Bearing Witness (15 page)

Chapter Fourteen

“Ishmael called me.”

“Not a bad opening,” Benny said. “Needs work, but not bad.”

I gave him a curious look. “What?”

“Never mind,” he said with a grin. “Ishmael, eh? So what's on the old boy's mind?”

I waggled my eyebrows mischievously. “Otto Koll.”

Benny smiled. “Ah, yes. And what, pray tell, is on Otto Koll's mind? Perhaps his upcoming deposition?”

I nodded and reached for my iced tea. It was close to one in the afternoon, and we were having a quick lunch at the Station Grille in St. Louis Union Station, which just happens to be my favorite building in the city. When it opened a century ago, Union Station was the nation's grand railway terminal, and it soon became the busiest train station in the world. During the glory days of rail travel you could stroll along the midway and watch porters tote luggage onto trains whose names have passed into railroad legend: the Katy Flyer, the Wabash Cannonball, the Twentieth Century Limited, the Lone Star. Indeed, it was from the back of one such train on Track 32 on election night, 1948, that a beaming Harry Truman held up the front page of the
Chicago Tribune
with that infamous headline, DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.

But that was decades ago. By the time the very last train departed on a stormy Halloween night in 1978, the splendor of Union Station had long since faded. Rainwater cascaded through holes in the rusted roof of the train shed, once a marvel of Victorian engineering with huge sweeping arches and butterfly trusses. But, to quote native son Yogi Berra, never say never. Union Station had been reborn—a jewel of urban restoration, its sweeping arches refurbished, its train shed reglassed and reroofed, its midway bustling again with specialty shops and eateries and bars and colorful handcarts, its travelers of yesteryear replaced by tourists and shoppers.

The rich heritage of the place seems almost palpable, even in the restaurant we were in. Sixty years ago, it was the home of the renowned Fred Harvey eatery, whose waitresses became household names with the 1946 release of MGM's
The Harvey Girls
starring Judy Garland. Reopened in the 1980s as the Station Grille, it's been restored to its earlier charm, with oak ceiling beams and plaster panels frescoed in tapestry effects. Add to that the stiff white tablecloths, heavy silverware, sparkling glasses, fresh flowers, and good light, and the effect is enchanting, as if you'd stumbled through a time warp into a graceful never-never-land where you might find a young Audrey Hepburn at the next table sipping champagne and laughing gaily with Cary Grant.

It was, in short, the last place you'd expect to find Benny Goldberg chomping down on a thick cheeseburger with extra grilled onions and pickles. Nevertheless, it was the perfect location for us to today. I'd just finished meeting a client at her office around the corner, and Benny had a presentation downtown after lunch.

Almost two weeks had elapsed since I'd received the English translation of Max Kruppa's 1939 letter to Conrad Beckman. I'd been spending a good portion of that time fighting the motions to quash that Roth & Bowles had filed in Chicago, Springfield, Gary, Indianapolis, and Memphis, while trying to interview prospective witnesses. My mother had been busy, too. She'd confirmed her initial suspicion that the Kuhn referred to in Kruppa's letter—“While no one can ever replace Kuhn in my heart”—was Fritz Kuhn of the German-American Bund. Her research showed that Kuhn had served as head of the Bund from 1935 until he resigned in the summer of 1939 under accusations of stealing Bund funds—accusations that quickly blossomed into an embezzlement conviction and a four-year prison term. In the late summer or early fall of 1939, the Bund named a new national führer, G. Wilhelm Kunze, who had started as head of the Philadelphia local. Kruppa's letter to Beckman, dated October 4, 1939, describes his “unforgettable evening with Wilhelm Kunze,” whom Kruppa first met “two summers ago in Philadelphia, when he was chief of their group.”

Kruppa's letter to Beckman opened with words of consolation for the gloom in St. Louis, “especially with the departures of Kessler and Metting over the summer.” Working backward in old microfilm from the date of Kruppa's letter, my mother found an article in the July 23, 1939, issue of the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
headlined:

10 ST. LOUIS BUND LEADERS
HAVE GONE TO GERMANY

The news report opened:

At least 10 members, including most of the onetime officers of the St. Louis division of the Amerika-Deutscher Volksbund, the American Nazi group, have gone back to Germany within the past year, and more Bund followers are preparing to go.…

Kessler and Metting appeared in the fourth paragraph:

Recent departures include Albert Mueller and Anton Kessler, former leaders of the St. Louis division, and Ernst Metting, first leader of the group when it was still known as the Friends of the New Germany.…

According to an unidentified source quoted in the article, “The departures have left the St. Louis Bund without any leader. They have no officers and few meetings.”

