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

by Jan Jarboe Russell

  When the Eiserloh family arrived at Crystal City in July 1943, an angry gloom hung over the camp. In the German section where they lived, Germans hostile to the United States had been elected the camp’s representatives and had complete control. Only three months before, on April 21—the day after Hitler’s birthday—a group of Germans identified by the FBI as loyal to Hitler gathered in the recreation hall and took down the American flag. In its place, they hoisted Germany’s red, black, and white flag with the swastika in the center.

  A phalanx of American guards on regular patrol, each carrying a rifle, soon arrived. The sight of the Nazi flag, repugnant to them, sparked outrage. With the butts of their rifles, the guards snatched the flag off the wall and tore it to shreds. When pieces of it fell to the floor, the German prisoners glowered and planned revenge. A few days later, a squad of Germans slipped out of their dwellings in the middle of the night and cut down the American flag flying from a pole inside the camp. The culprits were never identified, and thus began a long-running flag war.

  “We believe that the flag of the Detaining Power does not belong inside of an enemy alien internment camp,” wrote five German nationals in a complaint to camp officials and to the government of Switzerland, the designated protecting power for Germans interned in the United States. Copies of the complaint were also sent to the International Red Cross. In their letter, the German leaders requested that the two American flags in camp—the one in the recreation hall and the other in an open area in the middle of the camp—be removed.

  In response, Harrison, who held authority as the commissioner of the INS, compromised. He agreed to remove the American flag in the recreation hall, and the one that flew over the camp was moved mere inches, to a pole outside the fence so that the flag, objectionable to internees, was not flown inside the internment camp. The solution was an indication of other battles to come: with the German leaders in camp, peace was measured in inches. The irony of the situation was that Crystal City had been conceived of as a camp primarily for Japanese enemy aliens and their families, but the first internees were German nationals and German Americans. Their leaders were proving difficult to manage.

  The mechanism in place for the day-to-day running of the camp simply did not work on the German side. In line with the Geneva Convention, O’Rourke dealt with complaints from internees through elected spokesmen. He gave internees self-rule based on democratic elections of separate spokesmen for Japanese and German internees.

  The Japanese embraced the plan with enthusiasm. They held elections every six months and set up a vast network of elected internee councilmen and assistants. The only undemocratic aspect of the Japanese approach was that neither Japanese women nor their sons were allowed to vote in the elections. The Japanese fathers, issei long humiliated by their incarceration, insisted on exercising control.

  The Germans balked at democratic elections. Even compliant prisoners such as Mathias Eiserloh had come of age in Germany during World War I and lived under the tyranny of one Führer, or leader, after another. They had no model for self-government. Unlike the Japanese internees, who experienced a protracted history of racial discrimination in America and were more amenable in Crystal City, the Germans had a long tenure as immigrants and by then were the largest ethnic group in America. Behind barbed wire in Crystal City, the Germans became bitter, angry, and vulnerable to misguided leadership.

  At the time of the flag incident, the elected spokesman for the Germans, and one of the signers of the complaint, was a tall, commanding figure named Karl Kolb. When the United States had declared war against Germany, Kolb and his family lived in New York City, where he was an executive for Zeiss Ikon, a German camera company. He was arrested almost immediately and interned at Ellis Island. In the summer of 1943, Kolb, his wife, and their seven-year-old daughter were reunited in Crystal City.

  Upon arrival, Kolb quickly seized power. After his election as spokesman for the Germans, Kolb demanded that internees not be allowed to talk directly to O’Rourke, insisting that complaints be filed with the council of German internees. As commander of the camp, O’Rourke assigned jobs to both German and Japanese internees, but Kolb wanted that power himself. In an effort to compromise, O’Rourke gave it to him. Kolb took charge of the distribution of jobs and organized strikes among German workers.

  During a formal inquiry held in response to the April 1943 flag incident, Kolb played cat and mouse with his interrogators. “Am I being questioned as the spokesman of the German internees or an ordinary internee?” demanded Kolb. “How can I speak as the spokesman when there is an ordinary internee inside that person?” Near the end of the hearing, he was pronounced “uncooperative” and “a capable agitator” and confined to his quarters for a day.

