzer columns and mechanized infantry units closely supported by a brutal air force of dive-bombers (equipped with high-pitched sirens called Trumpets of Jericho), machine-gun-strafing Messerschmitt fighters, and level-flying medium bombers that had little trouble in eliminating the threat from the Polish Air Force.
The invasion officially began when the old German battleship Schleswig-Holstein, moored in Danzig harbor, fired its guns upon the Westerplatte munitions depot, which gave Albert Forster the signal to declare the Anschluss of Danzig with the Reich and appoint himself administrator of the region, making him an important ally of the Einsatzgruppen death squads that followed the troops into the occupied lands to liquidate prominent anti-Nazi elements with an emphasis on Catholic clergy, intelligentsia, and the Jews. Forster pledged his assistance in the task of turning the parts of western Poland to be incorporated directly into the Reich into a “blossoming, pure German” zone without Poles and Jews, who were to be sent eastward into a slave colony known as the General Government, a “dumping ground” in Hitler’s description. In a sign that the Luftwaffe was not yet designed to fight a war against far-flung enemies with significant air defense systems, the precision bombardment responsibilities were handled by what would become the most famous German plane of the war, the single-engine Junkers Ju 87, which could dive within thirty feet of targets on the ground in the risky hope that it would be able to withstand close contact with the adversary. In the minutes before the Schleswig-Holstein opened up on Danzig, three Ju-87 Stukas scored direct hits on a blasting device that the Poles were planning to use to detonate the Dirschau Bridge and slow the Wehrmacht’s advance across the Vistula, possibly the actual first shots of World War II. Yet the most lethal of the Luftwaffe’s air weapons remained the still-imprecise medium bombers, which were instrumental payload carriers in dozens of Guernica-style slaughters in settlements large and small. Incendiaries were literally shoveled out the cargo doors of the creaky Junkers Ju 52 (known as Tante Ju or Aunt Ju) transport planes sent over Warsaw. From neutral Washington, President Roosevelt issued an “urgent appeal to every government which may be engaged in hostilities publicly to affirm its determination that its armed forces shall in no event, and under no circumstances, undertake the bombardment from the air of civilian populations or of unfortified cities.” It was already too late.
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His thirty-one days now up, William Sebold chose this moment to escape from a war that was no longer theoretical. Probably at about the time in the late morning when Hitler was telling the Reichstag that he would lead Germany to victory or sacrifice his life in the attempt, Sebold traveled from Mülheim to the American consulate in Cologne, where he showed Dr. Gassner’s incriminating letters to a young clerk named Rosenberg, who was no more than nineteen or twenty years old. “He looked the letters over and said, ‘That is too bad; you had better run away on the next day to Ostend,’ ” the port in neutral Belgium where a ship might be found to America, Sebold recalled. “I was hurt a little, you know. I didn’t demonstrate anything, but inside I was a little hurt.” He described how he went out into the streets of the frantic city, flagged down two motorists with foreign license plates, and pleaded with them to sneak him over the border. Both refused. After spending the night in Cologne, he went the next morning to the train station but was certain the Gestapo was following him. “Well, they stood there and looked at me,” he said, providing a glimpse into his nightmare. Although he possessed a valid American passport, Sebold was mindful that he hadn’t received permission to leave his job at Siemens-Schuckertwerke. “I could not do it,” he said of boarding a train for Belgium. “There is a lot of official red tape. I have to have a permit to be properly discharged by the proper authorities in Germany. In the town I worked there is a labor bureau. . . . I just looked over the chances to get away and I thought it over and said I had better turn back again.” From Cologne, he took a streetcar to Düsseldorf, where he sent a cryptic cablegram to his wife, telling her not to worry about anything that might happen to him in the future. Then he returned to Mülheim and wrote a letter to Dr. Gassner. “I said I accepted his proposition one hundred percent.”
