Family of Spies: A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal, and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor
Family of Spies: A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal, and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor
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Christine Kuehn on Family of Spies: A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal, and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
Thirty years of looking away, then a phone call that made it impossibleThe project began not with curiosity but with a warning. In 1987, Kuehn’s Aunt Ruth ended a family visit by forbidding her to ask any more questions about her grandparents or Pearl Harbor. When Kuehn called her father, he explained Ruth away as traumatized. For seven years that explanation held. Then a letter from a Hollywood screenwriter arrived at her Maryland home asking whether her grandfather had been a Nazi spy involved in the Pearl Harbor attack. Her father denied it, hung up, called back fifteen minutes later sobbing, and the secret collapsed. What followed was not a clean decision to investigate but a long, painful oscillation between digging in and retreating.
I never planned on writing a book. The 30 years was an on-again, off-again journey. I would do a lot of research in the very beginning, and then it was really hard. What I was learning was difficult. And I would put it away.
The thing that finally forced a decision was competition. In 2020, a letter from a previously unknown cousin in Berlin brought new information about her grandfather. Then another author called to say he was writing a book about the Kuehn family. Kuehn was crossing the Bay Bridge with her husband when she resolved that if anyone was going to tell her family’s story, it would be her.
Her father’s dementia added a clock to the project that no amount of archival research could replace. He had spent her childhood offering elaborate, harmless fictions instead of the truth: stories about dancing with Shirley Temple, about alligators chasing the family dog. By the time Kuehn was ready to press him for real answers, those real answers were becoming unreachable.
He battled dementia for years. It felt like a race against time because he was starting to lose all his stories.
Even after she committed to writing the book, the voice of Aunt Ruth’s 1987 warning kept returning. Ruth had framed secrecy as an act of protection. Kuehn’s decision to publish required her to reject that framing, which she found herself rejecting and then reconsidering, repeatedly.
To this day, I sometimes hear those words [Ruth’s warning] and I consider keeping it a secret, not telling anyone. But then I think about my father, and what he endured. And how the decision he made not only affected his life but mine.
How she wrote it
FBI files, a photograph, and a father who could no longer confirm the storyThe research started the night her father’s phone call confirmed the secret. Kuehn and her then-boyfriend Mark drove immediately to a Borders Books and began pulling World War II histories off the shelf. She was scanning book after book, finding nothing, and starting to wonder whether the story was as serious as her father had suggested, when she looked over and saw Mark’s expression change.
I was looking through about four or five books. I wasn’t finding anything and starting to think maybe it wasn’t as bad as Dad said, maybe he had some information messed up. And then I looked over and I saw Mark’s face and I could tell he had found something and my heart just sank at that moment.
Mark had found her grandfather in Gordon Prange’s At Dawn We Slept, and then in several more books. The accounts placed the family in an attic over Pearl Harbor, flashing lights at Japanese submarines. Most of those details would later prove to be fabrications that had leaked from a secret military tribunal. Kuehn came home that night and confirmed the family connection at the genealogy library at the Mormon Temple in Kensington, Maryland, finding her grandfather, then her father, then herself.
The FBI files were the richest source and the most treacherous. Many sensationalized details in existing histories had originated as rumors leaking from that closed tribunal, which meant popular accounts were often wrong in specific, verifiable ways. Kuehn’s father told her the dormer-window story, repeated in multiple books, was physically impossible: the windows were too high in a hallway for anyone to stand there and signal a fleet. Working through the contradictions required a discipline closer to legal evidence review than to standard historical research.
It was really trying to take what was in the FBI files, what was in the articles, and then talking to my father about what life was like to be able to pull that stuff together. It was not an easy adventure at all.
Her journalism training pushed her toward the documents and away from her own presence on the page. Her editor had to push back. The moment that broke her resistance to first-person engagement was not a document at all. Among the research materials was a photograph of her uncle Leopold in full Nazi uniform, and it did what no file could do.
Well, I’ll be honest, everything surprised me. And every time I learned something, it was one more tragedy after the next. But I mean — I think Mark would say this too — when I saw [my uncle] Leopold in his Nazi uniform … you know, everything else was just words on paper, all the research we did. But when you saw the pictures, it just came to life.
Accepting what the research showed required a different kind of work, separate from the archival discipline. Kuehn stopped and restarted multiple times not because the evidence was thin but because the implications were hard to absorb. The difficulty was never factual; it was personal.
I stopped and started so many times because, you know, I was having trouble accepting what I was learning.
The personal thread
The moment she felt she had no right to stand at Pearl HarborHer father’s first response to the Hollywood screenwriter’s letter was denial. Her first response, when he finally confirmed the truth, was anger, not grief. That anger took time to move through before anything like understanding could follow.
I think, honestly, I think I was a little aggravated, maybe a little angry that he had kept this from me for my entire life. And so it did take time to move through this understanding.
The research eventually made her father’s silence make sense in a way it never had when he was healthy and she was asking direct questions. Understanding arrived slowly, and partly too late.
Doing this research and really understanding what his childhood was like, and what happened to him at 15 ... now I understand why he made up all these stories, because they were just too hard.
The weight of the family’s history followed her into physical space. At some point in her research she visited the USS Arizona Memorial, the site where 1,177 sailors died in the attack her family had helped enable. The visit did not feel like an act of reckoning. It felt like a transgression.
I didn’t think I deserved to be there, because my family had been involved.
What she wants us to sit with
A boy interrogated at fifteen, and the choice he made at eighteenKuehn’s grandfather, Bernard Julius Otto Kuehn, was the only person tried and convicted in connection with the Pearl Harbor bombing. But the book’s moral center is her father, Eberhard, who was fifteen when the FBI arrived in the night to arrest his entire family. He was detained alongside his parents and interrogated repeatedly, treated as a security threat equal to adults who had been paid by Japan and recruited by the Nazi Party.
My dad had to go through multiple interrogations by the FBI trying to determine what he knew. They thought he was just as big a security risk to the United States as his parents at 15. And I think, who does that? Who puts their kids in that line of fire?
Eberhard eventually wrote a letter declaring Germany was not his home, refused deportation when the rest of his family was sent back, joined the U.S. Army at eighteen, and fought at Okinawa. He never spoke to his mother or surviving brother again. Kuehn frames that sequence of choices as the actual argument of the book.
My father made the decision to walk away from his family. He was a true American, and I’m a result of him and his decisions, not my grandfather’s decisions.
The question she most wants readers to carry is not about guilt but about transformation. The Kuehns were not reluctant collaborators. They converted, and Kuehn wants that process of conversion to be the uncomfortable thing readers sit with, because it happened inside an ordinary family.
The whole family just was transformed by the promises that were being told by Hitler and the Nazi Party.
She is explicit that the book does not argue for inherited guilt, and she is equally explicit about why that argument matters to her personally. The distinction between her grandfather’s choices and her father’s choices is the distinction she built the book around.
I feel like it’s been a journey of personal reckoning, and coming to terms with your family’s past. Because I look at it and I feel like it was a secret, but this is a story that belongs to history, right? It’s not just my story. And I felt like it deserved to be part of the bigger picture.