Oscar Carl Pfaus (born Oskar Karl Pfaus; born January 30, 1901) was a German immigrant who became an American citizen through military service. He had a succession of jobs before becoming involved in pro-Nazi organizations in Chicago in the early 1930s and becoming a full-time Nazi propagandist there. He was also active in New York.
He returned to Germany in 1938 to work in propaganda for the Deutscher Fichte-Bund with responsibility for Ireland, the United States, and Canada, attempting to cultivate ties in the U.S. through correspondence with Irish-Americans and anyone who might be sympathetic to German interests. His letters were extensively quoted in the proceedings of the Dies committee on Un-American Activities in 1939.
He was recruited to the Abwehr, the German military intelligence agency, which sent him to Ireland in 1939 to make contact with the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and others who might help Germany. The Abwehr eventually sent an agent to the United States who arranged for the IRA to carry out acts of sabotage there.
Pfaus was active in espionage in Paris in 1941 and 1943, and in 1944 he was at Stalag 357, a prisoner of war camp in Thorn, Poland, where he described his role as "camp leader and interpreter". He later served in Czechoslovakia. In 1949, he said he was anti-Nazi and described the Nazi regime as "the former Prussian regimes of terror"."Still Awaiting New Germany" , Oscar C. Pfaus, Vancouver Daily Province, August 3, 1949, p. 4. Retrieved from newspapers.com January 20, 2020.
Early life Oskar Karl Pfaus was born in Illingen, Baden-Württemberg,"Pfaus, Oskar Karl" in Germany, on January 30, 1901.Stephan, Enno. (1961) Spies in Ireland. Harrisburg: Stackpole. p. 23. He emigrated to the United States in 1924 and anglicised his name. In 1929, an Oscar C. Pfaus is recorded as having married Sybilla C. Grutler in Cook County, Illinois.Oscar C Pfaus Illinois, Cook County Marriages, 1871-1920. Family Search. Retrieved January 19, 2020.
In his letters, Pfaus said he had served in the United States Army, in the Sixth Corps at Fort Sheridan, Illinois, and at Camp Custer, Michigan. According to author Ladislas Farago, he had also been a hobo and had worked as a forester, a prospector, a cowboy, and a policeman in Chicago where he learned about undercover work in the fight with organized crime.Farago, Ladislas. (1971) The Game of the Foxes. New York: David Mckay Co. p. 511.
At the time of the 1930 census, he was living in Chicago and working as a machinist. He had filed papers for naturalization as an American citizenOscar C Pfaus United States Census, 1930.Family Search. Retrieved January 16, 2020. and according to evidence later given in Congress, obtained it due to his military service.Un-American Propaganda Activities, Appendix Part VII, First Section-Nazi Activities, p. 31.
Activities in the United States
Pfaus became active in pro-Nazi activities in the early 1930s and at least initially was not an official agent of the German government which at that time was not interested in developing spies in the United States. According to Ladislas Farago, in Nazism he at last found a cause "worth fighting for" and he accompanied his devotion to it with the development of a philosophy of "Global Brotherhood" for which an acolyte was said to have nominated him for the 1932 Nobel Peace Prize.Hull, Mark, M. (2002) Irish Secrets: German Espionage in Wartime Ireland, 1939–1945. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. p. 305. "Antrag auf Nobelpreis-Verliehung an oscar Pfaus", California Journal, February 26, 1932. He does not appear, however, in the official list of nominations.Explore the archives. Nobel Prize. Retrieved January 31, 2020.
In Chicago he was a member of the Germania Club of Chicago along with ardent Nazis Walter Kappe and Heinz Spanknöbel"Ethnic Germans as an Instrument of German Intelligence Services in the USA, 1933-45" by Cornelia Wilhelm in and was the Chicago leader of the Friends of New Germany that was founded by Spanknöbel in 1933.
In New York, he joined Ignatz Griebl's not very secret cell of fledgling spies there in 1934 with Axel Wheeler-Hill and another man. The cell was created on the initiative of Grieb who had written to Joseph Goebbels in Germany offering his services as a spy. None of the members had access to secret information at that time and according to Ladislas Farago they were jokingly known among the wider circle of Nazi sympathisers as "Dr. Griebl's undercover boys", although Wheeler-Hill later became a member of the more significant Duquesne Spy Ring.Farago, pp. 24–26. Pfaus also started a Nazi group in New York with the Swedish-born Olov Edvin Tietzow, founder of The American Guard.Carlson, John Roy. (1943) Under Cover: My Four Years in the Nazi Underworld of America. New York: Dutton. p. 418.
He edited the Chicago Weckruf und Beobachter, a forerunner of the Deutscher Weckruf und Beobachter, the official newspaper of the German American Bund,Wilhelm, pp. 47–48. the successor organization to the Friends of New Germany, and was a columnist for Pittsburgh's Der Sonntagsbote. Records of the NSDAP (Nazi Party) show that in 1936 he was an informant for the Reichspressestelle (Reich Press Office) on German matters in the United States.MA 604 / 2. EHRI. Retrieved January 16, 2020.
Pfaus returned to Germany in 1938 at the suggestion of Tegeliss Tannhaeuser, the German consul in Chicago, to head the American-Canadian-Irish section of the Deutscher Fichte-Bund, the Nazi propaganda agency in Hamburg. Around the same time, he became an agent for the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service, with the code name "Stier" ("Bull").
