Double Agent (8 page)

What is America but millionaires, beauty queens, stupid records, and Hollywood?

—Adolf Hitler in conversation with his friend Ernst Hanfstaengl

W
ilhelm Gottlieb Sebold wanted nothing to do with the Aryan cause. He was a not-atypical German immigrant living in Yorkville who had experienced the horrors of the trenches and emigrated during the volatility of the Weimar era. If his early history had been characterized by anything, it was by a desire to forget all about the troubles that disfigured the Old Country. He saw his adopted homeland as “a sanctuary for those whom the misrule of Europe may compel to seek happiness in other climes,” as Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1817. “I came to America to forget all this,” Sebold said in less exalted language when asked his ideological views. “Don’t you talk to me about politics.”

He was born in 1899, the eldest child of a beer-wagon operator who christened him in the name of the reigning monarch. Wilhelm quit school as a young teenager at about the time his father’s death left his mother as the sole supporter of his two brothers and sister. He began apprenticing as a mechanical draftsman in the heavy-metal works that defined his home city of Mülheim on the Ruhr River in a smoke- and soot-filled region near the French border often compared with the Monongahela Valley surrounding Pittsburgh. Over four years of rigorous instruction, Sebold gained a thorough grounding in machine sciences that would carry him through the rest of his life. At age seventeen, he was drafted into the Imperial Army and, in early 1918, sent to the Western Front in the Somme District. Later asked about technology that was used during the war, he responded, “I don’t know anything. We were only machine gunners.” He spent eight months suffering along with hundreds of thousands of others from the malnutrition, infectious diseases, and mustard-gas poisoning that helped spell the doom of the German war effort, marking the beginning of physical maladies that would also remain constant until his dying days. “Every soldier was gassed, to a certain extent,” he said.

But Sebold neither surrendered nor deserted as so many did during the miserable final onslaught. Afflicted with the influenza that was ravaging the ranks, he was transported to a military hospital at Göttingen “a couple of days or a week” before the end of the fighting on November 11, 1918, which means that, like his fellow soldier Adolf Hitler in Pasewalk Hospital, he was recuperating from injuries when he was informed of the outbreak of nationwide revolution, dissolution of the House of Hohenzollern, declaration of a republic, and signing of the armistice. Sebold supported the Kaiser’s monarchy and was opposed to its usurpation. But his abiding purpose over the next three months at Göttingen was to recover his health with a steady regimen of medicine, nutrition, and sweat baths. “I was in the war, and a soldier is entitled to a rest,” he said.

He returned to the Ruhr Valley, which, in keeping with its role as the nation’s industrial heartland, was in the midst of the proletarian uprising. In Mülheim, the municipal government had been taken over by a workers’ and soldiers’ council (or soviet), which was serious enough about seizing the means of production that it arrested the elderly August Thyssen, the steel magnate in slouch hat known around town as King Thyssen and to American journalists as the Rockefeller of the Ruhr. Sebold began his journey from the military hospital in Göttingen in February or March 1919, which means that he would’ve arrived at about the time a battalion of the Freikorps, the right-wing militia of fearsome reputation that was helping put down the revolution on behalf of the Social Democratic government, marched into town and arrested the council without the bloodshed then occurring in neighboring cities. He stayed close to home for the next three tumultuous years, working in a machine shop and helping his mother maintain a business she was operating, a difficult proposition in a municipality that was prominent enough in the Communist movement to serve as the command headquarters for the second regional uprising in March–April 1920. A self-proclaimed Red Army of the Ruhr, composed of at least fifty thousand combatants, occupied the main cities of the region for less than two weeks before the army and its Freikorps allies ended the takeover in a five-day campaign of slaughter that left more than a thousand Communists dead, most of them shot after they had been taken prisoner. The Ruhr Valley of the immediate postwar period was a nightmare of wildcat strikes, fiery public meetings, running street battles, and worsening employment prospects. Asked about the political beliefs he held at the time, Sebold said, “I did not have any complaint about President Ebert’s government, but in our industrial district we had a lot of Communists and there was a lot of shooting, and nobody knew what was what.”