  By summer, the tensions in the German section had escalated. Secret distilleries sprang up. Organized bands of agitators roamed the camp, many of them brandishing clubs. When one of the distilleries blew up, the explanation given to O’Rourke by Kolb was that the Germans were making marmalade. Most German immigrants in the camp complied with the rules, but the small group of troublemakers held sway. “It was scary to see grown men walking around that camp with arms raised, giving each other the Heil Hitler salute,” recalled Ingrid years later.

  In June 1943, Fritz Kuhn, the former leader of the German American Bund, arrived as a prisoner of war in Crystal City. Kuhn was no longer wearing the military uniform of a German army officer, which he had worn seven years before when he paraded with storm troopers before Adolf Hitler, but by now the forty-seven-year-old Kuhn no longer needed a uniform to convey his self-styled importance. He was the most infamous American Nazi in the world.

  When Kuhn arrived at Crystal City, the German contingent numbered about 400 people, most of them German-immigrant fathers and mothers, and American-born children. The group also included 230 Germans from Latin America, deported from Bolivia and Peru. The Jacobis, who were German Jews, were one such family from Latin America. Arthur Jacobi, his wife, his two daughters, aged four and fourteen, and his five-year-old son had been transferred to Crystal City from a refugee camp in Algiers, Louisiana. Evelyn Hersey, assistant to Harrison in Philadelphia, handled the delicate arrangements for the Jacobi transfer. The camp in Algiers had a small cluster of Jewish families. Though Jewish by birth, Jacobi had converted to Christianity and was vocal about his religious views, which offended the other Jewish families. He requested a transfer, and the Jacobi family joined the improbable stream of foreigners into Crystal City on April 11, 1943, two months before Kuhn’s arrival.

  None of the German internees in Crystal City were aware that the success of the Soviet Union’s army would help turn the tide of the war. From 1941 to 1944, 95 percent of German casualties were inflicted by the Soviets on the Eastern Front. News was strictly censored. Nor did they know that at the Special War Problems Division negotiations were under way for a prisoner exchange. In return for Americans held by the Third Reich, some of the higher-value internees from Crystal City would voluntarily be repatriated to Germany. Others would go against their will.

  To the German government, Kuhn, a well-known figure in Germany with proven organizational ability and propaganda value, was near the top of the list of internees they wanted in trade. Therefore, Kuhn’s arrival at Crystal City added to the complicated political matrix in the German section. In effect, he was a man without a country. Kuhn was born in Munich, Germany, on May 15, 1896. His father was a wealthy businessman in Munich. For the duration of World War I—from 1914 to 1918—Kuhn served on the front lines of the German army as an infantry officer, earning an Iron Cross for his valor.

  Despite Kuhn’s status as a war hero, his family, according to his FBI file, considered him the black sheep of the family. After the war, he enrolled at the Technical University of Munich to study chemistry. While there, he was caught stealing coats from fellow students. He was arrested, charged, and convicted, subsequently spending four months in jail. After his release, he continued his
studies and completed a master’s degree in chemical engineering. However, his criminal record made it difficult for him to find employment. His father eventually persuaded a friend who owned a merchandise company in Munich to give Kuhn a job. Within eight weeks, Kuhn had stolen several thousand marks’ worth of goods from his employer. His father’s friend agreed not to file charges against Kuhn on one condition: he had to leave Germany. In 1924 Kuhn and his wife, Elsa, fled to Mexico, where both of their children were born.

  In 1931, the family moved to Dearborn, Michigan, where Kuhn worked as a chemist for the Ford Motor Company. He started at a wage of eighty-seven cents per hour. Three years later, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. A practical man would have savored the assets of his good American life: a steady job, a wife, and two children. But Kuhn craved notoriety and founded the Michigan chapter of the German American Bund. He attended camp rallies, practiced target shooting, and wore the Bund uniform: a white shirt, black trousers, and a black hat.

  He proved to be a better orator than a chemist. Every year that he worked at Ford, his salary went down. The first year he made $1,461.65; by 1936, when Hitler installed him as president of the Bund in America, Kuhn’s salary had dropped to only $745.65 a year. “On occasions while working at Ford Motor Company,” notes his FBI file, “Kuhn was laid off for a day or two because he was caught practicing speeches in the dark room.”

