PART ONE — THE HIDDEN GOVERNMENT IN AMERICA
Twice I have received the warning.
Each time it has come to me through the mails. An innocuous little package bearing no return address, no clue to its sender. Inside that package has been the symbol of the Gestapo — a leaden bullet.
The third and final warning has not yet reached me. Tomorrow, a month from tomorrow, a year from tomorrow, it may come in the mail.
Or a stranger may press close against me in New York's crowded streets. His eyes won't be deceived by the hat pulled down low on my forehead, the large dark glasses over my eyes.
His hand will meet mine. Wordlessly, into my fingers he will press the tiny symbol — my last warning.
This time a silver bullet! — which I shall be expected to fire into my own brain.
If I refuse to do so, an "accident" will almost certainly overtake me. I shall "fall" in front of a subway train. Or — as happened one midnight in Brooklyn — be pushed from the platform of the elevated railway high over the streets.
Preposterous? Theatrical?
I ask you to recall the Nazi Party's so-called "blood purge" of the summer of 1934 and the fate of queer sensual-faced Ernst Roehm, Chief of Staff of the Nazi Storm Troopers.
On the night that Adolf Hitler burst into Roehm's Munich bedroom, the Fuhrer took with him proof of Roehm's political perfidy and debased private life, proof furnished by Hitler's own Gestapo, then under the leadership of Goering. And Roehm was a doomed man.
Twice, according to official communiqués, Adolf Hitler sent to his former comrade bullets with which Roehm was expected to end his own life.
According to the account the whole world accepts today, Roehm twice refused to end his own life; was taken out and shot in the back by a firing squad. The story that I later obtained, from Nazi Party sources in Germany, however, says that Roehm received a third bullet from the Führer — and with it shot himself.
It matters little which account is true. Roehm was a traitor. He received the warnings. And he died.
They think that I, too, am a traitor!
But Roehm's death, you will protest, happened in Nazi Germany. Such a thing could not happen in America.
Don't be too sure. There exists in the United States today a small and hidden but ruthlessly efficient government-within-a-government — the hidden government of Nazidom, answerable only to Berlin.
I do not refer to the German-American Bund. That is largely the false face behind which the hidden government works. The Bund serves as a convenient front, diverts suspicion from the hidden group of Gestapo agents so that they are free to plan a system of sabotage which, if the United States ever enters the war against Germany, will plunge this country into a reign of terror.
There are between 500 and 600 members of the Gestapo actively at work in America today. Their mission is destruction. They act under sealed orders from Germany. They will, upon command, unhesitatingly assassinate any traitor to the Nazi Party in America.
That is why this story is written from hiding. That is why I, twice warned, live in daily dread. For I have been a traitor to the Nazi Party after twenty years in its service, sixteen of them spent as an active Nazi agent in the United States.
I was one of the first seven members of the Nazi Party to arrive in the United States, long before Adolf Hitler rose to power. I was one of the first seven hundred to join the Nazi movement in Germany.
Although I became a naturalized citizen of the United States, so fervent was my belief in the aims of Hitler that I accepted unquestioningly assignments from Germany to do work calculated to harm the country of my adoption. I spread propaganda in America, organized Nazi units here, obtained names of prospective saboteurs, even posed as a traitor to the Nazi Party in order to worm my way into the very heart of anti-Nazi organizations.
Yet I committed the one unforgivable sin of a Hitler agent in this country: I went directly to a United States governmental agency. There I laid bare the story of my sixteen years as a Nazi agent in this country. I told who my superiors were. I told from whom in Germany they received their orders. I wrote out a list of 122 fellow Nazi agents in America and explained what they did.
Needless to say, those revelations have never been put in print before. Now Liberty, a magazine devoted to Americanism, is privileged to make public all the facts. Only a few names are, necessarily, held in confidence.
