by Duffy, Peter
Although the Yorkville beer gardens survived Prohibition largely unmolested for reasons that might’ve had to do with the respected US senator who lived at 244 East Eighty-Sixth Street (the German-born Robert F. Wagner Sr.), Harder sold out for big money in 1929 and opened a classier joint across the street that was not reliant on the ostentatious consumption of vats of Bavarian lager. The Café Hindenburg featured dancing to the big-band sounds of Maria Wadynski and her orchestra in an upstairs ballroom and chocolates and pralines over quiet conversation in the downstairs lounge. Even with the onset of the Depression, the Hindenburg faced strong competition from along the boulevard and up and down the side streets, which only increased after Prohibition’s repeal in 1933 removed any worries about the open consumption of spirits. The Gloria Palast (in the lower level of the Yorkville Casino building) described itself as “Yorkville’s leading cabaret restaurant,” with three large dining and fox-trotting spaces that could hold upward of two thousand people. Directly across the street, the Corso also went for the sleek look of a Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers picture (“a futuristic stairway”), but boasted that its two orchestras could be enjoyed without a minimum-drink requirement. A few strides to the east, Restaurant Platzl employed the “famous” Willie Schiesser to direct its orchestra for nightly dancing, while the Café Mozart (249 East Eighty-Sixth Street) had Franze Deutschmann and his men render the romantic waltz beneath a bust of Wolfgang Amadeus with pfeffernüsse, anise, marzipan, and Apfelstrudel served till dawn. “A broad, bustling crossway, where you will find diversion good and plenty,” wrote a nightlife author of New York’s version of Unter den Linden. “Picture and four-a-day vaudeville halls. Beer dens with yodeling waiters. Roof gardens echoing guttural song. Fox trots at ten cents a dance. Plain, unpretentious haunts, on the whole, with a sympathetic air. And even if evening togs be few, the laughter is real and spontaneous.”
Charles Shaw, Nightlife (New York: John Day, 1931), 139–43; Helen Worden, The Real New York: A Guide for the Adventurous Shopper, the Exploratory Eater, and the Know-It-All Sightseer Who Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1932), 338–49; “Yorkville, Where Beer Never Ceased to Flow, Will Celebrate Return of Legality Tonight,” New York Times, April 7, 1933; James Rian, Dining in New York, an Intimate Guide (New York: John Day, 1934), 127–29, 241–44; Scudder Middleton, Dining, Wining, and Dancing in New York (New York: Dodge Publishing, 1938), 82–85; and “News and Gossip of Night Clubs,” New York Times, May 1, 1938.
237,588 German-born and 127,169 Austrian-born: According to the 1930 census. Ira Rosenwaike, Population History of New York City (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1972), 205.
“comes from pride in the”: New York Post, April 30, 1938.
“We called them undercover men”: US Congress, House Special Committee on Un-American Activities, Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the U.S., vol. 6, 1st sess., testimony of Helen Vooros, August 18, 1939.
J. Edgar Hoover, then forty-two: Raymond J. Batvinis, The Origins of FBI Counterintelligence (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 34–35, 48; Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 207–9; and “Spy Quiz Shows U.S. Has None of Its Own,” New York Daily News, June 21, 1938. Mr. Batvinis provides a comprehensive account of the FBI’s counterintelligence creation story in his important book. A scholar and former FBI special agent, he was most generous in offering his insights and research assistance to the author.
creation of Carl Lukas Norden: The institutional history of Carl L. Norden Inc. is explored in Stephen L. McFarland, America’s Pursuit of Precision Bombing, 1910–1945 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995).
According to an internal history: “Story of Norden Bombsight Released,” Norden Insight newsletter, December 1944.
“My dear, we are a”: Ibid.
in the living room of his Queens apartment: In his book, Ritter writes that Pop Sohn lived at 248 Monitor Street, which is located in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn. Public records reveal that Pop Sohn lived at 70-12 Sixty-Sixth Street in Glendale on the Queens-Brooklyn border, demonstrating Ritter’s tendency to add dubious color to incidents that we know from other sources did actually occur.
