Double Agent (2 page)

Frustrated by the stalemate, the German high command decided to send a larger force to carry out aerial assaults that would be lethal enough to help Franco but not so offensive as to spark a regional war that Germany wasn’t yet equipped to fight. With five thousand personnel and a hundred planes, the Luftwaffe’s Condor Legion deployed to northern Spain, where it was joined by a smaller number of Italian and Nationalist squadrons. Since the Republicans had mustered only a handful of aircraft to defend northern Spain, the Germans and their allies were given a chance to perform live-fire tests in close to optimal conditions. Beginning in March 1937, the combined air forces launched a vicious campaign against Republican strongholds in the Basque region, and they regarded Basque villages near the front lines as just as eligible for leveling as Basque Army positions, apparently in the belief that the world’s first demonstration of carpet bombing wouldn’t draw the French or British into the conflict.

Instead, the European powers were cowed, particularly after word reached the front pages in late April 1937 about the near total destruction of Guernica, a market town of five thousand to seven thousand inhabitants with a resonant place in Basque political history. At about 4:40 p.m. on Monday, April 26, a lone German aircraft, a twin-engine, medium-range bomber designed to release its bombs while flying horizontally, appeared over the undefended town and flew toward its most important military asset, the Rentería Bridge. With explicit orders to knock out the bridge, the plane, likely a Heinkel He 111, dropped its payload wildly off target, striking in and around the plaza in front of the railway station, which, like the rest of the town at the end of that market day, was populated with civilians. Within several minutes, two or three additional medium bombers heading toward the same objective landed a direct blow on the nearby candy factory instead, igniting an inferno that quickly spread to other structures. By the time the next wave of bombers arrived—this time the lumbering trimotor Junkers Ju 52s—Guernica was so full of smoke that “nobody could recognize the streets, bridge, and suburb [on the other side of the bridge],” wrote Condor Legion commander Wolfram Freiherr von Richthofen in his diary. “We therefore dropped the bombs right into the midst of things.”

Although some aspects of that day are still in dispute, over the next three hours wave after wave of bombers pummeled the center of the town with upward of fifty tons of highly explosive munitions. In addition, agile fighter planes—including the Heinkel He 51 and the brand-new Messerschmitt Me 109—used mounted machine guns and tossed hand grenades to slaughter civilians and animals (a detail integral to Pablo Picasso’s masterpiece) that had fled into open areas outside of town. The total number of dead was likely around 300, less than the Basque government’s official claim of 1,654, but the true figure will never be known. The sources agree that about 70 percent of the town’s structures were destroyed, although the historic Casa de Juntas parliament building and the sacred tree of liberty in its courtyard, the Guernica Oak, were untouched.

In his famous dispatch that appeared on page 1 of both the
Times
of London and the
New York Times
on April 28, British war correspondent G. L. Steer wrote that the “object of the bombardment seemingly was demoralization of the civil population and destruction of the cradle of the Basque race,” establishing the commonplace view that the Germans were conducting an experiment in terror bombing “to study the effects of those officially banned attacks on the civilian population,” as a German historian later wrote. The world was aghast to discover that the Germans were not only willing to raze a population center from the air but able to conduct the mission with “scientific thoroughness” that made it a “model demonstration of Nazi efficiency,” according to the editorials in the New York papers. “Rebels’ Nazi Aces Destroy City, Kill 800” was the front-page headline in the
New York Daily News,
the city’s great mass-market tabloid with the largest circulation of any newspaper in the country. “Guernica has taught us what to expect from the Germans,” said an official in the British Foreign Office, which might tell us all we need know about the attack’s persuasive power.

