Bearing Witness

by Michael A. Kahn

  “So tell me about Ishmael,” Benny said. “Is Abbott and Windsor going to represent Koll at his deposition?”

  I nodded. “Yep.”

  Ishmael was Ishmael Richardson, chairman of Abbott & Windsor, where Benny and I had started as young associates. Although I eventually left to open my own practice, the firm had retained me on a few occasions to handle sensitive matters that they were unable to handle for one reason or another. My contact on each of those matters had been Ishmael Richardson, and over the years we had developed about as nice a rapport as possible between a silver-haired charter member of the Chicago power elite and a Jewish female solo practitioner young enough to have gone to college with his granddaughter.

  “And?” Benny asked.

  “Ishmael didn’t come right out and say, but I got the sense that they’re reluctant to let Koll testify.”

  “Oh?” Benny snorted. “Like they have a choice? Did you remind Ishmael that you already defeated their motion to quash?”

  “Benny,” I said patiently, “you’re missing the point. Just because he shows up for his deposition doesn’t mean he has to testify.”

  After a moment, Benny’s frown changed to a smile. “Ah, are we talkin’ Amendment Number Five?”

  I nodded.

  “Goddamn,” Benny said with a cackle. “They’re thinking about having Otto take the fifth? I love it.” Benny rubbed his hands together. “Oh, baby, I call dibs on Otto’s deposition. This could break the case wide open.”

  I smiled. “It could.”

  That was because Ruth’s case was a civil action. In a criminal case, the defendant’s assertion of his Fifth Amendment privilege cannot be used against him, and the jury is not permitted to draw a negative inference from his refusal to answer a question. But that rule doesn’t apply in civil actions. Here, if Otto Koll refused on Fifth Amendment grounds to say whether he was involved in an illegal bid-rigging conspiracy with Beckman Engineering, his refusal to answer the question could be used against him and against his alleged coconspirators, and the jury would be permitted to draw any negative inference it saw fit.

  “Oh, baby,” Benny said, grinning savagely, “I can’t wait to go to Chicago. I’m going to make that Nazi bastard shit bricks.”

  That afternoon I took a four-hour journey back to the 1930s and the netherworld of the St. Louis Nazi movement. It was a journey made possible by the late Abram Levine, the charismatic head rabbi of Temple Shalom from 1929 until his retirement in 1954. Rabbi Levine had also served as executive director of the St. Louis Jewish Defense Alliance (JDA) from its founding in 1931 until its merger into the St. Louis chapter of the Anti-Defamation League in 1949. The JDA’s principal activity had been the gathering of intelligence on various organizations viewed as a potential threat to the Jews of St. Louis, and thus its principal focus during the years before World War II was the American Nazi movement.

  Rabbi Levine had planned to spend his retirement years writing both his memoirs and a major history of American Jewish life in the heartland during the years between World War I and the Korean War. Over his professional career he had amassed a substantial collection of personal papers and documentary records that were to serve as his source materials. Sadly, a heart attack killed Levine less than a year after he left the pulpit. All that remained of his ambitious literary plans were eleven uncatalogued boxes of papers. The papers had resided in the corner of a musty storage room in the basement of Temple Shalom’s dignified old quarters in the University City Loop until 1979, when the synagogue moved west to its fancy new digs off Clayton Road, the one with the wrought-iron bema that looks like a stage set from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.

  After the move, the synagogue’s new librarian placed the eleven boxes in an archive room in the back of the library and issued an open invitation to scholars and Judaica librarians to come review the treasure trove. Alas, the personal papers of one reform rabbi from the Midwest, to paraphrase Bogart in Casablanca, didn’t amount to a hill of beans in the modern historian’s world. But they did merit an entry in the St. Louis Holocaust Museum’s directory of resource materials on the German-American Bund, and that’s how my mother discovered their existence.

  Unfortunately, the contents of those eleven boxes were in complete disarray. For example, sandwiched between a sheaf of Rabbi Levine’s sermons from 1947–48 and the minutes of a March 8, 1951, meeting of the St. Louis Rabbinical Council was an undercover report on the celebration of Hitler’s birthday on April 20, 1937, at the St. Louis Deutsche Haus (German House) attended by German consul Reinhold Freytag.

