II. Jesus Plus Nothing - The Ministry of Proper Enlightenment

The Ministry of Proper Enlightenment

He did not want to be one of those who now pretended that “they had
always been against it,” whereas in fact they had been very eager to do
what they had been told to do. However, times change.

—HANNAH ARENDT, EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM: A REPORT
ON THE BANALITY OF EVIL (1963)

Manfred Zapp, a native of Düsseldorf by way of Pretoria, merited a line in the news when he stepped from an ocean
liner onto the docks of New York City on September 22, 1938, a
warm, windy day at the edge of a South Atlantic hurricane. Just a few
words in the New York Times’ “Ocean Travelers” column, a list of trav-
elers of note buried in the back of the paper. By the time he left the
United States, his departure would win headlines.
Zapp quickly established himself, settling rst at the Gladstone
Hotel and later in a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria, surveying his options
for o ce space before moving on to East Forty-sixth Street, just o
Fifth Avenue, where a sta of ten soon joined him, Germans and Ger-
man Americans, a dull-looking lot in whose company Zapp fairly
gleamed.1 He was thirty- ve years old with Berl in behind him and the
sea of Manhattan society before him, and when he spoke, the swells
tittered or growled with approval for the Wagnerian vitality they imag-
ined in his German-in ected Americanese. “I regard myself as having
arrived in the place I always wanted to be,” he exulted.2 His chestnut


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 145
hair was thinning and his cheeks swelled out into jowls, but big bones
beneath and a strong cleft chin kept him handsome. He wore elegantly
tailored pinstripes and shirts of slightly eccentric design. With the arch
of a brow, he made smoking a pipe look more mysterious than
old-fashioned. He was heir to a modest coal fortune, but he did not
consider himself a businessman. He had earned an advanced degree,
but he did not insist on being called “doctor,” in the German fashion.
He thought of himself as a journalist—“a respectable newspaperman!”
he would spit at interrogators after he’d been captured.
Zapp had been given charge of the American o ces of the Trans-
ocean News Agency, ostensibly the creation of a group of unnamed
German nanciers. He had recently left a similiar post in South Af-
rica. “It is of paramount importance,” the German chargé d’a aires
in Washington had written Zapp the month before his arrival, “that a
crossing of wires with the work of the D.N.B.”—Deutschland News
Bureau—“ be absolutely avoided.” DNB was transparently the tool of
the Nazi regime and thus under constant scruti ny. Transocean, as an
allegedly independent agency, m ight operate more freely. “My task
here in America is so big and so di cult,” Zapp wrote the German
ambassador to South Africa a month after he arrived, “that it de-
mands all my energies.”3
What was Zapp’s task? During his American tenure, he itted in
black tie and tails from Fifth Avenue to Park Avenue enjoying the
hospitality of rich men and beautiful women—the gossip columnist
Walter Winchell wrote of Zapp’s “madcap girlfriend,” a big-spending
society girl who seemed to consume at least as much of Zapp’s atten-
tion as the news. He avoided as much as he could discussions of what
he considered the tedium of politics. His friends knew he had dined
with Cordell Hull, the secretary of state, and Roo sevelt himself, and
some must also have known that he had worked quietly—and ille-
gally, if one must be technical —against the president’s reelection.
But one did not ask questions. He traveled, though no one was quite
sure where he went o to. One moment he was hovering over the
teletype in Manhattan; the next he was to be found in Havana, on the
occasion of a meeting of foreign m inisters. Some might have called


146 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
him a Nazi agent, there to encourage Cuba’s inclinations—a popular
radio program, transmitted across the Caribbe an, was called the The
Nazi Hour—but Zapp could truthfully reply that he rarely stirred
from the lobby of the Hotel Nacional, where he sat sipping cocktails,
happy to buy drinks for any man—or, preferably, lady—who cared
to chat with him.4
The fact was that Zapp was a man with little interest in political
machinations. He thought of himself as an empirical man. He loved
details and statistics—his idea of news ran toward almost artistic
stacks of data and systemized summaries of man-in-the- street
interviews—and he considered the conclusions he drew from them
not ideological but factual. He was a commonsense man. Consider
his rebuttal to a widely reported speech by Monsignor John A. Ryan,
the “Right Reverend New Dealer” whose Catholic social justice writ-
ings i nspired much of Roo sevelt’s program. “The German Reich,”
declared Zapp, irritated by the monsignor’s partisan Catholicism,
“with its new conception of the State, is i n the last analysis nothing
more than the national community itself.”5
To Zap p, totalitarianism—the term he preferred to fas cism —was,
once pruned of its absurdities, a sensible and lovely idea. The torches
and the “long knives,” the death’s-head and all that red-faced singing
and table pounding, these activities Zapp did not care for. He actu-
ally preferred life in America, the canyons of Manhattan and the gin-
lit balconies of the city’s best people, conversations that did not begin
and end with barking devotion. “Heil Hitler!” Zapp signed his letters
with this invocation, and a portrait of the Führer hung in his o ce,
but Zapp the journalist was too sensitive a recording device to enjoy
all that arm snapping. If only Manhattan and Munich, Washington
and Berlin, could be merged. It was a matter not of warfare but of
harmony, democracy’s bickering and bile giving way to the “new
conception,” in which power and will would be one.
Within a year, however, Zapp found cause to resist returning to
that ne new system. After a series of unsolved murders and per-
plexing explosions and i ntercepted transmissions led the FBI to raid
Nazi front organizations in Boston, Baltimore, Bu alo, Denver, New


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Orleans, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Zapp’s spartan o ce o Fifth
Avenue, where they found what they bel ieved to be evidence of the
orchestration of it all, Zapp began to reconsider his enthusiasm for
Hitler’s new order. He had failed the Fü hrer. How would his will
judge him? What power would be exerted in the Gestapo “ beating
room s” that Transocean employees had once considered themselves
privileged to tour?
The FBI seized him and his chief deputy and whisked them away
to cold, bare rooms, on Ellis Island, no less, where not long before,
the rabble of Europe had been pro cessed into “mongrel ” America,
land of “ degenerate democracy,” as Roosevelt himself quoted Z app in
a speech denouncing Germany’s “strategy of terror.”6
This last phrase as appl ied to Zapp’s pursuits was perhaps unfair.
“We now know why Nazi sabotage e orts failed,” the Washington Post
would announce after the war. Zapp and his fellow Nazi spies had
been too busy bickering.7
On one side were saboteurs of the “old line,” men who planted
little bombs disguised to look like chewing gum and set giant res
meant to be understood by Washington as arson, skulking and hulk-
ing gures who photographed munitions factories and murdered
German American informants they suspected of disloyalty to their
dishone st cause.
On the other were men such as Zapp. Along with a D.C.- based
diplomat named Ulrich von Gienanth (whom he would rejoin after
the war in Abram’s prayer meetings), Zapp considered the coming
con ict between the United States and the Reich one to be resolved
through quiet conversation, between German gentlemen and Ameri-
can “ industrialists and State Department men.”
Von Gienanth, a muscular, sandy-haired man whose dull expres-
sion disguised a chilly intelligence, “seems to be a very agreeable fel-
low,” Zapp wrote his brother, who had studied i n Munich with the
baron-to- be. Only second secretary in the embassy, von Gienanth
maintained a frightening grip over his fel low diplomats. He was an
undercover SS man, the ears and eyes of the “Reichsministry of
Proper Enl ightenment and Propaganda,” charged with keeping watch


148 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
over its secret American operations. He was, in short, the Gestapo
chief in America. While Zapp worried about his legal prospects in
the Indian Sum mer of 1940, von Gienanth was l ikely waiti ng for
news of a major operation in New Jersey: the detonation of the Her-
cules gunpowder plant, an explosion that on September 12 killed
forty-seven and sent shockwaves so strong that they snapped wi nd
into the sails of boaters in far-o Long Island Sound.8
Von Gienanth did not approve of such gestures. So rmly did he
oppose them as counterproductive, in fact, that he even attempted
to denounce to Berlin the Nazi agents who perpetrated such deeds.
Double agents or worse, his faction suggested, secret Jews bent on
smearing the honor of the Reich.
Von Gienanth’s i nitiatives were whimsical by comparison. Once,
for i nstance, he paid a pilot to dump pro-Nazi antiwar iers on the
White House lawn. He devoted himself to changing Goebbels’s gold
into dollars, and those dollars into laundered “donations” to the
America First Committee, where unwitting isolationists—Abram
allies such as Senator Arthur Vandenberg and America First presi-
dent Robert M. Hanes among them—stumped for recognition of the
“fact” of Hitler’s inevitability.
Like Zapp, von Gienanth considered himself a commonsense man.
And Zapp —Zapp simply reported the news and sold it on the
wire. Or gave it away. To the papers of Argenti na, Mexico, Brazil,
and to the small-town editors of America’s gullible heartland, Zapp
o ered Transocean reports for almost nothing. In some South Amer-
ican countries, 30 percent or more of foreig n news—the enthusiastic
welcome given conquering German forces, the Jewish cabal in Wash-
ington, the moral rot of the American people—was produced by or
channeled through Zapp’s o ce s. On the side, he compiled a report
on Soviet-inspired “Polish atrocities” against the long- su ering Ger-
man people and distributed it to thousands of leadi ng Americans, the
sort sympathetic to the plight of the persecuted Christian. Zapp’s
sympathetic nature would prove, after the war, to be as genuine as
his distorted sense of history’s victi ms.
Not long after Zapp’s capture, the Gestapo seized two American


