Family of Spies: A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal, and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor

An ordinary woman in suburban Maryland unearths the horrifying secret of her family’s impact on the events of WWII in this page-turning debut memoir. Kuehn recalls receiving an inquiry in 1994 from a screenwriter about her German American immigrant family’s role as spies for the Axis powers in Oahu ahead of WWII, a bombshell revelation that sent her on a decades-long investigation into her family’s secrets. Not only did she discover that her grandfather Otto was an SS officer turned covert agent, but that Otto’s daughter Ruth (the author’s aunt) had been a mistress of Joseph Goebbels, and that part of the reason the family was stationed in Hawaii was that Ruth, the child of a previous relationship of Otto’s wife Friedel, was half Jewish, and Goebbels wanted to avoid that truth from being exposed. During the family’s six-year stay in Oahu, which began in 1935, they were paid by the Japanese government to throw lavish parties, infiltrating Hawaii’s “upper crust” and gathering intel about ship movements ahead of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Kuehn weaves this sensational story—which includes the FBI’s cat-and-mouse attempts to uncover the spy ring—with her own personal journey from disbelief to reckoning with her family’s Nazi past. It’s a propulsive and disturbing tale. (Dec.)