The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange

by Jan Jarboe Russell

  Helen stood outside in her yard and called out to Ingrid, “Come on over.” Ingrid was relieved by Helen’s friendliness. Like her mother, Ingrid now feared being snubbed by people she’d assumed were family friends.

  Helen pointed to a trapeze and a trampoline set up for practices. Ingrid asked if she could try the trapeze. “Sure,” Helen told her. “But do it before Ernie gets back.” She immediately understood that for some reason Helen didn’t want Ernie to see Ingrid. She didn’t know why, but the trapeze was too exciting a prospect to ignore.

  She hopped on the seat of the trapeze and pumped her legs. She swung, back and forth, higher and higher. On a high pass, she opened her eyes and looked behind her to a nearby field and saw a streak of Pal’s golden hair, followed by Senta nipping at his heels. Her two dogs were off their rope and running at full gait.

  Then she heard the sound of two shotgun blasts.

  Heart racing, Ingrid jumped off the trapeze and ran toward the sound of the shots. She saw a bloody path through the tall grass at the edge of the field. She followed the trail and saw her dead dogs. She broke into a sweat. Slowly, shock rising in her like nausea, she turned and walked home.

  When she got to her house, she told her mother what happened. Johanna’s face was stern. She showed no emotion, as though her body’s nervous system failed to register the news. It frightened Ingrid that her mother was so disengaged from the tragedy, as if Johanna was in a spell of sorrow, too distracted by her own problems.

  What Ingrid did not know, but is made plain in her father’s declassified FBI files, was that Helen and Ernie were among those jittery neighbors who’d smeared Mathias as a potential German spy.

  The FBI file reveals that Mathias and Ernie had been involved in a long-running dispute over the boundary between their two properties. Part of Ernie’s motive for providing information to the FBI may have been to settle that dispute. Ernie may have wanted to prove his own loyalty by accusing his neighbor of disloyalty. The dogs were also a point of contention. Ernie had a kennel filled with dogs of his own. He’d warned Mathias to keep Ingrid’s dogs on the Eiserlohs’ property. When he saw them running that day, he fired and killed both dogs.

  Helen was a particularly aggressive accuser. Helen told one of the agents that Mathias had placed a large cement cistern in his basement, which she thought might be used as a secret room for saboteurs. According to Eiserloh’s FBI file, “She advised further that in her opinion the cistern might be filled with quicklime used to dispose of dead bodies in the event of war.” Ingrid explained that the cistern was simply used to collect extra water for her family.

  Agents interviewed Robert Poots, the chief of police in Strongsville, who knew about the excessive amount of cement that Eiserloh had used to build his home. Poots told the agents there was “no indication that the subject was building a secret room there,” much less a containment system for dead bodies. Though Poots disputed Helen’s claim, it nonetheless became part of the dossier used against Mathias.

  Helen also told FBI agents that the flat roof that Mathias had built on the top of his house might have been constructed “with the idea in mind of using it as a landing place for a gyro-plane in the event of war with Germany.” The truth was far more mundane and sprang from an engineer’s mind: Mathias had plans to add a second story to the home. Mathias told Ingrid and Lothar he had designed a swimming pool for the roof: “Americans love swimming pools. I’ll build you one someday soon. If we ever the sell the house, it will add to the value.”

  Not long after after Ingrid’s dogs were killed, Johanna received an offer on the house and property. Without income, she had no choice but to accept it. She contacted her sister-in-law Emily, who lived in nearby Cleveland and was a real estate agent. Emily was married to Johanna’s younger brother, Ludwig. Johanna explained that she needed to move out of the house soon and the sale had to be in cash—otherwise, the bank would freeze the proceeds. Emily arranged for resale. The offer—$4,000—was lower than she expected. On a tally of assets that Mathias gave to the FBI after his arrest, he listed the value of his house at $5,000. Still, Johanna realized that the opportunistic buyer had the best of her. Realizing that the family would have to move anyway, she took the money.

  The morning after the sale was completed, Ingrid woke early to the sound of Ensi fussing in the crib in her parents’ bedroom, next to Ingrid’s room. She pulled herself from bed, walked down the hall, and poked her head into Johanna’s bedroom. Her mother lay under the sheets, still and silent. Ensi stood in the crib and cried for milk.