  On the wall behind us in the archive room was a framed photographic portrait of Rabbi Levine, and he seemed no more pleased by the disarray than we were. He was glaring into the camera from behind his enormous desk, a pipe clenched between his teeth, his scowl amplified by the dark, bushy eyebrows that joined over a tomahawk nose. Under his baleful eye, my mother and I spent hours sorting and reorganizing and reading the materials.

  Gradually, the outlines of the story began to emerge, starting with the founding of the Hitler Club in March 1933 by a Dr. R. L. Groellefeld. Although the Hitler Club was soon to merge into the Friends of the New Germany (Freunde des Neuen Deutschland), it was around long enough to host a visit from ex-prince Louis Ferdinand of Hehenzollern, son of the former crown prince of Prussia, who delivered a speech to the members exhorting them “to atone for their sins in forgetting the fatherland in World War I by rendering every aid possible to our exalted führer and the New Germany.”

  This all according to the undercover report filed by someone identified by the initials H.A.R. H.A.R appeared repeatedly throughout the materials, along with three others: M.M.N., L.A.B., and B.P.P.

  As we sorted through the papers, we could see the American Nazi movement grow and expand like some insidious fungus in an old horror flick. The Hitler Club metamorphosed into the Friends of the New Germany, which in turn metamorphosed into the German-American Bund. At the 1938 observance of Hitler’s birthday, Anton Kessler, Sturmtruppenführer of the local group, addressed a crowd of celebrants at the German House. The men, dressed alike in black pants, black boots, brown shirts, black ties, and Sam Browne belts, cheered Kessler’s words (recorded, once again, by H.A.R.):

  Why shouldn’t the Gentile majority of St. Louis take arms against Jewish Anti-American subversions? This country is on the eve of a Communist revolution. The Stars and Stripes will be safe only so long as they hang between the Black-White-Red and the Swastika flag.

  The Bund was hardly the only manifestation of Nazi fervor in the St. Louis area during the late 1930s. There was the German-American Commercial League (Deutsch-Amerikanische Berufsgemeinschaft), a branch of the Foreign Division of the Hitler Labor Front, which organized boycotts of Jewish businesses throughout metropolitan St. Louis. There was the Hitler Youth Camp, which opened on July 4, 1938, on Funk’s Farm near Stanton, Missouri, and drilled the children in Nazi marching formations while instructing them in fascist propaganda. There was a group known as the Hitler Youth Group and an agency called the Nazi Employment Service. And on and on.

  My mother found an account of Kunze’s speech at the Liederkranz Club on October 12, 1939—the one Kruppa had urged Conrad Beckman to attend. H.A.R.’s report read, in pertinent part:

  Wilhelm Kunze, newly appointed national leader of the German-American Bund, spoke at the Liederkranz Club before a group of about 150 persons at a secret meeting at which the doors and windows were sealed. Men in SS uniforms moved through the crowd passing out pieces of anti-Semitic literature bearing the official stamp of the German government. Kunze said that the Democratic Party was a puppet of American Jewry, that Jews controlled the newspapers and radio stations, had a stranglehold on industry and the CIO, that Roosevelt was under Jewish domination, and that the recent sit-down strikes were a Jewish idea. Kunze announced that it was time to purify the American race. As the crowd cheered, he pr
omised that “Judaistic gore will soon flow in the streets of St. Louis.”

  We found page after page of thumbnail profiles of St. Louis Nazi activists during the late 1930s—a paperhanger, a perfume salesman, a watchmaker, an electrical contractor, a dentist, a sports editor, a mechanical engineer, a “naturopath,” a waiter. Bit players of the Apocalypse, foot soldiers at Armageddon.

  It was fascinating and it was creepy, but it wasn’t quite what I was hoping to find.

  And then my mother found it.

  “Oh, my God, Rachel,” she said, looking up from the fifth box. “Come here.”