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 149
reporters in Germany. The United States traded. With a Coast Guard
plane keeping watch overhead, Zapp and von Gienanth sailed with
several hundred other deported fascist agents aboard the USS West
Point, bound for Lisbon.9 When soldiers from the American 89th Di-
vision captured him again in April of 1945 —an occasion for national
headlines i n the United States —he pled his failure on behalf of the
Führer as his defense, as if his ultimate incompetence as a German
spy in America before the war proved that he’d always been a secret
enemy of Hitler’s regime.
But Zapp had been heard plying his version of journalism through-
out the war, broadcasting the “new conception” into Vichy France
along with a bittersweet tune about his forsaken love, America—a
land, he now lamented, thick with gangsters and Jews. A Democratic
congressman from New York demanded that Zapp—along with
“Little Al e” Krupp, the “munitions king” captured that same week
in his eight-hundred-room palace—be tried for war crimes immedi-
ately. Like Krupp—who actually was tried and convicted, but re-
turned to high places by the occupation government—Zapp had a
brighter future to look forward to.
The September 1951 issue of Information Bulletin, the magazine of
the U.S. occupation government, marked Zapp’s next appearance in
the American press. By Zapp’s standards, Information Bulletin was a
publication of crass obviousness—an article in the previous edition
was headlined “I Hate Communism”—but he must have appreciated
the irony of a pictorial feature titled “German Newsmen Tour Army
Bases.” In a photo of twenty-two newsmen gathered around an Amer-
ican o cer at an ordnance depot, Zapp can be seen just to the o -
cer’s right; he looks like he’s rocking back on his heels. His tie is
short, his pants ill tting, and he’s wearing shades —but he still
smiles for the camera, an Aryan Zelig, born again into the Cold
War.10


“There is still a lot of misery in this part of the world,” Zapp wrote
Abram in 1949. “ Every day between one thirty and two o’clock the


150 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
radio is broadcasting the names of lost persons.” What did Zapp do
about it? Nothing. “I say to myself,” Zapp wrote, “carpe diem, enjoy
your life.”
Over the next seven years, Zapp would write Abram tens of
thousands of words, the musings of a man speaking for a nation he
believed to be the war’s true victim. By far the most proli c of what
would grow to be Abram’s deep pool of German correspondents,
Zapp was also the most cogent in his description of Germany’s suf-
fering, and the most plain in his statement of the bargain he bel ieved
Germany still had the power to strike with America: its loyalty i n a
united front against communism—aka “materialism,” radicalism,
and that old byword, degeneracy—i n exchange for desperately needed
American dollars.
Abram was hardly alone in thinking this unwritten contract mutu-
ally bene cial. Such was the deal struck by Harry Truman, the Marshall
Plan the Faustian trade of food for faith made at the hinge between
wars, the one just ended and the Cold War which would stretch across
the next ve decades. But in 1949, nobody believed it would last that
long. “Now,” Zapp wrote Abram as North Korean troops massed along
the Thirty-eighth Parallel in 1950, “everybody sees clearly that a great
war between USA and Soviet Rus sia cannot be avoided.”
Zapp understood as well as any Cold Warrior that the battle would
be fought in faraway places. “Now it is Korea, tomorrow it might be
Formosa, or China, or Indochina.” One day, he feared, it would be
Berlin. He was skeptical of America’s chances. Had not the Wermacht
slaughtered 20 million Slavs? And still they had come, the Red Army
growing in numbers even as the ranks of its dead swelled to the size of
a nation. Hitler could not stop them. German civilians thought the
Americans would succeed where the Reich had failed. “Oh, the Rus-
sians can’t do anything,” Zapp summarized his man-on-the- street in-
terviews. “Because as soon as a war starts the Americans will drop a
chain of Atom bombs from the Baltic to the Black Sea and create a ra-
dioactive curtain right across Western Rus sia.” But Zapp, who under-
stood American propaganda and prom ises for what they were, knew
better. “ This optimistic opinion sounds to me like the whispering


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 151
campaign Dr. Goebbels started at the end of the war, when he spoke of
new decisive weapons, of which nobody knew anything.”
Abram agreed. The “steel bath” of armaments alone would not
protect them. Only the solution that had saved Seattle in 1935 would
su ce. “The totalitarianism of God is the only answer,” as one of the
Cold War academics routinely trotted about by Abram had lectured a
conference of diplomats in 1948. The gathering was the work of
Donald C. Stone, director of administration for the Marshall Plan, a
man who hardly seemed a likely candidate for fundamentalist cru-
sades. Stone was a blue-blooded bureaucrat inspired by noblesse oblige,
one of the many authors of Eu rope’s reconst ruction who never
made headli nes. But in the postwar era he had come to believe that
the West stood for Christ-like perfection while communism was
“ hate” i ncarnate. Stone’s ambition for the Marshall Plan was to con-
form the Western bloc “politically, economically, psychologically,
and spiritually,” to a “global o ensive” of ideas. The idea, for Stone,
was God. “My main use,” he told Abram, “is to try to get the Chris-
tian Spirit i nto [the Marshall Plan]. I have worked at that constantly.
It is vital.”11 In 1948, the newly formed National Security Council
had issued a secret menu of covert actions to be pursued with Mar-
shall Plan funds, with the only restriction being plausible deniability:
“propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including
sabotage, anti- sabotage, de mo li tion, and evacuation mea sures; sub-
version against hostile states, including assistance to underground
resis tance movements, guerillas, and refugee liberation groups; and
support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened coun-
tries of the free world.”12 The most important battlegrounds, Stone
concluded, were the souls of the undecided, who must either give
their absolute loyalty or be destroyed.
Stone, Zapp, Abram. Just three small men in the Cold War, they
might be said to stand in for the three branches of America’s ideologi-
cal army. Establishment Cold Warriors of Stone’s ilk dominate the
history books. Zapp, the al ly with an ugly past, is his dark shadow. But
Abram and the in uence of his fellow fundamentalists would remain
invisible for decades, their in uence unmarked by media and academ ic


152 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
establishments. The role played by fundamentalists in refashioning the
world’s greatest fascist power into a democracy would go unnoticed.
So, too, would the role of fascism—or, rather, that of fascism’s
ghost—in shaping the newly internationalist ambition of evangelical
conservatives in the postwar era.
Between the Cold War establishment and the religious fervor of
Abram and his allies, organizations that came of age in the postwar
era—the National Association of Evangelicals, Campus Crusade, the
Billy Graham Crusade, Youth For Christ, the Navigators, and many
more—one nds the unexplained presence of men such as Zapp,
adaptable men always ready to serve the powers that be. From Amer-
ican Christendom, Zapp and his ilk took the cloak of redemption,
cheap grace, in the words of Dietrich Bonhoe er, one of their most
famous victims. To it, they o ered something harder to de ne. This
is an investigation of that transmission; the last message from the
Ministry of Proper Enlightenment; the story of American funda-
mentalism’s German con nection.


On Christmas Day, 1945, one of Abram’s men wrote him a letter
about the world waiting to be made. “Well, Abram, D-Day is at
hand.” The letter writer, a member of one of Abram’s cells called the
“Lindbergh Group”—possibly that of Charles Lindbergh—referred
not to the actual D-Day, eighteen months past, but to the battle for
what Abram would soon take to call ing the “new world order.”
“We must move now,” wrote Abram’s correspondent. “You have
been raised up for a job like this.”
And yet the following spring God and Abram’s appendix laid him
low, nearly killing him in the m idst of a speaking tour of the Midwest.
Lying on an operating table in Minneapolis, about to go under, he lis-
tened with unfrightened curiosity to the worldly disinterest of his doc-
tors, one of whom thought the sixty-one-year-old silver-haired man
would momentarily “shake hands with St. Peter.” He may have. After
the operation, Abram would say that he had spent his time hovering up
near the ceiling of his hospital room, looking down at his body. Then