On September 3, with London and Paris evacuated of children and hunkered down for air strikes that were not (yet) coming, Britain and France made the reluctant decision to declare war on Germany. Chamberlain had barely finished announcing the news when air raid sirens sounded for the first time in London. In the early evening in the North Atlantic waters a few hundred miles west of the Hebrides, a German U-boat sent a torpedo into an unarmed British passenger liner, the Athenia, killing 112 of its 1,418 passengers and crew, which was the wayward shot that announced the beginning of the Kriegsmarine’s hit-and-run campaign against the Royal Navy and the British merchant ships that delivered the food, fuel, and supplies, mostly from North America, that meant the survival of the island nation. Of the three hundred Americans aboard the Athenia, twenty-eight perished, a propaganda disaster for the Germans that led the Nazi press to accuse the British of sinking the ship in an attempt to pull America into the war.
In his fireside chat that evening, President Roosevelt pledged to keep America out in the face of such provocations but noted that even “a neutral cannot be asked to close his mind or his conscience.” As required by the neutrality statutes, the British and French became subject to the arms embargo, which spurred FDR to call Congress into special session to once again consider revising a law that now actively conspired to keep Hitler’s enemies weak. Incensed to learn that the NYPD was forming a special sabotage squad to investigate acts that might be committed by violent Nazi supporters in the city, J. Edgar Hoover (through the reliable vehicle of Attorney General Murphy) persuaded FDR to issue a statement informing “all local law enforcement officers to cooperate with the FBI in the drive against espionage, sabotage, subversive activities, and violation of the neutrality laws,” the president’s first public comment on the Bureau’s expanded authority. He told the press he wanted “to protect this country against . . . some of the things that happened over here in 1914 and 1915 and 1916 and the beginning of 1917, before we got into the war.” He was referring to the violent campaign directed by German diplomats and military officials to prevent American-made war materials from reaching the Allied nations of Britain, France, and Tsarist Russia. Nearly two hundred acts of sabotage were credited to German initiative, committed by a small army of militant German Americans, German sailors stranded in New York Harbor, and Irish and other anti-British agitators. The most infamous attack occurred on July 30, 1916, when a massive explosion rocked the principal depot for Europe-bound munitions on Black Tom Island on the New Jersey side of New York’s harbor, a blast so ferocious that it blew shrapnel holes in the Statue of Liberty, shattered thousands of windows in lower Manhattan, and caused the Brooklyn Bridge to sway. Seven people were killed, hundreds injured.
In his own comment to the media, Murphy said the FBI was assuming counterespionage primacy in order to prevent the “inhuman and cruel things” that were committed against ethnic Germans after America entered World War I, making particular mention of the scourge of vigilantism. From April 1917 to November 1918, the Justice Department had encouraged average citizens to join amateur sleuthing societies, such as the 260,000-member American Protective League, which, according to a supporter, “apprehended plotters and prevented consummation of conspiracies beyond number,” but actually did little more than commit grievous violations of civil liberties. In the popular imagination
, fueled by a government-sponsored propaganda offensive urging antipathy toward the treacherous “Hun,” the German immigrant was assumed to be a covert agent unless proved otherwise. Anyone suspected of being pro-German could be harassed (forced to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” to prove their Americanism), horsewhipped (as six farmers in Texas were for refusing to contribute to the Red Cross), or tarred and feathered (such as the California brewery worker caught uttering sympathy for the Kaiser). In what was only the most severe instance of violence, a German-born drifter was lynched outside Collinsville, Illinois, on April 5, 1918, accused without evidence and despite his protestations of innocence, of planning to destroy a nearby mine. “All right, boys!” were reportedly his last words. “Go ahead and kill me, but wrap me in the flag when you bury me.”
