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

by Duffy, Peter

  The “Duquesne” Spy “Ring,” shown here in FBI mugshots, was in fact made up of four separate rings with a smattering of lone wolves, a diverse collection of Hitler supporters that included a convicted counterfeiter from Dusseldorf and a former auto executive with Ford and Chrysler, an employee of a boat basin in the Bronx and a secretary for the law firm representing the German Consulate in downtown Manhattan. J. Edgar Hoover described the investigation as “the greatest of its kind in the nation’s history.”

  Bill and Helen Sebold were relocated after the case to a small home outside San Francisco in an early version of the witness protection program. As the years passed, Sebold grew fearful of Nazi reprisals, which may have contributed to an increasing mental instability. But he never disavowed his service to the United States. He told an FBI agent in 1954 that he “did not take advantage of making money from his story or from radio or movie because he felt he had done what he did for the good of the country.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book could not have been written without the generous assistance of Christel Little, Shirley Camerer, and the late Helen Büchner (Bill Sebold’s sister-in-law); the family of the late James C. Ellsworth, in particular Thomas Ellsworth and Mary Pletsch; Katharine R. Wallace; Ray Batvinis; Art Ronnie; Joni Newkirk; Jim Millen; Diana “Dee” Schumann; Patrick Connelly and Trina Yeckley at the National Archives branch in New York City; Amy Reytar and Britney Crawford at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland; John F. Fox of the FBI; and translator Barbara Serfozo. Praise is due to the staffs of the FDR Library at Hyde Park, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the Brooklyn Public Library, the New-York Historical Society, the Hagley Library and Museum, the Museum of the City of New York, Kulturbetrieb Mülheim an der Ruhr, Contra Costa County Genealogical Society, and Politisches Archiv des Auswärtiges Amt in Berlin. Thanks also to George Spitz, Brian Hollstein, Kathy Jolowicz, Arthur Jacobs, Steve Landrigan, Peg Hoversten, Hal Shevers, Alice Ra’anan, Carolinda Witt, Ed Appel, Jeff Cuyubamba, John Driscoll, Janon Fisher, Corey Kilgannon, Patrick Weaver, Thomas Buechner, Alan Goldberg, Leo Jakobson, Gene Fein, Robert Shapiro, Nancy Ellen Goldsmith, Joe Fodor, Michael Skakun, Dennis Heaphy, L. G. Khambache Sherpa, Steve Chiu, George Miller, Ran Graff, Nat A. Pinkston, Daniel Stein, Paul Kerzner, Charles Donaldson, and Laura Harris of the New York Post photo library. I am the lucky beneficiary of the skill and professionalism of my editor, Colin Harrison, and his outstanding assistant, Katrina Diaz. The sound advice and spirited advocacy of my agent, Mary Evans, have been invaluable. Without the love and support of my wife, Laura, and daughter, Eleanor, I would’ve been nowhere.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Peter Duffy is the author of The Bielski Brothers and The Killing of Major Denis Mahon: A Mystery of Old Ireland. He writes regularly for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, New York, the New Republic, Slate, and many other outlets. He lives in New York City with his wife and daughter.

  © RAN GRAFF

  PETER DUFFY is the author of The Bielski Brothers and The Killing of Major Denis Mahon: A Mystery of Old Ireland. He also writes regularly for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, the New Republic, Slate, and many other outlets. He lives in New York City with his wife and daughter.

  Visit his website at PeterDuffy.net.

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  ALSO BY PETER DUFFY

  The Killing of Major Denis Mahon:

  A Mystery of Old Ireland

  The Bielski Brothers:

  The True Story of Three Men Who Defied the Nazis, Built a Village in the Forest, and Saved 1,200 Jews

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  NOTES

  PROLOGUE

  “I have everything I ever”: The quotation is taken from one of six surviving letters written from William Sebold to Jim Ellsworth generously provided to the author by the Ellsworth family.

  “lapsed into an obscurity which”: Henry Lee, “Smashing the Biggest Spy Ring,” Coronet, December 1951.

  “those who reflect in their”: George McJimsey, ed., Documentary History of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidency, 40 vols. (Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, 2001–8), 32: 34–41.