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 153
Jesus came and bobbed along next to him, oating on the stale currents
of hospital air. This was not a dream, Abram would insist, but direct
communication. Together they discussed esh and “personality.” The
body, they concluded, is no more than “our means of contact with the
physical world.” Abram and the Jesus of his hallucination had rein-
vented the Gnostic heresy, the belief that bodies possess no essence of
humanity, that esh is meat, the su ering of which matters little or not
at all. Such convictions have very worldly rami cations when wielded
by the powerful —those in positions to make decisions about the suf-
fering of others. Abram, of course, didn’t think about that.13
Abram’s mystical experience marked a transformation in his mis-
sion. Gone were any vestiges of the Social Gospel, any old-fashioned
Christian notions of feeding the poor—food, that is, not scripture—
as a matter of rst concern. The Cold War and spiritual war would
be one in his eyes, but this battle would be ideological, fought for
hearts and m inds, those of the leaders who could set terms for the
unknowing masses. Thereafter Abram’s religion, the faith of the fun-
damentalist elite, would be global in scope, with Washi ngton, D.C.,
“the world’s Christian capital.” Fundamentalism could no longer
simply defend its own ground; it must, as Finney had done, conquer
new territory.
In 1947, an evangelical theologian named Carl F. H. Henry would
publish a startling book titled The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Funda-
mentalism, since interpreted as a reconciliation of fundamentalism
with the postwar world, a eulogy for William Jennings Bryan and
Billy Sunday and the Bible thumpers of old that allowed fundamental-
ism to bury its dead and move on to an easier relationship with soci-
ety at large. And yet The Uneasy Conscience still “ breathes with re,” an
editor of Christianity Today (the agship evangelical magazine Henry
started) wrote just a few years ago, “rejecting the failed theology of
liberalism, discredited by the devastation of two wars.”14
That one could view the ruins of Europe and the dead of Aus-
chwitz, Bergen- Belsen, Dachau—or, for that matter, Dresden or
Hamburg or Hiroshima—and conclude in 1947, or today, that liber-
alism was the problem, that Locke’s tradition of tolerance had led to


154 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
the slaughter, that what the world needed more of was the gospel of
no compromise, was, whatever else we might make of it moral ly or
historically, a bold assertion. It was American fundamentalism com-
ing i nto its own, ful lling the evangelical promise it claimed to up-
hold, no longer defending itself against modernity’s encroachments
so much as expanding into modernity’s sphere. Henry’s call for “pos-
itive engagement” with politics laid the foundation for a pop u lar front,
to borrow a term from the American Left of the previous decade: an
ideological army of common cause, with “Christianity” the battle cry
rallyi ng the troops well beyond the con nes of fundamentalism.
“I believe honestly,” Harry Truman had announced at war’s end,
“that Almighty God intends us to assume the leadership which he
intended us to assume in 1920, and which we refused.” Truman was
a hard-nosed liberal who borrowed heavily from American funda-
mentalism even as he held it at a distance. It took hi m another two
years to fully blend the two in his 1947 “Truman Doctrine” —a man-
date for massive m ilitary aid arou nd the world—on behalf of a Greek
government riddled with fascist collaborators, ghting a civil war
against the very same mountain partisans—communists, indeed—
who had been the chief resisters against the Germans.
Before the war, Truman had been such a devotee of Buchmanism
that he had attempted (unsuccessfully) to corner FDR into an im-
plicit endorsement of the Moral Re-Armament guru. In 1947, Sena-
tor Absalom Wil lis Robertson, a ercely conservative Democrat from
Virginia (and Pat Robertson’s father) met with Truman to invite him
to expand his sphere of piety to the Fellowship’s meetings. Robertson
would tell Donald Stone that Truman seemed excited by the idea,
but nothing came of it. By then, Truman was o cially distancing
himself from MRA lest he be tainted by its prewar enthusiasm for
fascism. It seems more likely that it was Truman’s hardheadedness
that in uenced the Fellowship rather than the other way around,
leadi ng toward a more mil itant realpolitik than Abram, enamored of
pomp and status, had yet imagined.15
Unlike Abram —who considered King Paul of Greece a messen-
ger from God—Truman wasn’t addled by royalty. The doctrine that


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 155
began by making client states of Greece and Turkey, the old “impe-
rial interests” as FDR had dismissed them, was too ambitious, too
abstract, to be starstruck by Europe’s quaint nobil ity. It was at best
and at worst an ontological division of the world into heaven and hell,
with the United States declared to be not only on the side of the an-
gels but responsible for enforci ng their dictums. “Worldwide Spiri-
tual O ensive,” Senator Frank Carlson would call this strategy at a
twentieth- anniversary meeting of the prayer breakfast movement.
He meant to summon the uni ed forces of politics and religion—
power and will, as Manfred Zapp, a propagandist of a blunter re-
gi me, might have phrased the idea. “Moral Doctrine for Free World
Global Planning,” was how another Abram disciple, a Pentagon di-
rector of “ information” named John C. Broger, would frame it i n the
barely secular terms of midcentury Cold War.16
Such was the language of the times: aggressive but vague. Five
years before Carl F. H. Henry published his Uneasy Conscience, the
denominational leaders of America’s conservative Protestant factions
had come together to form the National Association of Evangelicals.
It was an alliance of orthodox fundamentalists, such as Bob Jones Sr.,
and “ free enterprise” apostles, such as Abram’s friend J. Elwin
Wright. The NAE would ght “real dangers” threatening America, a
category of menace su ciently broad that it included both Roo se-
velt’s “managerial revolution” and the separatist fury of fundamental-
ists too pure for politics. The NAE saw socialism and separatism as
opposite ends of the spectrum of the beast known as secularism, which
the NAE considered the unnatural division of believers and Ameri-
can power. “Personal legalisms” —this church doesn’t approve of
dancing, that one won’t play cards—would thereafter be just that,
personal, not to i nterfere with the war for a Christian nation. “Christ
for America,” proclaimed the NAE’s president in his second annual
address. Come on in, said the populist front, whether you speak in
tongues and wave your hands on Sunday or sit on them and tsk, tsk at
the sweat and tears of the holy rollers. Its fundamentalism was not
theological; it was American. The totalitarianism of God, unlike that
of man, welcomed all true believers.17


156 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet

• • •
During the war years, Abram had acquired a new patron, a young-
ish widow named Marian Aymar Johnson, heiress to the fortunes of
both her late stockbroker husband and of her old, Hudson River fam ily.
A lovely if empty-headed beauty raised between Newport, London,
and Manhattan, she was a second cousin to FDR, but her isolationist
politics were far to his right. Before the war, she’d been fond of Buch-
manite house parties, hosting one herself at her Long Island estate —an
event of su cient gossip value to rate an article in Time. Tall and
blue-eyed with a broad, open sm ile, after her husband died she resolved
to develop greater gravitas. She gave up the life of a social butter y for
what she called Abram’s “total Christianity.” Her goal was the estab-
lishment of “spiritual beach heads” from which to evangelize leaders.
Only by accepting the same Christ, the “ Supreme Leader” she had
come to serve, could they save America from communism.18 With her
help, Abram bought a four- story mansion on Embassy Row in Wash-
ington at 2324 Massachusetts Avenue. He hoped it would be a head-
quarters for politicians and diplomats of all denominations, a place for
businessmen visiting Washington (by this point, Abram’s inner circle
included the president of the National Association of Manufacturers) to
share their concerns with brothers-in-Christ in spiritual, not material,
terms. A “Christian Embassy.”19
Abram kept o ces on the third oor, and there was a reception
hall, a library for small gatherings, a formal dining room, and a din-
ing room for servants on the second oor. There were guest rooms
above and drawing rooms suitable for soul surgery—a term Abram
borrowed from Buchman—below. It quickly “became natural” for
ambassadors “looking for a Christian approach and solution” to drop
in for lunch, but Abram delighted even more i n “drifters in from a
pagan legal ism” —what nonbel ievers call ethics—who, sitti ng with
Abram on the back porch during a summer meal, might catch the
“contagion” of the Idea.
A magni cent garden in the back grew upon the green ridge of
Rock Creek Park, the narrow gorge that separated the property from


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 157
the sculpted grounds of Dumbarton Oaks. It was there, in 1944—
the same year that Abram and his wife, Mattie, at last risen from her
sickbed in Seattle, moved to the Christian Embassy—that Roo sevelt
and his advisers began planning the United Nations.20 Abram at rst
interpreted the United Nations as the result of divine intervention
leadi ng the secular world toward international acknowledgment that
the truths of the world’s religions were best summarized in the per-
sonality of Jesus. He turned his weekly congressional prayer meet-
ings i nto lobbying sessions on the organization-to-be’s behalf, and
his most conservative prayer disciples—especially the old arch-
isolationist Senator Arthur Vandenberg, converted to Cold War i n-
ternationalism before World War II had even ended—helped quiet
American resis tance to the endeavor.
History, not his Christ, would disappoint Abram. After the war
ended, after it dawned on him that the UN would not become an
international Christian congress, after the atom bombs fell, after
the Red Army boi led up to the edge of Western Europe and did not
stop so much as simmer, waiting, Abram was certain, for Stalin’s
command, for Satan’s whisper—after he had taken stock of the
war’s victories and defeats, his anxieties and his enthusiasms grew
more warlike than the UN could accommodate. Communism no
longer meant the c reed of i nsu ciently submissive workers; now it
was as great and grand as Luc ifer’s kingdom, an evil empire that had
launched “World War III,” Abram decided. “Most of these commu-
nists are in fact rebels and should be treated as rebels,” he said, wav-
ing the black ag of no mercy for those who disobeyed God—a
sentiment his followers in developing nations would later make real
by murdering hundreds of thousands of leftists. Abram’s fundamen-
talism was polite only within the con nes of Washington; projected
onto the world, it thrived on violence and raised up those most ca-
pable of it.
In 1946, Abram undertook a mission to scou r t he Allied pris-
ons in Germany for men “of the predictable type” ready to tu rn
their allegiance from Hitler to Christ, and thus, in Abram’s thinking,
Americ a. In later years, Abram would say he had gone at t he U.S.