There were still open items in Kruppa's letter. For example, he mentioned Kunze's upcoming speech in St. Louis at the Liederkranz Club. My mother found no report of any such speech in the issues of the
Post-Dispatch
and the
Globe-Democrat
for that period.

Nevertheless, her research efforts had certainly pushed Conrad Beckman a few important steps closer to the American Nazi movement in the late 1930s. Kruppa's letter, read in light of what my mother had turned up, sounded like a communication between Bund members. And that, oddly enough, might be relevant to my case. My mother's research had planted the kernel of a theory: the possibility of a German-American Bund connection between these two young contractors, one in St. Louis and one in Memphis—a connection that perhaps led to other important connections in business ventures. Perhaps the trust and camaraderie they developed back then enabled them to join forces years later to implement a bid-rigging scheme. After all, an antitrust conspiracy was another sort of relationship that requires a high level of trust and camaraderie among the participants. And maybe, just maybe, Otto Koll had also shared a youthful flirtation with the American Nazi movement.

I had now received translations of the other four letters written in German by Max Kruppa. Three were directed to officials of the German-American Bund, and revealed Kruppa as an active and enthusiastic American Nazi. But the fourth was to Otto Koll. Although it was far more circumspect than the one he sent to Conrad Beckman two years earlier—no proper names, no quotations from speeches, no references to the Bund—Kruppa signed off with a “Heil Hitler.” Presumably, one did not close a letter that way in the United States in 1941 unless the author believed that the addressee was a kindred soul.

“So tell me about Ishmael,” Benny said. “Is Abbott and Windsor going to represent Koll at his deposition?”

I nodded. “Yep.”

Ishmael was Ishmael Richardson, chairman of Abbott & Windsor, where Benny and I had started as young associates. Although I eventually left to open my own practice, the firm had retained me on a few occasions to handle sensitive matters that they were unable to handle for one reason or another. My contact on each of those matters had been Ishmael Richardson, and over the years we had developed about as nice a rapport as possible between a silver-haired charter member of the Chicago power elite and a Jewish female solo practitioner young enough to have gone to college with his granddaughter.

“And?” Benny asked.

“Ishmael didn't come right out and say, but I got the sense that they're reluctant to let Koll testify.”

“Oh?” Benny snorted. “Like they have a choice? Did you remind Ishmael that you already defeated their motion to quash?”

“Benny,” I said patiently, “you're missing the point. Just because he shows up for his deposition doesn't mean he has to testify.”

After a moment, Benny's frown changed to a smile. “Ah, are we talkin' Amendment Number Five?”

I nodded.

“Goddamn,” Benny said with a cackle. “They're thinking about having Otto take the fifth? I love it.” Benny rubbed his hands together. “Oh, baby, I call dibs on Otto's deposition. This could break the case wide open.”

I smiled. “It could.”

That was because Ruth's case was a civil action. In a criminal case, the defendant's assertion of his Fifth Amendment privilege cannot be used against him, and the jury is not permitted to draw a negative inference from his refusal to answer a question. But that rule doesn't apply in civil actions. Here, if Otto Koll refused on Fifth Amendment grounds to say whether he was involved in an illegal bid-rigging conspiracy with Beckman Engineering, his refusal to answer the question
could
be used against him
and
against his alleged coconspirators, and the jury would be permitted to draw any negative inference it saw fit.

“Oh, baby,” Benny said, grinning savagely, “I can't wait to go to Chicago. I'm going to make that Nazi bastard shit bricks.”

That afternoon I took a four-hour journey back to the 1930s and the netherworld of the St. Louis Nazi movement. It was a journey made possible by the late Abram Levine, the charismatic head rabbi of Temple Shalom from 1929 until his retirement in 1954. Rabbi Levine had also served as executive director of the St. Louis Jewish Defense Alliance (JDA) from its founding in 1931 until its merger into the St. Louis chapter of the Anti-Defamation League in 1949. The JDA's principal activity had been the gathering of intelligence on various organizations viewed as a potential threat to the Jews of St. Louis, and thus its principal focus during the years before World War II was the American Nazi movement.