On April 30, von Richthofen arrived to inspect the carnage, noting in his diary what he apparently didn’t know previously, that Guernica occupied an important place in Basque history. He described the “complete annihilation” of the townscape, marveled at the size of the bomb craters visible in the street (“just terrific”), and groused that the Nationalist Army didn’t take better advantage of the fact that the “town was completely cut off for at least 24 hours.” But the ruins of Guernica exposed a greater problem. The Luftwaffe had failed to eliminate the Republicans’ most vital strategic installation, the bridge, because its level-flying bombers lacked an advanced “bombsight” able to guide their cargo, an analog computer with the ability to calculate the tug and countertug of gravity and air resistance that would play upon an explosive device of specific mass and shape as it was released from a particular altitude and velocity. “Germany did not possess a reliable bombsight that would allow a horizontal bomber to hit the target with any degree of accuracy,” wrote aircraft manufacturer Ernst Heinkel. The Goerz Visier 219 was useful “only in closely limited areas and after a good deal of practice,” according to a bomber group commander. The Air Ministry’s Technical Office in Berlin had to devise a way for its warplanes to destroy “choke points” such as the old stone crossing over the Mundaca River, which had indeed allowed for the escape of Fascism’s enemies. In the hours after the bombardment, G. L. Steer had watched their “long trek from Guernica to Bilbao in antique, solid-wheeled Basque farm carts drawn by oxen. The carts, piled high with such household possessions as could be saved from the conflagration, clogged the roads all night long.”

While the attack on Guernica has come to be justly regarded as a prelude to the horrors that Nazi Germany would inflict upon innocents during World War II, the regime’s technicians saw it as further evidence that the Luftwaffe needed to augment its airborne savagery with the ability to achieve basic military objectives. They weren’t yet aware that a solution to “the bombsighting problem” could be found at a small plant in lower Manhattan that employed a high percentage of German immigrants.

Having lived in the United States, subject thought to make use of some of his contacts there for the benefit of the Abwehr.

—FBI report on Nikolaus Ritter, September 2, 1945

I
n early 1937, a Wehrmacht officer with a polished manner and a healthy girth was summoned to the Berlin headquarters of the Abwehr, the division of the German armed forces assigned to conduct spy missions on behalf of the army, navy, and air force. Founded in 1921 as a
counter
espionage service in accord with the strictures of Versailles, the Abwehr was undergoing an aggressive expansion, creating conflict and overlap with Nazi police-state institutions such as the SS, SD (its intelligence division), and Gestapo (secret state police), which were forever eager to expand their clandestine activities beyond German borders. Quite to his surprise, the officer, Nikolaus Adolf Fritz Ritter, then thirty-eight, was assigned to found and lead a new office of air intelligence at Abwehrstelle (or Ast) Hamburg, the post with primary authority for military espionage targeting Great Britain and the Americas. Ritter would be responsible for organizing a network of agents to supply the Luftwaffe with “everything that could be procured in terms of technical and military information . . . to make up for lost time,” as he later wrote.

Nicknamed Fatty by at least one of his future spies, Ritter was the pampered scion of an aristocratic family from Lower Saxony, his father a severe college president who exemplified Prussian ideals of honor and duty, his mother a blue-blooded eminence never seen in anything but prim dresses with ankle-length petticoats. Yet the Ritters were a playful bunch, known for marching into the picturesque countryside around the Aller River for afternoon picnics and holding actual pissing contests among the males to see whose stream of urine could fly the farthest. Nikolaus, the oldest of six children, possessed an entitled air that prevented him from taking orders from anyone he regarded as his social inferior. He was schooled at a Prussian military academy, served as an officer during World War I, went to business college after the war, and wound up as a manager of a textile plant in Silesia with 250 employees.

But in the wake of a hyperinflation episode of such phantasmagorical severity that a single American dollar was worth 4.2 trillion marks before it crested, Ritter decided to leave behind the instability of the pre-Nazi Weimar Republic and move to the United States at age twenty-four in 1924. He claimed that after a period of youthful escapades (a cross-country trip with friends in an old Dodge included an extended visit to the Menominee Indian Reservation in Wisconsin) he knuckled down to a “steady, work-filled life” in New York, an assertion that would’ve been challenged by his wife, an auburn-haired schoolteacher from the backwoods of southeast Alabama whom he wed in 1926. Aurora Evans Ritter, who came from hardy, Bible-preaching stock, worked long hours as an English-language instructor in metropolitan-area schools and minded their two children of American citizenship (Klaus and Katharine) while he supped in private clubs in Manhattan with a circle of eccentric reactionaries who welcomed the rise of Nazism because they were “utterly convinced that Communism was the greatest threat to America and, on that score, they totally agreed with Hitler’s policy,” he wrote in his 1972 German-language memoir. Mrs. Ritter would recall to her children in later years how he “loved parties and glamour,” never sat down to a meal in less than coat and vest, and positively reveled in the image of himself as a lead player in the center of a drama. “He simply could not resist the temptation of adventure,” said his daughter, Katharine.

