After decades without answers, a writer learns her family were Nazi spies

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• Title: Family of Spies: A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal, and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor
• Author: Christine Kuehn
• Genre: Non-fiction
• Publisher: Celadon Books
• Pages: 272

Christine Kuehn tells a tale about family, fascism and forgiveness that, as a novel, might be considered improbable. And yet the events are true and meticulously researched.

Family of Spies deals with the writer’s efforts, stretching over three decades, to understand the experiences of her father, grandparents, uncles and aunt in the years leading up to and following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Semi-spoiler alert: This review tells part of that story. But knowing the narrative doesn’t spoil it in the least. For how Kuehn learned about her family’s history is as fascinating as the history itself.

Her father, Eberhard, who was born in Germany and never lost his accent, joined the American army in 1944 and fought at Okinawa, one of the bloodiest battles of the Second World War. He loved to tell stories, but not about the war or his family.

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“When talking about his past, my dad described his parents – his whole childhood, really – in vague, whitewashed snippets,” Kuehn writes in Family of Spies. Her Aunt Ruth, whom Kuehn first met when she was dating her future husband, was equally reluctant to lift the veil.

“You have a good life. You don’t want to ruin it with the past,” Ruth replied when Kuehn asked about the family.

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Kuehn was reconciled to never learning much about her family’s history until one day in 1994, when a letter arrived from a movie screenwriter asking her if he could speak to her father about the role of Nazi spies in the attack on Pearl Harbor. When Kuehn called her father, Eberhard said it must be some mistake and hung up. Minutes later he called back, sobbing, and began to tell the Kuehns’ story.

For the next three decades, Christine Kuehn researched that story, through interviews, archival records, memorabilia and trips overseas. At various times she considered writing a book but then put it aside as she raised her children and pursued her career. Finally, one day in 2020, she sat down at a computer and typed: “My father liked to tell stories.”

The story of Otto and Friedel Kuehn and their children defies belief. In the 1920s, Otto was an often-failed-but-finally successful businessman living in Germany; Friedel had delivered two children, Ruth and Leopold, from two different men before marrying Otto and giving birth to Eberhard and Hans.

In 1930, Otto became infatuated with the Nazi Party, three years before Adolf Hitler took power. As Otto rose through the party’s and then the government’s ranks, Ruth attracted the attention of Joseph Goebbels, the monstrous propaganda minister. Goebbels, a notorious womanizer, had an affair with Ruth, then still a teenager, before discovering that Ruth’s father was Jewish. He could have had her eliminated, but instead offered the family to the Japanese government, which was looking for people who could operate as spies in Hawaii, headquarters of the American Pacific fleet.

The Kuehns embraced their new assignment with enthusiasm. The Japanese government paid them handsomely; there were houses and cars and horses. Otto threw lavish parties, hoping naval officers would drink too much and speak indiscreetly. They ran a beauty salon, where the wives and girlfriends of officers would tattle. Ruth’s modus operandi was to flirt – and perhaps more than flirt – with officers, teasing out valuable information. Eberhard and Hans, teenage kids, were unaware of all of this.

The FBI strongly suspected the Kuehns were spying for Japan but couldn’t build enough of a criminal case to make an arrest. But on Dec. 8, 1941, the day after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the entire family was arrested.

Otto, the only person to be criminally convicted over the attack on Pearl Harbor, was sentenced to be executed, but the governor of Hawaii commuted the sentence to 50 years of hard labour. He was ultimately released in 1948. He spent several years working in Buenos Aires, reuniting with the family in Germany in 1955, shortly before he died of cancer.

Friedel wanted Eberhard to come back to Germany with her and Ruth and Hans, but he would have no part of it. He considered himself American and joined the U.S. Army. After the war he eventually moved to Jacksonville, Fla., raised his family and tried to forget – and hide them from – his past.

It is unlikely that the Kuehns’ spying had any material impact on the Japanese success in destroying or sinking more than a score of ships and about 190 aircraft, at the cost of more than 2,400 lives. The attack was a study in tactical brilliance on the Japanese side and missed signals, blindness and incompetence on the part of the Americans.

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But as anyone who has studied that day knows, the American aircraft carriers, which would render battleships obsolete, were not in the harbour. In failing to sink them, the Japanese in one sense lost the war the day they began it.

But Christine Kuehn’s book isn’t really about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Her goal is to understand her family’s role in that attack, her father’s efforts to cover up and forget, and her own need to forgive.

“We all have family secrets, don’t we, connected to acts in our bloodline from long ago,” she writes in conclusion. “But we’re not locked into following that path. Each of us gets to choose the type of person we want to be and the footprint we want to leave on the world.”

As part of her own footprint, Kuehn has given us an amazing story and a fine book.