He sought escape to a more peaceful land. At age twenty-three, he signed on as a junior engineer on a Schindler Oil tanker that plied between Hamburg and Galveston, Texas, although he only stayed aboard long enough to reach American soil. “When I left Germany, I had in mind never to go back,” he said. He jumped ship with five dollars in his pocket, using three or four of them to take the train from Galveston to Houston, where he sauntered over to the fire department. “I did not get a steady job, but I made a dollar or two a day cleaning engines and carrying the lunches for the firemen,” he said. A German American member of the force, part of an ethnic community that had been represented in significant numbers in the state since the nineteenth century, suggested he travel to the Texas panhandle, where the member’s father owned a ranch. Sebold was hired there as a mule tender, giving him an opportunity to become conversant in the English language, his own version of a work-study program.

After six months, he moved on to Brenham, a city in east-central Texas with a sizable German and Bohemian population, where he spent another half year or so toiling at a furniture store, a funeral home, and a cotton mill. Then a letter from Mülheim alerted him to trouble on the home front. In the midst of the hyperinflation crisis, French and Belgian troops had occupied the Ruhr in an attempt to pry delinquent reparation payments owed under the Treaty of Versailles out of German industry. So young Willy Sebold, who had pledged himself to a lifetime of exile, agreed to come home to help. “My people were losing their homes in the inflation in Germany,” he said. “I went back to see what I could do to save them.” With the $150 he’d earned in Texas, he stowed away on a thousand-ton tramp steamer, the
Hans,
hiding in the chain box until he was discovered three days out and forced to work his way to Hamburg. Upon his return to Mülheim, Sebold opened a bicycle shop that enabled him to pay off the mortgage on his mother’s home. He remained for a year until the government introduced a new currency to stabilize the economy and foreign troops began their withdrawal from the Ruhr. A lesson had been learned: Sebold could be counted on when it mattered.

Around Christmas 1924, he secured work on the SS
Rhodopis,
bound for South America. He jumped ship in the Antofagasta region of Chile, enticed ashore by a German saloon owner from the Ruhr looking for someone to fill a bartender job. He spent five or six months slinging drinks for the workers in the mining camps, who were extracting profits from the region’s nitrate deposits on behalf of European and American companies. “I did not like it,” he said. “I wanted to go to work at my profession.”

He saved up 150 pesos, enough to get him to the coastal town of Iquique, Chile, where he was hired by a German company as a specialist in the diesel engines that were bringing greater automation to the processing plants. “I worked in the saltpeter mines there,” he said. He was soon lured away, given the title of diesel foreman with an American concern, the Anglo-Chilean Consolidated Nitrate Co., based in Tocopilla, Chile. He gained such a firm understanding of diesel technology that he took a short trip to Oakland, California, in 1927, in an unsuccessful attempt to interest the Atlas Imperial Manufacturing Company in an innovation he had devised. He returned to South America for another two years, following his boss from Anglo-Chilean to a new position with a company over the border at Callao, Peru, where he was paid $250 a month. But his health problems emerged again: he was struck by typhoid fever that probably was exacerbated by the internal injuries he’d suffered in the trenches of the Great War. Two months of hospitalization would be required before he was healthy enough to return to work.

In 1929, Sebold boarded the
Cuzco
for San Francisco. On February 13, 1929, just a few weeks shy of his thirtieth birthday and less than a year before the stock market crashed, he entered the United States as a legal immigrant. His route to New York was typically wayward. He was employed for several months at a gold-dredging company in Alaska and another several at various regional outposts of the Bucyrus-Erie Steam Shovel Company of Milwaukee, which laid him off in the early days of the Depression. Like any good German, he set out for Yorkville, where he struck up a friendship with a butcher, Victor Wien. Victor was married to a roundish fashion plate from northern Bavaria, Rosa “Rosie” Büchner, who was employed as one of a team of servants for a wealthy family on Park Avenue. Rosie had a demure younger sister, Lena (or Helen, in the Americanized form), also a maid on the Hilders family staff, responsible for tending to the particular needs of a daughter.

