Double Agent (40 page)

: William L. Shirer,

(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), 307.

: Smelling a rat, Ira F. Hoyt, the office’s supervisor, asked Rumrich if he could call him back to confirm his identity. Rumrich said, “unfortunately I could not reach him as he was at the Waldorf Astoria incognito and that no one must know that he is in the city; that this was all very secret and that the press must positively not get a word,” Hoyt wrote. “He said that he felt sure I understood the meaning and his mission.” Realizing the call was a fake, Hoyt agreed to send the passports to the Taft Hotel as instructed, estimating that it would take about an hour for them to arrive. After hanging up, he called Washington to confirm that Secretary Hull wasn’t in New York and then made arrangements with a special agent of the State Department and two detectives from the NYPD’s Alien Squad to meet in front of the Taft, located just north of Times Square. The officers would arrest the mysterious caller when he appeared in the lobby to receive a package of dummy passports from Mr. Hoyt. (Hoyt’s statement, File 862.20211/1760, Box 6773, Record Group 59, General Records of the State Department, National Archives, College Park, MD.)

As Rumrich later admitted to authorities, he hung up the pay phone “almost certain” that Mr. Hoyt “knew he had not spoken to the Secretary of State.” Despite his trepidation, he hopped the uptown IRT to Grand Central Station, found a phone booth, and placed a call to the Taft, asking if a package had arrived for Edward Weston. He was told it hadn’t. He then dialed the Western Union office within the terminal and asked the dispatcher to send a messenger—“a boy,” he called him—to pick up a package expected shortly at the Taft. After waiting for what must’ve been upward of a half hour to forty-five minutes, Rumrich called Western Union, asked if the package from the Taft had been retrieved, and was told the messenger had come and gone without finding it. Rumrich then slumped his shoulders and took the train back to the Bronx, “almost certain that the whole thing was off.”

When Mr. Hoyt arrived at the Taft, he discovered that he had missed the connection with the messenger. He milled about the ornate lobby, which featured a woman in a glass booth under an

ASK MISS ALLEN

sign who distributed tourist maps and cut-rate Broadway tickets, while his police backup kept a covert watch on the door. “After waiting about forty-five minutes I went to the washroom after giving Mr. Tubbs [the State Department special agent] the wink and a little while after he followed to the washroom and we discussed procedure from then on,” Mr. Hoyt wrote. Alas, Mr. Hoyt’s brief career in counterespionage was over. He handed the envelope of fake passports over to a Mr. Robbins of the Package Room, spoke with the detectives outside on Fifty-First Street about his capitulation, and took the train back downtown with Mr. Tubbs. When the Western Union messenger showed up again to pick up the passports, the two NYPD detectives tailed him across midtown traffic to Grand Central Station, where they “will remain on duty until that package is picked up whether it is tonight or tomorrow or when,” Hoyt told Washington.

Next morning, Rumrich reported for work as usual at his chemical company job at 163 Varick Street, where he was employed as a translator for $22.50 a week. At 12:15 p.m., he thought he’d give another try to the Western Union office at Grand Central. “I inquired whether the package had been called for from the Taft Hotel,” he said. “The man answering the telephone said ‘yes,’ the package was being held there for me. He spoke so resolutely that I dismissed my doubts of the previous day.” Rumrich asked for the package to be delivered to the Western Union office at 200 Varick Street, then went downstairs, posting himself across the street “to see if a package was being brought from the subway.” But when nothing showed up by one minute to 1:00 p.m., he returned to his job.

After turning it over in his head for much of the early afternoon, Rumrich called the Kings Castle Tavern, where he sometimes lunched, and asked the proprietor’s daughter if she would accept a delivery on his behalf, with the promise that he would reimburse the costs when he was able to come by. She agreed. Leaving the office again, he parked himself in a cigar store on Varick, used its phone to confirm that the Weston materials had arrived, and asked for the package to be rerouted to the tavern. He watched as the uniformed messenger walked half a block south and turned right on King Street. Rumrich took a parallel street, Houston, in the same (westerly) direction, turning south onto Hudson Street after one block and reaching the northwest corner of King and Hudson in time to see the messenger enter the tavern. Allowing sufficient time to lapse, Rumrich went in and ordered a beer from the bar. But something didn’t feel right. “The place was rather dark,” he said. He left without requesting the package.

Once outside, he asked a boy to do him a favor, explaining that he wanted to avoid the bartender at the Kings Castle because he owed him money. The boy agreed. Rumrich handed over two $1 bills and scurried to the other side of the street in his nervousness. When the boy returned to the original spot with the package in his hand, Rumrich whistled him across the street. But there was a problem. The boy wanted additional compensation for his labors, and Rumrich had “altogether 10 cents in my possession.” As the argument escalated, detectives John Murray and Arthur Silk of the NYPD’s Alien Squad broke in on the scene and took “Gus” Rumrich into custody.

: Statement of Guenther Rumrich, File 862.20211/1763, Box 6773, Record Group 59, General Records of the State Department, National Archives, College Park, MD.

: Griebl was briefly president of the Friends of the New Germany, the pro-Nazi organization that became the German American Bund. During the organization’s German Day celebration in October 1934, held on the grand stage of Madison Square Garden, he announced that anyone “who fights us must perish—socially as well as economically—because of our determination to destroy our enemies completely and without any consideration whatever.” He was also the author of a seventy-one-page exercise in anti-Semitica called

which he wrote under a pseudonym, William Hamilton. He explained that he feared the Jews would destroy him if they knew he wrote it. “They are everywhere and at all times prepared to deliver a serious blow or declare an economic war on any people of different blood or of white origin,” he wrote, noting that “Jews should never be regarded as a white race” because “their origin is as black as that of their brothers of common race and blood, the Syrians, Arabs, and Abyssinians of Asia and Africa.”