  Ingrid checked on Lothar, who was sound asleep in the living room, and went to the kitchen and turned on the stove to heat a bottle of milk. She wondered why her mother had not awakened and fed Ensi, but assumed that Johanna had just overslept.

  Ingrid gave Ensi her bottle, sat down in the rocker, and watched the baby suck down the warm milk. Happy to see Ensi’s eyes droop, Ingrid placed her back into the crib in her parents’ darkened room. As Ingrid walked toward her mother’s bed, her foot slid on something sticky. She reached for her mother’s hand, but Johanna didn’t move. Now Ingrid was scared. When she tried to find her voice, it came out as a croak.

  “Mom,” she said, shaking her mother gently. “Are you all right?”

  Her mother, who was curled on her left side in a fetal position, groaned.

  Ingrid backed away from the bed to find the light switch on the wall. When she went back to her mother’s side, she saw blood on the floor. She shook her mother and Johanna opened her eyes.

  “What happened?” asked Ingrid.

  “I’m okay,” said Johanna, groggy.

  “Mom, can you sit up?”

  Johanna didn’t move. Ingrid pulled the bedcovers back and saw that her mother’s nightgown was torn and blood was on the sheets.

  Ingrid wasn’t sure where the blood had come from—it could have come from the back of her mother’s head, her pelvis, or her legs. All Ingrid knew was that her mother was injured and needed help.

  The house had no telephone. Ingrid raced about an eighth of a mile down the hill to a farmhouse owned by the McGoverns. Pat McGovern was in the same grade as Ingrid, and the Eiserlohs knew the family well.

  Rosemary McGovern came to the door but would not let Ingrid enter the house. Through the screen door, Ingrid explained that her mother was hurt. She asked Mrs. McGovern to call the sheriff. Then Ingrid handed her the phone number for her aunt Klara, Mathias’s oldest sister, in Cleveland.

  “Please tell Aunt Klara to come right away,” said Ingrid. “Please, Mrs. McGovern, Mom is hurt. We need help.”

  Ingrid ran home and took a bucket and a mop and cleaned the blood off the floor. Later, she regretted destroying what could have been evidence, but it made no difference. The sheriff never came and there was no investigation. Mrs. McGovern never called him. Even if the sheriff had arrived, Johanna would never have reported a rape or a burglary. Why borrow more trouble? All through that morning, Ingrid nursed her mother. She heated water on the stove, made her coffee, and in the afternoon helped Johanna up from the bed to take a shower.

  Later, Johanna told Ingrid and Lothar that a man wearing a mask and dark clothes broke into the house and appeared at her bedside. He demanded cash, saying he knew the house had sold. Johanna denied it.

  While no guns were in the house, Johanna had a lead pipe hidden underneath her pillow because she was frightened living without her husband. Sleepy and confused, she’d reached for the pipe and swung at the intruder’s face. She heard a crack and thought she might have broken the intruder’s nose. He turned and ran out of the house.

  Ingrid became convinced that her mother had been raped. Although she believed Johanna may have used the pipe to fight off the man, she also thought the man might have wielded the pipe against her mother. For months after the attack, Johanna was confined to bed. Much of the left side of Johanna’s body was paralyzed. She couldn’t use her left arm and dragged her left leg. Johanna blamed the injury on
“shock” and later told INS authorities that she had suffered a stroke. When Ingrid asked Johanna for more information, her mother refused. Later she told Lothar she had been “assaulted” and that the man had attempted to rape her. Lothar did not ask his mother for details, but remembered that his mother was focused on how the intruder knew she had cash in the house. Had her sister-in-law Emily inadvertently told someone? At least the man did not get the cash, as Johanna had hidden it well.

  Later that day, Ingrid’s aunt Klara and her husband, Frank, arrived at the house. While Mrs. McGovern had not called the sheriff, she had called Klara and asked her to check on the Eiserloh children. Johanna told Klara she no longer felt safe in the house. Klara and Frank packed bags for all three children and Johanna and drove them to their house in Cleveland. Over the next few months, Klara made space for them in her home. She nursed Johanna and cared for the children.