Mission to Ireland, 1939
In 1939 and throughout the Second World War, Ireland was not a strategic priority for the Germans. Officially, the Abwehr had banned contact with anti-government groups in Ireland although in practice there had been some limited contact with the IRA and Irish nationalists from which the Abwehr had concluded that the IRA was too weak to form a credible partner against Britain. On January 12, 1939, the IRA set out to raise its profile with Germany and to establish a working relationship with the Nazis by sending an ultimatum to Lord Halifax, the British foreign secretary, that if British troops were not withdrawn from Ireland within days, further action would be taken. The IRA subsequently declared war on Britain and began a series of bomb attacks in England on January 16 under the S-Plan or Sabotage Campaign.Duggan, John P. (1989) Neutral Ireland and the Third Reich. Dublin: Lilliput Press. pp. 59–61.
Accordingly, in February 1939, Abwehr II, the department responsible for relations with discontented minorities, sent Oscar Pfaus to Ireland under the cover of being a journalist for a German newspaper to make contact with the IRA, the first of 13 agents they sent in 1939–43. He received a briefing from Franz Fromme, whom the Abwehr regarded as an expert on Ireland, and travelled via Harwich, London, and Holyhead, arriving at the coastal town of Dún Laoghaire, county Dublin, on February 2 or 3, 1939 by the mailboat CambriaO'Donoghue, David A. (1995) Hitler's Irish voices. The story of German radio's propaganda service, 1939–1945. Dublin: DORAS. and staying until February 14. The British authorities warned the Irish that he was coming but Irish intelligence did not keep him under close surveillance as they thought he was travelling only to spread propaganda.Carter, pp. 101–103. On arrival, he made his way to Dublin city where he rented a room in a boarding house.
The Abwehrs level of knowledge about Ireland was shown by the fact that Pfaus's designated contact was Eoin O'Duffy, a fascist and former Blueshirts leader, but by then, unknown to the Abwehr, a staunch opponent of the IRA. O'Duffy refused to help but Pfaus was able to contact the IRA through O'Duffy's secretary, the fascist sympathiser Liam D. Walsh who knew Maurice Twomey, a former IRA Chief of Staff. Twomey took Pfaus to a Dublin safe house while his status was established and that having been done, Pfaus met IRA leaders Seán Russell and Jim O'Donovan as well as other IRA members. O'Donovan later described Pfaus as a "real S.S. type". It was agreed that an IRA man would visit Germany for further discussions and a £1 note was torn in half for identification purposes with the visitor to take one half and Pfaus to keep the other. O'Donovan subsequently visited Germany three times in 1939.
As well as the IRA, Pfaus was also able to meet individuals from the wider Irish nationalist and republican movements which contained strands of pro-fascism, anti-Semitism, and anti-communism.'Oh here's to Adolph Hitler'?…The IRA and the Nazis. Brian Hanley, History Ireland, Vol. 13, No. 3 (May/Jun 2005). He met the anti-Semite and anti-democrat William J. Brennan-Whitmore and Liam Walsh, both members of the executive committee of the tiny Celtic Confederation of Occupational Guilds (CCOG), but of interest to the Abwehr, and arranged for Walsh to visit Germany, where he promised to use the CCOG to back German interests. Another of Pfaus's contacts was Maurice O'Connor, an Irish railway clerk who had visited Germany and was pro-Nazi and later took a significant role in the CCOG as it became more radical. O'Connor drew up a pamphlet titled "Who is your enemy?" that was adapted from Pfaus's "We Accuse!", originally published in Chicago.
As a result of Pfaus's visit, the IRA established better connections with the Germans, but they never acquired the munitions and wireless equipmentOne transmitter was obtained and quickly seized that they hoped for, while the Germans were never able to persuade the IRA to launch a full assault on Northern Ireland to divert British troops away from the mainland, meaning that there were few concrete results of the collaboration. The German agents that followed Pfaus into Ireland during the war proved ineffectual at best and incompetent at worst, such as Walter Simon, who was briefed by Pfaus and arrived in Ireland with a list of 2,400 people who the Abwehr thought might be good contacts. Soon after arrival, he got drunk and was arrested with the list, which the Irish used to round up potential subversives.Carter, pp. 191–194. Pfaus's visit and subsequent contacts with the IRA did, however, allow the Germans to become acquainted with IRA support and operations in the United States and in due course to send an agent, Karl Franz Rekowski, to the U.S. where he arranged for the IRA to carry out sabotage attacks such as the 1940 attack on the Hercules Powder Company plant in New Jersey, in which 52 people died and a further 50 were injured.
Deutscher Fichte-Bund
Back in Germany, as part of his propaganda activities for the Deutscher Fichte-Bund (DFB), Pfaus wrote ingratiating letters to contacts in the United States who he thought might be sympathetic to Germany, adapting his approach according to their background and interests, such as being Irish-AmericanDuggan, p. 149. and therefore perhaps not supportive of the British Empire, or anti-Semitic or anti-communist. His letters were extensively quoted from in the proceedings of the Dies committee of the U.S. Congress's House Un-American Activities Committee in September and October 1939:
In March 1939 he wrote to one correspondent about a possible visit to the U.S. for the purpose of "studying Irish-American folklore" and seeking to be introduced to "influential Irish-Americans".Un-American Propaganda Activities, p. 6205. In May he wrote to another about the threat to Christianity from the alliance of England and France with its "arch-enemy", "Red Russia", and the role that Irish-Americans could play in protecting American ideals from a "Jew-British-Red combination", a position that was soon undermined after Germany itself formed a pact with the Soviet Union.Un-American Propaganda Activities, p. 6201.