Dr. Griebl’s medical practice and residence was located in the beaux arts building at 56 East Eighty-Seventh Street next door to the ornate side entrance of the Park Avenue Synagogue. The waiting room of his office was graced with a large portrait of Field Marshal Paul von Hindenberg and typically filled with the higher class of German women, drawn by his specialties in gynecology and varicose veins. It was from among this population that he selected his mistresses, which caused considerable pain to his otherwise formidable partner in Hitlerism, Mrs. Griebl, who initially refused to swear on the “old Jewish Testament” or respond to questions from “Jewish judges and a Jewish district attorney” when she appeared before a federal grand jury investigating a Nazi comrade.

The FBI discovered that he kept an extensive library of files on prominent Jews in New York, cataloging their “birthplaces, schooling, and residences at all stages of their careers, their social, business, fraternal, and political connections, their estimated wealth, their friendships with non-Jews of note, the offices they held,” Leon Turrou wrote. “It made, apparently, no difference whether they were professing Jews or not, as long as they had Jewish blood. I noted names which surprised me. All notes were interlarded with scurrilous, often obscene, remarks.”

: Leon Turrou,

(New York: Random House, 1938), 136.

: Ibid., 12.

: Nest Bremen’s

was Erich Pheiffer. His extensive interrogation is available in file KV2/267, British Archives, Records of the Security Service, Kew, London.

: Statement of Ignatz T. Griebl, File 862.20211/1850, Box 6773, Record Group 59, General Records of the State Department, National Archives, College Park, MD.

: “Hoover and Hardy Clash in Spy Case: FBI Holds Prosecutor Responsible for Escapes—Official Here Denies It,”

, June 2, 1938.

Gestapo

: Turrou,

282.

: Heinkel,

187.

: David Irving,

(Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), 61.

Daily News

: “Can Anything Be Done for the Austrian Jews?,”

March 15, 1938.

:

series D (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1951), 1:635–39, 1:664–77.

: Ibid., 1:691.

: The congressional experience with un-American investigations can be traced to the efforts of one Congressman Samuel Dickstein. A Vilnius-born cantor’s son who represented the Lower East Side, he convened informal hearings in late 1933, “Nazi Propaganda Activities by Aliens in the U.S.,” under the auspices of his Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. The impetus was the negative publicity surrounding the Friends of the New Germany. During five sessions in November and December, customs guards, journalists, seamen, and union officials detailed how German sailors were delivering printed matter, military garb, propaganda films, and spy directives to pro-Nazi operatives in the United States, particularly in the oft-mentioned Yorkville. In executive session, a witness described how two sailors of Nazi affiliation asked him if he would “represent them here as American agent” during a meeting at the Café Hindenburg on Eighty-Sixth Street. Another requested anonymity because “I am well-known in Yorkville and New York City, and they will make it very hard for me, as there are too many of them; they will make it so very hard for me that I will probably have to leave New York.”

When Congress reconvened in January 1934, Congressman Dickstein pushed for a new, wider inquiry into what he described as an effort to undermine the foundations of our democratic system. He claimed on the House floor, “We have dozens of spies coming to America as sailors on German boats . . . trying to spread hate among our people,” which caused the

to scoff that since the spies “had failed completely in this, Mr. Dickstein will organize a first-class heresy hunt to spread it for them.” In the spring, the House of Representatives voted 168–31 to create the Special Committee on Un-American Activities Authorized to Investigate Nazi Propaganda and Certain Other Propaganda Activities, the “certain other” designation a concession to legislators, including those with large German American constituencies, more interested in examining the threat from Communist infiltration.

The McCormack-Dickstein Committee—it was chaired by the Irish Catholic representative John W. McCormack of South Boston to prevent “unkind criticism by certain persons or organizations,” Dickstein said—heard testimony from an array of Nazi-sympathetic organizations and individuals, amplifying the message that

Hitlerism was establishing a beachhead in America. Prominent figures in the public relations field, including “Poison” Ivy Lee (a well-known mouthpiece for John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil) and Carl Byoir (whose PR firm was among the biggest in the country), were shown to have received Joseph Goebbels’s money to burnish National Socialism’s image in the United States. Connections were drawn between German American supporters of Hitler and native-led Fascist groups such as William Dudley Pelley’s Silver Legion of America (the so-called Silver Shirts), which promulgated the idea that President Roosevelt was descended from a Dutch Jewish family and his real name was Rosenfeld. Testimony revealed that New York–based members of the Stahlhelm (or Steel Helmets), a paramilitary clique of war veterans that conducted bloody battles with Communists during the Weimar years, had become integral members of the Nazi movement in the city. “No,” said Bertha Ziegler, the proprietor of the F. X. Mittemeier bookshop at 229 East Eighty-Sixth Street when asked if she read the Nazi books, magazines, and newspapers she stocked in her store. “I just sell them.” Several officers of the Friends of the New Germany testified without qualm about how membership lists had grown tenfold since the beginning of the year with fifteen locals now in operation in New York City and its suburbs alone. A Friends’ turncoat told the committee that transatlantic couriers on the German liners were utilized to send messages to the Reich about those in Yorkville or Ridgewood who were unwilling to honor the legitimacy of the Hitlerites’ claim on German American loyalty, an assertion that resulted in headlines about a “Nazi spy system” operating in New York. (“Nazi Spy System Is Reported Here,”