  “knowing that he would never”: FBI File 100.HQ.373899, Sections 1 and 2, Record Group 65, National Archives, College Park, MD. Hereafter cited as Sebold personal FBI file.

  “elimination of this organization, which”: Samuel A. Tower, “FBI’s Hidden Struggle Against Spies Continues,” New York Times, February 11, 1945.

  “a sacred thing”: Sebold personal FBI file.

  “This Sebold is the kind”: U.S. v. Hermann Lang, et al., United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, Case 16000, Record Group 21, National Archives at New York City. Hereafter cited as trial transcript.

  “as you know”: Sebold personal FBI file.

  CHAPTER ONE: THE OBJECT OF THE BOMBARDMENT

  “It is only a question”: Richard Suchenwirth, “Command and Leadership in the German Air Force,” United States Air Force Historical Studies 174 (Aerospace Studies Institute, 1969), 8.

  “not for an adjustment of”: On general rearmament, Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power (New York: Penguin Press, 2005), 337, 615.

  Even though only about eight: Edward L. Homze, Arming the Luftwaffe: The Reich Air Ministry and the German Aircraft Industry, 1919–39 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976), 98.

  “fifth column” within, “men now”: Paul Preston, The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution, and Revenge (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2009), 181; and Louis De Jong, The German Fifth Column in the Second World War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 4.

  Over one month: Antony Beevor, The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 (London: Penguin Books, 2006), 173.

  At about 4:40 p.m. on: Herbert Rutledge Southworth, Guernica! Guernica! A Study of Journalism, Propaganda and History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 240–41, 245, 277.

  “Guernica has taught us what”: Ibid., 231.

  the “complete annihilation”: R. Chickering and S. Forster, eds., The Shadows of Total War: Europe, East Asia, and the United States, 1919–1939 (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 288.

  “Germany did not possess a”: Ernst Heinkel, Stormy Life: Memoirs of a Pioneer of the Air Age (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1956), 162.

  “only in closely limited areas”: Richard Suchenwirth, “Historical Turning Points in the German Air Force War Effort,” United States Air Force Historical Studies 189 (Aerospace Studies Institute, 1969), 28.

  The Air Ministry’s Technical Office: James Corum, The Luftwaffe: Creating the Operational Air War, 1918–1940 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), 200.

  CHAPTER TWO: THE HIGHEST HUMANITY

  “everything that could be procured”: Nikolaus Ritter, Deckname Dr. Rantzau: Die Aufzeichnungen des Nikolaus Ritter, Offizier im Geheimen Nachrichtendienst (Hamburg: Hoffman und Campe, 1972). The book was written with an uncredited ghostwriter, American author Beth Day. I rely on two main sources for Ritter’s recollections: an English-language translation of Deckname generously provided by Ritter’s daughter, Katharine R. Wallace, and Ritter’s interrogation at the hands of British intelligence immediately following the war. Since the Ritter-related information in Ladislas Farago’s Game of the Foxes (New York: David McKay, 1971) is often at variance with Ritter’s own account, I have avoided Mr. Farago’s version. (Mr. Farago is equally unreliable in his presentation of William Sebold’s story.) In addition, I have gained
insights on Mr. Ritter through interviews and correspondence with Mrs. Wallace, who authored a book on the wartime experiences of her family: KF Ritter, Aurora: An Alabama School Teacher in Germany Struggles to Keep Her Children During WW II after She Discovers Her Husband Is a German Spy (Xlibris, 2006).

  On or about February 1, 1937: The British investigation and interrogation of “Nikolaus Adolf Fritz Ritter, alias REINHARDT, alias VON RANTZAU: based mainly in Hamburg,” can be found in files KV2–87 and KV2–88, British Archives, Records of the Security Service, Kew, London. Thanks to Carolinda Witt for providing the author with copies of the documents.