Born on August 6, 1903, in Marburg, Germany, I, Joachim Ferdinand Paffrath, was able to trace my ancestry back to 1402, when the Paffrath clan was numbered among the nobility. I lived, with two younger brothers and my parents, on a large estate. I was, as the eldest child, pointed toward a military and eventually a diplomatic career.
I was eleven years old when the world plunged into war. My father, whom I worshiped, died in the summer of 1916, while on patrol duty. A piece of shrapnel severed his jugular. I treasure to this day a picture of him, erect and handsome, in the uniform in which he died.
The winter of 1917 was bitterly cold. We had money, but there was no coal to be had, and very little wood. We began to wear wooden shoes in the winter, go barefooted in summer. Rations were cut to the bone. Our chickens died from starvation. Of twenty-one in our family, nine had been killed in action.
By 1918 starvation was general all over Germany. We prayed that somehow the war would end. It did — to be followed by the inglorious peace of the Versailles Treaty.
An epidemic of influenza immediately after the war wiped out another million persons. Germany was in a state of semi-Communism and the government was topheavy with grafting officials. Then came inflation. My family's fortune was wiped out overnight. My mother went to work as a governmental clerk.
In this unfathomable chaos I, an impressionable youngster, endeavored to find myself. Hoping to become an accountant, I became an apprentice first at the Krupp Works in Essen, later at a branch in Mettmann. I had much spare time. It was natural that I should become interested in political philosophies. I read everything — from Karl Marx to the most reactionary prattle. I became, like many of my generation, only more confused. But out of that confusion rose one conviction: Communism, Socialism, and their affiliates would be the ruination not only of Germany but of the whole world.
Others of my perplexed generation had arrived at the same conclusion. I joined an organization — violently nationalistic and bitterly anti-Semitic — called the Jung Deutscher Orden (the Jungdo) whose chief objectives were to overthrow the grafting government in power and to establish a regime modeled on American democracy, guarded by typical Prussian supervision.
While working at Krupp, I became leader of the Mettmann branch of the Jungdo, which comprised twelve locals. Head of the entire organization was Captain M — , an ex-army officer.
My furnished room at Mettmann became the headquarters of our district. Beneath it was a typical old German cellar, which in a dry cistern concealed an arsenal piled high with smuggled hand grenades, machine guns, rifles, and ammunition.
One day Captain M — sent word to me that we were to hold a drawing. I summoned the leaders of the locals. Eleven white marbles and one black were placed in a basin. I drew a white marble. The leader of the Düsseldorf district drew the black marble.
I took him to Captain M — 's office in Kassel the following day for the final drawing. Captain M — was a huge broad-shouldered chap, a ruthless nationalist, and the heaviest drinker I have ever known.
The district leaders from Emden and Kassel, who had drawn black marbles in the preliminary drawings, stood with me and my Düsseldorf leader in the glare of spotlights that Captain M — had focused upon us.
The captain swore us to secrecy. Then he told us the purpose of the final drawing — assassination!
Two men were to be murdered: Walther Rathenau, Germany's Jewish Foreign Minister, and Matthias Erzberger, a liberal who had won our animosity by advocating heavy taxation of the nobles and Junkers.
"Erzberger," the captain said, "will be eliminated first; then Rathenau. The man who draws the black marble will formulate the plans. He may have three assistants. The two who actually do the killings need not know the identities of the victims. Ten days will be allowed. This will cover expenses."
He threw a roll of bills on the desk. The drawing began. My Düsseldorf leader drew a white marble; so did the district leader from Emden.
Young Baron X of the Kassel district drew the black marble. He was only twenty-two, but he had lived the disciplined life of a soldier for ten years. He remained behind, after the drawing, to plan details of escape following the assassinations. He chose, I learned later, three men to help him. One is today an official high in the Nazi Party's Gestapo. The others, the actual murderers, were young students.
Erzberger escaped (though he later was murdered), but Rathenau was shot down in cold blood on the promenade of a health resort where he was vacationing. Police all over Germany were set on the trail of his assassins.