  Meanwhile, Mathias, jailed at the Cleveland Police Department, remained unaware of the FBI file that Hoover’s special agents had gathered against him. A warrant for his arrest had been issued on January 3, 1942. He was on the custodial detention list, informally known as Hoover’s black list. The FBI’s ranking system categorized suspects such as Eiserloh according to the danger they posed. Class A was considered the most dangerous, Class B indicated suspects who would be arrested but subject to conditional release, and Class C indicated suspects about whom the FBI did not have sufficient information to indicate need for investigation. The headings were subjective, based on an investigator’s judgment, but as a German man living legally in the United States who was employed in a business heavily engaged in defense work, Eiserloh was classified Class B.

  As an engineer with the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, Eiserloh had designed many bridges in Ohio, including the first iron drawbridge across the broad span of the Cuyahoga River. On the day the bridge opened, Johanna christened the bridge with a bottle of champagne, as if she were the queen. It was one of Ingrid’s favorite childhood memories. Now that the United States was at war, FBI agents concluded that since Eiserloh designed bridges and had access to dynamite, he also had the capability to blow them up.

  By comparison with the FBI’s investigation of suspected Class A subversives and primary German targets such as the leaders of the German American Bund in New York, known as the American Nazi Party, the field investigation of Mathias Eiserloh was routine and the case against him unremarkable. No illegal wiretaps were used against Eiserloh, no “black bag jobs,” meaning no home or office break-ins.

  The investigation of Eiserloh began in October 1941, before the attack on Pearl Harbor, when one of his coworkers at the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company anonymously dropped his name to the special agents in the Cleveland field office. As Hoover later put it in official correspondence to Edward J. Ennis, director of the Alien Enemy Control Unit of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, “The informant believes that the subject [Eiserloh] is dangerous to the security of the United States because of his skill and knowledge of structural design.” Hoover’s letter to Ennis was written on January 5, 1942, only three days before Eislerloh was arrested. Eiserloh did not know it, but he was already enmeshed in the machinery of government internment—a carefully prepared paper trail existed that sealed his fate.

  During the investigation, agents compiled a comprehensive biography of Eiserloh. He was born on July 4, 1895, in Plaidt, Germany, in the Rhineland. As a boy, he worked alongside his father, who was a building contractor. Eiserloh was drafted into the German army in 1915 during World War I, served as an infantry officer, and was discharged in 1917. He was wounded in November 1917, leaving a scar down the right side of his back and damaging the hearing in his left ear. In 1921, Eislerloh graduated from the Technical College for Civil Engineering in Idstein with a degree in structural engineering.

  While in Idstein, he met Johanna, who lived there with her parents. Mathias had an older sister, Anne, who had immigrated to the United States. Johanna and Mathias decided to marry and immigrate there as well. Ensi, their youngest daughter, said, “My mother was crazy about America. As a girl, she thought the streets were paved with gold. I believe one of the reasons she married my father was to get to America.”

  Mathias left Germany on the Reliance steamship and arrived in New York on March 29, 1923. He traveled to Williamson, West Virginia, and stayed with Anne, his sister, and her husband, a World War I veteran who worked as a coal miner. For two months Mathias worked in the mines with his brother-in-law. In October, Mathias went to work for the Mingo County Road Department as an engineer.

  Johanna followed him to the United States later that year. On Christmas Eve 1923, Mathias and Johanna were married. In their wedding photograph, Johanna wears a knee-length, pale silk dress, white stockings and shoes, and holds a large bouquet of roses. Mathias is dressed in a double-breasted, pin-striped suit. They both display hopeful smiles and already look as prosperous as they had dreamed of becoming—the image of shiny new immigrants to America. If they worked hard, the couple believed, they would become American citizens in due time.

  In the 1920s, it took Germans living legally in the United States five years to obtain citizenship. Applicants had to report every year to the Immigration and Naturalization Service and provide references. If applicants missed a step, they would have to start anew.

