After a parent dies, children commonly wish they had asked more questions about their family’s history. Anyone who has ever had that wish would find Christine Kuehn’s new book, Family of Spies, more than just interesting.
In her case the questions came late in her father’s life. And, as it turned out, they were not just about her father’s fighting on Okinawa, the Japanese island where, at age 19, he survived a 1945 battle in which 12,000 Americans were killed. All he would say about that was that he was glad he survived.
Rather, the questions concerned her father’s life as a teenager in Hawaii, where he lived with his German parents and a much older sister. From 1935 to 1945 the family enjoyed a life of luxury. They drove fancy cars, built a house overlooking the ocean on the back side of he island, and entertained American naval officers and their wives with lavish parties.
But Kuehn’s father never mentioned any of that. He was silent for a reason: Her father’s parents and his sister were all spies, a fact that landed not only them, but also Kuehn’s teenage father, in jail shortly after the Japanese attack on June 7, 1941. Their lifestyle was financed by the Japanese government.
In 1994, when Kuehn first became aware of the possibility that her father’s family had helped the Japanese, her father denied it all. It was only later, as she investigated further, and he slowly slipped into dementia, that she learned the awful family history.
Not only were her family spies who reported American ship movements to the Japanese, but they were enthusiastic Nazis. Hitler came close making her grandfather the head of what became the Gestapo. Her father’s older sister was a mistress of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s vicious Minister of Propaganda who viewed Jews as “vermin” to be eliminated. But Goebbels found out that the sister was the mother’s child by a man to whom she was not married, and that man was Jewish. To avoid embarrassment, he exiled the entire family to Hawaii in 1935 to work for the Japanese.
Fortunately for Kuehn’s historical search, but not for her grandparents’ freedom, the FBI opened an office in Hawaii in 1939 and suspected that the German family was up to no good. The FBI documented their activities. The grandfather allegedly had a business that required visits to a steel company in Japan. The FBI monitored their bank accounts. Large sums of money – totalling $1 million or more – appeared that did not seem to be fully explained as money from German relatives. The family, and especially Goebbels’ former mistress, befriended Navy officers. The grandmother opened a beauty parlor where wives might be tempted to gossip.
But the FBI could never find any evidence of actual espionage. It was only after the attack on Pearl Harbor that the FBI found in the Japanese consulate a code for signaling Japanese ships from a “dormer window.” That confirmed their suspicions. The family had the only dormer window on the back side of the island.
With that evidence in hand, the military arrested the family, including Kuehn’s teenage father. Her grandfather confessed, was convicted by a miliary court, and received a death sentence. Eventually his sentence was reduced to life in prison and after the end of World War II he was released. As it turned out, the miliary lacked the power to try a civilian whose crime was committed before the declaration of war. He died in poverty in Germany.
Kuehn’s father became an American. He knew nothing about his family’s treachery. It caused him to be arrested, imprisoned, repeatedly interrogated by the FBI, and required to testify at his father’s trial. When released, he became an American citizen and soldier, and after the war not only resisted family attempts to get him to return to Germany, but made every effort to close the book on his family history.
His daughter has now opened that book with the help of FBI files and the assistance of a few distant relatives. One hero of the book is the FBI agent in charge of the Honolulu office, Robert L Shivers. He monitored the family, collected the evidence that convicted Kuehn’s grandfather, decided her teenage father did not know about the treachery, and in the chaos that followed the attack took steps to protect innocent Japanese on the island. His record in these respects is better than that of his boss, J. Edgar Hoover, who in August before the attack refused to credit the report of a double-agent that the Germans were trying to help the Japanese spy on Pearl Harbor.
Luther Munford is a Northsider.
