ears after the death of my great aunt Dorle Soria in 2001, I discovered five sets of love letters written to her from different men hidden in her apartment, all from the ’30s. Researching these men for Master Lovers, a book I’ve written about Dorle, has sent me on a long, twisty journey, making me question both my own connection to evil and the nature of evil itself. Coming from a Jewish family that arrived in the United States between the Slave Trade and the Holocaust, I thought I was ethically in the clear, but several people connected to Dorle, including her lover, John Franklin Carter, were linked to dark mid-century forces. And those dark forces could be absurd. Carter, a suspected Nazi, and his sidekick, Ernst Sedgewick “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, an actual Nazi, had farcical adventures reminiscent of a movie I loved as a kid, The In-Laws (1979), in which dentist Alan Arkin’s life gets overtaken by his CIA agent brother-in-law, Peter Falk. Carter and Putzi deserve a prequel though the backdrops to their lives—Nazism, the Holocaust, the Japanese internment camps—are even more sinister than the Cold War Latin America of The In-laws.
Carter was a journalist/civil servant/spy connected to Franklin D. Roosevelt. Putzi, a half-American advisor to Hitler, introduced the ecstatic pep rally chants of his alma mater Harvard to the Führer’s early speeches. The two materialize like jokers, Zeligs, at key moments in the 1930s and the 1940s. The mild-looking Carter, the tall, tussled Putzi were like Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, and Tucker Carlson today, apologists for fascism accepted into the firmament of American society.
Dear Aunt Dorle, a liberal Jew who donated to the defense funds of Sacco and Vanzetti and the Scottsboro Boys, is implicated by association. A force in classical music in her day, instrumental to Maria Callas and Leonard Bernstein’s careers, she had drifted perilously close to an evil that would likely have annihilated her if her family hadn’t made their way from Poland to New York in the 1880s.
In 1932, The New York Times will claim that Carter had been deputized by Herman Goering to bring Nazism to the United States. But several years before, after an affluent childhood as the eldest son of a cleric in Williamstown, Massachusetts, he went to Yale and worked on a controversial issue of The Record, the university’s humor magazine, called “The Bolshevik Number.” Its cover, bearing the caption “Down with the Dean’s Office,” depicts a Soviet peasant manhandling an elderly academic in a white suit. “The purpose of the Bolshevik number,” proclaims Carter in an early example of his petulant prose, “is to register one, final, uncompromising and perfectly open protest at certain conditions as they now exist in college life and certain personalities and customs which to us appear ridiculous.”
Carter re-emerges in Rome a few years later as a stringer for U.S. and British newspapers. My grandfather, Percy Winner, is there, too, covering Mussolini sympathetically for the New York Herald. Two larger-than-life American journalists in summer suits drink white wine at a café off the Piazza Navona, gazing at the Bernini fountains, comparing notes about fascism.
Back in America at the end of the decade, John loses his post as an economic advisor to the Coolidge Administration because, in the words of his FBI file, “Articles revealing secrets of the State Department began to appear in newspapers and magazines under [his] name, resulting in an investigation.” 1932 finds him and his wife Sheila back in Europe, Germany, trying to interview Hitler at the behest of Fredrick Birchall of The New York Times. This is where Putzi enters the story, tasked to take the Carters around the country.
Putzi graduates Harvard in 1914, but the First World War prevents him from returning to Germany. When he finally gets back to Munich, his fluent English and aristocratic connections make him the perfect conduit between American diplomats and German politicians. By the time he’s met John and Sheila Carter, he’s become Hitler’s close friend and foreign press secretary. At private gatherings at Hitler’s house, he bangs away at the Liszt piano transcriptions of Wagner, beloved by the Führer, who also liked a piece by Irving Berlin, unaware that he was a Jew.
The Carters’ time in Germany with Putzi is relayed in brisk detail in Sheila’s 1932 diary. They attend a Hitler rally. “He was accompanied,” she reports, “by guards, flags, music, quite a good show.”
Then “Putzi persuaded us to go to Berlin for the dissolution of the Reichstag.”
“All of Berlin,” writes Sheila once they’ve arrived, “feels electric over showdown in Reichstag—where all the traffic has been stopped, heavy police guards posted.”
