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The Nazis sent them to Hawaii to spy for the Japanese
Family of Spies: A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal, and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor
By Christine Kuehn
Celadon Books, 272 pages, $30
Surely this must be historical fiction.
Here’s the premise: In 1930s Germany, a teenage girl has an affair with chief Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. When he somehow discovers she is half-Jewish, her immediate family (excepting one ardently Nazi brother) is banished to Hawaii, where mother, father and daughter are tasked with spying for the Japanese — and facilitating the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Decades later, an American writer inherits this unlikely story and the resulting generational trauma. She sets out to uncover more details, spurring an intermittent, emotional 30-year quest and, finally, this book, Family of Spies.
Which, it turns out, is not fiction, but rather an astonishing blend of history and memoir.
“Christine Kuehn was cocooned in the sanctity of a quiet suburban life when a mysterious letter in 1994 pierced that bubble,” the author’s biographical blurb states. The letter, from a screenwriter, seeks information about a grandfather involved with the Nazis. It sends the skeptical Kuehn and her husband to a bookstore, where, in the World War II section, sure enough, they find scattered references to a man named Otto Kuehn and his daughter, Ruth. Both are linked to anti-American espionage.
By this point, Otto and his wife, Friedel, are dead. So, too, is Leopold, the brother who stayed behind and fought for Germany during the war. But living witnesses remain: Christine’s father, Eberhard, and, even more tantalizingly, Ruth herself.
“You don’t need to know about the family, the past, or Pearl Harbor,” Ruth had told Christine years earlier. Christine’s father, too, had supplied only “vague, whitewashed snippets” about that past.
But after some prodding, Eberhard Kuehn shares memories of his Hawaiian boyhood, an idyll of swimming, surfing and fishing during which he was unaware of the family’s spying. When the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor happened, on Dec. 7, 1941, he was 15 and, though not yet a citizen, thoroughly American. He enlisted in the U.S. Army as soon as he could, fought at Okinawa, and remained estranged from his parents for the rest of his life.
As Christine investigates, Eberhard, always a teller of fantastical stories, is ravaged gradually by dementia. His recollections fade, leaving her to continue her fraught pilgrimage through family history alone.
As for Ruth — if this were indeed a novel, the climax would be a confrontation between aunt and niece, with attendant revelations. But Ruth is intent on concealment. On a visit to Germany after her mother’s death, she and another brother, Hans, burn a cache of family papers. She dies having kept her secrets.
Kuehn’s narrative weaves back and forth between the history itself and her quest to discover and decipher it. She reports deeply on the intricacies of espionage and counterespionage in Hawaii, relying largely on FBI files. Her structure and style are clear and effective. But it is really the improbability of the tale that hooks readers.
Its precipitating events take place in Berlin, where Ruth, like the rest of the family, is immersed in Nazi culture. Encountering Goebbels, a vicious antisemite who is also a charming womanizer, she succumbs, and for a while he does, too. But it turns out that her biological father is not Otto Kuehn, a failed businessman trying to rise in Nazi ranks, but a Jewish architect with whom Friedel was involved before the marriage. That, of course, is a problem.
Otto Kuehn’s own history includes missteps and near-misses. One family anecdote has him loaning the financially strapped Rudolph Heydrich, his competitor for a top SS post, train fare to get to the job interview. Heydrich beats Kuehn out for the position, later becoming Gestapo head and a key architect of the Holocaust.
Meanwhile, Otto works as a secret agent, first for the Weimar-era German navy and then for the Nazis. So, drafting him, in 1935, for Hawaiian espionage makes a certain sense. But in his granddaughter’s telling, he is “vain, grandiose, a risk-taker,” a less than superlative spy. He and Friedel are too ostentatious, parlaying cash windfalls from their Japanese handlers into real estate purchases and lavish parties. Ruth is seemingly more subtle in prying military information from U.S. naval officers charmed by her. “Dating was the perfect cover,” Kuehn writes.
At one point, Ruth becomes engaged to a German steel executive living in Tokyo, a man who happens to be the family’s Japanese handler. But when Friedel travels to Japan to collect money owed to the Kuehns, she finds Ruth’s fiancé living with another woman.
Here, the story (which evokes the great FX spy thriller The Americans) becomes stranger still. The FBI and U.S. military intelligence have by now grown suspicious of the Kuehns. An FBI operative, Robert L. Shivers, is assigned to Honolulu in 1939 to stake out the family, as well as other suspected spies. A cat-and-mouse game of surveillance and surreptitiousness erupts.
One of Otto’s principal contributions to the attack on Pearl Harbor was devising a code that involved using light signals to broadcast U.S. ship movements to the Japanese military. Cables from the Japanese consulate to Tokyo describing the signals were intercepted by American intelligence, but not decoded or translated until after the attack.
