https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15332917/nazi-family-photo-secret.htmlThe family photo in my email inbox shook me to my core. It exposed a Nazi secret so sickening, I told my husband: 'I don't want to do this anymore'
By HARRIET ALEXANDER, US SENIOR FEATURES WRITER
Published: 00:44, 2 December 2025 | Updated: 16:01, 2 December 2025
Christine Kuehn had been digging into her family history for over 25 years when a photograph landed in her inbox and stopped her in her tracks. The black and white picture from 1937 was of her uncle, Leopold, on his wedding day in Berlin. The bride wore a white flowing gown and carried a bouquet of flowers. The 25-year-old groom wore something far more sinister: a black uniform, with a swastika proudly displayed on his arm. 'I'll be honest, I said to my husband: "I don't want to do this anymore,"' said Kuehn, 62, speaking to the Daily Mail from her Maryland home. 'Before it had all just been words on a page; reading the National Archives; reading books. But to see my own family member in a Nazi uniform hit me at my core to think that I could be related to someone that would think that way about other human beings. That was really, really hard for me.'
Yet something stronger than the revulsion and shame sparked by that photograph propelled her forward. It was the sense, Kuehn said, that it was finally time to lift the lid on her family's devastating past. The result is 'Family of Spies,' published on November 25. In it, Kuehn, a journalist and mother to two sons and a daughter, chronicles her family's extraordinary Nazi past and the devastating role her grandfather played in Pearl Harbor, America's 'Day of Infamy.' Perhaps most astonishing is the story of her aunt Ruth, who she knew as an elderly woman still striking-looking and rather intimidating who lived in a retirement community in Charleston, South Carolina. For several months in 1935 Ruth, then just 19, was the mistress of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda chief. Her teenage entanglement with the married Nazi commander altered the course not only of her family's history but of America's as, along with other family members, she aided and abetted the Japanese strikes on Pearl Harbor. Kuehn questioned her aunt about that history, but Ruth always shut her down. 'You have a good life. You don't want to ruin it with the past,' she told Kuehn during their first ever meeting, in 1987, when Ruth was 72.
Kuehn had caught sight of a black and white wedding photo, of the people she suspected were her grandparents, and asked Ruth to tell her more. 'You don't need to know about them,' said Ruth. 'Don't ask me anymore. You have a good life. Nothing good can come from it. You don't need to know about the family, the past, or Pearl Harbor.'
Her words haunted Kuehn, who couldn't shake her need to know more. In 1994, she embarked on her 30-year quest for the truth. Ruth's story began back in Berlin, Germany. Her mother, Friedel, was in a relationship with a well-known architect, and gave birth to Ruth in 1915. But they broke up, and in 1920 Friedel married a businessman, Otto Kuehn, who raised Ruth as his own. By the time Ruth was in her mid-teens her stepfather and older brother Leopold had become passionate supporters of the recently elected Adolf Hitler. Otto and Leopold saw Hitler speak in 1930 at Kiel, on the Baltic Coast: Otto joined the party the next day, while Leopold signed up to join the Storm Troopers. Friedel became a member of the women's league; Ruth followed suit and joined the Hitler Youth. Leopold rose rapidly through the ranks and established the family on the Nazi social scene. It was he who invited his teenage sister to the 1935 gala hosted by Goebbels, where the 37-year-old propaganda chief was enchanted by the 'young, pretty, high-spirited' Ruth. The pair became lovers. But, several months later, Goebbels discovered that Ruth's biological father was Jewish. He called off the relationship and needed her 'gone,' Kuehn writes: the Nazis were about to enact the Nuremberg Laws, which outlawed sexual relations between Germans and Jews. By the end of the year, the family had vanished from Germany. Otto, Friedel, Ruth and her younger brothers Eberhard (Kuehn's father), then nine, and two-year-old Hans all traveled to Hawaii. Only Leopold, by then a high-ranking Storm Trooper, remained. Kuehn had always known that her father grew up in Hawaii, but she had never known how he got there. Her research revealed that Otto and Friedel had been dispatched to the American state on Nazi orders, to assist the Japanese with their spying on Pearl Harbor. Over the course of three years, from 1936 to 1939, Kuehn's grandfather Otto was paid the equivalent today of over $1 million for his work. He was committed to it as were his wife and teenage daughter, Ruth. In the early days of researching her family, Kuehn had come across a section on Ruth in a book entitled 'The World's 30 Greatest Women Spies.' 'There, in black and white, right next to Mata Hari, was aunt Ruth,' she writes. 'My sweet little old aunt Ruth? I thought. It was more than shocking.'
She discovered how her family hosted lavish gatherings at their Hawaiian home, milking their guests for gossip about the nearby military base. Friedel and Ruth set up a hair salon, where they would listen intently while the wives of the military men chatted freely about the goings on at Pearl Harbor. The FBI was monitoring their activity closely, wondering how the family with no discernible income could live so luxuriously. And they were hardly subtle. In January 1941, the gossip column of The Hawaii Sentinel wondered 'when the deportation of the local Nazi family is going to be announced' and 'what the little lady of the trio [Ruth] was up to in her playing around with the local gold braid boys.'