During a social evening sponsored by a German club, according to the story told in the family, “William” Sebold, captured in photographs during these days as tall and thin with jug ears and a vibrant grin, was introduced to Helen Büchner, who with her strong jawline and unfussed-over bob seemed the picture of Bavarian constancy. They were married with little fanfare on May 2, 1931, at the German Catholic church on East Eighty-Seventh Street, St. Joseph’s, located just around the corner from the apartment on Eighty-Eighth near First Avenue that they might have been sharing before Monsignor Gallus Bruder formalized the union. Sebold was such an indifferent Catholic that he could remember neither the name of the church (“St. John’s?” he ventured) nor the identity of its pastor when the subject came up a decade later. “And did you meet Father Bruder?” No, he said, although he insisted he attended the church “several times.”

While his wife kept her position on Park Avenue, Sebold hopped from job to job in the midst of a woeful labor market, just another laborer in New York trying to survive a time of soup lines and homeless encampments. He worked as a maintenance man for an orphanage on the Upper West Side, a “great big real estate concern in New York,” and the Hudson Terminal at 30 Church Street. He built a boathouse and installed steampipe for Mrs. Ida Oschlag of Madison Avenue. He was a porter and relief elevator operator for the apartment building at 151 West Seventy-Fourth Street, “giving the best of satisfaction in his work and at all times doing his utmost in every detail entrusted to him,” according to a recommendation written by his boss, A. S. Lupez. “I worked in building work, as a handyman, and superintending,” Sebold said.

Of his political associations, this much is known: one of the two sworn witnesses on his petition for naturalization, which he submitted on July 15, 1935, was a relative of his wife’s, Lorenz Büchner, who operated a
Bierstube
underneath the Second Avenue el that advertised itself in pro-Nazi publications as a cozy gathering place for
Gesinnungsgenossen
or like-minded political companions. Sebold, who lived a block and a half away from “Lorenz Büchner’s,” could not but have spent time around or near the rowdy ideologues who plotted their intrigues from just such drinking and dining establishments in the heart of German Yorkville. But we also know that he took seriously the pledge he made on February 10, 1936, when he raised his right hand before a deputy clerk in federal court in Manhattan and recited the following words: “I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, and particularly to the German Reich of which I have heretofore been a subject; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion. So help me God.”

He would later assert he meant every word he uttered: “I had nothing to do with Hitler anymore. I was an American citizen.”

The techniques of advanced scientific crime detection that had proved indispensable in conquering home-bred banditry were now set to work uncovering the enemy.

—J. Edgar Hoover

T
he summertime impasse over the Sudeten crisis ended when Adolf Hitler, still intending to launch his invasion of Czechoslovakia in the name of rescuing ethnic Germans by the first of October, delivered a violent speech on the final day of the Nazi Party meeting in Nuremberg on September 12, 1938. With an international audience hooked up to “the world-awaited talk on Germany’s foreign policy to be delivered by Adolf Hitler,” as the chirpy CBS radio announcer described it, the Führer ranted at length about the mostly imagined misery of his fellow members of the
Volksgemeinschaft
who were “being oppressed and humiliated in an unprecedented fashion.” They “may not sing a song they like because the Czechs dislike it.” They are “beaten until they bleed simply because they wear stockings which the Czechs care not to see.” They are “terrorized and abused because they greet one another in a fashion the Czechs cannot bear even though they were merely greeting one another and no Czech.” He pledged that “if these tortured creatures can find neither justice nor help by themselves, then they will receive both from us. There must be an end to the injustice inflicted upon these people!” In the aftermath of the tirade, Konrad Henlein’s storm troopers dutifully launched riots in the Sudeten regions, which were only quelled after the Czech government declared martial law on the following afternoon. Listening in from Rochester, Minnesota, where his son was being treated at the Mayo Clinic, President Roosevelt (who could understand German) turned to his aide Harry Hopkins and instructed him to go to the West Coast “to take a look at the aircraft industry with a view to its expansion.” Hopkins felt that at that instant FDR knew “we were going to get into war and he believed that air power would win it.” On the following evening in London, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain sent his historic message to Hitler offering “to come over at once to see you with a view to trying to find a peaceful solution.”