  In July 1936 Kuhn and 250 other Bund members in America sailed on the SS New York to attend the Summer Olympics in Berlin. Kuhn’s celebrity moment occurred when he passed in review in front of Hitler at the Olympics. After the parade, Kuhn presented Hitler with a “Golden Book” signed by several thousand people from the United States and gave the Führer a check for $2,300.

  It’s difficult to calculate how significant a threat the pro-Hitler Bund in America was to the US war effort. By the time Kuhn was president in 1936, the vast German American population, who’d lived through World War I, did not want another war with the United States. Kuhn boasted that the Bund had two hundred thousand members under his tenure, but the Department of Justice put the number at eighty-five hundred. Other sources suggest that the membership was seventy thousand. This disparity in the numbers suggests that the FBI and the Department of Justice overestimated the Bund’s importance.

  Nonetheless, Kuhn was cast as the archvillain in a March of Time 1938 newsreel titled “Inside Nazi Germany.” In the black-and-white film, Kuhn, dressed in a dark suit, stood in front of a swastika flag in the New York office of the Bund at 172 East Eighty-fifth Street. At the screening of the newsreel, Kuhn watched as images of him as the “Number One Nazi” in America unfurled and heard his heavy German accent booed in the theater. Only then did Kuhn realize he’d been tricked by his own vanity. Walter Winchell, the syndicated newspaper and radio commentator, reported that Kuhn left the theater screaming, “I’ve been ruint. Ruint!”

  What the presidency of the Bund did offer Kuhn was a platform for his con games. After Germany and Russia invaded Poland in 1939, the FBI received a tip that Kuhn had hatched a plan to extort $500,000 from Helena Rubinstein, the fabled New York cosmetics manufacturer. According to the FBI’s informant, Kuhn’s extortion plan was to send Rubinstein, a Jew who was originally from Poland, a threatening letter decorated with a swastika on the envelope. The informant provided a copy of the letter to the FBI, with Kuhn’s demand for $500,000 and the threat that if the money was not paid, then Rubinstein’s sister, trapped in Poland, would be exterminated by the Nazis.

  Hoover ordered FBI agents to interview Rubinstein at her 300 Park Avenue apartment. Rubinstein was sixty-seven years old and a self-made female multimillionaire. Her lawyer was at her side. No, she told the FBI agents, she hadn’t received any extortion letters and hadn’t paid any money to anyone. As far as she knew, Rubinstein told the agents, her sister was safe.

  After the interview, the FBI agents left the Park Avenue penthouse and marked the Rubinstein matter “closed.” Even though Rubinstein had not received the letter, she must have been shaken to learn of Kuhn’s plan, suddenly brought into her living room.

  In February 1939, Kuhn addressed twenty-five thousand people at a Bund rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City. During the speech, he called President Roosevelt “Frank D. Rosenfeld” and fulminated against the New Deal as the “Jew Deal.” Enraged protesters rushed the stage and Kuhn had to be carried off by police officers.

  Four months later, Thomas E. Dewey, the district attorney in New York, indicted Kuhn on charges of embezzling more than $14,500 from Bund accounts. Dewey’s evidence showed that some of the money was used to move Kuhn’s mistress from California to New York. The New York Daily News reported that Dewey called Kuhn a “common thief.” Mayor La Guardia and Commissioner of Investigation William B. Herlands vowed to pursue more charges against Kuhn. When reporters interviewed Kuhn, who was dressed in a vest and a carefully knotted tie, he laughed off his arrest. Never a shrinking violet, he vowed to fight the charges and took malevolent aim at La Guardia, who was half-Jewish, and Herlands: “I’m not running away from the Jew Herlands and that little Red, La Guardia.”

  Kuhn was convicted of all charges and sentenced to two and a half to five years. He served forty-three months. When he was released from Dannemora Prison on June 21, 1943, his American citizenship was revoked and the attorney general’s office formally declared him a dangerous enemy alien. He was transferred first to Ellis Island and then to Crystal City.

