Double Agent (3 page)

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On the same day the judgment was issued, Nikolaus Ritter strolled onto the deck of the SS
Bremen
, one of the thirteen ocean liners operated by the North German Lloyd and Hamburg America steamship companies that arrived every few days from Nazi Germany into the busiest port in the world, and “joined other passengers along the railing and admired the always breathtaking silhouette of New York,” he wrote. He was gazing upon a truly international capital that was intimately connected to the great conflict between Fascism and Communism. On the far left of the political spectrum, New York was home to the headquarters of the Communist Party USA (35 East Twelfth Street), which boasted about thirty thousand local members who were the organizational energy behind emergent labor unions such as the Transport Workers Union and an endless list of Popular Front organizations (everything from the nationwide American League for Peace and Democracy to the local West Side Mothers for Peace), skillfully fashioning a broad-based coalition for progressivism at a time when the Soviet Union was a nightmare of show trials, purges, and mass shootings.

The streets of the city (or at least
some
of the streets) resonated with the sounds of the anti-Fascist message. Outraged by Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, Imperial Japan’s continuing assault on China, and the proto-Axis onslaught against the Popular Front government in Spain, activists bellowed from soapboxes in Union Square and key intersections in several (usually Jewish) neighborhoods of Brooklyn and the Bronx and during parades, demonstrations, and picket lines that seemed to be organized anew every day. “The essential thing for a street corner speaker is to work the back-and-forth relationship, the give-and-take, because the audience in a street corner is not one that just stands quietly,” said Irving Howe of his days as a young Socialist in the East Bronx. “It participates. It joins in. It heckles.” About fifteen hundred volunteers from the city went to Spain to fight for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade at a time when the country was growing
more
isolationist in response to the instability abroad, leading the US Congress to pass, and President Roosevelt to reluctantly sign, neutrality legislation that forbade the sale of armaments to countries at war, which reflected the now-prevalent belief that America had been pulled into the World War by the greed of weapons manufacturers and international bankers. Yet broad support for the far left was hard to come by even in New York. The Irish working class, proud bearers of a revolutionary tradition that still had unfinished business in Northern Ireland, was generally repulsed by the idea of replicating a dictatorship that was murderously opposed to the Church, a position hammered home by steady coverage in the Irish and Catholic papers about atrocities committed by leftists against priests and nuns in Spain and Mexico. In the municipal elections held nine days before Ritter’s arrival, the four Communist candidates for City Council were all defeated. When a teenage Joseph Papirofsky, later the theater director Joseph Papp, shook a can of coins seeking donations for radical causes on the subway, he was invariably told by impatient straphangers to “go back to Russia!”

On the farthest right, the picturesque activities of the pro-Nazi Amerikadeutscher Volksbund, or German American Bund, composed almost exclusively of German-born immigrants with less than two decades in the country and presided over by the burly figure of Bundesführer Fritz Kuhn, were on prominent display during the summer and fall of 1937. Reporters were dispatched to write up the “swastika waving, heiling and Hitler praising” engaged in by ever-larger assemblies at its local summer gathering spots, Camp Siegfried in Yaphank, Long Island, and Camp Nordland, at Andover, New Jersey, with Kuhn insisting that the camps were not “maintained for military training and the promotion of subversive aims,” but for “the recreation of youngsters of German-American parents and to a lesser extent for the recreation of the parents themselves.” In September, the
Chicago Daily Times
published a spectacular series of articles that sought to expose this statement as a lie, detailing how the Bund’s true aim was to unite Germans and other Americans of Fascist sympathy into a militaristic front to prepare for the inevitable day when it would be necessary to take up arms against the Jewish-Communist revolutionaries intent on seizing America. The series claimed that the Bund had twenty thousand members in sixty chapters throughout the country, “at least” fifteen summer camps, about a hundred thousand fellow travelers willing to appear at Bund functions, a Nazi-centric indoctrination program for children, and a hard core of “former German army officers . . . expert machine-gunners, aviators and riflemen, some of whom wear on their shirts Iron Crosses awarded for bravery in the World War.”