158 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
State Depart ment’s request, and while it’s true t hat the State De-
partment did send Abram and provide any support he needed, it
was Abram who in itiated the trip, writing to Undersecretary of
State Major John H. Hildri ng that the men of the Senate and House
prayer groups had insisted that Abram carry “the Idea” to defeated
Germany. Abram sailed on the Queen Mary in June, launched a
prayer cell of Swiss bankers in Zurich, and ew from F rankfurt to
Berli n on the private plane of General Joseph T. McNarney, com-
mander in chief of t he U.S. Forces of Occupation, to meet with
General Lucius D. Clay, soon to take over from Eisenhower as
military governor. Everywhere, he met with the “Christian forces
of Germany”—those who saw Germany’s su ering as penance for
its embrace of the totalitarianism of a man rather than that of God.
He found them all weeping, he wrote his wife, c rying for thei r
Führer, for the thousand-year Reich in the grave at age twelve, for
the dead and the missing and t he blank-eyed boys who had stum-
bled home in retreat from the Rus sians. In the West he wept with
them; in East Berlin, he prayed with “secret cells” of Christians
determined to overthrow communism. Even in the West, he be-
lieved, “atheistic devotees” of subversion—that is, those with strong
anti- Nazi rec ords, concentration camp survivors—had been ele-
vated by an American military government blind to the threat
posed by its eastern ally. “Nominal membership” in the Nazi Party
was being held agai nst good Christians wit h the necessary experi-
ence to govern. A co alition of leading German churchmen begged
him to intervene, asking only that none but Christians be given
authority.21
In Frankfurt Abram, with the churchmen and the pi llars of the
Third Reich to whom they introduced him, “the most intelligent,
honest and reliable people of Germany,” settled on a plan. They
would provide Abram with a list of imprisoned men, “war crim inals”
according to the view of a certain un-Christian “element” among the
Allies. Abram’s friends i n the military government and back home in
Washington would certify them as “men not only to be released but


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 159
to be used, according to their ability in the tremendous task of re-
construction.” That September, U.S. secretary of state Jimmy Byrnes,
under the advice of General Clay, delivered in Stuttgart a
world-changing address, “Restatement of Policy on Germany.” The
burden of reparations would be lessened, Germany would be allowed
to keep more of its industrial base, and the purge of National Social-
ism would soon come to an end: “ It never was the i ntention of the
American Government to deny to the German people the right to
manage their own internal a airs as soon as they were able to do so in
a democratic way.” 22
In Frankfurt, Abram claimed, God personally revealed to Abram
a key man to quietly help manage the internal a airs of Germany’s
elite: Dr. Otto Fricke, an austere German churchman with an un-
com fortable past. “You are God’s man for this hour in Germany,”
Abram told him.23 Had Abram asked about Fricke’s role in Germa-
ny’s previous hour, Fricke would have begged o explai ning his ac-
tivities during the Third Reich. As a radio preacher, he’d been
recruited by Goebbels to propagandize, charged with explaining to
the German people the decadence of jazz. “Terrible disharmonies,”
he warned. He presented as evidence of moral degeneracy the jazz
standard “Dinah.”24

Dinah,
Is there anyone ner
In the state of Carolina?
If there is and you know her,
Show her!

History does not know if the recording Fricke played for a nation
of secretly thrilled Aryans—the German love a air with jazz pre-
dated the nation’s fetish for Hitlerian opera—was of Ethel Waters,
Louis Armstrong, or a bare-chested, shimmying Josephine Baker.
Abram would not have asked.
He never asked.


160 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet

• • •
If we are to understand the ease with which former Nazis and fas-
cist sympathizers were born again as Christian Cold Warriors, we
must consider for a moment the meaning of memory within the new
religion—Christ at its center, no earthly Führer to serve—o ered
up by the Americans. And we must remember that this religion, a
“spiritual Marshall Plan,” as Wallace E. Haines, Abram’s chief Amer-
ican representative in Europe, called it in a speech delivered at one of
King Paul of Greece’s palaces, was new not just to the former fascists
who received it but to the Americans who gave it, transformed by the
sight of su ering. Not of the Jews, invisible to Abram’s men. Not of
the Japanese—a missionary wrote Abram dozens of letters from the
radioactive ruins, but he never received a reply. It was to Germany,
the front line of the Cold War, that Abram’s heart turned; Germany
that raised for American fundamentalism the question of theodicy: if
God is both good and all-powerful, why does he permit the su ering
of i nnocents? That is a question with which all faiths must struggle—or
learn to ignore.
Abram’s German brethren chose the latter path. In Germany,
after the war, sleep. Hunger and terrible labor, yes, months and then
years of clearing rubble, bent- back human chains of men and women
and children carting away pieces of the country in which they once
lived brick by brick. But it was starving, red-eyed slumbering work,
a dead sleep without dreams. No one could a ord dreams. No one
wanted history, the past translated by the night-mind into a land-
scape of guilt and shame. In Nuremberg, a little girl asked her mother
where the Jews of “Jew Street” are. Hush. There are none, darling,
there never were. In Frankfurt a group of American o cers, concen-
tration camp survivors, and the kind of Germans Abram considered
“subversive” gathered in a small theater standing among ruins on a
darkened side street and screened a twenty-m inute lm they were
considering showing to the German people. More bodies, many more
bodies, great piles of them, and gold, buckets of gold teeth, and then


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 161
more bodies, joyful, cheering, marching Germans at torch-lit rallies,
and a voice-over in German, “You remember, I was there, you were
there . . .” The lights came up in the theater, and the Americans and
the German subversives promised one another, “This we will show
to every adult German. We will make attendance compulsory.” The
lm played in every theater; but in the dark, Germany shut its eyes,
literally, millions squeezing theirs shut until the short lm was over
and the main feature came up, a romance, a comedy, a subtitled
Western. Anythi ng but the German past.25
“At times,” a German named Hans Kempe wrote Abram, “ there
are hours when I have to lie on the oor, as I can go no further.”
Kempe ran a camp for 500 German men displaced by the war, men
to whom Abram in America was drawn. They were once so strong
and now so broken. Kempe sent Abram stories: one man, a former
government o cial—a Nazi o cial, but what does that mean
anymore?—came to Kempe and told him he could no longer believe
in a God who would allow Germany to su er.
Their su ering was sweet. They had no fat and no meat, Kempe
reported, but they’d gotten hold of sugar. That was thei r food. Kempe
worked fourteen hours, eating sugar, and then collapsed. He lay on
the oor, staring at the ceiling. There angels gathered. Angels and
demons, “streams of grace” and a monster he called Hiob, sent by
Satan to talk with him. Kempe rose. The men needed a mirror for
shaving. This became his m ission. He dispatched two to beg for one,
and they returned with one and perhaps the men gathered round and
stared at their re ections, Kempe stari ng at them stari ng. “Want,
death, su ering, griefs and cares. Wherever I go, it is always the
same.” He lay on his oor, stared at his ceili ng, waited for Hiob. He
heard a storm coming. His men thought it had passed, but he knew it
was comi ng. They were sleeping, and they must open their eyes, not
to the past, which must be forgotten—put a mirror between yoursel f
and history—but to the future. “Whoever does not already realize
that we are at the midnight hour will awake too late,” he wrote
Abram. “ The storm bells ring loudly.”26


162 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
George Kennan heard them in Moscow. In 1946, the American
diplomat padded through the embassy on a cold Rus sian winter night
and sent his “Long Telegram” to Washington, “an eighteenth century
Protestant sermon,” he’d call it, a warni ng, a prophecy, a prescrip-
tion, the language of diplomacy channeling the spirit of Edwards: we
are as spiders, dangling over the abyss; the ames are rising. The So-
viet Union was greater than the men in Washington i magine. They
could not see what Kennan saw, could not imagine what he imag-
ined, when he lay in his bed at night, staring at his ceiling. The storm
bells rang loudly in his ears, and so he rang them for Washington.
“Containment,” he declared, a great clanging word. “Counterforce.”
The bell cracks. This, say the history books, was the beginning of the
Cold War.27
But for Abram it had al ready started, and Kempe’s demons and
bells were simply con rmation of the crisis he believed had long been
com ing, the notorious “B” of his nightmares now writ large. For
Abram the Cold War began the moment Germany’s defeat was cer-
tain. By the time Kennan published the new creed of containment,
under the pseudonym “X,” the rst great public statement of Ameri-
can strategy, the American vision for the coming decades, Abram
had already been gathering his forces.
“The demand for this hour is for America to awake,” declared
one of his many manifestos, a 1945 agenda for a meeting of govern-
ment o cials Abram had organized. “Awake” —as if warti me mobi-
lization had been nothi ng but a bleary-eyed prayer before morning
co ee. “With faith in God and con dence in t he Christian people of
America, the u ndersigned, representing various national agencies,
believe that the time has come when we should unite our forces in
an e ort to promote such an awakening.” They would do so by es-
tablishing prayer cells rst in every congressional district in the
country and then overseas.28 Germany, on the front lines, must
awaken, not to its past, to its destiny. Even in 1945, when “destiny”
was dust in the German rubble, Abram believed that Germany sti ll
had one. And Germany’s destiny, he was certai n, was in t he hands of
the Americans.