  In Crystal City, the flamboyance of Kuhn’s strut and the straightness of his six-foot-tall carriage suggested that he was making an effort to ignite the fire of his former bravado. But exhaustion was in his gray eyes, square jaw, and rounded shoulders. In June 1943, Kuhn was reunited in Crystal City with Elsa and his son, Walter Max, a fifteen-year-old with a pallid expression, both of whom had been arrested as enemy aliens. “While Mrs. Kuhn never shared much in the notoriety her husband attained as Bundesfuehrer and uniformed exponent of the Nazi ideals,” reported the New York Times, “she has admitted membership in the Friends of New Germany, and attendance at various social functions of the Bund, which succeeded the Friends as the outstanding pro-Nazi organization in this country.” According to the same newspaper article, Walter was apprehended because he was active in the Bund’s youth movement.

  One of Elsa’s first acts in Crystal City was to ask O’Rourke if he could help her find news of her daughter, Waltraut, who had returned to Germany from America in 1938 and married a German soldier. No one in the family had heard from her since. O’Rourke made note of Elsa’s request in his file, but did not follow through. He had no incentive to help her because, since his arrival, Kuhn had acquired a small group of followers.

  Within a few weeks of Kuhn’s arrival, O’Rourke had a letter of complaint on his desk from Therese Hohenreiner, one of the internees, claiming that Kuhn was in charge of the German internees at Crystal City and had bullied her. She copied the letter to the FBI agent in charge in San Antonio. The agent, R. C. Suran, wrote to O’Rourke and asked if it was true that Kuhn had “maneuvered himself into a position as unofficial spokesman for the other German internees.”

  By this time, the population of the camp numbered 523 internees—378 Germans and 145 Japanese. The original idea that the camp would be mainly for Japanese had been abandoned. Given the friction among the Germans, there was safety in not buying trouble. Most of the teenagers, including Ingrid, didn’t know what to make of Kuhn.

  Eberhard E. Fuhr, commonly known as Eb, was seventeen years old when he and his family arrived in Crystal City in July 1943, one month after the Kuhns were reunited there. Eb’s experience was typical of that of the other German teenagers in camp. His parents immigrated to the United States with their two sons, Eb and Julius, in the late 1920s. At the time Germany was embroiled in political and economic conflict, and Eb’s father decided to leave to escape communism. As German immigrants, legal residents of the United States but not citizens, the Fuhr famil
y settled in Cincinnati. A third son, Gerhard, was born in August 1942. Both of Eb’s parents—Carl, a baker, and Anna, a housewife—had been arrested and interned, along with Gerhard, a citizen of the United States. “Had my brother Gerhard not joined my parents, he would have been sent to an orphanage, a fate shared by other internee children,” Eb recalled.

  After the arrest of his parents, Eb and Julius were left to fend for themselves. Eb, a senior at Woodward High School and a popular football star, supported himself with an early-morning newspaper route. His older brother, Julius, dropped out of college and went to work in a Cincinnati brewery.

  “On March twenty-third, 1943, while I was in class, the principal came in and asked me to step out in the hallway,” recalled Eb. “I stepped out and two FBI guys grabbed me.” He was escorted to his locker and retrieved his football letter sweater. On the street, the FBI agents placed him in handcuffs, and then drove to the brewery where his brother worked. Julius was arrested and handcuffed as well. “I was just seventeen years old. I never returned to school and did not graduate with my class. In fact my picture was expunged from the yearbook,” recalled Eb. “I lost many of my personal belongings that day, but also my dignity.”

  Eb never understood the motive for his or his brother’s arrest. Like their parents, the brothers weren’t American citizens. Their father, Carl, had not pursued American citizenship because in the struggle to support his family he had neither the time nor the money to go through naturalization. Eb’s mother, Anna, expected to inherit property in Germany from her mother and didn’t pursue citizenship either. Their older sons followed their lead. But the FBI files show no complaints about the Fuhr brothers prior to the arrest of their parents. After their arrests, a Lutheran minister expressed concern that the boys needed assistance and supervision. Eb has two theories on why they were arrested: the government wanted to use them to expand the pool of potential repatriates in the family camp in Crystal City, and as a signal to other Germans and German Americans in Cincinnati that they, too, were in danger of internment.