  It was a typed undercover report by M.M.N. prepared in July 1939 in which he described a sunny afternoon at a Bund-sponsored family camp called the Deutsche-Horst (German Nest), located near the Meramec River south of St. Louis. The day’s events opened at noon as fifty members of the Bund, all dressed in storm-trooper uniforms, gathered at the two flagpoles on the parade ground in front of the clubhouse. An unidentified commander supervised the raising of an American flag and a Nazi flag. The ceremony ended with the storm-troopers lifting their right arms in a stiff-armed salute, shouting three “Heil Hitlers,” and goose-stepping in double file off the parade grounds to the cheers and applause of approximately one hundred spectators, mostly mothers and fathers and children. As the storm troopers left to change out of their uniforms and rejoin the group, the spectators drifted off in groups for the afternoon’s recreation. For much of the remainder of the day, according to M.M.N., the camp “had the appearance of many other Meramec River clubhouses.”

  The words that caught my mother’s eye were on the last page of the report:

  The operations of the Deutsche-Horst family camp are under the auspices of Otto Groshong, a former druggist who now works during the week at the German House. He curses Roosevelt and calls him a Jew. Working as counselors under Groshong’s direction are three young men: Rudolphe Schober, Herman Warnholtz, and Conrad Beckman. All three were in uniform at the flag-raising ceremony at the beginning of the day and at the pledge later that afternoon. Schober, age 19, loads trucks at the Lemp Brewery. Warnholtz, 20, is a custodian at a St. Louis public elementary school and an active member of the storm troopers. He has a short temper and has been arrested three times on assault charges. Beckman, age 18, is a plumber’s apprentice in his uncle’s business. For one week every June since he was 15, Beckman has worked as a boxing instructor at the Hitler Youth Camp.

  We continued sorting through the boxes, and as we searched, we drew whatever conclusions one could draw from Rabbi Levine’s disjointed and incomplete records of the era. It appeared that the Bund’s power in St. Louis began to fade after 1939; by the end of 1941, it was all but irrelevant. But part of the decline was deceptive. As law enforcement shone their spotlights on the Bund, its members scurried into darker corners. Some of the splinter groups appeared to be close to mainstream organizations, while others were far more malignant. Perhaps the most sinister of the post-Bund organizations, according to a January 9, 1942, letter to Rabbi Levine from the Chicago offices of the Anti-Defamation League, was a secret outfit called the American SS-Death’s Head Formation (Amerikanische SS-Totenkopfverbände). This band of thugs got its name from the German storm-trooper division of the same name that was in charge of the Nazi concentration camps. Like their counterparts in Germany, members of the American Death’s Head Formation wore a skull-and-bones insignia on their black storm-trooper tunics. According to the letter from the Anti-Defamation League, the Death’s Head Formation was based in the Midwest with chapters in several cities, and “a somewhat reliable source in Springfield claims that the leaders of the local unit are Edgar Muller and Fritz Voerster.”

  I stared at those names, thinking again of Gloria Muller and her vague allusion to her ex-husband’s dark past. I handed it to my mother.

  “Here,” I said to my mother. “Look at this.”

  She looked up from the document she was reading and took the letter from me. She read it with a frown and nodded. On the table in front of her was a folder of materials she had removed from the last box. She lifted the top sheet from her folder. “Read this.”

  It was a carbon copy of a half-page typed report from H.A.R. dated February 27, 1942:

  Efforts to obtain substantive information about the operations of the SS-Death’s Head Formation unit in St. Louis have been unsuccessful to date. Given the small size of the unit, the prospect of finding a reliable informer is low and the likelihood of infiltration is nil. The current fuhrer (leader) of the unit is rumored to be Herman Warnholtz. According to a source who was at Sauters Roadhouse on Telegraph Road late one night after Warnholtz and a man named Haupman had consumed several pitchers of beer, Warnholtz bragged that his storm troopers are prepared, if necessary, to engage in acts of violence to further the cause of Nazism in America.

  The remainder of that last box contained more than a dozen drafts of Levine’s proposal for an updated Passover Haggadah (and letters of rejection from various publishing concerns) and copies of his correspondence with various national Jewish organizations during the late 1940s and early 1950s on a variety of topics wholly unrelated to the American Nazi movement. There was no further mention of Conrad Beckman, the Death’s Head Formation, or anything having to with the American Nazi movement in the 1930s and 1940s.