On the Saturday before Election Day in 1937, nine hundred Bundists paraded down East Eighty-Sixth Street, the bustling, neon-lit commercial strip running through the Yorkville neighborhood on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the more prominent of the two large German enclaves in the city. Wearing steel gray shirts with black ties, Sam Browne belts, and black overseas caps, they goose-stepped past the European-style nightclubs, rowdy beer gardens with singing waiters clad in lederhosen, Viennese cafés,
Apfelstrudel
-dispensing bakeries, and German-language movie houses that made Yorkville a Germanic hub of sybaritic consumption and unrepentant capitalism that didn’t seem to conform to the grim vision of National Socialism. The
New York Herald Tribune
reported that “thousands of spectators lifted their arms in the Nazi salute, a few raised clenched fists in Communist salute, and others saluted by raising the right hand with fingers outspread and placing the thumb to the nose.” The
Times
said “the heils reached a loud crescendo” at the corner of Eighty-Sixth Street and Second Avenue, the geographical heart of the neighborhood, but “the boos were predominant” by the time the marchers reached Eighty-Sixth and Lexington at the western edge of the German colony.

The Bund officially claimed 17,000 members in the city, a small minority of the 237,588 German-born and 127,169 Austrian-born residents, but anti-Nazi sentiment in the wider German American community was hard to detect outside a small core of Socialists and Communists. A more typical viewpoint was expressed in an op-ed published in the Hitler-neutral
New Yorker Staats-Zeitung
in November, which took care to praise certain unnamed “Reich Germans” for seeking “to make German-Americans understand the new Germany better” before cautioning them to “not forget that they are guests in a foreign land, whose institutions and laws offer them protection as well as cultural and material advantages.” A general “Nazi feeling” existed in outer-borough Ridgewood, which was home to a hundred thousand German Americans and straddled the unmarked Brooklyn-Queens border roughly along the path of the elevated subway lines. It “comes from pride in the way Germany has regained a dominant position in Europe,” a neighborhood leader told the
New York Post
. “How many do I estimate are really Nazis? Five percent. Not more than 5 percent here are radicals—Nazis.” The
Chicago Daily Times
reporter found that outspoken talk about Hitler was generally avoided in the tourist-friendly clubs along Eighty-Sixth Street in Yorkville because “bartenders want to avoid fights,” but that in the shadowy
Bierstuben
under the el on Second Avenue, neighborhood joints with sawdust on the floor, a lone musician on the piano, and chopped-meat-and-Swiss-cheese sandwiches on the menu, locals were louder in their praise. “Oh, those Germans argue over Hitler every night,” a waitress named Juliana who worked at St. Pauli’s near Eighty-Seventh Street said. “You don’t dare say anything against them, no matter what you think. When those guys get talking about Germany and drink toasts to Hitler and against the Jews, they’re plenty tough. Nearly all of them that come in here are for Hitler.”

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Nikolaus Ritter had launched his great mission traveling under his real name and using his actual German passport. As far as the US government was concerned, he was a textile engineer with many years’ experience in the country looking to tie up some business before returning back to Germany; this contained truth if not all of it. He was told by his Ast Hamburg overseers to stay away from Nazi diplomats at the embassy and/or consulates and avoid spies affiliated with the other Abwehr post conducting work in the city, Nebenstelle (or Nest) Bremen, which was based out of northern Germany’s second city. But keeping Abwehr spy efforts on separate tracks was not easy, particularly since both Ast Hamburg and Nest Bremen relied on some of the same couriers, employees of the German passenger liners who spent their few-day stopovers involved in the whole range of pro-Nazi activity in New York, everything from transporting the latest propaganda publications to associating with secret-police organizations such as the Gestapo or SD, which were rumored to have a surreptitious presence in Yorkville and Ridgewood. “We called them undercover men, you see,” said a Bundist of the mysterious figures seen lurking in the meeting halls and beer gardens. “They do a lot of work, but you do not know what they do.” What was undoubtedly true was that a
single
German spy ring existed in New York, with several overlapping and mutating strands of official, pseudo-official, and unofficial provenance that together reached into the entirety of the Nazi-supporting community.