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 163

• • •
Only once, ever so delicately, would Abram raise the subject of
Germany’s recent unpleasantness. In 1948, Fricke wrote to Abram
that he would be sending him a man named Gustav Adolf Gedat, a
Lutheran pastor who had been a popular writer before World War II.
Gedat was the honorary president of the German YMCA, an enthusi-
ast for “ boys’ work,” as it was called. He was a towering man, his
shoulders sharp and so broad that his hairless head looked like a
boiled egg made to stand on its narrow end between them. He be-
lieved as a matter of pri nciple in big grins and bonhomie, but his face
was made for sternness and his soul for discipline; the toothy, lipless
grimace that emerges in photographs from his succession of chins
calls to mind a malevolent giant in a nursery rhyme. At war’s end,
Gedat was a staats end, declared an enemy of the Nazi regime, and on
this basis he built a brilliant postwar career, not to mention a castle in
the Black Forest for his boys’ work, reconstructed with funds from
American backers eager to support “good Germans.”29
Maybe that’s what Gedat had become. But even Abram, deter-
mined to believe in the goodness of all men granted status by Jesus,
wondered otherwise. “We have had some negative reports,” Abram
wrote Fricke about Gedat in a letter marked “CONFIDENTIAL,”
“ because of his former Nazi connections and publications.” Abram
did not care to know details one way or the other. Rather, he wanted
to know if Gedat’s past would interfere with his work for the organi-
zation Abram had by then rechristened the International Council for
Christian Leadership.
“Dear Brother Vereide,” responded Fricke, an unusually intimate
greeting for the German pastor. He thanked Abram for arranging the
attendance of John J. McCloy, the high commissioner of the Ameri-
can Military Occupation, at Fricke’s most recent gathering of “really
leading people.” But, he went on, he could not tolerate such an inqui-
sition. Gedat “ did what we all tried to do in 1933 and ’34,” he wrote,
“ nd a synthesis between the new party and Christianity.” For this,
other German churchmen, “willi ng to be the tools of Satan,” had


164 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
denounced Gedat as a Nazi. Fricke’s “tools of Satan” would have in-
cluded the martyr Dietrich Bonhoe er had he survived, but such
Christian resis tance to Nazism meant nothing to Fricke. T he truth, he
argued, was that Gedat was a victim—of those unwilli ng to forget the
past. “Even if Gedat had been a Nazi—which he has not been—and if
he saw his failures, let us say only in 1945, and if he repented, would
there not be the way of forgiveness from God and men?”
Is this a clue to the actual date of Gedat’s repentance? In 1935,
apparently still searching for synthesis, Gedat gave a speech in which
he declared that “God ordered hunters to chase Jews to where God
wants them.” Two years previous, he had welcomed the new regime
as the kind of full- strength disinfectant needed to rid Germany of
“materialism,” a concern that plagued him well into his postwar
years. Gedat may have hoped that the Christian wing of National
Socialism would triumph over its pagan mirror image.30 When it did
not—the two strands of fascism remained intertwined throughout
Hitler’s regime—Gedat turned against Hitler as a false prophet, a
man bent on usurping Christ’s rightful place at the head of the na-
tion. Gedat took his totalitarianism seriously, could not stand to see
it reduced in the personality of this uncouth little Austrian. He did
not bel ieve the problem with Jews was racial. It was biblical. He did
not believe in a master race; he believed in a master class of key men
from all nations. For this, Hitler banned him from speaking and even
imprisoned him, and then “materialists” shadowed him with accusa-
tions. Yes, Gedat was a victim.
Would Abram join the materialists? Fricke wanted to know. Was
Abram consumed by the “spirit of vengeance,” the “spirit of Morgen-
thau,” as Germans had taken to calling the tough policies of the Jew-
ish American secretary of the treasury, the strongest advocate of
denazi cation? Germans like Fricke struck a delicate balance with
such implicit accusations. All ied justice e qualed vengeance, they sug-
gested, and vengeance was the stu of the Old Testament. Putting
their meaning more plainly would have been disastrous; even Abram
would have recoiled, in 1948, from a German who blamed the Jews
for his current troubles. Abram preferred the positive approach, the


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 165
New Testament, New World, American method: reinvention. He
called it reconciliation. To argue for anything else, he’d insist—to de-
mand justice—was un- Christian.
What did Morgenthau really want? No more than accountabil-
ity. Not every German was a “wil ling executioner,” as the historian
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen puts it—indeed, many were themselves
executed—but the Third Reich was not something imposed on an
innocent German nation, as Abram and other American fundamen-
talists believed, but something it had brought about.
“It should be brought home to the Germans,” declared a directive
from the Joint Chiefs of Sta delivered to Eisenhower in April 1945,
“that Germany’s ruthless warfare and the fanatical Nazi resis tance has
destroyed the German economy and made chaos and su ering inevi-
table and that the Germans cannot escape responsibility for what they
have brought upon themselves. Germany will not be occupied for the
purpose of liberation but as a defeated enemy nation.”31
This attitude, believed millions of Germans, was the true
crime against human it y. They had said they were sorry; wou ld the
Americans behave like Bolsheviks and Slavs—purveyors of “Asi-
atic nihilism,” as one of Fricke’s political allies wrote Abram—and
refuse to forgive? “The world is playing a very dangerous game
with the German people,” wrote Fricke, “if that repent ance is not
accepted.”32
Abram replied i mmediately. The charges against Gedat had come
from the liberal Federal Council of Churches. Not worth a dime. “I
responded by pointing out how natural it would be for a man in Ger-
many to look with hope to any aggressive leadership that could unite
the forces against the Communistic i n ltration . . . I am thrilled
with the progress that is bei ng made in Germany.”33


Gedat was a mong the least tainted of the men that Abram and
Fricke, and later Gedat himself, gathered into prayer cells to help
forge the new West German state. But they were repentant men,
this they testi ed to at every session. Repent ant for what? It was


166 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
hard to say. Every one of them claimed to have su ered during the
war years. Men such as Hermann J. Abs, “Hitler’s banker” and a
vice president of Abram’s International Christian Leadership
(ICL), German division; Gustav Schmelz, a manufacturer of
chemical weapons; Pau l Rohrbach, the hypernational ist ideologue
whose con ation of Germany with Christian it y, and most of Eu-
rope wit h Germany, had inspired the Nazis to understand t heir
war-hu nger as divine; and General Hans Speidel, who had ac-
cepted the surrender of Paris on behalf of the Fü hrer in 1940, in-
sisted that he had never believed Hitler, had been forced into his
arms by the Red Menace, had regretted the u nfortunate alliance
with such a vulgar fool, a disgrace to God ’s true plan for Ger-
many. They had done not hing wrong; they, too, if one gave it some
thought, were victims.
Perhaps some of them were. That is one of the many clever strat-
egies of fascism: persecution belongs to the powerful, according to
its rules, both to dole out and to claim as the honor due martyrs.
Abram did not ask questions; he simply took out his washcloth and
got busy with the blood of the lamb. He scrubbed his “new men”
clean. Did it work? Abs, “Hitler’s banker,” became “Adenauer’s
banker,” a key gure in the West German government’s nancial
resurrection. Schmelz kept his factory. Rohrbach wrote on, author-
ing tributes to Abram’s International Christian Leadership in the
Frankfurter Allgemeine.
And Speidel? He was a special case, a coconspirator with Rom-
mel in the attempted assassination of Hitler, the “July Plot” of 1944.
There was somethi ng almost American about him; like Buchman,
like Barton, he considered Hitler’s racial policies a distraction from
his really good ideas. For this ambivalence, the Allies rewarded him:
he served as commander in chief of NATO ground forces from 1957
to 1963, when Charles de Gaulle, unpersuaded of his reconstruction,
insisted on his ouster.34
Such men are only a few of those whom Abram helped, and by no
means the worst. There were Zapp and von Gienanth, there were