Two days after Rathenau's murder some one knocked at the door of my house in Mettmann. A thick voice gave our password. I opened the door, and Baron X staggered in. He was drunk and dangerously talkative. He tossed a Lueger pistol upon the sofa in my room. "There," he proclaimed boastfully, "is the gun that killed Rathenau. Keep it for me. It is my most priceless possession."
I sent for two of my men and ordered them to transport him to a castle hideaway in Austria. There, a few days later, he committed suicide. That he did so under instructions I have no doubt.
The police traced his visit to my home and came there. They made a perfunctory search and I thought my fate, too, was sealed. But they went away without finding the huge store of guns and ammunition to be used that same month by our revolutionary group in throwing down the Separatist movement in Cologne.
We disbanded the Jungdo to form the Deutsch Voelkische Partei. Armed to the teeth, we ruthlessly broke strikes. We ran contraband. We went into Finland and Poland to throw our weight against the forces of Communism there. We were good soldiers.
Walter Kappe, a charming, brilliant fellow with an anti-Semitic obsession, became my closest friend. At eighteen he became the publisher of the first anti-Jewish newspaper in Germany.
Eventually twenty-seven of us became a lost unit. Back in Germany, we were not wanted by our own army. We were too nationalistic. Likewise, employment in private industry was closed to us. We became virtual hoboes.
A meeting of all nationalist groups was scheduled one day in Gotha, Thuringia. Some of our group attended. When the ceremonies were almost over, an uninvited and unscheduled speaker leaped to the podium. In one hand he held the German war banner; in the other the red-white-and-black nationalist flag.
He began to speak. The man was a spellbinder. He loosed a tirade against the German government. Nor did he absolve the nationalists, whom he called "sterile foots."
The members of our little party were tremendously impressed. We learned his identity later from the newspapers. He was Adolf Hitler, a former private in the Bavarian army.
We pooled our resources and traveled to Munich. No one there seemed to know of Hitler or where his group met until we ran across Joseph Schuster, a young Nazi who gave us the address of the Bürgerbrau Keller. We marched there in a body on the night of the next meeting. The little room, now a Nazi shrine, had space at tables for not more than a hundred persons.
Yet here, at a table, sat the men who were later to take absolute control of all Germany:
Joseph Goebbels, Rudolf Hess, Heinrich Himmler, Ernst Roehm, Gottfried Feder, Julius Streicher, Hermann Goering, and — at the head, of the table — Adolf Hitler.
I marched directly up to Hitler. I spread my credentials before him: newspaper clippings, discharge papers from the Polish and Finnish armies, my Jungdo card. I told him that we had come to join his party.
He arose, looked at me sharply, clicked his heels, and sat down again. He did not look at me again and there was mingled impatience and nervousness in his manner. "This is a closed meeting," he said. "If you want anything, come around tomorrow. Speak to Rudolf Hess."
I saw some of our little group show disgust and anger. I jumped up to a speaking platform.
"We have come here," I shouted, "at great financial sacrifice! We have traveled more than one hundred miles to offer our services. We heard you speak at Gotha. We were warmed by your absolute nationalism. And now you tell us to come back later! We are youthful and fearless. We have arms and know how to use them. If we wished, at this very moment we could take over you and your whole organization."
Hitler was smiling at my audacity. When I finished, he came over to shake my hand.
"You will leave the hall for fifteen minutes," he ordered. "Then come back. I am convinced you are not Red spies." He smiled. "I am also convinced that while you think you could handle us, that is not so."
When we returned, we were inducted into the Nazi Party. Each of us put our hands on a stick on which had been carved ancient Teutonic symbols, and swore fealty. We were given membership cards signed by Hitler. My card was No. 699.
We joined the army, the Reichswehr, so that we might spread nationalist propaganda and, by creating false riots, obtained supplies of arms and ammunition.
