Big Brother

A salesman sees a prospect in everyone he encounters; a swindler sees a “pigeon.” J. Edgar Hoover saw a suspect. Was Hoover wrong? Did he help protect the United States against the most ruthless and demented enemies America ever had? Or was he a threat to the country’s most fundamental value: civil liberties? Was he a fool seeing in every European refugee a possible black sheep? Did his prodigious zeal harm the United States in its war or protect it against the enemies in its midst? Was Hoover himself--the Grand Inquisitor and Upholder Extraordinaire of Political Virtue who served eight presidents--a loyal American? Or was he so consumed by his anti-Red zeal as to be a virtual fascist?

Alexander Stephan’s book, “Communazis,” describes the antagonistic relationship between Hoover and the German intellectuals who sought refuge in the United States during World War II. Stephan sketches the works and fates of two dozen more or less prominent German refugee writers, as well as some other artists and filmmakers: Thomas Mann, Bertold Brecht, Franz Werfel, Lion Feuchtwanger and others. He tells of the vast net of agencies, all affiliated with the FBI and all charged with the “security” of the United States, that spent prodigious amounts of money and employed armies of agents to observe these German (or ex-German) political “suspects” and report back to headquarters even the smallest items.

“Communazis” first appeared five years ago in Germany, with the title “In the Sights of the FBI: German Exile Writers in the Dossiers of American Secret Services” (my translation). This title fits the book better than the American title, which suggests that Communists and Nazis were essentially the same. That is seriously misleading; during the time that Stephan’s book covers, Communists and Nazis were involved in a life-and-death struggle. Nazism, a policy of racism and national expansion through war, was the collective madness in whose grip all German social strata were caught at the time. Communism, on the other hand, featured state control of the economy without the nationalistic overtones. It did not glorify the Germanic race or war as the Nazi doctrine did; it was pedestrian rather than “heroic.”

This difference between Nazism and Communism must be kept in mind because the German emigres with whom Stephan deals were implacable enemies of Nazism, yet on the whole not fierce enemies of Communism--at least not at the time when Soviet Russia was America’s ally. The times and the war pushed many persons of democratic persuasion to the left.

What role did these refugees from Germany play in America? Did they have an influence on the outbreak or conduct of America’s war against Germany? Was the enormous expense in money and manpower that Hoover used to keep the German refugees under surveillance, day and night, justified? Stephan’s book leads to one overarching conclusion: Politically, the German exile literati in America were entirely loyal to U.S. war aims. Not one was ever shown to be in league with America’s enemies. Despite many political quarrels among them as to what a postwar Germany, or Europe, or world should look like--typical quarrels between political emigres throughout history--the German refugees (or self-exiles) without exception had only one purpose and desire: to see Hitler’s Germany defeated, preferably by America. Did Hoover, the German refugees’ indefatigable observer and antagonist, not share this desire with them? Of course he did. Why then did he marshal such Brobdingnagian resources to observe them in ways that appear at times like those of the Keystone Kops? Why did the FBI make such great and costly efforts to tap every phone, open every letter, examine every contact for every one of the German literati? Was there method in Hoover’s apparent madness?

From this book we learn that yes, there was at least some method, and even some justification. Hoover was appointed to his first important position as political investigator by Franklin Roosevelt in 1936 and learned his methods of investigation during the Prohibition era, investigating major gangsters with political connections. It was a course that required more devious means of pursuit than usual. Hoover later used some of these methods--tapping phones, opening letters--of surveillance on the exiles.

In his handling of the German literati refugees, he went to the extreme measure of recruiting the State Department, which took a dim view of these “premature anti-fascists,” persons who had made themselves politically suspicious by their early eagerness to see the United States fight the Nazis in war and abandon its isolationist ways.

Although Hoover and the refugee writers from Germany were hostile to Nazism, they had very different ideas on how to fight it. Hoover and the German exiles differed, especially regarding the shape of a postwar world. To the extent that he represented anybody but himself, Hoover represented conservative America, which had entered World War II late and saw no need for America to turn the entire world and the doctrine of democracy upside down to defeat the Third Reich. Hoover and his particular type of Red-hating America had no intention of letting America become leftist or internationalist; that was anathema to them. It also would, they reasoned, diminish America’s dominant position in the world. Yet, the better the war went, the more the German refugees dreamed of a new and better postwar world, while Hoover hoped just as strongly to leave the world as it was.

Hoover was motivated--as most German emigre literati were not--by personal ambition. Despite his pursuit of genuine foreign and domestic “subversives,” Hoover thrived because he was feared by all and loved by none. His methods were effective counters to “the unconventional warfare” or the new “total war” that the Nazis were waging.

In their war against Hitler, Allied military leaders and the American nation as a whole had often been taken by surprise: First there was the bloodless conquest of Norway with the help of the infamous Nazi collaborator Vidkun Quisling; then Pearl Harbor, engineered by Hitler’s Japanese allies; and the stunning fall of France. Finally, there was the frightening appearance of V-1 and V-2 rockets that shook the Allies badly.

Hoover suspected the German refugees of disloyalty to the United States and of political “subversion” mainly because some of them called for a better world after the war. Yet, they were never a hazard to U.S. security--their unconditional enmity toward Nazi Germany made them the most dedicated supporters of America’s war effort. Still, as Stephan shows, the average FBI dossier on a German refugee ran to 100 pages.

The large number of German-Americans in the United States were a different story. There was good reason to fear they might commit sabotage of American war production facilities because many of them were known to be friendly to the Nazi cause and therefore opposed to the war effort. Yet these German Americans never seem to have engaged in hostile acts against the United States. Whether Hoover can be credited with having prevented such acts we do not know. But the German Americans are not Stephan’s subject.

“Isolationist” Americans, i.e. Americans who opposed the American war effort against Germany, including such prominent Americans as Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh, were a serious problem for the American conduct of the war against Germany because they had considerable antiwar support in the nation. Such isolationists did not commit sabotage of war facilities; their modus operandi was antiwar propaganda. Hoover clearly sided with these (often crypto-fascist) isolationists who accused the German refugees of driving America into the war for their own selfish purposes of revenge against Hitler, and that they were Communists. Hoover suspected them of anti-American activities because they were foreigners (he was a wild xenophobe) and because they were “premature anti-fascists.” Even though these German exiles were America’s staunchest allies against Hitler, Hoover monitored their every move. He also clandestinely collected large amounts of information about them for the purpose of proving they were “Reds.” But he was never able to prove that any of them were disloyal to the United States during the war.

With its 46 pages of notes, 28 reproductions of recently released FBI documents and a bibliography of 243 related books, “Communazis” is an important compendium of one aspect of World War II: the lives (and the illusions) of German literary figures who took refuge in the United States from the most evil curse in human history, only to find themselves monitored incessantly by Hoover, the Inquisitor General of the United States.