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 167
“little Nazis” Abram championed for U.S. i ntelligence positions, and
there were big ones: Baron Konstantin von Neurath, Hitler’s rst
foreign m inister, and General Oswald Pohl, the last SS commander
of the concentration camps, among them. For those beyond hope of
blank-slate rei nvention, Abram and his web of Christian cells pled
medical mercy (von Neurath, sentenced to fteen years for crimes
against humanity, was released early in 1953; Abram took up his case
upon learning from von Neurath’s daughter that her father, classi ed
as a “Major War Criminal,” was receiving less than exemplary dental
care in prison) or expediency (it was unjust, they felt, that Pohl, who
while imprisoned by the Allies wrote a memoir called Credo: My Way
to God—a Christ- besotted path that did not include acknowledging
his role in mass murder—should be left wonderi ng when he would
be hanged).35
When occupation forces charged Abs with war crimes, he of-
fered a novel defense. He did not deny what he had done for Hitler;
he simply declared that he had done it for money, fascism be damned.
He would gladly do as much for the Al lies. And so he did, a task at
which he so excelled that he would come to be known as the wizard
of the “German Miracle.” His past was forgotten—a phrase that
must be written in passive voice in order to suggest the gentle elision
of history in the postwar years, undertaken by those eager to see a
conservative German state rise from the ashes, a sober son of Hitler’s
fatherland that would inherit the old man’s hatred for one radicalism
but not his love of another.
When, in 1982, the Simon Wiesenthal Center del ivered to the
public a massive case detailing Abs’s crimes—among them the loot-
ing of the Third Reich’s riches on behalf of Nazis eeing to South
America—Abs, not long retired from his spot at the helm of the
Deutsche Bank, must have felt a sense of annoyed déjà vu. Would the
world condemn his nancial machinations for the glory of the Reich?
Then it must also reject those on behalf of capitalism’s easternmost
bulwark in Europe, America’s most crucial ally in the Cold War, the
Federal Republic of Germany: a nation in which the past became the


168 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
crass obsession of “materialists,” those who preferred brute “mem-
ory” to more modern, more spiritual a airs.


“Humility begets power,” Congressman Clyde Doyle of Cal ifornia
preached at a prayer meeting convened by Abram to consider the
problem of “reconciliation” as V-Day approached. Let us take the
gentleman from California at his word. Let us suppose that the politi-
cians Abram gathered to dedicate themselves to the “su ering” of the
German people—men such as Senator Alexander Wiley, the Wiscon-
sin Republican who’d declare even Kennan’s muscular manifesto
“panty-waist diplomacy”; Senator Homer Capehart, the Indianan who
became the most vocal defender of former fascist “rights” after the
war; Representative Walter Judd, the ex-missionary from Minnesota;
and Representative O. K. Armstrong, a jol ly Missourian who thrilled
to the sound of Bavarian oompah bands—were true believers, humble
and powerful and eager to be of service for their su ering brethren.36
Consider Capehart, a Hoosier who’d invented the mass-production
jukebox. “The embodiment of Senator Snort with his vast paunch
and triple chin, a large cigar xed permanently i n his round face,
Senator Homer Earl Capehart was a cartoonist’s dream,” the South
Bend Tribune would later eulogize him. Capehart was no Nazi; he was
a Christian, a spiritual warrior, a red hunter, a vice president of
Abram’s organization, and a member of the Committee on Foreign
Relations. Like Abram, Capehart only wanted to soothe the heart-
ache of the most broken.37 “The rst issue” of the postwar situation,
Capehart declared in a 1946 broadside against an unspeci ed “vicious
clique” withi n the Truman admi nistration, “ has been and continues
to be purely humanitarian.” Capehart spoke of the “tragedy in
Germany”—the rubble of Berlin, the empty stomachs of Hamburg—
with such pathos that one might be forgiven for m istaking which side
he had been on. Subsequent generations of neo-Nazis have done just
that, endlessly recycling his speeches. “Those who have been respon-
sible for this deliberate destruction of the German state”—he meant
not the policies of the Reich itsel f but Morgenthau’s short-lived plan


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 169
to “pastoralize” the fatherland i nto a second infancy—“and this crim-
inal mass starvation of the German people have been so zealous in
their hatred that all other interests and concerns have been subordi-
nated to this one obsession of revenge.” 38
To Frankfurt and Berli n, Senator Snort and Abram and the Fel-
lowship of the Senate dining room sent new suits, so that the Ger-
mans could dust themselves o and emerge from the rubble clothed
like gentlemen, and overcoats to protect them from the chill of a na-
tion that burned what was lef t of its f urniture to stay warm. What do
you need? Abram asked Fricke, promising to take up any matter in
the Senate dining room. “ Though I hardly like to say it aloud,” Fricke
wrote back, “shoes.” So Abram gathered donations and sent shoes.
And he arranged passports, so that restricted Germans could
travel out of their country. In August 1947, he convened at Lake Ge-
neva a council of nations to befriend the Germans, forgiving French-
men and Dutchmen and Czechs and Poles and Britons and a delegation
of Americans led by Senator Wiley, a member of the Foreign Rela-
tions Committee. “Choose two or three promising leaders,” Abram
had advised Fricke for the German contingent. The Swiss m inister of
nance would send the invitations, which the Germans should then
take to a certain American in the occupation government, who would
see to their arrangements for leaving Germany. At the head of the
table Abram placed Alfred Hirs, director general of the Bank of
Switzerland and a key gure in Abram’s Europe an calculations. Hirs
had credentials. His wife was a Bible teacher in Zurich, and his home
was a destination for traveling missionaries. The year previous he
himself had sought out Abram. A Youth for Christ missionary would
recall meeting Hirs at a “Christian businessmen’s” convention in
Washington in 1946, at which Hirs had apparently complained of the
tepid temperature of the religiosity on display. Someone steered Hirs
to the Christian Embassy, where he found Abram and presumably
prayers of a more satisfying fervor.
Hirs was a man in need of consolation. He had come to Washing-
ton not to bask in American Christendom’s good feeli ngs but to ght
over the spoils of war, and it seemed, then, that he was losing. The


170 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
Americans were demanding that he reveal the secrets of Swiss bank-
ing, and worse, that deposits be returned, not to Nazi depositors —
suicides, Argentine exiles, men who would not ask for their
money—but to Jews.
“Do you want to take 500 mil lion Swiss francs of gold and ruin
my bank?” he screamed at representatives of Morgenthau’s Treasury
Department. This sum—500 million Swiss francs in Hirs’s bank
alone, 1.25 billion dollars, money to be fought over for the rest of the
century—no one in Washington had imagined that Hitler had ex-
tracted such a rich vein from the bank accounts, jewel boxes, the
jaws of Europe’s Jews.
Back in Zurich, Hirs found more understanding friends. Nathan-
iel Leverone, the vending-machine ki ng of America, reported on
what he learned in Zurich to American bankers and the National As-
sociation of Manufacturers. The German guests spoke on the need
for solidarity among men of free enterprise if the dollar was to stand
as a bulwark against Stalin’s tanks. Christ or com munism was the
choice they o ered Leverone. By Christ, the German contingent
meant to imply them selves.
And then there was Senator Wiley, a good friend for a man like
Hirs to have. A Republican from Wisconsin, he was a pleasingly
round-faced man of sixty-three years, dapper in a tux, and skilled in
the use of a hawkish eye and a sly smile. He was, more than anything
else, an opportunist: an isolationist before the war when indignant
cries of dictatorship —FDR’s, not Hitler’s—could raise a man in the
Republican Party, but an internationalist after it, when ghting com-
munism won more votes than keeping our boys safe at home. He en-
joyed a pulpit, and he didn’t much care what faith it belonged to. “ The
Jews and the Arabs,” he once declared, “should settle their dispute in
the spirit of Christian charity.” Such a faith had no trouble absorbing
Hirs and the Germans, since Wiley was a deep believer i n the moral
relativism of anticommunism. During the war, he had been an advo-
cate of the Jewish cause, cal ling for a Jewish “foreign legion” of exiles
and Palestinian Jews. Afterward, Jewish gold was of no concern when
weighted against the strength of the Red Army. That threat, real and


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 171
imagined, drove Wiley to distraction. The Rus sians would rape the
womanhood of Europa. In Korea Mao’s Chinese would swarm like
ants. In the union halls of Milwaukee honest Americans would turn
like werewolves into godless monsters. Everywhere, he thought, com-
munism was about to bubble out of its cauldron. He didn’t want to
just put a lid on it; he wanted to blow up the kitchen.
That had already been tried. Europe in 1947, the year of its cold-
est winter in decades, remained a rubble of roo ess buildi ngs and
bridges into thin air. “At night,” one German American returnee
wrote in his journal, “you see ever so often the dim sky through the
walls of a building: the ligree of chaos. Then it seems beautiful in a
weird way and you forget that houses are good only when they pro-
tect people from rain and cold.”39 That thin li ne of indigo was a stron-
ger barrier to hostilities than the “ iron curtai n” Winston Churchill
had warned of.
Senator Wiley wanted total war. Take the men of Hitler’s old
panzer divisions, bless ’em under Christ, and point ’em toward Mos-
cow. Abram’s German point man, Otto Fricke, wasn’t so blood-
thirsty; he merely wanted twenty- ve rearmed German divisions to
slow the Rus sian invasion he saw coming. “What Do We Christians
Think of Re-Armament?” was the theme of one of Fricke’s cell meet-
ings in 1950. They were con icted, tempted to take “malicious joy
that the ‘Allies’ are now forced to empty with spoons the bitter soup
that has been served by the Rus sians.” The judgments at Nuremberg
had dishonored the Wermacht, and the dismantling had insulted and
robbed Germany’s great industrial ists, Krupp and Weizäcker and
Bosch—all well represented i n Fricke’s cells. By al l rights they should
stand down, refuse to rearm, let the Americans defend Christendom
from the Slavs. But there it was: Christendom. They were Christian
men, chosen not by a nation but by Jesus himself to lead thei r people
into the “Order” God revealed to them in their prayers. “To accom-
plish these tasks,” the Frankfurt cell concluded, “the state needs
power and this powerfulness is indispensable for the sake of love.”40
But the Rus sian blitzkrieg wasn’t actually coming. The Soviet
Union quickly realized its interests were best served in Western