I say much of Hitler in those days. He was a vegetarian. He had no interest in women, though he did not, as has been charged, have abnormal sexual propensities. He was simply too immersed in the Nazi movement for outside interests.
He appeared to me to be the mouthpiece, not the brains, of the Nazi movement. Gottfried Feder, perhaps, could lay greater claim than Adolf Hitler to origination of the philosophy expressed in Mein Kampf.
The first time I heard Hitler speak of race theories was during a conversation in which he had joined about six of us. Extolling, with excited gestures, pure face strains, he turned to me. "Are you Aryan?"
I told him my lineage went back to nobility.
"Nobility!" he scoffed. "Leeches, living on the German people!"
Joseph Schuster came to my defense. "If Paffrath's a leech, so are you," he told Hitler. "You're over here, living on the German people. You're an Austrian."
Hitler's first bid for power came in the futile Munich Beer Putsch of 1923. I was in the Nazi beer garden when Goering rushed in to shout, "Everybody ready! All arrangements have been made! We start in four hours!"
I remember that I could not believe my ears. I grabbed his sleeve. "Do you mean," I asked, "that we go now? That we take over Bavaria, then spread out from here?"
"Of course!" he shouted. "Man, we need funds! The Bavarian Reichswehr is marching with us!"
That was comforting news. But I still doubted our readiness. However, there was nothing to do but assemble. I had 124 men under me. Our objective was the government and communication buildings around the Odeonsplatz. We took our posts, hid in doorways, and distributed the hand grenades we had with us. We were the only unit with a machine gun.
We stood at march order when I heard the sound of machine-gun fire. Hitler's group had been ambushed. The Reichswehr, instead of marching with us, had trapped us.
For my group to have gone to the aid of the others would have been suicide. Further, our orders had been that if anything went wrong we were to flee and hide. To save our lives — and our organization.
The Putsch, as the world knows, was a dismal failure. Goering was wounded, temporarily fled the country. Hitler was imprisoned, wrote Mein Kampf. And I, with my young Nazi comrades, became a fugitive.
I had been unable to obtain an education. Now I was unable to obtain a job. My kind were blackballed by business and the government, both under control of Leftist labor unions. What was worse, the authorities knew of my participation in the Munich Putsch and were seeking me. And I feared they would endeavor to tie me up with the murder of Rathenau. I found a hiding place in my home town. But eventually, I knew, I would be uncovered.
I determined to flee to America. On July 29, 1924, I obtained my American visa, and on August 3, my army discharge. Sometime later I went to Hamburg to board the Westphalia, which was to sail at midnight.
In Hamburg that night I met an old friend who was a seaman on the ship. We went to the Hippodrome bar and talked and drank. I told him I was sailing to America. At eleven o'clock he left me.
I should have known better than to confide in him. Hamburg was a dangerous place for my kind. Virtually all the sailors in that port were rabid Communists.
I got to the pier just two minutes before sailing time. I broke into a run. I heard other men running behind me. As I reached the gangplank, a sailor blocked my path. He tripped me. Hands seized me roughly. A blow cracked against my face. Then something thudded on my skull.
When I regained consciousness, a doctor was with me. We were already out to sea. Later I learned that I had been assaulted by four men. They had been arrested but, in the absence of witnesses, released.
I brought to America with me the pistol that had been used in the assassination of Rathenau. Eventually I gave it to an Austrian carpenter living in New York's East Fifties. So far as I know, he still has it.
I was happy, at first, in the refuge that was America. I became a dyestuff mixer. I enrolled in night school. I brought my mother and two brothers over here. I took out my first citizenship papers.
But the virus of adventure, I suppose, was in my blood. I became an auditor for United Fruit Company in Managua, Nicaragua, where I acquired malaria and the drink habit and lost my job. I returned to America, married, had a son, was divorced. I held a succession of jobs in various parts of the country.
I corresponded regularly with some of my comrades in the Nazi Party in Germany. I asked them to find out, from headquarters, if there were any other Nazis besides myself now living in the United States.