With the reluctant blessing of the Abwehr chief, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, obtained during a face-to-face meeting in Berlin, Ritter was assigned to “build up an organization on the spot,” a task he believed he could accomplish better than any other operative since American counterintelligence authorities were “not particularly active,” he wrote. In this, he was right: The Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) was so small it could barely complete routine work. The Military Intelligence Division (also known as G-2) had a single officer and two assistants protecting the entire Second Corps Area (New York, New Jersey, and Delaware) from spy infiltration. J. Edgar Hoover, then forty-two, had received verbal instructions from President Roosevelt to monitor Fascist and Communist groups to obtain “a broad picture of the general movement and its activities as may affect the economic and political life of the country as a whole,” a pivotal step in restoring subversion-hunting powers that had been stripped from him after the lawless excesses of the Palmer or Red Raids of two decades earlier. But the FBI was rarely permitted to open up a
specific
counterespionage investigation in the absence of a request from the Army, Navy, or State Department, which meant that Hoover’s special agents, celebrated as remorseless defenders of the nation’s honor trained in the new science of forensic analysis and outfitted in the smartest of suits and snap-brim hats, had little incentive to develop expertise in the detection and apprehension of spies. In simple fact, the United States was doing next to nothing to protect itself from foreign espionage on the day Nikolaus Ritter arrived in the port of New York.

Yet in the seconds after he reached the two-story passenger terminal at Pier 86 at West Forty-Sixth Street on the Hudson River, Ritter thought his covert career had come to a premature end. As he was making his way through the entry process, he heard his name being shouted: “Ritter!” It was not an officer of the law preparing to haul him to the detention facility on Ellis Island, he was relieved to discover, but an acquaintance of his, a reporter for the
Staats
who was present to get a quote or two from disembarking notables. After an inspector spent many excruciating moments trying to determine whether a prescription drug found in his luggage could be carried into the US—it couldn’t—he was asked to hand over his umbrella cane, which was of a type that was “not at all well-known in America at that time,” he wrote. The inspector removed the casing, performed a careful examination, and announced that it would make “an excellent hiding place.” Ritter joked, “I’m sorry that I have to disappoint you.” Permitted to enter the United States of America at last, he hopped a cab bound for the Taft Hotel, the two-thousand-room behemoth at Seventh Avenue and Fifty-First Street, with the expectation that he would blend into its clientele of travelers from throughout the world.

Over the next few days, he acted the part of a legitimate businessman, constructing an alibi by loudly speaking to would-be clients over the lobby telephone. He reserved a room at the Wellington Hotel, four blocks to the north, under the name “Alfred Landing,” and then mailed two postcards to his fictitious creation, one sent to the Wellington, the other to a nearby post office, general delivery, as he explained in his book. After checking out of the Taft as Ritter, he registered at the Wellington as Landing, where he was given the postmarked item that had earlier arrived for him and which he took to the post office and used as identification to receive the postcard waiting there. With his new identity given recognition by a branch of the US government, he gathered up all of his Ritter-related documents and stuffed them into a safe-deposit box, giving the key to a friend who would hold it until he was ready to return to Germany. Wearing a new felt hat he purchased on Broadway, his old gray overcoat from Hamburg, and an American pair of nickel eyeglasses, Ritter was now Alfred Landing, on the hunt for agents to work for Hitler.

His first stop was to see “Pop,” Friederich Sohn, whom he described as a “stocky, middle-aged man in shirtsleeves.” Sohn was an employee of Carl L. Norden Inc., the US military contractor in lower Manhattan that produced what Major General Benjamin D. Foulois, chief of staff of the US Army Air Corps, called “the most important military secret project under development.” Known to the Navy as the Mark XV bombsight and to the Army as the M-9 or M-series bombsight, the “Norden bombsight,” as it would eventually be known to the culture, was a mechanical-electrical-optical apparatus roughly the size of a watermelon. It weighed fifty pounds, boasted at least thirty-five patentable features, was interlaced with upward of two thousand minutely calibrated parts, had a single motor-driven, wide-angled telescope, and was stabilized with two servo-connected gyroscopes spinning at seventy-eight hundred revolutions per minute. Most significant, the bombardier wasn’t required to hit the release button. When the axis of the sighting telescope and the pointer on the range bar clicked into alignment, the bombs fell automatically, sent along their path by the ingenious resolution to a problem of advanced mathematics, ballistics, electrical engineering, optics, and aeronautics.