  ***

  As I walked to my car in Temple Shalom’s parking lot, I thought of the creepy bonds between my investigation and Jonathan’s. I was trying to unravel an American Nazi connection dating back fifty years while Jonathan was trying to unravel a different Nazi connection right here in the present. I let the car engine idle in the cold weather as I recalled the hateful words of G. Wilhelm Kunze’s speech that Kruppa quoted in his letter to Beckman and the hateful words of Bishop Robb’s sermon from that Sunday morning several weeks ago.

  My mother’s family had died in the Holocaust. “Never Again” was the motto of those who insisted that we never forget the lessons of that terrible moment in history. Yet here we were, more than a half century later, and the grand march of progress had delivered up a modern version of the same old monsters. What a dismal parallel. Were we just Time’s captives, running nowhere forever on ancient treadmills?

  Chapter Fifteen

  My secretary was able to match initials with names through records at the Anti-Defamation League, which had merged with the Jewish Defense Alliance in 1949. All four men had been volunteers, doing their investigative work at night and on weekends. Two of them—Myron M. Newman (M.M.N.) and Lester A. Bronkowski (L.A.B.)—had been dead for close to twenty years. A third, Bernard P. Proskower (B.P.P.), was alive but far beyond reach; according to a nurse at the Jewish Center for the Aged, he was in the final stage of Alzheimer’s disease and spent his days curled in a ball.

  But H.A.R. was alive and well. Harold A. Roth was now eighty-nine years old, a widower who lived alone in a one-bedroom apartment on the third floor of an older building on Waterman Avenue in the Central West End. Back in the 1930s, according to the materials Jacki obtained on him, Harold Roth had been a plant manager in a metal-casting factory in South St. Louis. He first learned of the American Nazi movement from leaflets brought into the plant by some of his workers. Although not a religious Jew, he was a proud and defiant one. On the schoolyards of his youth, he had fought the neighborhood bullies who taunted the smaller Jewish kids. Accordingly, he was outraged by the Bund literature. Eager to join the fight against Nazism, he went down to the offices of the Jewish Defense Alliance after work that day to enlist as a volunteer.

  I pulled my car into a space in front of his apartment building on Monday morning. The trial against Beckman Engineering started in one week. My five student volunteers were hard at work at my office this morning, and Benny was up in Chicago taking the deposition of Otto Koll. Although my to-do list of trial preparation tasks seemed to keep growing, I had to see Harold Roth. It was one loop I felt compelled
to close.

  I found his name on the lobby mailbox for apartment 3C and rang his bell to let him know I’d arrived. The inner lobby door, once a security door through which guests were buzzed, no longer served that function. The entire doorknob was missing—there was a clean round hole where it had been—and the door pushed open at the touch. The steam was hissing and clanging in the stairwell radiators as I walked upstairs. The gray carpet tread was old and frayed, and the smells from last night’s dinners—the roasted meats, the fried onions, the cooked garlic—still hung in the air. It had snowed again yesterday, and there were snow boots, some still wet, in front of the four doors on each landing.

  The door to apartment 3C opened as I reached the landing. Holding it open was an elderly man with fierce dark eyes magnified behind heavy black horn-rims. His upper torso curved forward, which made him seem to peer up at me even though we stood at eye level to one another. He was wearing off-brand tennis shoes, black trousers belted high on his waist, and a freshly pressed red-and-gray-plaid flannel shirt buttoned to the collar, which seemed about three sizes larger than his neck. His bald head was covered with age spots.

  “Miss Gold?” he said in a thin, reedy voice. He was leaning on a wooden cane. There was a hearing aid in each pendulous ear, and his head shook with a slight palsy.

  I introduced myself. He nodded, unsmiling, and gestured me in, turning to lead the way down the short hallway. Although he took small steps and leaned on his cane, his physical frailties were offset by an aura of sheer resolve.

  The living room was small and sparsely furnished with odds and ends that looked as if they once stood in the showroom window of a 1950s discount house. He moved toward an easy chair covered with a brown corduroy fabric. At the side of the chair was a TV tray. Resting on the tray were an empty mug with an old tea bag that stained the bottom brown and a well-used set of red bicycle playing cards dealt in an unfinished game of solitaire. He settled into the easy chair and pointed me toward a sagging grayish couch against the side wall.