There were, in 1932, only seven of us in America. One was Walter Kappe. He was with a German newspaper in Cincinnati. I wrote to him, and we promised to get together at the first opportunity.
Other members of the Nazi Party then in the United States included a Yale professor, a reporter with a Chicago newspaper, a Brooklyn dancer, a butcher's helper, a clerk in a travel bureau in New York's Yorkville.
All of us kept in close touch by correspondence. We exchanged such Nazi papers as we could lay our hands on. They were difficult to obtain from Germany, for the Red sailors would find them and throw them overboard.
I was now in business for myself at the time in Montclair, New Jersey. Somehow the suggestion arose that we — the nucleus of the Nazi Party in America — should get together in Chicago on German Day. We did. We obtained permission to march in the parade to Soldier Field.
We wore our brown Storm Troop uniforms. It was the first time the uniform had ever been seen in the United States. We wore swastika armbands and carried a black flag with a white swastika. It drew a lot of applause, and we were amused to see that some of the applause came from innocent Jewish bystanders. Our Yale professor carried a sign reading: "We will always be Germans. To hell with the Versailles Treaty!" We termed ourselves the Voelkischer Verein of Chicago. All seven of us spoke at Soldier Field.
A few months later, on January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler marched to power with the Nazi Party in Germany.
Our first thought was to return there immediately. On reflection, we delegated Walter Kappe to cable for instructions. His cable, sent directly to Hitler, stated that we placed ourselves unreservedly at the disposal of the Nazi Party.
Our reply came, a few weeks later, as identical telegrams to each of us, sent from New York. They bore the signature of the North German Lloyd Lines and instructed us to go to the offices in New York and identify ourselves to one Captain S — .
Suspecting a trap, Kappe cabled Ernst Wilhelm Bohle, leader of the Auslandsdeutscher organization which has charge of Germans living abroad. When his reply confirmed the telegrams, we reported to the New York steamship offices.
Captain S — proved to be a huge gray-haired man with a bashed-in nose and a hard jutting jaw. With him was a man of about forty, handsome, well dressed. This was Heinz Spanknoebel, who had, upon the accession of Hitler, been appointed, by Drs. Frey and Goebbels of the Nazi Foreign Propaganda Bureau in Hamburg, head of all Nazis in the United States. A former minister, he had given up his church to become an organizer for National Socialism.
Captain S — demanded to see our identification. When we refused, to our surprise he produced his own identification card as a member of the Nazi Party's foreign division. We knew the signatures upon it to be genuine. So we produced our cards.
Spanknoebel recorded our names and numbers. "I shall verify your identification with the home office in Germany," he promised. "And then you may expect to hear from me."
Three weeks later he telephoned us where and when we were to meet him in New York City.
The quarters he had taken consisted of almost the entire twenty-first and twenty-second floors of one of the leading hotels. He received us graciously and referred to the cable we had sent to Hitler, offering our services. "Your field," he said, "is here in the United States. We have enough competent men to carry on in Germany."
He explained to us that the Nazi Party looked upon. Great Britain, with its centered capitalism, as the archfoe not only of Germany but of the whole world. Communism, he said, could be won over by propaganda, but England was civilization's mortal enemy. Her allies would be France, dependent upon her whims, and — the United States!
"During every administration here since the days of Theodore Roosevelt," Spanknoebel said, "the United States has been the economic vassal of England. That must not happen again. And that is where our work begins."
Our "work," we learned from him, was to be a most colossal job of disseminating propaganda. If that was not enough, sabotage, violence, and destruction would be in order.
Enthusiastically, under Spanknoebel's skillful guidance, we began slowly to construct a stupendous propaganda machine. We organized a seemingly innocuous society, Friends of the New Germany. Within six months our speakers were talking to packed lecture halls filled with German-born Americans. We began to plant the seeds of National Socialism in the United States.