She feels cross when John and Putzi leave her to meet not with Hitler, who rarely dealt with Americans, but with Herman Goering.
Carter wires what he claims to have been an interview with Goering to Birchall at the Times, but the Times publishes a news story instead, claiming that “John Franklin Carter, a young American now traveling in Europe, has been appointed chairman of an organizing committee for a New National Party that is to introduce Hitlerism in the United States.”
The article goes on to say that Carter was heading to “Geneva and Lausanne to investigate what developments for Hitlerism are possible in those directions.”
Sheila reports getting bitten by mosquitoes on Lake Geneva but does not suggest that John is off laying the foundation for a Nazi Switzerland.
It took me several years of amateur sleuthing to get at least some idea of the slippery truth.
John did try to establish a political party upon his return from Europe. He rented an office space in Manhattan. He sought donors. But nothing suggests the party was “Hitlerest” and by the time of Roosevelt’s victory in November, an event which left Sheila and John “tired but happy,” he seems to be losing interest.
But what happened between Goering and Carter? How do we get from the wild tale, hiding in plain sight from historians, of an American dispatched by Goering to bring Hitlerism to the United States to a bureaucrat and Roosevelt-apparatchik happy about the 1932 elections? Carter’s own answer to these questions can be found in his archive, a motley collection of documents at the University of Wyoming in Cheyenne, where I found Sheila’s 1931–1932 diary, mislabeled as John’s.
Carter wrote to a man named Weinstein in 1937, claiming that Fredrick Birchall, the editor who sent him to Germany, had “substituted his [Birchall’s] garbled dispatch [the story about Goering and Carter actually published in the Times] for the signed interview which he had commissioned,” a dispatch with “two entirely untrue statements”: that “Hitler had appointed me to head a Nazi movement in the United States,” and that “I left Berlin to look into the possibility of a Nazi movement in Switzerland.”
That explanation takes an even weirder turn. Carter insists that both Birchall and Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher of the Times, had sent him letters admitting to their error but that he had “lent” the letters to a man from the “Jewish Telegraph Agency,” which sounds like an antisemitic concoction but did and does exist. When the man failed to return the letters, Carter contacted the organization, but they had no knowledge of him, a fraud or phantom.
Sulzberger, whose letter to Carter is among his papers at the New York Public Library, complains that “the tone of [Carter’s] letter makes it difficult for me to answer,” particularly the accusation of the intentional “falsification of the news from Berlin,” but grants that “as far as the facts of the particular matter of discussion are concerned, the indications are that you are right and we are wrong.”
The heart of the “misunderstanding” appears to lie in the following phrase, “The Interview was accorded me in my capacity as chairman of the organizing committee of the New National Party of the United States,” which apparently indicated to Birchall that Carter’s party was concocted by Goering to bring Nazism to America.
After interviewing Goering in Berlin, Jon takes the Île de France back to New York by himself, conveniently stranding Sheila in Le Havre and meeting Aunt Dorle aboard ship. Their turbulent affair will last, on and off, for the next five years.
The cloak-and-dagger tale of the phantom JTA member brings us to the next phase in Carter’s career, which will ultimately reunite him with Putzi. While John spent most of the 30s working on New Deal farm programs, by the early 40s he was trying his hand at espionage. Carter also wrote novels that echoed his political life. In Murder in the Embassy (1932), he had created a fictional secret service working for “the liveliest cripple in American politics [who is] as easy to pin down as a live eel on a sheet of oilcloth.”
Unaware or unoffended, in the lead-up to America’s entrance into World War II, Roosevelt granted Carter the authority to create his own spy agency, which the FBI referred to as “Carter’s organization.” John was tasked with rooting out potential German subversion, ironic given his own subversive German connections. Which went beyond Goering and Putzi. In a letter to Dorle towards the end of their affair, John announces that he has met with a man named George Viereck. John, Viereck tells him, has been included in a list of Nazi Agents gathered by the McCormack-Dickstein Report. McCormack-Dickstein, a Committee in the House of Representatives that investigated German propaganda, does not actually mention Carter, but Carter’s buddy Viereck was referred to by Rachel Maddow in her Ultra podcast in the fall of 2022 as the “top banana” of German infiltrators in the lead up to World War II.
