"Family of Spies" | Reviewed by William Winkler

In the summer of 1994 Christine Kuehn, working at a Maryland radio station, received a letter from a Hollywood screenwriter. He was writing a screenplay based on a World War II incident that might have involved Otto, her grandfather. The writer hoped to make contact with Eberhardt, her father, Otto’s son, to uncover facts about the matter.

Thus began a 30-year quest that led Kuehn deeper and deeper into unknown territory in her family’s history. Her father had always been quiet about his earlier years and time with his family. When the author questioned him about the Hollywood request, he demurred, equivocated, and finally dissolved into tears. Kuehn was about to unravel details of that history that would prove disturbing, yet healing.

Otto Kuehn’s family was socially prominent in Berlin of the 1930s. But as they fell on hard times, Otto began to cast about to restore the family’s status. His half-daughter Ruth, lovely and charming, caught the eye of rising Nazi leader Joseph Goebbels and they began an affair. But when Goebbels discovered that Ruth was half Jewish he had to be rid of her. Rather than have her killed he managed to have the family sent to Hawaii to work as spies for the Japanese beginning in 1935.

The Kuehn family, surreptitiously paid by the Japanese, lived a lavish lifestyle in Honolulu, attracting the attention of the FBI since they had little obvious means of support. The agency was unable to gather enough evidence to charge Otto and his wife Friedl until shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941.

“Family of Spies,” meticulously researched over more than three decades, details the events in the Kuehn family’s life leading up to the Japanese attack. It then describes the consequences facing the family as the U.S. government tries them for spying. And finally, the author tells how her research led her to learn the whereabouts of family, aunts uncles and cousins, she never knew.

Kuehn’s book is a fascinating plunge into a previously unknown set of facts about the years leading up to the U.S.’s involvement in World War II. Simultaneously the book describes in touching detail how Kuehn re-established and deepened her relationship with her father even as he descended into dementia.

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