by Christine Kuehn, 2025
Every family has secrets—shameful things they’d rather not get aired in public. Then there are other families that have real whoppers. Imagine finding out that your German grandparents were not only Nazi loyalists, but were the key spies who supplied the Japanese with critical intel leading up to the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
In Family of Spies, Christine Kuehn leads the reader on an astonishing journey that she herself had to take, slowly peeling back layers that were carefully laid down by her protective father Eberhard. His parents, Otto and Friedel Kuehn, his brother Leopold, and half-sister Ruth were sent from Germany to Hawaii by Joseph Goebbels to spy on the American naval fleet. Their orders were to feed the information to Japanese contacts that ultimately led to the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Kuehn traces the timeline of Otto and Friedel’s lives, from their start in Germany, to the lavish lifestyle they led in Hawaii while on the Japanese payroll, to the devastating bombing, to coming under suspicion and being arrested, to the final consequences of their actions.
As a teenager, Eberhard split ideologically with his parents and became anti-Nazi, but the rest of the family remained loyal to the Fatherland. He became so thoroughly Americanized during his time living in Hawaii that he enlisted while still underage in the US military. Once the war was over, he never returned to Germany, and was determined that his own offspring would never know of the shameful past of his family.
Decades of research, writing, and soul-searching went into this eye-popping account of Kuehn’s family and, as her German relatives did, it would have been easy for her to set fire to all the documentation she uncovered and simply walk away from the truth. But instead she chose to write it down for the rest of us. It’s an astounding historical record, extremely well told, showing the impact not only on nations but on children and families. You won’t be able to put this one down.