As part of his espionage for FDR, Carter dispatched Henry Fields, an heir to the Fields department store fortune, to Trinidad to investigate the longstanding French community because Carter deemed it somehow “vulnerable to [German] espionage.” Another agent, investigating Café Society, an early integrated nightclub in New York, racked up a $750 (1941 dollars!) bill that Carter asked the FBI to pay.
“Absolutely not,” scrawled J. Edgar Hoover on the memo requesting funds.
“We know Carter well and most unfavorably,” Hoover later concluded. “He is a crackpot, but a persistent busybody bitten with the Sherlock Holmes bug and plagued with a super exaggerated ego.”
Back in Germany, Putzi’s relationship with Hitler is deteriorating. Putzi keeps insulting Goebbels, as Goebbels grows closer to the Führer. Putzi stumbles upon Goebbels without shoes to hide his clubfoot and thereafter refers to him as a “satanically gifted dwarf.” Putzi takes his son Egon and Unity Mitford, Nancy’s sister and a Nazi acolyte, out on Lake Starnberg in Bavaria. On the boat, Putzi complains vociferously about Goebbels and other members of Hitler’s inner circle that he didn’t like.
But Mitford, who could not brook the slightest hint of disloyalty and was famously indiscreet, repeats Putzi’s words to Hitler and Goebbels over lunch soon afterward and falsely claims that Putzi had disparaged the bravery of German soldiers fighting for Franco in Spain.
Like lethal seventh graders, Hitler and Goebbels hatch a punishment for Putzi, which may or may not have been a species of practical joke.
Every year, Putzi held a large party for Washington’s birthday, which fell in February like his own. This one promises to be even more elaborate, as Putzi is turning fifty himself.
A week beforehand, Putzi receives word that he is to be dispatched on a secret mission. He protests but is told that the Führer is insistent. The plan (an assassination attempt or practical joke; the verdict is still out over eighty years later) involves Putzi parachuting into Spain, Franco-controlled Salamanca, to assist German journalists covering the war.
Rather than the comfortable Lufthansa crafts on which Putzi had flown with Hitler during his political campaigns, he boards a military plane and is expected to withstand the long journey strapped into a metal seat.
He complains to the pilot and learns during their conversation that he is not to be parachuted down into Salamanca but behind loyalist lines, a likely death sentence.
As Putzi clings miserably to his parachute in his cramped seat, he hears the engine failing. The plane is forced to make an emergency landing at a small airstrip between Leipzig and Dresden.
At the airstrip bar, Putzi plies his fellow travelers with vermouth, and, once they are lubricated, slips away. He finds a country road (he later writes) on which a friendly peasant woman directs him to a small train station where a train is just then leaving for Leipzig. From there, he catches another train to Munich, and, finally, a night train to Zurich.
In Zurich, he stays at a luxurious hotel and summons his sister Erna from Germany. She only reluctantly complies as she doesn’t believe that Hitler really wants to eradicate him. She sees Putzi as paranoid, delusional. They had only been flying him towards Spain to scare him and would have returned him safely to Germany.
Once Erna arrives in Switzerland, she and Putzi create a ruse of their own. Communicating with people back in Germany, they suggest that Putzi has gone to Switzerland for treatment, a cure, rather than to escape the regime.
Putzi does seek treatment, therapy with Carl Jung still practicing in Zurich at the time. Erna wants Putzi to speak to Jung about what she believes to be his paranoia, but Putzi, feeling himself entirely right in the head, only consents to pretend to be crazy. A suspicious Jung quickly cuts off therapy.
Erna returns to Germany, but Putzi goes into exile in England.
In London, his money runs out, and he supports himself (barely) by writing about Hitler and the Nazis for various newspapers. Once war breaks out, the British imprison him along with other Germans. And pack him off to be interned in Canada.
Carter, still working on espionage, convinces FDR that Putzi is an asset with useful information about the Nazi war machine. Overcoming British resistance, FDR clears the way for Carter to bring Putzi down to the United States for questioning.
Apparently, something goes awry when John and Sheila Carter cross over the Canadian border on their way to Ottawa to reach Putzi. Carter asks the FBI and the State Department for assistance in returning to America. No one wants to help, a State Department official declaring that “in all probability, Carter, being the type that he is, insulted some immigration inspector on the way up and anticipates an argument on the way down.”