Kuehn describes the terror of Pearl Harbor, with its massive American casualties and damage to the U.S. Pacific fleet — and what happened to her family next: imprisonment, separation, wandering, exile, a Biblical level of catastrophe. Otto, convicted of espionage by a military tribunal, barely escaped a firing squad. But imprisonment with hard labor broke him, and his subsequent life — first in Argentina; then in Germany, with Friedel – was unhappy. It cannot have helped that after leaving the United States he never saw his son Eberhard again.
While there is no climactic confrontation with Ruth, Christine does find some closure by traveling to Germany. There, long-lost cousins share documents and photos and help her collate the family history. Lisa, who had reached out to her, is the daughter of Otto’s brother. “We are very excited for you to tell the story,” she tells Christine, marking the end of an intergenerational conspiracy of silence.
The post The Nazis sent them to Hawaii to spy for the Japanese appeared first on The Forward.
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German Antisemitism Commissioner Targeted With Death Threat Letter After Arson Attack on Home
Andreas Büttner (Die Linke), photographed during the state parliament session. The politician was nominated for the position of Brandenburg’s anti-Semitism commissioner. Photo: Soeren Stache/dpa via Reuters Connect
Andreas Büttner, the commissioner for antisemitism in the state of Brandenburg in northeastern Germany, has been targeted the second attack in under a week after receiving a death threat, sparking outrage and prompting local authorities to launch a full investigation.
According to the German newspaper Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten (PNN), the Brandenburg state parliament received a letter on Monday threatening Büttner’s life, with the words “We will kill you” and an inverted red triangle, the symbol of support for the Islamist terrorist group Hamas.
State security police have examined the anonymous letter under strict safety measures, determining that a gray substance inside was harmless. Authorities are now probing the incident as part of an ongoing investigation into threats against the German official.
Ulrike Liedtke, president of the Brandenburg state parliament, condemned the latest attack on Büttner, describing the death threats and harassment as “completely unacceptable.”
“Threats and violence are not a form of political discourse, but crimes against humanity,” Liedtke said. “Andreas Büttner has our complete support and solidarity.”
A former police officer and member of the Left Party, Büttner took office as commissioner for antisemitism in 2024 and has faced repeated attacks since.
On Sunday night, Büttner’s private property in Templin — a town located approximately 43 miles north of Berlin — was targeted in an arson attack, and a red Hamas triangle was spray-painted on his house.
The home of Germany’s antisemitism commissioner, Andreas Büttner, was set on fire overnight in a targeted attack.
His family was inside the house at the time.
This is the second attack against Büttner in the past 16 months. His car was previously vandalized with swastikas. This… pic.twitter.com/cAbFnMIwQ7
— Combat Antisemitism Movement (@CombatASemitism) January 5, 2026
According to Büttner, his family was inside the house at the time of the attack, marking the latest assault against him in the past 16 months.
“The symbol sends a clear message. The red Hamas triangle is widely recognized as a sign of jihadist violence and antisemitic incitement,” Büttner said in a statement after the incident.
“Anyone who uses such a thing wants to intimidate and glorify terror. This is not a protest, it is a threat,” he continued.
Hamas uses inverted red triangles in its propaganda videos to indicate Israeli targets about to be attacked. The symbol, a common staple at pro-Hamas rallies, has come to represent the Palestinian terrorist group and glorify its use of violence.
In August 2024, swastikas and other symbols and threats were also spray-painted on Büttner’s personal car.
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Harvard President Blasts Scholar Activism, Calls for ‘Restoring Balance’ in Higher Ed
Harvard University President Alan Garber speaks during the 374th Commencement exercises at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, May 29, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder
Harvard University president Alan Garber, fresh off a resounding endorsement in which the Harvard Corporation elected to keep him on the job “indefinitely,” criticized progressive faculty in a recent podcast interview for turning the university classroom into a pulpit for the airing of their personal views on contentious political issues.
Garber made the comments last week on the “Identity/Crisis Podcast,” a production of the Shalom Hartman Institute, a Jewish think tank which specializes in education research.
“I think that’s where we went wrong,” Garber said, speaking to Yehuda Kurtzer. “Because think about it, if a professor in a classroom says, ‘This is what I believe about this issue,’ how many students — some of you probably would be prepared to deal with this, but most people wouldn’t — how many students would actually be willing to go toe to toe against a professor who’s expressed a firm view about a controversial issue?”
Garber continued, saying he believes higher education, facing a popular backlash against what critics have described as political indoctrination, is now seeing a “movement to restore balance in teaching and to bring back the idea that you really need to be objective in the classroom.”
He added, “What we need to arm our students with is a set of facts and a set of analytic tools and cultivation of rigor in analyzing these issues.”