  In 1924, a year after they married, Mathias and Johanna moved to Cleveland, Ohio. Mathias secured a job with the Cleveland Electric Illumination Company, and both he and Johanna finally felt settled in America. They filed their applications in Cleveland to become citizens. In a signed document, they pledged their intention to “renounce forever all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign potentate, state or sovereignty and particularly to The German Empire.” With their signatures, they officially transferred their loyalty from Germany to America. The document required Mathias and Johanna to certify that they were not anarchists or polygamists, which were automatic disqualifiers for citizenship. Their pledge to the government and to themselves was “in good faith to become a citizen of the United States of America and to permanently reside therein: SO HELP ME GOD.”

  But Mathias was careless about meeting the requirements for citizenship. Five years after he filed his application, he was required to file additional documents, but he failed to meet the deadline. In the summer of 1929, he and Johanna went on a prolonged trip to Germany to visit Johanna’s ailing parents. The missed deadline meant they had to start the process all over again.

  The trip to Germany had other negative consequences as well. Prior to leaving America, Mathias worked as a structural engineer for the New York Central Railroad in Cleveland and earned a decent wage. When the Eislerohs returned to the United States in the fall of 1929, the country was in the depths of the Depression and he was unable to regain his former position. Mathias took a series of low-paying jobs in Cleveland, and he and Johanna lived in an upstairs room of an old hotel in the city’s downtown for $5 a week. After Ingrid was born on May 8, 1930, Eiserloh paid $50 down for an isolated property on Albion Road in Strongsville. He put up a tent on the land and moved in with Johanna and Ingrid. “With just sand and cement and a few steel bars, the cheapest material to be had, but the hardest to work with, I managed to build four walls with a floor and a roof over them to live in,” he later wrote. “But it was very primitive.”

  During all these years, Mathias lived as an unremarkable new immigrant. “I was a graduated civil engineer when I entered this country, 28 years old and in prime condition,” Eislerloh explained in his own letter to Biddle after his arrest. “My only ambition was to work hard, to live an honest and decent life, to be among my family, and give my children happiness and an education as my father gave me.”

  Though they struggled financially, Mathias and Johanna were resourceful, worked hard, and built a reasonably stable life in Strongsville. Mathias was arrested only once, in 1927, when he was working for the New York Central Railroad in Cleveland as an engineer. On the way
home from work, he ran a red light and did not have the money to pay the fine. He spent three hours in jail until Johanna could arrive and bring $30.

  For six weeks in 1934, Mathias was unable to find work, but he received help from the local relief headquarters in Cuyahoga County. Proud, and by his own description a “stubborn German,” Mathias was embarrassed to accept charity. “I cannot and do not want to live on somebody’s sweat,” he told authorities.

  In early 1935, he finally secured a job with the White Motor Company in Cleveland as an automobile body designer. It paid $45 a week, less than Eiserloh thought he deserved, but at least his family was off the dole, which lessened his shame. “The job hardly allowed me to buy the materials that I wanted but I worked hard in my spare time. “By 1937, there were five rooms in the house,” wrote Eisleroh. “It was a period of relative contentment.”

  A year later, the White Motor Company suffered an economic setback and Eiserloh lost his job again. He applied for a job with the Works Progress Administration, one of Roosevelt’s New Deal projects, but he was not eligible. Only citizens of the United States could apply, a requirement that prompted Mathias to file another application for citizenship. Nine months later, on the day he was supposed to appear at the INS, he had a job interview and failed to make the appointment. For the second time, his citizenship application was put on hold. The more jobs he lost, the more setbacks he suffered, the more he felt like an outsider in America.

  By September 1939, Hitler had seized power in Germany, rolled across the Polish border, and seemed unstoppable. In response, France and Britain declared war on Germany, and America stood at the brink. As a result, the US economy had improved and companies were hiring more engineers. Nonetheless, month after month Eiserloh looked for jobs without success. As he explained to Biddle, “a certain question always spoiled my chances”—that of his nationality. “As a husband and now father of two children, I could not see why they and my wife should starve, just because I was born in Germany.” Ashamed, he took a chance. He told an employment agent that he was Swiss and his scheme worked. In the late fall of 1939, he got a job that paid $75 a week, the most he’d ever earned in America. He returned to designing bridges, his dream job, this time for the Columbia Chemical Division in Cleveland.