  “The essential thing for a”: John Rodden and Ethan Goffman, eds., Politics and the Intellectual: Conversations with Irving Howe (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2010), 315.

  the picturesque activities of the pro-Nazi Amerikadeutscher Volksbund: Following Adolf Hitler’s ascension to power in 1933, Heinz Spanknoebel, a Reich citizen who had been active in Nazi circles in Detroit in the 1920s, was assigned by high officials including Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, to consolidate all local German groups in America into a national movement that could serve as an advertisement for the regime’s objectives. Within months, his Bund der Freunde des Neuen Deutschlands or Association of the Friends of the New Germany had organized more than twenty locals in German neighborhoods throughout the United States, a clutch of ideology-spreading newspapers for regional distribution, an elite Ordnungsdienst or Order Force with paramilitary uniforms and a spy branch that sought a reliable “young lady of good appearance” who would “come over on the Europa or Bremen as a hairdresser” to conduct espionage, according to a letter intercepted by the Communist Daily Worker, the New York newspaper dedicated like no other to smoking out the Fascist enemy.

  With a mustache trimmed in the Hitler fashion, Spanknoebel stormed into the offices of the daily newspaper New Yorker Staats-Zeitung und Herold and demanded, on authority from Berlin, that the publication cease printing “pro-Jewish articles,” even though it carried no criticisms of Nazism. Bernard Ridder, who was copublisher of the newspaper with his brother Victor, said he told the visitor, “All I can tell you, Spanknoebel, is to get the hell out and stay out.” Spanknoebel had greater success forcing his way onto the board of directors of the United German Societies of Greater New York, which included seventy organizations that represented the breadth of German life in New York, everything from Alte Bronxer Carneval Ritterschafter, (the Old Order of Bronx Carnival Knights) to the Bund der Sudeten-Deutschen in Amerika (Association of Sudeten Germans in America), from the Damenchor des Baeckermeister Gesangvereins (Ladies Choir of the Bakers’ Singing Society) to the German-American Athletic Club of East Eighty-Second Street. He promised that the Nazi regime would bring punishment on the “parents or other relatives” of anyone in the group who stood in the way of his plan of Nazification, a boast that carried significant weight coming from a credentialed agent of the Reich. The story broke into the open when Mayor John P. O’Brien, a Tammany hack in the midst of a reelection campaign, said he would refuse to allow German Day festivities starring Spanknoebel to be held at a city-owned armory. He said the “occasion would be utilized by aliens to sow seeds of Hitler’s intolerant and intolerable religious prejudices in New York, where we have no room for the bigotry of anti-Semites, Ku Kluxers, or other principles of spite and hatred.” Carefully crafted to appeal to Jewish, Irish Catholic, and black voters, the message didn’t prevent Mayor O’Brien’s loss to the reformist energy of Fiorello La Guardia, the half-Jewish Italian Episcopalian with a fed-up-with-it bravado and visceral hatred for Hitler (a “perverted maniac,” “the brown-shirt fanatic”) who was destined to become the colorful personification of New York’s civic life in the 1930s, the inimitable “Little Flower.”

  Within days, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York announced he was conducting an investigation into Spanknoebel for violating a federal law passed in 1917 that required representatives of foreign governments to register with the State Department. At this point, Hitler’s conservative diplomatic corps, which wanted above all to improve the image of the Reich in America, distanced itself from the whole affair, and some Nazi officials began considering the need for more subtle methods of persuasion in a country like the United States, where “the opposing elements are in every respect all-powerful.” His assignment canceled, Spanknoebel was confronted by an operative from Berlin in an apartment just off Park Avenue where he was hiding from a US arrest warrant. The man put a gun to Spanknoebel’s chest and escorted him to the waiting Europa, which carried him back to Germany and, according to one story, a successful career with the SS.

  In the meantime, Samuel Untermyer, a seventy-five-year-old Wall Street lawyer and Jewish civic leader, was gaining notice for his call to “undermine the Hitler regime and bring the German people to their senses by destroying their export trade on which their very existence depends,” a resonant issue in a city that was populated with 2 million of the world’s 15 million Jews. During an address over WABC radio, Untermyer said his boycott campaign (opposed by some Jewish organizations as too provocative) targeted “German-made goods” and “German ships or shipping” but also “any merchant or shopkeeper who sells any German-made goods or who patronizes German ships or shipping,” which located the matter directly on the streets of New York. Noisy sidewalk demonstrations soon convinced major department stores such as Saks, Hearns, Straus, Gimbels, and Woolworth to drop their business with Hitler’s Germany.

