Fetch the Devil: The Sierra Diablo Murders and Nazi Espionage in America

[37]

37 Nazi sycophants like Joseph Goebbels convinced Hitler that America’s Achilles’heelwastheloyalTeutonicbloodflowingintheveinsofathirdof its citizens.225 The Nazi leaders were smug in their assurances to the führer that these ethnic German Americans would, at the very least, prevent the United States from entering the fight against the fatherland. A small, thoughvocallypowerful,cliqueofisolationist,anti-Rooseveltsenatorsand congressmen, along with such notable public figures as flying ace Charles Lindbergh, further abetted the Nazi myth that America would not again activelyjoininthedefenseofformerWorldWarIalliesBritainandFrance. The Germans may have had a reasonable basis for their prediction. Americansweremoreconcernedwithsurvivingthegrindingpovertyofthe seemingly endless Depression, then in its ninth year. A public opinion poll conducted in 1938 by George Gallup found that 97 percent of Americans wanted the United States to stay out of the wars in Europe and Asia.226 Germany’s military intelligence leaders, such as Admiral Wilhelm Canaris at the Abwehr, did not rely on rhetoric about hypothetical blood ties alone,however.Fromtheearly1930s,theybeganinfiltratingpropagandists, spies, and saboteurs into Teutonic fraternal and social organizations, ethnic communities, and the American society at large. The mission of these agents was to prepare the German American communities to rise up and overthrow the “Jew-controlled Roosevelt government.” Failing that goal, their assignment was to steal the military-industrial knowledge of the nation . Finally, if all else failed and it came to war, these enemy aliens were prepared to sabotage the nation’s defense industries and fortifications on its coasts and borders.227 When spies or Nazi sympathizers could not be successfully infiltrated into the plants, individual employees—from assembly-line workers to administrative personnel—were subjected to surveillance, threats, blackmail , and intimidation to force them to become sources of information. Persons with German surnames or with families still in the fatherland were especially vulnerable to these brazen tactics. 216 fetch the devil A subsidiary organization within the Nazi Party was the nexus of the spy apparatus. The Ausland-Organization (AO) compiled and maintained the names and addresses of tens of thousands of important German American families, with hopes of recruiting or coercing some of them into the Nazi world crusade. Fortunately, this effort to intimidate and compromise Americans just because they had German surnames failed miserably. Unbeknownst to officials, even in the highest U.S. counterespionage circles,amomentousdecisionmadefivemonthsbeforetheFromemurders hadsetinmotionacampaignofcovertaggressionthatspecificallytargeted American companies like Atlas Powder. On the evening of November 5, 1937, Hitler told a small gathering of his generals and party officials in Berlin that Nazi Germany must prepare for total war.228 From that date forward, German sleeper agents, who had been clandestinely placed in major U.S. industrial centers to steal technology, were ordered to go fully operational. The war that Hitler planned to launch to gain territory for his promised thousand-year Reich was intended to be limited to England, France, and Russia. But the American industrial complex, which was the main supplier for the Allies, as it had been in the early years of the last world war, was designated as a primary target for espionage. Soon after Hitler’s November decision, orders went out from the Germanintelligenceorganization —theAbwehr—toactivatethesleepercells. The spy operations in America were directed from a dozen consulates in key cities and from the German embassy in Washington, D.C. German subversive activities on the East Coast, and to a lesser extent in the industrial belt of the Midwest, began to appear in newspaper headlines, from the mid-1930s onward. There were frequent reports of German-AmericanBundbrawlsattorchlightparades,theoccasionalarrest of an industrial spy, and even announcements that G-men had busted up a spy ring or two. Little or nothing was reported about espionage in the western United States or on the U.S.-Mexico border. But the absence of headlines did not mean an absence of German or Japanese spy activity. In fact, it could be arguedthattheAxis’soperationsinthewestwerejustbetterconcealedfrom an enemy within 217 federal agents and the press, because an efficient German spy network had flourished there, from shortly after Hitler came to power. Taking the helm of the Germans’ western operations was a rabid Nazi from Hitler’s original inner circle. Baron Manfred Freiherr von Killinger wasnamedconsulgeneralinSanFranciscoinJune1937.HewassenttoSan Francisco to take charge of and invigorate the already existing, clandestine Nazi spy network in the western United States. His mandate covered all German espionage activities from the Pacific Northwest on the Canadian border, through Mexico, to terminal points at German embassies in Brazil and Argentina. Spies operating out of the large Los Angeles consulate also...