Family Of Spies

I know from my own experiences that every family has it secrets, but the secrets revealed by Christine Kuehn in her gripping family memoir are--well, I mean...

Let's just let them speak for themselves.

Her paternal grandparents--Otto and Friedel--were Nazis.

And not just-rank-file members, who signed up relatively late in the game, having no choice once Hitler took over.

But true believers, who bought into the toxicity of what Hitler was selling almost from the moment he started selling it.

Otto was so highly regarded by the Nazi chieftains that they asked him to apply for a top job in the Gestapo.

Had an interview with Heinrich Himmler and everything.

Took a train from Berlin to Munich for the meeting--alongside Reinhard Heydrich--who got the job and went on to almost gleefully order the slaughter of millions of people.

Sorta as a consolation prize, Hitler's crew wound up dispatching Otto and Friedel to Hawaii to act as spies, providing intel to Japan to help prepare for the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

They took with them their daughter--Christine's Auntie Ruth--a voluptuous young woman who used her charms to elicit inside info from clueless U.S. Naval officers.

Meanwhile, back in Germany, Christine's Uncle Leopold--Ruth's half brother--was a high-ranking official in Joseph Goebbels's department of propaganda.

Stayed loyal to the Nazis until the very end, even after Hitler and Goebbels committed suicide.

And that's not even the end of all the family secrets Christine had to deal with--there were secrets within secrets.

Leopold and Ruth were not Otto's biological children.

No, before she met Otto, Friedel got knocked up by a man she thought she would marry. But he ditched her when he discovered she was pregnant. Leaving her to raise Leopold by herself.

Things looked bleak until she hooked up with a man, identified by Christine only as a "well-known architect in Berlin." He knocked up Friedel and she gave birth to Ruth.

Prompting the architect to drop Friedel. At which point she met Otto, who married her and agreed to raise Leopold and Ruth. And gave her two other children--including Eberhard, Christine's father.

Are you following me? I fear I may have lost you in this jumble of names just as things take an even more toxic twist...

That unknown architect was Jewish. Which means Ruth was Jewish--at least according to Nazi law--whether she practiced the religion or not. And she most definitely did not.

And Ruth hooked up with Goebbels.

Yes, Aunt Ruth was fucking Goebbels, architect of of the vicious propaganda machine that helped convinced Germans to eradicate their Jewish neighbors. 

Thank you, Christine Kuehn, for revealing the secrets your family tried to hard to keep hidden...

If you want to know the details of what Otto, Friedel and Ruth were up to in Hawaii, I urge you to read the book.

Sometimes just the mere thought of her biological connection to such monsters made Christine break down. Like when she considered a wedding photo of Uncle Leopold...

"The Nazi uniform my father's brother was wearing, the dagger, the swastika armband--it shouldn't have been a surprise to me. The pattern was clear to anyone: Otto had interviewed for head of the Gestapo. Friedel was a Nazi. Ruth had joined the Hitler Youth. But all that information had been words on a page. Seeing the swastika on Leopold, right there in black and white, made it too real, too close to my dad, too close to my kids. `I don't want to dig into this story anymore,' I told [my husband]. I felt tears rolling down my cheeks.

But she persevered. It took her 30 years to write the book, but eventually those secrets were revealed.

If there's a good person in this story, aside from Christine who had the guts to tell it--it's Eberhard. Her father, a tormented soul.

Eberhard broke from his family at the age of 15. Testified against them in court. Joined the U.S. Navy. And fought at the battle at Okinawa against the very Japanese forces his parents and aunt tried so hard to assist.

Eberhard didn't reveal the secrets to Christine. She found out when a stranger sent her letter, asking her if she was related to the Nazi spies--Otto and Friedel Kuhn.

Apparently, those secrets were too painful for him to share.

In one passage, Christine connects what happened in Germany to what's happening right now her very own town in suburban Maryland.

"One night not too long ago, anti-Semitic flyers were left on the green, well-kept lawns of our neighborhood, and swastikas were scrawled on the desks and walls at the local school. So many things came back to me: a picture of Leopold in his Nazi uniform, Kristallnacht, how it all unfolded so slowly at first, and then so fast. Not only can it happen again, I thought, it is happening again."

A sobering thought in a serious book that deserves to be read.