Otto even built a dormer window on his house, looking out across the bay, so he could signal to the Japanese submarines when they came to launch their attack. 'She was such an enigmatic figure,' writes Kuehn of Ruth. 'It was tough to reconcile the woman I had come to know with the tales of her scandalous affairs with Nazi henchmen and femme fatale–style espionage pursuits.'
The 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, orchestrated with Otto's help, brought all their worlds crashing down. His work contributed to the death of 2,400 Americans and forced the United States to enter the Second World War. 'I felt as if I was sinking into shock,' writes Kuehn of the discovery. 'My sweet aunt Ruth signaling to Japanese bombers from the house my father grew up in, and conspiring to kill American sailors, launching the United States into a horrific war that decimated millions? My grandfather plotting the downfall of my country? It couldn't be true.'
But as she plowed through hundreds of pages of FBI files and Justice Department documents, the truth was undeniable. Otto was the only person ever tried for his role in the attack. Kuehn's father, Eberhard, then 15, and his nine-year-old brother Hans were forced to testify against their father, who half-heartedly admitted his crimes but showed no remorse. 'I know I am in a certain sense guilty,' Otto told the court. 'I know I never should have done what I did. The thing is, I should have reported immediately to the United States authorities when I heard the Japanese were trying to contact me. I don't feel to be a criminal. That's all, sir.'
He was sentenced to death by firing squad, but found his sentence challenged on the grounds that America was not at war at the time he was spying, so the military tribunal was the wrong place to have tried him. He was sent to Ellis Island for several years awaiting deportation to Germany but, in another twist, was released from the island in 1948 and lived and worked in New York City, before ultimately moving to Argentina: he died of cancer in 1955. After Pearl Harbor, Ruth and Friedel were sent to a prison camp with Eberhard and his younger brother Hans. Ruth, Friedel and Hans were eventually deported back to Germany Kuehn's father Eberhard, by then 16, refused to go with them and instead joined the US Army. Remarkably, by 1949 Ruth was back in the United States, married to a travel agent and living in New York City. How she managed to be granted permission remains a mystery. Kuehn herself has never managed to make sense of the wild twist that saw Ruth returning to live in a country she had actively tried to destroy. According to Kuehn, Ruth appeared haunted by the decisions she made as a young woman constantly worried that the dark family secrets would be brought to light. She was right to be concerned: J Edgar Hoover himself kept detailed files on her and her family. Kuehn pauses when asked who from her family she'd most like to speak to now. 'I'd really like to have a panel discussion,' she said. 'I wouldn't want to talk to just one of them. I'd love to talk to my aunt Ruth; for her to be able to come clean and tell me, so did you really do this? I don't know if she knew she was Jewish when she was younger. I would like to talk to my grandmother Friedel, because she was the matriarch of the family. I think she knew everything. But honestly, I'd love to get them all in a room, lock the door and say, okay, let's move through this. I want to know how you got here, why you did it, good, bad, ugly, whatever it is. I would like to know that: the why. Was it really just for money? Was it for the Nazi agenda? I would like to ask them, looking back, if you could do it again, knowing what you know now, would you still have done it?'
Her father eventually came round to the idea of her interest in their story. He died in 2006, aged 80. Her aunt Ruth, she is sure, would have vehemently disagreed. She spent her later years warning the younger generation not to look to the past, and died in 2010, aged 95. Kuehn is unsure whether Ruth's reticence was the product of 'guilt or self-preservation' although she is inclined to believe it was to save herself from the ignominy. 'This story for 30 years was stopped and started more times than I can even begin to talk about,' said Kuehn. 'Something terrible would come up, or I would find out some terrible history, and I would pause and say, okay, I can't go. I can't do this anymore. But then I start thinking about what my dad went through, the sacrifice he made walking away from his family, and I felt like it was the right time. Several historians were beginning to reach out about books they wanted to write, and I thought if anyone is going to tell my family's story, it's going to be me. Because so many things have been written in the past that just weren't true.'
The writing was deeply painful, at times, but she is relieved the truth is finally out there. 'I can't tell you how many people read the book and the first words out of their mouths is, I didn't know the Nazis were elected into office. I think we move on, and history kind of loses the pieces we really need to remember. And I think uncovering my family's secrets, or any hidden secrets about a period of time, is really important to make sure that we don't repeat the transgressions of the past.'
Does she have any sympathy for her Nazi relations?
Their story, after all, is tragic. Otto lived out his days in exile, only returning to Germany at the very end. Friedel, who died nine years after her husband, in 1964, never saw her son Eberhard after he joined the US Army; Leopold died fighting for the Nazis while the rest of the family were in prison in the US; Hans, who battled the shame of his family's actions for decades, took his own life in 1974. 'I don't know if sympathy is the right word,' said Kuehn, slowly. 'What I do look at is how quickly they got caught up in it. They went and listened to Hitler speak, who was very charismatic, and joined the Nazi Party the next day, and it bothers me that they would turn so quickly from being a normal family to all of a sudden becoming these die-hard Nazis. I think I have sympathy for my dad. I have sympathy for Hans, the life that they had to live and they had to testify against their father. Otto and Friedel and Ruth and Leopold were grown people, and they made decisions. And unfortunately for a lot of us, they made the wrong decisions.'