“technicians occupying responsible posts, many”: United States v. German-American Vocational League, Inc., et al., Case Files 2017C–2018C, Selected Case Files, 1929–ca. 1980, Office of the US Attorney for the Judicial District of New Jersey, Record Group 118, National Archives at New York City.
Frederick “Fritz” Joubert Duquesne was: Art Ronnie, Counterfeit Hero: Fritz Duquesne, Adventurer and Spy (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1995), 211. Mr. Ronnie’s rollicking and well-researched biography goes a long way toward separating fact from fiction in Duquesne’s story. “He was no hero,” the author concludes, “but his was an incredible life encompassing bizarre exploits of drama, danger, and adventure few people are privileged to live.” Mr. Ronnie was the picture of collegiality in providing archival materials to the author.
“superlative gift of oriental storytelling”: Ibid., 102.
“Suppose an elephant charges me”: “Get Tip on Big Game: President Learns How to Shoot Beasts of the Jungle,” Washington Post, January 20, 1909.
“directed all operations connected with”: Fritz Joubert Duquesne file, KV2/1955, British Archives, Records of the Security Service, Kew, London.
“Speculation would suggest that he”: Ronnie, Counterfeit Hero, 136.
“infinitely truer than any bald”: Clement Wood, The Man Who Killed Kitchener: The Life of Fritz Joubert Duquesne (New York: W. Faro, 1932), 13.
“all information possible about the”: Ritter’s British interrogation.
CHAPTER THREE: ALMOST SINGLE-HANDED
“in immediate proximity to the”: William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), 307.
The supervisor answering the call: Smelling a rat, Ira F. Hoyt, the office’s supervisor, asked Rumrich if he could call him back to confirm his identity. Rumrich said, “unfortunately I could not reach him as he was at the Waldorf Astoria incognito and that no one must know that he is in the city; that this was all very secret and that the press must positively not get a word,” Hoyt wrote. “He said that he felt sure I understood the meaning and his mission.” Realizing the call was a fake, Hoyt agreed to send the passports to the Taft Hotel as instructed, estimating that it would take about an hour for them to arrive. After hanging up, he called Washington to confirm that Secretary Hull wasn’t in New York and then made arrangements with a special agent of the State Department and two detectives from the NYPD’s Alien Squad to meet in front of the Taft, located just north of Times Square. The officers would arrest the mysterious caller when he appeared in the lobby to receive a package of dummy passports from Mr. Hoyt. (Hoyt’s statement, File 862.20211/1760, Box 6773, Record Group 59, General Records of the State Department, National Archives, College Park, MD.)
As Rumrich later admitted to authorities, he hung up the pay phone “almost certain” that Mr. Hoyt “knew he had not spoken to the Secretary of State.” Despite his trepidation, he hopped the uptown IRT to Grand Central Station, found a phone booth, and placed a call to the Taft, asking if a package had arrived for Edward Weston. He was told it hadn’t. He then dialed the Western Union office within the terminal and asked the dispatcher to send a messenger—“a boy,” he called him—to pick up a package expected shortly at the Taft. After waiting for what must’ve been upward of a half hour to forty-five minutes, Rumrich called Western Union, asked if the package from the Taft had been retrieved, and was told the messenger had come and gone without finding it. Rumrich then slumped his shoulders and took the train back to the Bronx, “almost certain that the whole thing was off.”