The Putzi that John and Sheila encounter in Canada is hardly the same. Once impeccably, often extravagantly dressed and coiffed, he is haggard, dirty, losing his teeth. He’s been through a lot since his 50th birthday got canceled and he fled the country. Once high-spirited, ebullient, he’s sour, erratic.
While the war was going on in Europe, German prisoners (minor Nazis at best) were detained in miserable conditions. But once he reaches America, Putzi is put up in a dilapidated but grand eighteenth-century estate called Bush Hill in northern Virginia.
Where he begins to behave strangely.
Infuriated by the disorderly landscaping—trees, bushes, undergrowth run wild—he sets a bonfire to contain it that creeps dangerously close to the house. When a revolver is discovered poking out from his pillow, he announces that he presumed that “you stupid Americans would never notice it.”
He’s allowed to attend a dinner party at a neighboring house if he doesn’t reveal his identity or say anything political. Late in the evening, presumably intoxicated, he plays the piano for the other guests, moving from innocuous Debussy to the Liszt Wagner transcriptions so beloved by Hitler.
“Mein Führer, mein Führer,” he apparently declaims, his eyes full of tears, begging Hitler to make peace even at the cost of surrender so that Putzi’s beloved fatherland won’t get destroyed.
Very little useful intelligence emerges from the interrogation. Never privy to military secrets and years out of the loop, Putzi can only come up with sensational personal claims. Geli Raubal, Hitler’s niece and presumed mistress, had not taken her own life, as was suspected, but was murdered by the Führer, himself, after she’d had the temerity to fall in love with her Viennese Jewish singing teacher. Hitler’s own megalomania, opines Putzi, was the result of getting venereal disease from another Jew from Vienna, a prostitute, that rendered him unable to maintain an erection or ejaculate or both.
As the interrogation of Putzi, titled the “S-project” for Sedgwick, Putzi’s American name, was expensive and unsuccessful, FDR gave in to British pressure and sent Putzi back to the U.K.
Putzi and Carter may never see each other again. The bromance was over, but what was it about? They shared large personalities and grandiose ambitions. They were simpatico politically, both having odd relationships with fascism, and they were useful to each other. Putzi brought Carter into the orbit of prominent Nazis to interview Goering. Carter provided a respite from a period of internment for Putzi. Putzi would have been living in Munich when he heard of the passing of Carter in 1967. Did he shed a tear? If he wrote a condolence letter to his old pal Sheila, it was not among the Carter papers that landed in Wyoming.
In Britain after the shuttering of the S-project, Putzi is remanded to the Isle of Man. He’s pleased to find himself on a Gestapo death list, but the British still don’t release him until 1946, whereupon, weak, dispirited, and broke, he returns to Munich.
Carter: An Important Task
In the months before Pearl Harbor, as conflict with Japan grows likely, FDR asks Carter to determine the loyalty of the Japanese community in California: an investigation that will impact hundreds of thousands of American lives.
Carter dispatches a former military officer named Curtis B. Munson to California. Despite a plethora of racist assumptions and terminology (“the Japs”), Munson susses out the basic trustworthiness of the nisei, Japanese born in America, though he is more skeptical about isei, Japanese born in Japan. The Munson Report, which was sent to Carter to present to FDR, suggests that the nisei, rather than white outsiders, should be called upon to govern the community. What that would have looked like exactly we don’t know, but it would certainly be less intrusive than what ultimately occurred, the uprooting and interning of the entire Japanese community.
I’ll hit pause. Carter’s politics are creepy, his prose bombastic, but having seen so many of his letters and books, having read his wife’s diary, having spent so much time in his virtual company, I feel connected to him. I want to think the best of him for his own sake and for Dorle’s, whose great love seems to have been on the just side of history at least once. The Munson Report was a breath of fresh air. Carter had commissioned a document that contained suggestions that could have prevented or at least minimized a great American tragedy.
I’d learned about Carter and the Munson Report by rudimentary Internet digging, and after Greg Robinson’s book By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans arrived in the mail, my brief faith in Carter came crashing down. A summary penned by Carter that may be all that FDR read of the Munson Report, “minimized and distorted Munson’s endorsement of community loyalty.”
