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Everyone I’ve told about Family of Spies has had their jaw drop, and rightly so. In short: an American journalist finds out that the paternal grandparents she heard very little about growing up were… Nazi spies.
Yeah, that would be mind-blowing. Christine Kuehn spent a couple of decades deciding what to do with the information she learned. First, when she got enough facts to confirm the initial news, she began a lot of research to learn more. Archives, letters, phone calls. She bought books. Books and files stacked up around her house.
Then finally she decided a few years ago to go ahead and write Family of Spies. Her father and his siblings had suffered from staying quiet, she concluded after years of observation. Sharing the information, opening wide the door on the skeletons moldering in the closet, would be better.
So we have this fascinating nonfiction book. Kuehn writes a compelling narrative nonfiction account that dives deep into all the information she gathered over those couple of decades.
Her father’s parents, Otto and Friedel Kuehn, were Germans who heartily embraced the Nazi movement in the years leading up to World War II. Otto tried to get some big roles in the party, but a series of events led to him being sent by the Nazis to help their allies the Japanese in Hawaii.
Otto and Friedel actively collected information for about five years before the infamous attack on Pearl Harbor. They were paid over a million dollars in today’s currency and still lived beyond their means. Rather than keeping quiet and staying unobtrusive, they spent big, bought several houses, entertained, and were featured in the newspaper gossip columns. Somehow, despite their non-spy-like ways, they did succeed in getting important information for the Japanese.
And it was their information, their signals from the house up in the hills where they lived, that led to December 7, 1941. To the deaths of thousands. To the rounding up and interning (by Americans) of Japanese, Germans, and Italians living peacefully and innocently in Hawaii.
The information devastated Kuehn, but she wrote a book that is hard to put down and is, in its detailing of the rise of Nazism in Germany and the murder of millions, yet another reminder today of what we have to recognize and resist in politics.
There’s so much I could share about Family of Spies, but instead I will simply say, read this book.
Rated: Mild. There is no profanity, and a few uses of the name of Deity. Violence includes descriptions of the injuries and deaths that occurred during wartime, particularly in Pearl Harbor, and references to what occurred in Nazi Germany. Sexual content includes some references to affairs but no details.
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*I received an ARC in exchange for my honest review.