When Mr. Hoyt arrived at the Taft, he discovered that he had missed the connection with the messenger. He milled about the ornate lobby, which featu
red a woman in a glass booth under an ASK MISS ALLEN sign who distributed tourist maps and cut-rate Broadway tickets, while his police backup kept a covert watch on the door. “After waiting about forty-five minutes I went to the washroom after giving Mr. Tubbs [the State Department special agent] the wink and a little while after he followed to the washroom and we discussed procedure from then on,” Mr. Hoyt wrote. Alas, Mr. Hoyt’s brief career in counterespionage was over. He handed the envelope of fake passports over to a Mr. Robbins of the Package Room, spoke with the detectives outside on Fifty-First Street about his capitulation, and took the train back downtown with Mr. Tubbs. When the Western Union messenger showed up again to pick up the passports, the two NYPD detectives tailed him across midtown traffic to Grand Central Station, where they “will remain on duty until that package is picked up whether it is tonight or tomorrow or when,” Hoyt told Washington.
Next morning, Rumrich reported for work as usual at his chemical company job at 163 Varick Street, where he was employed as a translator for $22.50 a week. At 12:15 p.m., he thought he’d give another try to the Western Union office at Grand Central. “I inquired whether the package had been called for from the Taft Hotel,” he said. “The man answering the telephone said ‘yes,’ the package was being held there for me. He spoke so resolutely that I dismissed my doubts of the previous day.” Rumrich asked for the package to be delivered to the Western Union office at 200 Varick Street, then went downstairs, posting himself across the street “to see if a package was being brought from the subway.” But when nothing showed up by one minute to 1:00 p.m., he returned to his job.
After turning it over in his head for much of the early afternoon, Rumrich called the Kings Castle Tavern, where he sometimes lunched, and asked the proprietor’s daughter if she would accept a delivery on his behalf, with the promise that he would reimburse the costs when he was able to come by. She agreed. Leaving the office again, he parked himself in a cigar store on Varick, used its phone to confirm that the Weston materials had arrived, and asked for the package to be rerouted to the tavern. He watched as the uniformed messenger walked half a block south and turned right on King Street. Rumrich took a parallel street, Houston, in the same (westerly) direction, turning south onto Hudson Street after one block and reaching the northwest corner of King and Hudson in time to see the messenger enter the tavern. Allowing sufficient time to lapse, Rumrich went in and ordered a beer from the bar. But something didn’t feel right. “The place was rather dark,” he said. He left without requesting the package.
Once outside, he asked a boy to do him a favor, explaining that he wanted to avoid the bartender at the Kings Castle because he owed him money. The boy agreed. Rumrich handed over two $1 bills and scurried to the other side of the street in his nervousness. When the boy returned to the original spot with the package in his hand, Rumrich whistled him across the street. But there was a problem. The boy wanted additional compensation for his labors, and Rumrich had “altogether 10 cents in my possession.” As the argument escalated, detectives John Murray and Arthur Silk of the NYPD’s Alien Squad broke in on the scene and took “Gus” Rumrich into custody.
“much harder than the life”: Statement of Guenther Rumrich, File 862.20211/1763, Box 6773, Record Group 59, General Records of the State Department, National Archives, College Park, MD.
Dr. Ignatz Griebl, a Nazi: Griebl was briefly president of the Friends of the New Germany, the pro-Nazi organization that became the German American Bund. During the organization’s German Day celebration in October 1934, held on the grand stage of Madison Square Garden, he announced that anyone “who fights us must perish—socially as well as economically—because of our determination to destroy our enemies completely and without any consideration whatever.” He was also the author of a seventy-one-page exercise in anti-Semitica called Salute the Jew!, which he wrote under a pseudonym, William Hamilton. He explained that he feared the Jews would destroy him if they knew he wrote it. “They are everywhere and at all times prepared to deliver a serious blow or declare an economic war on any people of different blood or of white origin,” he wrote, noting that “Jews should never be regarded as a white race” because “their origin is as black as that of their brothers of common race and blood, the Syrians, Arabs, and Abyssinians of Asia and Africa.”