  The “jüdischen Boykott” would be the rallying cry in a renewed effort to bring German America under the umbrella of the Friends of the New Germany. The vehicle would be an auxiliary organization called the German-American Business Committee, known by its German-language acronym of DAWA, launched to “boycott the boycotters” by urging adherents to “buy German” and “patronize Aryan stores only,” according to the language of its handouts. Within a month of its formation in early 1934, the DAWA published a “trade guide” that listed 750 member businesses, including more than 200 in Yorkville, each of which paid a sliding-scale registration fee for the privilege of placing a blue eagle sticker in their window, a physical mark on the city’s landscape that denoted either support, acquiescence, or fear of Nazism. The New York Times reported that “several large establishments” in Yorkville didn’t display the eagle and only joined DAWA “in order not to offend the Friends of the New Germany” but that the proprietors of “delicatessens, groceries, and fish markets” were “enthusiastic about the blue DAWA eagle,” saying it increased business, which was probably what really interested them about it. The next step could’ve been predicted: in short order, “dozens” of Jewish businesses in the neighborhood “had their front windows marked with large swastikas,” including an optical company, a cut-rate drugstore, a bakery, and two furniture stores, according to a Jewish newspaper. Some Jewish merchants in Yorkville were so fearful that they sought membership in DAWA in order to save businesses dependent upon German patronage. “I sent two letters, one of them registered, to the DAWA offices,” said one. “They did not respond.”

  Anti-boycott sentiment appears to have done wonders for Nazi recruitment efforts by stoking the same resentments that had enabled Hitler to gain popular support back home. In a scene that was replicated in all the major German American auditoriums in the metropolitan area, more than two thousand people gathered on March 17 at the rustic Schwaben Halle on the Brooklyn side of Ridgewood, located in what today would be referred to as the Bushwick neighborhood. In between bursts of martial music, a succession of speakers demanded support for the DAWA campaign by shouting that “Jewish economic masters” were seeking the impoverishment of all German Americans. A reporter for a Jewish newspaper noted that only a dozen hands were raised in stiff-armed salute as the first notes were struck of “Deutschland über Alles.” “After one verse it swung into the Horst Wessel Lied, the Hitlerite marching anthem, and half the audience saluted,” he wrote. “When the ba
nd began the fourth and last verse of the song, every hand in the house (with one exception) was raised. And as the music mounted higher in the closing bars, Nazis besought a unanimous salute to Hitler. ‘Hoch mit den Haenden,’ they urged.” High with the hands. Three weeks later, and several blocks to the east over the Queens line, six thousand Germans jammed into the Ridgewood Grove arena for a similar evening of obloquy and song while a few thousand more gathered outside on Palmetto Street and St. Nicholas Avenue. To make the scene a near replica of what was happening in Germany, the Nazis engaged in “eighteen brawls,” according to the careful accounting of one reporter, with their political foes, in this case hundreds from the “Anti-Fascist League of Brooklyn, the Blue Shirt Minute Men of Brownsville, and the Jewish War Veterans League,” according to the papers. The Ordnungsdienst used billy clubs to attack those who stuck around after the cops left. Then on May 17, 1934, more than twenty thousand gathered at Madison Square Garden, which was decorated with swastikas, American flags, and English- and German-language banners, including one near the speaker’s rostrum that urged German Americans to “Erwache!” Awake! Protected by seven hundred and fifty officers of the NYPD outside and eight hundred Ordnungsdienst men inside, the speakers said that the DAWA was a “defensive measure against the reign of terror foisted upon the United States and especially the City of New York by certain professional Jews and their Bolshevist confederates,” according to a featured orator. “We give you warning today for the last time,” said another. “Stop the incitement. Stop the boycott and we too shall be silent and we too shall then devote ourselves to our special task. But if you continue the battle, you shall find us fully armed and then you will have to bear the consequences.”