The great-uncle of the writer Ulla Lenze, a strange Nazi spy in New York

The family of the German writer Ulla Lenze vaguely remembered her grandfather’s brother, who had emigrated to the United States in 1925, years before the Second World War, and who ended up involved in a dark Nazi espionage affair in New York. When in 2014 the author’s mother gave her 180 letters exchanged between Josef Klein, the emigrant, and his brother Carl, who also wanted to emigrate but had to stay in Germany, Lenze sensed that in that piece of family history there was a plot of novel. This is how The Radio Operator was forged, a book published in Germany in 2020, and which arrived this week in Spain edited by Salamandra.

“I read the letters at first more out of private interest, I wanted to understand my family and what that time was like; Then I started researching Josef Klein and found articles in newspapers, but the turning point came when I consulted the FBI files and heard his original voice from the interrogations; “Then I realized that my great-uncle had been involved in something really big and serious,” explains Ulla Lenze during an interview in Berlin.

Indeed, Josef Klein was part of Fritz Duquesne’s spy network that the Third Reich managed to infiltrate in the United States before the war, recruiting mainly German immigrants. On December 13, 1941 – just six days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor – the 33 members of the network had been convicted in court or had pleaded guilty. Klein received five years in prison. The letters to Carl begin in 1946, when Josef was interned at Ellis Island, and end in 1955.

“It was the largest espionage case with convictions in the United States to date; “I was surprised to find that he was almost completely unknown in Germany, while American historians have published books on the subject,” continues Lenze, who chose to reconstruct Josef Klein’s adventures in the form of a novel, because she felt “more comfortable in the language of narrative than in non-fiction.” The events reported and Klein’s involvement in the secret plot are real; His great-niece has worked on them in a literary way and has added the character of the American Lauren to include a love plot.

It all begins when, in the 1920s and driven by poverty in their native Rhineland, brothers Josef and Carl decide to emigrate to the United States. But Carl loses an eye in an accident at the factory, which disqualifies him from being accepted by American immigration authorities, and will later exempt him from fighting in World War II. “If my grandfather Carl had emigrated, I wouldn’t be here,” sighs his granddaughter Ulla, born in 1973 in the Rhineland town of Mönchengladbach.

In New York, Josef gets a job in a printing company and leads a humble and solitary existence in an apartment in Harlem, where he distracts himself by building an amateur radio receiver, with which he communicates with the world. The device arouses the interest of the Nazi spy network and Josef, between naivety and the desire to make money, agrees to transmit suspicious strings of figures to distant Germany. A photo seized by the FBI in the Harlem apartment shows him with the receiver and his dog Pal, who in the novel is called Princess.

The author treats her protagonist with something resembling pity. “Sometimes I feel sympathy for him; Yes, I admit it, because he is my character in the novel and I felt sorry for him, for a poor emigrant who finds himself involved in something that surpasses him, but talking to my mother she always reminds me that Josef Klein worked for the Nazis – he explains –. My mother was an eleven-year-old girl when he was expelled from the United States to West Germany in 1949 and she met him at my grandparents’ house in Neuss; “She remembered many details that I have included in the novel.”

Ulla Lenze explains that she asked many friends to read the original before publication, to ensure that her compassionate view of Klein could not be interpreted as a historical imbalance, or even as an apology for her behavior. “I think that despite everything I judge what he does, what he sees and what he says, I evaluate his behavior; My approach has been to try to understand, not show understanding, which are two different things; I wanted to understand him, because it is important to see how so many people in Germany were part of the Nazi tangle, and it makes sense to look at ordinary people, average people.”

The radio operator, a book translated from German by Carlos Fortea, is the first work by this author to reach the Spanish market. Ulla Lenze, graduated in Music and Philosophy from the University of Cologne, has previously published three other novels in Germany. The last direct news that the family had of Josef Klein was the letter of condolence that he sent in 1978 from Costa Rica for Carl’s death, in which he included a photo of him, that of an elderly man with gray hair.