Dr. Griebl’s medical practice and residence was located in the beaux arts building at 56 East Eighty-Seventh Street next door to the ornate side entrance of the Park Avenue Synagogue. The waiting room of his office was graced with a large portrait of Field Marshal Paul von Hindenberg and typically filled with the higher class of German women, drawn by his specialties in gynecology and varicose veins. It was from among this population that he selected his mistresses, which caused considerable pain to his otherwise formidable partner in Hitlerism, Mrs. Griebl, who initially refused to swear on the “old Jewish Testament” or respond to questions from “Jewish judges and a Jewish district attorney” when she appeared before a federal grand jury investigating a Nazi comrade.
The FBI discovered that he kept an extensive library of files on prominent Jews in New York, cataloging their “birthplaces, schooling, and residences at all stages of their careers, their social, business, fraternal, and political connections, their estimated wealth, their friendships with non-Jews of note, the offices they held,” Leon Turrou wrote. “It made, apparently, no difference whether they were professing Jews or not, as long as they had Jewish blood. I noted names which surprised me. All notes were interlarded with scurrilous, often obscene, remarks.”
“We handled him with gloves”: Leon Turrou, Nazi Spies in America (New York: Random House, 1938), 136.
“In every strategic point in”: Ibid., 12.
“partly false, partly exaggerated remarks”: Nest Bremen’s Leiter was Erich Pheiffer. His extensive interrogation is available in file KV2/267, British Archives, Records of the Security Service, Kew, London.
According to Griebl’s later statement: Statement of Ignatz T. Griebl, File 862.20211/1850, Box 6773, Record Group 59, General Records of the State Department, National Archives, College Park, MD.
J. Edgar Hoover was incensed: “Hoover and Hardy Clash in Spy Case: FBI Holds Prosecutor Responsible for Escapes—Official Here Denies It,” New York Times, June 2, 1938.
“Nazi Gestapo men saw him”: Turrou, Nazi Spies in America, 282.
“mammoth bureaucracy, composed of mediocrities”: Heinkel, Stormy Life, 187.
“If we win the fight”: David Irving, The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe: The Life of Field Marshal Erhard Milch (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), 61.
the Daily News mused that: “Can Anything Be Done for the Austrian Jews?,” New York Daily News, March 15, 1938.
He penned two long memos: Documents on German Foreign Policy, series D (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1951), 1:635–39, 1:664–77.
a directive of two sentences: Ibid., 1:691.
Special Committee on Un-American Activities: The congressional experience with un-American investigations can be traced to the efforts of one Congressman Samuel Dickstein. A Vilnius-born cantor’s son who represented the Lower East Side, he convened informal hearings in late 1933, “Nazi Propaganda Activities by Aliens in the U.S.,” under the auspices of his Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. The impetus was the negative publicity surrounding the Friends of the New Germany. During five sessions in November and December, customs guards, journalists, seamen, and union officials detailed how German sailors were delivering printed matter, military garb, propaganda films, and spy directives to pro-Nazi operatives in the United States, particularly in the oft-mentioned Yorkville. In executive session, a witness described how two sailors of Nazi affiliation asked him if he would “represent them here as American agent” during a meeting at the Café Hindenburg on Eighty-Sixth Street. Another requested anonymity because “I am well-known in Yorkville and New York City, and they will make it very hard for me, as there are too many of them; they will make it
so very hard for me that I will probably have to leave New York.”
When Congress reconvened in January 1934, Congressman Dickstein pushed for a new, wider inquiry into what he described as an effort to undermine the foundations of our democratic system. He claimed on the House floor, “We have dozens of spies coming to America as sailors on German boats . . . trying to spread hate among our people,” which caused the New York Herald Tribune to scoff that since the spies “had failed completely in this, Mr. Dickstein will organize a first-class heresy hunt to spread it for them.” In the spring, the House of Representatives voted 168–31 to create the Special Committee on Un-American Activities Authorized to Investigate Nazi Propaganda and Certain Other Propaganda Activities, the “certain other” designation a concession to legislators, including those with large German American constituencies, more interested in examining the threat from Communist infiltration.