After twelve years during which he developed a near-perfect grasp of idiomatic American English, Ritter returned with his family to Germany, apparently at the invitation of Hitler’s military attaché in Washington, Friedrich von Boetticher, who told him that the foreign office of the Armed Forces High Command was interested in his services. Ritter was impressed with Hitler’s rise to power, believing that the German people were at last able “to breathe freely because, after so many horrible years of subjugation and unemployment, order and work had returned.” By the autumn of 1936, he was living with his wife and children in Bremen and serving as a staff officer for the Wehrmacht. Soon after his surprise assignment to the Abwehr, he was promoted to captain and transferred from the army to the air force. On or about February 1, 1937, he entered the squat gray structure on Sophienterrasse that housed Ast Hamburg and was shown to an office that contained a desk, a chair, a typewriter, and “an empty cupboard,” as he later said during a postwar interrogation with British intelligence. He was so disheartened that he immediately asked to be sent back to Bremen, only to be told “to stay and do my best, for I would find it most interesting and satisfying work,” he said. A fellow spymaster took pity on him and dropped a gift into his lap. He told him about a man known as Pop, a New Yorker who had sent over technical documents that the Luftwaffe wasn’t able to decipher. Pop’s package included a note that “assured us that the blueprints were of the utmost importance and that it would be well worth our effort to send somebody over to establish personal contact,” Ritter recalled in his memoir.

But any potential mission to America was put aside during the spring and summer of 1937 as Ritter immersed himself in the espionage trade. He was schooled in the latest microphotography techniques to create tiny reproductions of documents and in less cutting-edge “invisible ink” methods to disguise secret messages within ostensibly routine letters. He combed English-language newspapers and magazines for news on the aircraft industry (an often fruitful source of information) and took research trips to Luftwaffe installations to learn about the latest advancements. Posing as a glad-handing businessman with an international clientele, he began meeting with potential recruits, first in Germany and then (using fake passports for each country) in Belgium, Holland, and Hungary, and succeeded in finding a handful of individuals to infiltrate England. Ritter sought “Germans or people of German origin, although here again we had to be cautious because they were not only a suitable target for us, they were also in the crosshairs of the counterintelligence service of the country in which they lived,” he wrote. To his contacts, he was known variously as Dr. Rantzau, Dr. Renken, Dr. Weber, Dr. Rheinhardt, Dr. Leonhardt, or Dr. Jantzen. By the fall of 1937, Ritter was given a larger office and a second secretary to handle his increasing volume of work.

As he settled into his new routine, his eyes fell upon one of his clerical assistants, Irmgard von Klitzing, who was just twenty-four, from a prominent lineage that appealed to his grand sense of himself, and a member of the Nazi Party. She, too, was smitten. He “looked so American” as he “shook hands with everybody” and “raced through the hallway in his light-colored raincoat and frightfully bright-gray Stetson hat,” she later recalled. Ritter often brought Ms. von Klitzing home for dinner at the family residence on the Alster Canal, and Mrs. Ritter found that she quite enjoyed the young lady’s company, oblivious to the fact that she was hosting her successor. The marriage was doomed, not least because Ritter, who was coming to like his new life of glamorous subterfuge, knew he couldn’t be comfortable in the military hierarchy while married to a foreigner. His explanation in his memoir was that “as an American” his wife had “no understanding for my kind of work nor for the extraordinary stress to which I was exposed as a result of my duties.” When the divorce was “delivered” on November 11, 1937, according to court documentation, it was on the legal grounds of “sexual incompatibility.”