Patricia Kollander. "I Must Be a Part of This War": A German American's Fight against Hitler and Nazism. World War II: Fordham University Press, 2005. xvii + 254 pp. $32.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8232-2528-6.

Reviewed by Daniel Hutchinson (Department of History, Florida State University)
Published on H-German (November, 2006)

The Extraordinary Wartime Experience of a German American

This biography describes the unique wartime service of K. Frank Korf, a German American who suffered persecution under Nazi racial laws and immigrated to the United States. Determined to contribute in the fight against fascism, Korf's participation in World War II included extraordinary duties. He served as an FBI informant against the German American Bund, a military intelligence officer, a liberator of a concentration camp, the administrator of a POW camp, a hunter of war criminals and an investigator of the diaries of Joseph Goebbels. Korf thus witnessed events and encountered individuals critical to the history of the war. This well-written biography offers much of interest to both historians and a general readership.

Born Kurt Friedrich Franz Korf in 1909 to a prosperous Berlin family, Korf inherited an illustrious pedigree. His father's side boasted a tradition of military service dating from the Crusades. His mother's family, the Mossners, had resided in Berlin since the eighteenth century and were members of the city's Jewish community. The Mossners enjoyed success in banking and held social connections with the elite of Prussian society. By the late nineteenth century, however, Korf's maternal grandfather split with his Jewish relatives over his marriage to a Protestant and subsequent conversion to Christianity. Thus, by the time his grandson was born, the Mossners considered themselves Christian members of the German upper classes.

Although Korf grew up amid the tumult of the First World War and the Weimar era, academic success and family resources allowed him to earn a law degree from the University of Freiburg. Unfortunately, the rise of National Socialism prevented Korf from pursuing a legal career; he was labeled a "Mischling zweiten Grades" under the 1935 Nuremburg Laws. As James Tent and other scholars have documented, "Mischlinge" endured similar persecution to that suffered by their Jewish relatives, if to a somewhat less lethal degree.[1] As a "non-Aryan," Korf could not gain admission to the bar. Despite this ban, Korf was determined to practice law and completed a doctorate in jurisprudence, which allowed him to serve as a legal counsel for the Mossner publishing company. However, the increasing virulence of German antisemitism and a frightening encounter with Wehrmacht counter-intelligence spurred Korf to leave.

Korf departed surreptitiously in January 1937, finding refuge in the German American community of New York City. The only employment Korf initially found was as an elevator boy. The enterprising young man persisted, however, and eventually secured employment as a newspaper reporter for a German-language newspaper, attended Fordham Law School and met his future wife, Rita Baunach. Despite his success in America, however, Korf remembered his family in Germany and hoped to provide some sort of resistance against the detested Nazi state.

Korf's subsequent contributions were remarkable. Before American entry into World War II, Korf spied on Fritz Kuhn, president of the pro-Nazi and isolationist German American Bund. When Korf's newspaper assigned him to investigate the Bund, he discovered that Kuhn maintained an apartment in his own building. Korf approached the FBI, offering his services as an informant. The FBI eagerly accepted. Korf even broke into Kuhn's apartment, stealing papers that documented Nazi contacts in the United States. Kuhn was convicted in 1939 of embezzling funds from the Bund, which dealt a major blow to the pro-Nazi movement in America. While of dubious legality, Korf's actions nevertheless contributed to undermining an odious cause.

Korf began wartime service after petitioning to enter the U.S. Army in October 1942. He attended Officer Candidate School and became a military intelligence officer. Korf arrived in the European theatre in 1944, where he was responsible for interrogating POWs for actionable intelligence. During this time he Americanized his name for fear of possible execution for treason if he was captured by the Germans. In April 1945 Korf witnessed the liberation of the Flossenbürg concentration camp and the horror of the Holocaust.

Historians will also be interested in Korf's service during the first years of Germany's occupation. Korf's brief term as an administrator of a large POW camp at Bad Aibling and Kollander's descriptions of camp conditions add another challenge to the claims of James Bacque. Bacque's assertions that the Allies schemed to engineer the death of a million POWs by starvation are contradicted by Korf's account of postwar chaos and general food shortages.[2] Korf also played an important if previously unknown role in investigating the diaries of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. When Doubleday published the Goebbels diaries in 1948, Korf was assigned to discover how these important documents found their way into the hands of an American corporation. Korf's investigation and continued interest in the Goebbels diaries contributed to the discovery of the complete set of diaries in the former Soviet Union in 1992 by historian Elke Fröhlich of the Institute of Contemporary History.[3]

While this biography capably covers Korf's wartime experiences, it would have been interesting to read more about Korf's service on the American home front, particularly in the South. Korf spent two years in Louisiana and Maryland in Officer Candidate School and surely observed Jim Crow segregation in both the American military and society at large. It would have been interesting to learn more about Korf's opinions on these matters, given his own exclusion from German society as a member of a racial minority.

Nevertheless, Kollander provides a well-written, well-researched biography. She fleshes out Korf's personal accounts with archival evidence from the National Archives and the Hoover Institute, as well as a full body of secondary literature. The volume helps to alleviate the relative paucity of biographies on German-Americans who fought in World War II. As Kollander notes, the service of thirty thousand others like Korf is still largely undocumented and deserves further scholarly attention.

This book serves as a fitting tribute not only to Korf, but also to Kollander's colleague and co-author John O'Sullivan. Sadly, both Korf and O'Sullivan met untimely deaths in 2000. This volume is recommended to readers interested in World War II, the Nazi era and the history of German Americans.

Notes

[1]. James Tent, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Nazi Persecution of Jewish-Christian Germans (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2003). Other recent works addressing the plight of the estimated 100,000 Germans who fell under this ruinous classification include: Bryan Mark Riggs, Hitler's Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2002); and Nathan Stolzfus, Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996). For a recent discussion of the issue of Nazi persecution of the so-called Mischlinge, see this link for the panel report from the 2004 German Studies Association Annual Meeting: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-German&month=0411&week=a&msg=s4FknNXoRtNUWuXPIfWnUg&user=&pw= .

[2]. James Bacque, Other Losses (Rocklin: Prima Publishers, 1992). For rebuttals to Bacque's claims, see: Gunter Bischof and Stephen Ambrose, eds., Eisenhower and the German POWs: Facts against Falsehood (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992); S.P. MacKenzie, "Essay and Reflection: On the Other Losses Debate," International History Review 14 (1992): 717-731.

[3]. Elke Fröhlich, ed., Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, 24 vols. (Munich: K.G. Saur, 1993-2006).

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Citation: Daniel Hutchinson. Review of Kollander, Patricia, "I Must Be a Part of This War": A German American's Fight against Hitler and Nazism. H-German, H-Net Reviews. November, 2006.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=12571

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