Part 20

"We have nothing to do with the Consul General--"

"What happened to Willi Sachse who used to be a member here?"

"He is supposed to have gone back to Germany."

"Have you heard from him from Germany?"

"No; I haven't heard since he left."

"You received a letter recently from him from San Francisco where he is watching foreign vessels--"

"Oh," said Schwinn, raising his hands in a helpless gesture, "I know you have spies in my organization."

We talked a little longer--of visits he made to Nazi agents in the Middle West and in New York, of secret conferences with propagandists and spies. But he refused to do any more than shrug his shoulders at all new questions.

"I have said too much already," he said.

FOOTNOTES:

Gissibl left for Stuttgart, Germany, and leadership was taken over by his brother, Peter.

Before McFadden died, I published evidence that while he was a member of Congress he worked with Nazi agents in this country.

As this book went to press, the U.S. Government had just begun action to revoke Schwinn's citizenship, claiming that he had obtained it by making false statements.

Congressman Samuel Dickstein. The McCormick Congressional Committee was frequently referred to as the "Dickstein Committee" because Dickstein had introduced the resolution for the investigation.

During the trial of the four Nazi spies in New York the Federal prosecutor brought out that they also carried orders sealed in brown, manila paper.

Von Buelow has since sold his home and moved into the El Cortez Hotel in San Diego.

At that time working for Henry Ford.

VIII

Henry Ford and Secret Nazi Activities

One of the Chief Nazi propagandists in the United States recently ran in the United States Senate primaries in Kansas and was almost nominated. He is Gerald B. Winrod, who poses as a Protestant minister but has no affiliations with any reputable church.

Winrod, even before he tried to get into the Senate, was one of the most brazen of the Nazis' Fifth Column operating in this country. He has held secret consultations with officials in the German Embassy in Washington and carries on his propaganda under Fritz Kuhn's direction.

Shortly after Winrod returned from a mysterious trip to Germany and held an equally mysterious long consultation at the Nazi Embassy in this country (1935), he organized the Capitol News and Feature Service, with offices at 209 Kellogg Building, Washington. The "news service" supplied smaller papers throughout the land with "impartial comments" on the national scene. The Service was edited by Dan Gilbert, a San Diego newspaperman, and the material was sent free of charge (as is the material sent to the Latin American countries from Germany and Italy). It was of course, deliberately calculated to spread pro-Hitler sentiment and propaganda.

Few who read Winrod's publications realize the extent of his activities. On March 1, 1937, Senator Joseph T. Robinson addressed the United States Senate on what appeared to him to be "unfair propaganda" carried on by Winrod against President Roosevelt's proposed reorganization of the judiciary system. The Senator stated that he could not understand why the issues should be deliberately falsified by a gentleman of the cloth--that it reminded him of the old Ku Klux Klan tactics.

The Senator did not know that Winrod's propaganda against Roosevelt was only part of a propaganda campaign cunningly and brazenly organized by Nazis in this country in an effort to defeat a man who, they felt, was not friendly to them. In this campaign, Nazi agents worked openly and secretly with a few unscrupulous members of the Republican Party in an effort to defeat Roosevelt.

Several years ago Winrod was a poverty-stricken man living at 145 N. Green Street, Wichita, Kansas. He called himself a minister but all church bodies have repudiated him. Without a church, he did a little evangelistic preaching and lived off collections made from his audience. It was a precarious livelihood and often the "Reverend" did not have enough money to buy even ordinary necessities.

Records in several Wichita department stores tell the story of the evangelist's poverty before an angel came to visit him. All the storekeepers with whom Winrod dealt requested that their names be withheld, but signified their willingness to present their records to any governmental body which might be interested in the sudden wealth he acquired after he became an intense Hitler propagandist. In the days of his poverty Winrod, the records show, could afford to buy only the cheapest furniture, the cheapest clothes, and pay for them on the installment plan in weekly payments ranging from fifty cents to two or three dollars a week.

I am reproducing with this chapter several of the installment cards. The reader will notice that as late as 1934 Winrod was paying at the rate of one dollar a week. It was in this period that Nazi agents in the United States were carrying on their intensive campaign, and it was also in this period that Winrod began to harangue his audiences about the "menace of the Jews and the Catholics."

Then one day, the Reverend Gerald B. Winrod suddenly found himself possessed of enough money to go to Germany. When he came back in February, 1935, he had new suit cases, new clothes and a fat check book. The records in the Wichita department stores where he had been getting credit for clothes and furniture show that after his return from Germany he paid all his debts in lump sums--by check. Then he became a publisher.