Rabbi Levine had planned to spend his retirement years writing both his memoirs and a major history of American Jewish life in the heartland during the years between World War I and the Korean War. Over his professional career he had amassed a substantial collection of personal papers and documentary records that were to serve as his source materials. Sadly, a heart attack killed Levine less than a year after he left the pulpit. All that remained of his ambitious literary plans were eleven uncatalogued boxes of papers. The papers had resided in the corner of a musty storage room in the basement of Temple Shalom's dignified old quarters in the University City Loop until 1979, when the synagogue moved west to its fancy new digs off Clayton Road, the one with the wrought-iron bema that looks like a stage set from
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
.

After the move, the synagogue's new librarian placed the eleven boxes in an archive room in the back of the library and issued an open invitation to scholars and Judaica librarians to come review the treasure trove. Alas, the personal papers of one reform rabbi from the Midwest, to paraphrase Bogart in
Casablanca
, didn't amount to a hill of beans in the modern historian's world. But they did merit an entry in the St. Louis Holocaust Museum's directory of resource materials on the German-American Bund, and that's how my mother discovered their existence.

Unfortunately, the contents of those eleven boxes were in complete disarray. For example, sandwiched between a sheaf of Rabbi Levine's sermons from 1947–48 and the minutes of a March 8, 1951, meeting of the St. Louis Rabbinical Council was an undercover report on the celebration of Hitler's birthday on April 20, 1937, at the St. Louis Deutsche Haus (German House) attended by German consul Reinhold Freytag.

On the wall behind us in the archive room was a framed photographic portrait of Rabbi Levine, and he seemed no more pleased by the disarray than we were. He was glaring into the camera from behind his enormous desk, a pipe clenched between his teeth, his scowl amplified by the dark, bushy eyebrows that joined over a tomahawk nose. Under his baleful eye, my mother and I spent hours sorting and reorganizing and reading the materials.

Gradually, the outlines of the story began to emerge, starting with the founding of the Hitler Club in March 1933 by a Dr. R. L. Groellefeld. Although the Hitler Club was soon to merge into the Friends of the New Germany (Freunde des Neuen Deutschland), it was around long enough to host a visit from ex-prince Louis Ferdinand of Hehenzollern, son of the former crown prince of Prussia, who delivered a speech to the members exhorting them “to atone for their sins in forgetting the fatherland in World War I by rendering every aid possible to our exalted führer and the New Germany.”

This all according to the undercover report filed by someone identified by the initials H.A.R. H.A.R appeared repeatedly throughout the materials, along with three others: M.M.N., L.A.B., and B.P.P.

As we sorted through the papers, we could see the American Nazi movement grow and expand like some insidious fungus in an old horror flick. The Hitler Club metamorphosed into the Friends of the New Germany, which in turn metamorphosed into the German-American Bund. At the 1938 observance of Hitler's birthday, Anton Kessler,
Sturmtruppenführer
of the local group, addressed a crowd of celebrants at the German House. The men, dressed alike in black pants, black boots, brown shirts, black ties, and Sam Browne belts, cheered Kessler's words (recorded, once again, by H.A.R.):

Why shouldn't the Gentile majority of St. Louis take arms against Jewish Anti-American subversions? This country is on the eve of a Communist revolution. The Stars and Stripes will be safe only so long as they hang between the Black-White-Red and the Swastika flag.

The Bund was hardly the only manifestation of Nazi fervor in the St. Louis area during the late 1930s. There was the German-American Commercial League (Deutsch-Amerikanische Berufsgemeinschaft), a branch of the Foreign Division of the Hitler Labor Front, which organized boycotts of Jewish businesses throughout metropolitan St. Louis. There was the Hitler Youth Camp, which opened on July 4, 1938, on Funk's Farm near Stanton, Missouri, and drilled the children in Nazi marching formations while instructing them in fascist propaganda. There was a group known as the Hitler Youth Group and an agency called the Nazi Employment Service. And on and on.