172 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
Eu rope by parliamentary democracies, in which communists un-
tainted by collaboration could seize power without a shot red. Or
so Stali n thought. Across the continent in those cold, hungry days,
middle- and upper-class conservatives regained the power they’d lost
to the fascist rabble. They were not, however, mi litarists, at least not
of the operatic breed. The Germans did rearm under Chancellor
Konrad Adenauer, the most pious politician in all of Europe, but
much more than militarization, Germany threw itself into making the
tools of Cold War. It was the nonpolitics of Krupp and Hirs, quiet
men who knew how to hold on to money not properly theirs, that
conquered Western Europe as Hitler never had.
“I am modernizing my factory,” Baron Ulrich von Gienanth,
Zapp’s old Gestapo colleague, boasted to one of Abram’s aides in
1952.41 He had 800 workers in his employ, he went on, men orga-
nized according to Christian principles. And he was opening a new
factory in Switzerland. His ICL brother-in-Christ, Baron von der
Ropp, a “prophet” according to Abram, provided men such as von
Gienanth with a new Christian management theory. Von der Ropp,
before the war a Prussian propagandist for a “greater” Germany, was a
Christian nationalist who had resented Hitler’s cult of personality—a
vulgar parody, he thought, of the Christian destiny for Germany pro-
claimed by Martin Luther. In a stroke of luck, he had been banned
from public speaking just before the war’s end, and on that thin moral
basis rei nvented himself, like Gedat, as an instructor of boys.42
Von der Ropp specialized i n young working-class men, or “the
Stirred,” as he referred to those distracted by “social problems” from
the masculi ne model of Jesus. On one hand, von der Ropp’s religion
was straightforward American fundamentalism, remarkable only for
the t horoughness with which he transplanted it to German soil. But
he also anticipated the middle-class fundamentalism of the Ameri-
can future, the point at which Abram’s upper-class religion and the
popular front would converge. A geologist by training, he preached
that “too much science” would lead to “i ntellectual shallowness,” a
foreshadowing of the claims of today’s fundamentalism, intellectu-
ally critical and anti-intellectual at the same time. He taught that the


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 173
poor, with their demands for government services —which he un-
derstood as a failure to trust that God would provide—were “ the
adversaries of the church.” But not through their own doi ng; rather,
absent some modicum of prosperity, they were too bitter to prop-
erly appreciate Christ’s providence. This, i n essence, was the faith
that would thrive in future decades, when both the cell group and
the megachurch became staples of evangelicalism, the mic roscope
and the telescope of American fundamentalism. It certainly did not
take hold in Germany; but it evidently made an impression on
Abram.
Perhaps, too, on von der Ropp’s fellow aristocrat, Baron von
Gienanth. The two would have met often at Abram’s private conven-
tions of Germans and Americans. The di erence was that von der
Ropp, never a Nazi o cial, could travel and spread his ideas at
Abram’s international meeti ngs. Von Gienanth was bound to the Fa-
therland. This, he complai ned to Abram, was an impediment to re-
construction. He’d wanted to attend a conference in Atlantic City
with further ideas of expansion i n m ind. Would the American mili-
tary really say that a man of his stature would blemish the boardwalk?
He was on a list of undesirables, he had learned from certain
connections—probably ICL men within the occupation. This would
be “understandable,” he thought, if he had been a communist. “But I
don’t see any sense in including people of my attitude”—ex-fascists
ready to make common cause with the United States.
Among the many testimonies von Gienanth collected on his own
behalf was a letter from an American diplomat’s wife who insisted
the baron had not been a Nazi so much as an “idealist.” Eventually,
von Gienanth had bel ieved, “the good and conservative element of
the German people would gain control.” Fascism had been like strong
medicine, unpleasant but necessary to what von Gienanth had always
believed would be the reestablishment of rule by elites li ke himself.
“In the com ing years of reconstruction,” his advocate wrote, “such
men will be needed who can be trusted.”43
Abram contacted the Combined Travel Board that decided on
which former Nazis could be allowed to leave the country. The baron


174 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
was needed, Abram insisted. There were high Christian councils to
be held in The Hague. “Expedite the necessary perm it.”
Should that argument prove inadequate, Abram hired von Gien-
anth’s wife, Karein, as a hostess on call for Americans traveling on
Christian missions. She was an American citizen, though she’d spent
the war with her SS o cer husband. Now her American passport
was being threatened. Abram saved it. That summer, he sent the
baron and his wi fe a gift of sorts: a congressman from California, to
be a guest on the baron’s estate. The following winter Senator Frank
Carlson visited. “As you know,” Abram advised Karein, “ he is one of
the closest friends and advisors to Eisenhower.”
A “serene con dence has lled me,” she replied, “as to President
Eisen hower’s guidance by God.” That summer, her husband ew
with her to England, his passport evidently restored.


The Castle of the Teutonic Order sits on the eastern edge of a smal l
island in Lake Constance, a Bavarian gem at the intersection of Ger-
many, Austria, and Switzerland. Shaped like a sh, the waters are
emerald, sapphire, and amber, depending on the time of day. The is-
land itself, called Mainau, is even more dazzling, the “island of ow-
ers,” a botanical garden formed according to the whimsy of the
Swedish princes who have lived within this fortress for generations.
Since the nineteenth century they have been col lecting blossoms and
butter ies for their retreat, and, most of all, trees, giant redwoods
and cedars from Lebanon and pal ms, more palm trees, surely, than in
all the rest of Germany combined, gathered from around the globe.
The crest emblazoned on the castle is a bristle of swords and
spears and gray ags that resembles a charging, heavy-tusked bull el-
ephant with a purple crown between his great ears. But the castle
itself, raised in 1746 on the ruins of older castles, celebrated as an
ideal of the architectural style known as Southern Bavarian baroque,
looks like a giant cake made of pale orange sorbet. Its walls are
smooth and creamy, its windows like the ornamentation of sugar
cookies. “You would have liked the surroundings,” Abram’s chief


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 175
representative in Europe, Wallace Haines, wrote him in June 1951.
Haines had just presided over an international meeti ng which Abram’s
health had prevented him from attendi ng. Mainau, he gushed, was a
“fairy island,” and the conference, judging by his letter alone, might
have been something out of a fairy tale: owers sculpted into the
shapes of strange creatures, great candle-lit halls, “ divine services” in
the chapel, ornate and glittering as a Faberge egg’s interior.44
The rst meeting at Castle Mainau had taken place in 1949, the
same year the Allies allowed Germans to begin governing themselves
again. The 1951 meeti ng was planned to mark what Abram consid-
ered the complete moral rehabilitation—in just two years —of Ger-
many. Abram wanted the Americans to go to them, a grand contingent
of senators and representatives. Gedat, now the uno cial leader of
the German organization, was thrilled. But when word came that
o cial duties i n Paris prevented the American delegation from at-
tending, he was furious. There was more bad news. Chancellor Ad-
enauer, Gedat’s keynote speaker, was called away to a crisis. And
Abram himself, slowed down by more bad health, would not be
there. His representatives could take notes.45
“For our God is a consuming re”—Hebrews 12:29—was the
conference’s theme. What did this mean? “God is the God of power,”
said one of the rst speakers. God is not the God of ethics, of moral-
ity; God is great, God made this order and chose its leaders. Prince
Gottfried Hohenlohe opened the meeting on a Thursday eve ning.
“God gave me my place in the world,” he told 150 assembled wor-
thies, a statement not of pride, in his mind, but of humility, a mod-
esty shared by his audience, men and women now trained for several
years, through weekly cell meetings, in Abram’s religion of key men
and destiny.
General Speidel was there, as was Rohrbach the propagandist:
There were representatives from the major German banks and from
Krupp and Bosch, and there was the president of Standard Oil’s Ger-
man division. There was at least one German cabinet member, par-
liamentarians, mayors, a dozen or more judges. A U-boat commander,
famed for torpedoi ng ships o the coast of Virginia, cut a dashing