We grew so fast that we had to divide the organization into various units. The DAWA, ostensibly formed to counteract the Jewish boycott of German merchandise in the United States, was one. Later it became the German-American Business League, Inc. For some years I headed it.
We "solicited" funds from wealthy Germans in America. Most of them had near relatives in Germany. It was simple to hint that those relatives might land in a concentration camp if the funds were not forthcoming.
The need for a Nazi newspaper in America was obvious. Spanknoebel assigned Walter Kappe and Dr. Ignatz T. Griebl (later involved in the spy ring broken up by the F. B. I.) to direct that venture. Funds poured in. The paper — the Deutsche Zeitung — soon outsold all German-language papers in the United States.
Nazi agents, by this time, were pouring into the country. Spanknoebel told us what he had in mind. "Soon," he said, "there will be a thousand Nazi agents in this country. Each of them will obtain membership in some old, established German society that is not yet pro-Nazi. Once we have control of the societies, we will vote out their officers and we will dictate concerning both policies and finances."
His plan worked with a number of German societies that had been organized for no more harmful purpose than to furnish members beer, card parties, and sick benefits. Jewish members were promptly ousted.
The gospel of National Socialism was being spread among native-born Germans in the United States. Later, should we need saboteurs or spies, they would come from these ranks; not from among our alien agents, who could be deported.
Spanknoebel had daring and imagination and rare ability to organize. But he also had an incredible recklessness. He knew nothing and cared less about the laws of America. He would not listen to advice.
The Ridder brothers are perhaps America's most important publishers of German-language newspapers. They published, among others, the Staats-Zeitung und Herold in New York. And they were, when Heinz Spanknoebel appeared on the scene, definitely not pro-Nazi. At headquarters one sultry afternoon he announced his intention to "take over" the Ridder papers.
How would he go about it?
He waved the details aside with a flourish. He would simply go in to the Ridder brothers and tell them, "We're taking over. You get out."
A few of us tried to tell him that this was America, not Germany. That the Ridders were fourth-generation Americans. That they were influential and respected. He waved these mere details aside, too.
A violent anti-Semite, he broached another idea that afternoon. In Germany there exists an organization known as the Bunaste. Its members are the official organizers of pogroms. They are stiletto experts, assassins.
Heinz Spanknoebel intended to bring the Bunaste to America! He fully intended to launch a bloody murderous reign of terror among the Jews of New York City.
And, fantastic as his plan was, it had a grimly diabolical measure of ingenuity. Remember that Nazi agents were pouring into the city from every German boat that docked.
"It is foolproof," he boasted to us "A German liner sails for America. Aboard her, disguised as crew members or even passengers, are half a dozen members of the Bunaste. They leave the ship when it docks. Late at night, walking deserted streets in New York, they come upon their quarry. A Jew. Zip! When they return to their ship, each has killed a Jew. Unless clumsy enough to be caught in the very act, none has been caught. And within a few hours they sail back to Germany, never to return to America. But somewhere in mid-Atlantic their ship passes another ship en route to America with six or nine or a dozen equally efficient assassins.
"We shall have the Bunaste here in America. You shall see. And, mark you, it will not fail."
I looked at Spanknoebel awaiting the approval he felt his due. I found my voice, raised it in protest.
"It's too fantastic. It would never work. We would all be caught. All of our work would be ruined."
Another voice joined mine; a third. We were three against; four for it. Spanknoebel let us wrangle among ourselves. At last he silenced us.
"It is not necessary to argue, gentlemen," he said quietly. "I say my plan will work. That is enough."
I remember thinking, as we left his hotel suite:
Good God, we've got to get rid of this madman before he takes us all to hell with him!
"This madman" was soon to be a fugitive from justice! Who had taken the lead in getting rid of him? Who was to replace him as head Nazi in this country? Above all, how many years ago did Hitler's domination of Soviet Russia actually and definitely begin?
Publication Date: March 30, 1940