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I just finished reading Christine Kuehn’s Family of Spies. The story follows her discovery of a family secret: her paternal grandfather, grandmother, and aunt had been Nazi spies sent to Hawaii to gather intelligence for the Japanese. Her father was just in his teens at the time and was just a German transplant becoming fully Americanized, even as his father, mother, and aunt were collecting information for the Japanese (as they had been doing for years).
Christine’s father never talked about his family. Her father had actually been a US soldier in the battle for Okinawa. So when she was contacted by a fellow writer examining her family’s spying activity, it created confusion but started her on her personal journey of discovery.
Over a period of nearly twenty years, she pieced together the story with some limited revelations: from a father sinking into dementia, official government files requiring Freedom of Information Act requests, and later, extended German family papers when she was finally able to make the connection with them.
As we remember Pearl Harbor, we cannot know too much about how that event came together, how dedicated our foes were, or how our leadership made mistakes.
Discussion (6)
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Link to book on Amazon fixed
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How did the US soldier feel later about his family.
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He felt very ashamed. When he married the first time he told his wife everything about his family connections to and activities for the Nazis. When the marriage later came apart, she used this information in their arguments. After his divorce he vowed to say nothing about it again. And so the author (daughter of the second marriage) never had a clue other than some cryptic reference to now dead grandparents. The aunt who spied was known to the author but similarly never said anything. In the aunt’s case she was very concerned that she would be re-arrested by the FBI even though years had passed. It was this shame that cut off the author from any family member on her father’s side who was not in the US, which only left her father and her aunt. She found out that her aunt was regarded as one of the most successful female spies in history. The author eventually reconnected with her German relatives that helped her flesh out many details from papers they possessed. Understandably, the aunt had burned a lot of family documents.
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Now in my audible queue. Thx.
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Ok, spoiler alert: Otto and Friedl were the author’s paternal grandparents. Ruth was an older half-sister to the author’s father. Hans was the author’s father’s younger brother. Leopold was Otto’s brother and uncle to the author’s father, Eberhard.
All of them, except Leopold who was in Germany, were detained after the Pearl Harbor attack. Hans was 9 and immediately placed with a foster family (with catastrophic results). Friedl and Ruth were fairly soon transferred to an enemy alien detention camp in Texas and near the end of the war exchanged for American diplomats held by Germany. Otto was quickly tried by a secret military tribunal and sentenced to death by firing squad, but the execution was delayed while legal issues were being examined relating to the jurisdiction of the tribunal given that the arrest occurred before martial law was declared.
Eventually a decision was made not to execute him but send him to Ft Leavenworth for 50 years. The fact of the secret trial only became known as a result of a divorce case involving Ruth and the husband she married only months before the Pearl Harbor attack and years after being a social butterfly collecting information from numerous boastful military officers who were enchanted by her. (She had once been one of Goebbel’s lovers, but needed to be cast off when he discovered she was half Jewish. Sending the family to Hawaii solved a number of problems.)
After the war he was released and eventually made his way to Germany. He and Eberhardt met once as he was leaving. Otto died later of cancer, as did Friedl (whom Eberhardt never saw after she was sent to Texas and he cut off all contact). Ruth eventually came back to the US where she died with neither she nor Eberhardt revealing what the family had done.
Eberhardt spent ages 15-17 in detention in Hawaii. The FBI agent who built a case against the gamily finally became convinced Eberhardt had been clueless — just living a teens life of sun and surf and loving it. Eberhardt joined the military and was sent to Okinawa and served honorably.
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