How Well Do You Know Your Family?

Kuehn, Christine.  Family of Spies: The Untold Story of the Attack on Pearl Harbor and One 

         Family's Rise as Nazi Spies.  New York: Celadon Books, 2025.  ISBN: 9781250344465

  

How well do you know your family's history?  Can you trace back your family tree to when your ancestors's first came to America?  Do you know all about the black sheep that may be hidden in the past?    In 1994 Christine Kuehn got a letter from a screenwriter wanting to contact her father regarding the role Nazi spies had played in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.  He had to have gotten the wrong address, hadn't he?  

 

Unfortunately, Christine Kuehn learned from her dad Eberhard Kuehn that it was not a wrong address.  His father, his mother, his sister Ruth had all been part of a spy ring that collected intelligence on the facilities, ships and aircraft at Pearl Harbor that they passed on to the Japanese.  As to why, well that is a complicated story that Christine Kuehn put together over time through research, new-found relatives, and Freedom of Information inquires.  She traces the family's involvement in the Nazi party, Otto's missed opportunity to head the counterintelligence division of the SS (Reinhard Heydrich got the job), Ruth's affair with Joseph Goebbels, and the revelation of Ruth's father being a Jew which led the family to find work outside Germany.  That work was the opportunity to be paid by the Japanese to live in Hawaii and provide intelligence that the Japanese could not otherwise obtain.  However, Otto and Friedel were not the type to keep a low profile, and neither was Ruth.  The FBI had a team watching them, but not the quite the evidence for an arrest. The attack on Pearl Harbor led to the arrest of most of the family and eventual deportation of most back to Germany - except Eberhard who chose to remain in the US, graduate high school and then join the army to fight at Okinawa.  He never returned to Germany.  But Christine Kuehn did venture there to meet the relatives she was just getting to know.

 

Christine Kuehn  provides an interesting trip through her father's family history entwined with her journey of discovery.  If the reader is interested in the back story of Pearl Harbor, Family of Spies would be the book to help scratch that itch!