176 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
gure. A gaggle of aristocrats, minor princes and princesses, barons
and counts and margraves, were intimidated by some of the best
minds of the old regime. There was the nancial genius Hermann J.
Abs, and a fascist editor who had once been a comrade of the radical
theorist Walter Benjamin before throwing his lot in with the Nazis.
Wallace Haines spoke for Abram. He stayed up all night before
his lecture, praying for the spirit that spoke aloud to his mentor. The
Americans, God told him to say, were thrilled with the “eagerness”
of the Germans to forget the war. The Americans came to the Ger-
mans humbled, he told them. Haines brought proof of their new-
found wisdom: a letter of repentance for the sins of denazi cation
signed by more than thirty congressmen including Wiley and Cape-
hart and a young Richard Nixon.
On Saturday night, Theophile Wurm, the former Lutheran bishop
of Württemberg, spoke in the White Hall, a confection of gold gilt
dully shining by the light of candles. First there was music, cembalo
and violin, “old music,” reported one of Abram’s Germans, a former
Nazi propagandist named Margarete Gärtner. Blue darkness fell on the
lake, and Bishop Wurm began to speak. All felt sacred, for here was a
man of deep character. He’d been an early and enthusiastic supporter
of national socialism, had helped purge the German church of dissent-
ers, had drawn up lists of the weak, the deformed, the degenerate.
This, as Fricke had said, was simply as they “all” had done. But Bishop
Wurm was di erent; Bishop Wurm did not believe in killing. Not
more than necessary, anyway. This watery conviction, he thought,
made him a “resister.” His identity at the end of the war, when the clock
sprang back to zero in 1945, stunde null, the Germans called it, was his
identity forever. He was the man who wrote Berlin a letter asking the
Reich to spare some Jews. “Not from any predisposition for Jewry,”
he’d written, “whose immense in uence on cultural, econom ic, and
political life was recognized as fatal by Christians alone, at a time when
almost the entire press was philosemitic.” No, Bishop Wurm wrote,
his version of truth to power, “the struggle against Jewry” was correct;
but shouldn’t the Reich rst try to convert them?
In the White Hall Bishop Wurm stood before a great window,


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 177
the snow-covered Alps glowing purple in the dusk. A thunderstorm
rolling in over the lake split the sky and boomed through the castle,
setting the candles aquiver, silhouetting Wurm when lightning ashed.
He spoke of the mechanization of man and the loss of faith i n free
enterprise, God’s delicate weavings, the idea, the promise, that God
helps those who submit totally. The lightning cracked, and Frau
Gärtner, Bishop Wurm, the barons and the generals and the captains
of industry submitted, totally. “We are children of fear,” Prince Ho-
henlohe had proclaimed at the meeting’s beginning, but that night,
forti ed by the spirit of Wurm and electri ed by lightning glaring o
the lake and over the mountains, their bel lies full of warm stories
and good wishes from around the world, the children of fear felt like
children of God, and for this ne sensation, wrote Frau Gärtner and
Wallace Haines and Gedat, they sent their thanks to Abram.


For years, Manfred Zapp had been Abram’s harshest correspon-
dent, constantly warning that the “man on the street” with whom he
seemed to spend a great deal of time had had enough of America’s
empty promises. America had committed “mental cruelty,” he charged,
holding “so-called war crim inals” i n red coats —the uniforms of the
Landsberg Prison—awaiting execution inde nitely.
Abram agreed, and sent to the occupation government letters
signed by dozens of congressmen demanding action.
America prevented German industry from feeding the nation,
Zapp argued.
Abram agreed, and intervened time and again on behalf of German
factories. He saved as many as he could, though a steel foundry named
for Herman Göring was beyond even his powers of redemption.
America had put leftists and trade unionists and Bolsheviks in
power, Zapp complained.
Abram agreed. The cleansing of the American occupation gov-
ernment became an obsession, the subject of his meetings with the
American high commissioner John J. McCloy and his weekly prayer
meetings with congressmen.


178 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
“Idealists” were prevented from serving their people, said Zapp.
The man on the street was losing faith in the American religion.
“Freedom in their interpretation is the ideal for which we shall ght
and die but the reality is nothing else but a beautiful word for ser-
vices for Western powers . . . The word freedom is not taken seri-
ously anymore.”
Within a few years, nobody cared. The “Morgenthau Boys” were
as much a part of the past as the history no German cared to speak of.
“Tab ula rasa,” declared Konrad Adenauer when he took power as the
Bonn Republic’s rst post-
Hitler ruler.46 Abram met with Adenauer
on several occasions, but the “Old Man of Europe,” a creature of the
Weimar Republic’s forgotten tradition of conservative reformers,
never took to him; Adenauer was a Moral Re-Armament man, a
great friend of Buchman’s. But by then Buchmanism had diluted its
fundamentalist avor, had become 100 percent Cold War spirits,
suitable for men and women of any faith who hated Bolshevism.
More, Adenauer was too Roman Catholic to really embrace Abram’s
religion—even, one might say, too Christian. A former mayor of
Cologne, he had been deposed as soon as the Nazis took power in
1933, and had spent most of the next twelve years gardening and
reading theology. At the heart of Europe an politics for two decades
after the war, by inclination he was a monastic, his face dis gured by
an accident i n his youth, his old bones subject to chills that led him to
wrap himself in blankets on long journeys. His Christian Democratic
Union (CDU)—the German equivalent of the Republican Party—
was ascetic in its devotion to purging Germany of leftist tendencies
but liberal i n its economy. Adenauer did not like to see his Germans
go hungry.
Given Abram’s in uence in postwar Germany—if Adenauer kept
his distance, many of his m inisters did not—what kept the nation
from falling into the orbit of American fundamentalism? Why did its
Christian Democratic Union, Germany’s most powerful party, not
become part of a Christian bloc within the Western bloc, the founda-
tion of an evangelical supranationalism beside which the strength of
the contemporary movement would pale?


The Family by Jeff Sharlet | 179
Part of the answer lies in its Christianity, essentially Catholic,
and its Democracy, which was, with occasional hiccups, actually
democratic, in the most pedestrian sense—that of dull bureaucratic
order. More, it was a political party; in the United States fundamen-
talism grew during the 1950s and ’60s by presenting itself as a greater
force, to which men of either party could pay tribute i n return for
divine favors.
But most of all there was old, wrinkled Adenauer himself, more
blatantly Christian in his pronouncements than any American politi-
cian could ever be, but also more cautious. Keine Experimente, “No
Experiments,” was an o cial campaign slogan. The “values and sense
of justice of Western Christendom”47 was the political plank on which
he plodded forth, but it was the very lack of such a sense that made of
Adenauer’s Germany a secular nation. For it was a nation with no
concept of sin. That had gone into the dustbin right along with his-
tory when Adenauer in his rst act as chancellor dropped all charges
against—privileged was the o cial term—nearly 800,0 00 minor
Nazi o cials, many of whom would become the functionaries of his
blank- slate regime.
In place of the very real dangers of German romanticism, the
bloodlust of Wagner, Adenauer o ered modest family values. A depo-
liticized philosophy of inward-looking house holds, the moral conform-
ism of proper Germans. The man-on-the- street in the era of Adenauer,
lamented Zapp, nostalgic for the thunder of the “new conception” now
past, wants only “his job, his food, his movie, and his sport.”48
In the end, Abram and the Americans learned more from the
Germans than the other way around. It was after the CDU turned
family into cultural code that American fundamentalism found a way
to make the term both modern and traditional, used to describe—and
shape—the postwar suburban world as well as that of a mythical
small-town past. Abram nally retired normalcy, the Harding-era ne-
ologism that for two decades had de ned his mission, his Christ, and
his pol itics. It was a notion to which postwar Americans studiously
subscribed even as they celebrated the myth of themselves as rugged
individuals, but family captured that paradox more neatly, a nation of


180 | The Family by Jeff Sharlet
cozy little kingdoms ruled by Father. And the new evangelical alli-
ances, forged along the lines of spiritual war rather than the eradi-
cation of vices traditionally considered masculine—drinking,
gambling—made sure that Father knew best about not only his little
unit’s material welfare but also its spiritual morale, once the prov-
ince of Mother. “Men must reclaim the Bible from their wives,”
Abram’s “prophet,” Baron von der Ropp, taught the workers of the
Ruhr, a succinct statement of the old ni neteenth-century muscular
Christianity that took on new meani ng in the postwar era.
And then there were the questions of sin and of history, inescap-
able in Europe and thus ignored. But sin and history presented more
nuanced dilem mas to American fundamentalism. Not its prewar mild
sympathy for fascism—the blood of D-Day had wiped that record
clean as far as most Americans were concerned—but the drag the
actual, awful past put on the movement’s new global ambitions. What
were they? Nearly the same as those of the nation’s. For a muddled
period after the war, the United States had pretended that it could
shrink back to its prewar isolationist ways, but by 1947, with the
Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan in place, it was rmly com-
mitted to the “new world order” hoped for by Abram and Senator
Wiley and their bipartisan alliance of Christian internationalism.
“The United States has been assigned a destiny comparable to
that of ancient Israel,” Harold Ockenga, the president of the National
Association of Evangelicals, had declared at its inception, reviving
the old notion of manifest destiny and extending it around the globe.49
But manifest destiny, the original westward thrust that erased a con-
tinent of Native souls, burns history like coal and knows no sin but
that of its enem ies. So, too, Abram’s dream, in both its religious and
secular manifestations. And in this regard, too, the Americans learned
from the Germans, who understood that mythology makes of the
past a parable, smooth and enigmatic, best understood by those who
ask no questions.