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Upon learning the happy news that Sebold had agreed to join unsere Gesellschaft, Dr. Gassner asked to meet at the Metropole Hotel in Mülheim to discuss the arrangements. When Dr. Gassner arrived as scheduled, Sebold told him he wanted to go somewhere else. “I said, ‘I don’t like this hotel. It is too high-class. Let us go to the Handelshof,’ ” which was apparently a more downscale inn. Sitting at a table in the rear of the Handelshof’s restaurant, Dr. Gassner informed Sebold that he would soon be introduced to the man from Hamburg who would supervise his training. Sebold responded by telling Dr. Gassner that he was leaving his mother’s home to take up residence in the Handelshof, a generous attempt to shield his family from his new associations. Over the next two weeks, he heard nothing but the news that the Germans were overrunning Poland without the British and French making any move against the (poorly defended) Siegfried Line in western Germany. The RAF was more interested in protecting its naval interests when it dispatched twenty-nine medium bombers to attack warships docked in two Kriegsmarine bases on the North Sea coast. Seven of the planes were shot down by Germany’s impressive antiaircraft guns, which may indicate just how valuable to the German war effort was Sperry Gyroscope’s Ed Roeder, one of America’s foremost experts in such fire-control systems.
On September 17, the Soviet Union accepted Hitler’s invitation and invaded Poland, easily seizing the eastern half of the country (and beginning its own campaign to exterminate Polish national identity) in accord with the secret protocols of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, which carved up Eastern Europe between the two tyrannies. As Sebold made his way to and from the job at the steam-turbine plant that he wasn’t yet allowed to quit, he may have caught a glimpse of the leaflets that the RAF was dropping on the countryside in lieu of bombs because of Chamberlain’s worries about retaliatory strikes against British cities. “Your rulers have condemned you to massacre, misery, and the privations of war,” the flyers said. “They cannot hope to win.”
The next phase of Sebold’s ordeal began on the morning of September 22, when he awoke to discover that his US passport, which was in the breast pocket of his coat hanging on a chair, had been stolen while he slept. Sometime later in the day, Dr. Gassner arrived at the Handelshof and introduced Sebold to his Hamburg controller, “Dr. Renken,” who was not identified to him as Nikolaus Ritter. In his postwar statements, Ritter revealed that he made no attempt to discern Sebold’s feelings about serving the Reich, a failure of basic competence that he would come to rue.
“Since I had been assured that this man had been checked out, I did not do my own review,” he wrote, adding with aristocratic scorn, “He did not particularly impress me. He looked quite ordinary, was of average intelligence, and obviously came from modest means.” In his British interrogation, Ritter claimed that Sebold “showed no reluctance” to work for the Abwehr. During an interview with the German newsmagazine Stern in 1953, Ritter said that Sebold made a “nationalistic impression” and revealed “a pronounced willingness to work for Germany in the United States.” Ritter described as “absolute invention” the suggestion that he threatened Sebold into cooperating. “The decisive point in this matter for me was the fact that he was born a German and that he fought as a German soldier during the first war,” Ritter said in his memoir. “Since I had his personal data, I did not waste any time with any other questions but went straight to the point: ‘We are afraid that the United States might enter the war against us,’ I said. ‘We need information from over there, and we can get that only from somebody who not only lives over there but who is also an American citizen.’ ”
According to Ritter’s story, Sebold then requested permission to visit the US consulate in Cologne because he wanted to apply for a visa for his wife so she could come to Germany for his training, a convenient misremembering of the facts that attempts to obscure Ritter’s blame for all that would follow. Sebold’s version is confirmed by contemporaneous State Department documents: it was Gassner and Renken who requested that Sebold go to the consulate, where he was to apply for the replacement passport that would be required before he could begin his (legal) journey to New York. Whoever came up with the idea, Sebold was proving himself trustworthy enough to be allowed to walk into the enemy camp.
During that same meeting, Sebold remembered that he underwent a cursory physical examination. “I did not have to take off my clothes, but they looked me over and said, ‘Well, this guy can’t hurt a fly,’ ” which may have contributed to a belief that Sebold didn’t have the inclination or the capability to turn against them. According to the FBI report, “This statement is probably well founded as by this time he was practically a physical wreck from worry about this matter.” On the following day, he collapsed and was admitted to St. Marien Hospital for what he described in one statement as a “nervous breakdown” and in another as a “physical breakdown.” Six days later, he had regained his strength enough to send an inquiry to Cologne about the procedure for obtaining a new passport and received a response that told him to arrive “in person to make affidavit explaining the circumstances of this case.”