Coming during winter recess and the Jewish and Christian holidays, Garber’s interview fell under the radar after it was first aired but has been noticed this week, with some observers pointing to it as evidence that Harvard is leading an effort to restore trust in the university even as it resists conceding to the Trump administration everything it has demanded regarding DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), viewpoint diversity, and expressive activity such as protests.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, Garber has spent the past two years fighting factions from within and without the university that have demanded to steer its policies and culture — from organizers of an illegal anti-Israel encampment to US President Donald Trump, who earlier this year canceled $2.26 billion in public money for Harvard after it refused to grant his wishlist of reforms for which the conservative movement has clamored for decades.
Even as Harvard tells Trump “no,” it has enacted several policies as a direct response to criticisms that the institution is too permissive of antisemitism for having allowed anti-Zionist extremism to reach the point of antisemitic harassment and discrimination. In 2025, the school agreed to incorporate into its policies a definition of antisemitism supported by most of the Jewish community, established new rules governing campus protests, and announced new partnerships with Israeli academic institutions. Harvard even shuttered a DEI office and transferred its staff to what will become, according to a previous report by The Harvard Crimson, a “new Office of Culture and Community.” The paper added that Harvard has even “worked to strip all references to DEI from its website.”
Appointed in January 2024 as interim president, Garber — who previously served in roles as Harvard’s provost and chief academic officer — rose to the top position at America’s oldest and, arguably, most prestigious institution at a time when the job was least desirable. At the time, Harvard was being pilloried over some of its students cheering Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel and even forming gangs which mobbed Jewish students wending their way through campus; the university had suffered the embarrassment of its first Black president being outed as a serial plagiarist, a stunning disclosure which called into question its vetting procedures as well as its embrace of affirmative action; and anti-Israel activists on campus were disrupting classes and calling for others to “globalize the intifada.”
Garber has since won over the Harvard Corporation, which has refused to replace him during a moment that has been described as the most challenging in its history.
“Alan’s humble, resilient, and effective leadership has shown itself to be not just a vital source of calm in turbulent times, but also a generative force for sustaining Harvard’s commitment to academic excellence and to free inquiry and expression,” Harvard Corporation senior fellow Penny Pritzker said in a statement issued on behalf of the body, which is the equivalent of a board of trustees. “From restoring a sense of community during a period of intense scrutiny and division to launching vital new programs on viewpoint diversity and civil discourses and instituting new actions to fight antisemitism and anti-Arab bias, Alan has not only stabilized the university but brought us together in support of our shared mission.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Holocaust Survivors Sent Care Packages to Oct. 7 Hostages for Hanukkah
The Menorah for Hanukkah on the Square 2025 in Trafalgar Square, London, United Kingdom, Dec. 14, 2025. Photo: Matthew Chattle/Cover Images via Reuters Connect
Survivors of the Holocaust spread holiday cheer this Hanukkah by delivering care packages to a group of 20 hostages whom the terrorist group Hamas recently released from captivity to fulfill the requirements of a ceasefire which suspended hostilities with Israel.
The gifts, dropped off at the Israeli consulate office in New York City, was made possible by The Blue Card, the only US-based charity organization which provides financial assistance and other services to survivors of the Holocaust. Originally founded in 1934 to assist Jews who had fled Germany to escape Hitler’s persecution of the country’s Jews, it has operated ceaselessly for nearly a century.
Over the past two years, the world has seen a revival of antisemitism unlike any since the period in which The Blue Card was founded, sparked by the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre that claimed the lives over of 1,200 Israelis and stole years and even more lives from 251 more who were kidnapped and held hostage in Gaza.
Some of the hostages who survived captivity have been released in stages since Israel and Hamas agreed on a ceasefire in October, and on Monday, Blue Card executive director Masha Pearl said the organization felt it necessary to reach out to them due to their having experienced a plight that is painfully familiar to what its clients endured in Europe during the Holocaust. Pearl also discussed the Bondi Beach mass shooting, in which a father and son inspired by Islamism opened fire on Jews celebrating the start of Hanukkah, murdering 15 people and injuring 40 others.
“Holocaust survivors and former hostages share a uniquely painful bond shaped by survival and resilience,” Pearl said. “After witnessing a mass shooting at a Chanukah event in Sydney, it felt even more urgent for our survivors to deliver these care packages now, spreading light at a moment that feels dark for the entire Jewish world. The resilience of the Holocaust survivors we assist, the former hostages, and now the survivors of the attack in Australia remind us that even in the face of hatred and violence, the Jewish people remain united.”
In a press release Blue Card said the care packages “carried profound meaning,” being filled to the brim with goods of all sorts, from blankets and water bottles to chap stick and even handwritten notes from the Holocaust survivors who sent them.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.