After thirteen days in the hospital, Sebold was discharged on October 5, the same day that Hitler was reviewing his triumphant troops in Warsaw and directing reporters’ attention to the ruins that he promised to replicate in Paris and London. Sebold traveled to Cologne, where he filled out his passport application without mentioning his new life as a German spy. On the following day, as Hitler was offering a peace settlement to Britain and France that consolidated his gains and forswore any desire for further foreign conquest, Sebold returned to drop off the necessary photographs. Once he made it back to Mülheim, Sebold penned a note to Dr. Renken (at Rothenbaumchaussee 135, Hamburg), informing him that the consulate had assured him the passport would be forthcoming. Renken/Ritter responded in a letter the following day that asked Sebold to return to the consulate in two weeks to see if he could speed up the process. “The passport affair is indeed very regrettable, but it can’t be helped and I can only hope that you will succeed in getting out before America declares war on Germany,” the letter read. Renken reminded Sebold of the necessity of coming to Hamburg “so that I can show you around my plant and you can get to know the German methods of manufacture here.” Nine days later, Sebold received another letter from Dr. Renken, this one instructing him to visit the consulate to obtain a bulletin on the repatriation of American citizens. On the next day, October 17, Sebold did as requested, arriving at a time when the hysteria of the war’s early days had subsided. With Dr. Renken’s “German methods of manufacture” note in hand, he asked for a meeting with the American consul general, Alfred W. Klieforth. It was granted.
Sebold later testified that Klieforth was less than welcoming to an American citizen who was desperate for the assistance of his government. “He said, ‘Okay, let me see the letter,’ ” Sebold said. “I showed him that letter. And then he said, ‘Well, we cannot help you. You are in a bad spot. You have to know yourself what you are going to do. We have nothing to do with this. But I have to take this letter and copy it and send it to the State Department.’ ”
“Is that all he said?” Sebold was asked.
“That is all he said.”
Nine days later, on October 26, Klieforth offered his version in a dispatch to Washington. William Sebold “appeared at the consulate and related a story which may or may not be important,” he wrote. “Mr. Sebold claims that through a strange set of circumstances he is now at the mercy of certain German secret organizations interested in the production of American military aeroplanes.” Klieforth said Sebold was being forced to undergo training in Hamburg in preparation for service in the United States. “Mr. Sebold was interviewed by Vice Consul Parker and myself and impressed us with his integrity,” Klieforth wrote. “I take it that he involved himself in the beginning believing that the affair was harmless but now that it has reached a serious stage, he is in fear of his own life.” Klieforth passed along the news that Sebold “requests that he be met upon his arrival in New York by representatives of the State Department in order to convey his story to them by word of mouth.” Klieforth concluded, “I will report Mr. Sebold’s departure by telegraph to the Department.”
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The American public didn’t want to fight in the new war, but a Washington Post poll showed that 62 percent supported President Roosevelt’s proposed revision of the neutrality laws, which would repeal the arms embargo and allow Britain and France to obtain guns, ammunition, and planes from US private industry through a cash-and-carry arrangement that required payment up front and the use of non-American ships for the journey across the Atlantic. With his ear attuned to popular sentiment, FDR argued that cash-and-carry would ensure neutrality by giving the Allies the ability to purchase the tools necessary to defeat Germany on their own and also assist in the nation’s economic recovery by putting more Americans to work in the war industry. He made the solemn pledge that he had no intention of sending our boys overseas. Believing that the legislation was the first step to war, a third of the country opposed it, an unlikely coalition of libertarians, literary intellectuals, religious pacifists, Midwestern business leaders, left-wing revolutionaries, Anglophobes, concerned mothers, college students, and Hitler-sympathetic bigots and anti-Semites. Charles Lindbergh was granted time on all three national networks to urge Americans to resist the propagandistic emotionalism that would draw us into a fight against our racial equals.