“There are still Japanese in the United States,” wrote Carter, losing Munson’s crucial distinction between loyal nisei and foreign-born agents, “who will tie dynamite around their waist and make a human bomb.’”
From the Bolshevik Report to the Goering interview, the run-ins with Hoover, the fruitless interrogation of Putzi, Carter has bounced from one inanity to the next, but this time he may have caused irreparable harm, though (under pressure from xenophobic California politicians) FDR may have ordered the internments regardless.
Carter does, however, join with Munson and Kenneth Ringle, a naval intelligence officer, in proposing a plan to safeguard the Japanese in California after the violent backlash post-Pearl Harbor, but the Ringle Report, like the Munson one, is ultimately ignored.
The real Carter may not have helped the Japanese, but a fictional Carter bravely argues for them in another of his novels, The Catoctin Affair (1949). Placing himself, Roosevelt, Churchill, and others in a fictional Camp David, he demands of the president: “In 1941, a government survey [indicated that] the Japanese Americans were fully as loyal as the Southerners or Mid-Westerners. . . Why sir did you let the army [imprison] them?”
In the late ’50s, over twenty years after their breakup, John gets back in touch with Dorle. He visits her and my Uncle Dario, her husband since the late ’30s, in the same 55th Street apartment where I will stay myself just a few years later, not far from the metal filing cabinet where John’s letters to Dorle are hidden.
John elegiacally describes saying goodbye to Dorle after cocktails. “When the elevator arrived, I was about to deliver myself of a profound remark—at least if not really profound, one which represents a good many years’ reflection. So for what it is worth it is that people never fall out of love. Sometimes love falls out of people, but only if the love or the people are not real.”
Carter died seven years later in 1967, a heart attack while at work in the National Press Building in Washington. But Putzi was alive and well enough by the early ’70s to publish a memoir in which he claims, yet again, that Hitler’s plan for him in Spain was a death sentence rather than a joke. For someone tough enough to get close to Hitler and wily enough to escape, it’s no wonder that he doesn’t slip easily away from this Earth.
Back in Bavaria in 1974, he is diagnosed with prostate cancer and given only weeks to live. He falls into a coma, and the end seems near, but he emerges from it and lives for several more months before his world goes dark.
As of the fall of 2024, as I write, I have spent over a decade with Dorle’s lover and his old German friend, and I’ve begun to wonder about their descendants, not that their descendants would wish to hear from the likes of me. Before this piece of writing, members of Carter’s family could safely Google him to hear about an august figure, a journalist, an FDR ally, but now they may run across extramarital affairs and Nazi ties.
Ancestry.com reveals that John and Sheila’s daughter died in Santa Barbara in 2004. Obituaries and lists of survivors have proved illusory, but I found a woman on Facebook with her name living in Santa Barbara who could have been related except her conventionally ideal body and unconvincing facial features suggested that she was an AI creation.
Putzi’s son, Egon, was Hitler’s godson. He was born in New York in 1920, died somewhere in the United States in 2007, but was buried in Bavaria. While his father was at Bush Hill, he tried to rescue the family’s American reputation. When his offer to go to Germany to kill Hitler was ignored by FDR, he went off to fight in the war, urging fellow German Americans to do the same “to find out for certain which side they were on.”
Several years after the war, he taught at Brooklyn College and attended faculty meetings, leaving me to wonder if his many Jewish colleagues knew who his godfather had been. Egon’s son, Eynon, born in 1950, was Hitler’s god-grandson, if such a category exists. A minor actor, he played in German movies before taking his own life in 1988 at the age of 37.
Putzi came back to America for a Harvard reunion in 1974.
He probably flew through New York; perhaps he lingered before going up to Cambridge.
The name Putzi recalls the exotic-sounding names of Dorle and Dario’s friends: Ismail, Henri- Louis, Kazuo, Boris, Giorgio. My favorite was a German one like Putzi, Gustl. Memory provides Gustl, an Austrian music producer, with a short pudgy body and wild mane of white hair, though he’s thinner and better coiffed in a photo that I found. Unlike Dorle and Dario, he strayed beyond the confines of classical music. Led Zeppelin were awful to work with, but David Bowie, with whom I was enamored, was charming, immediately grasping that Gustl Breuer was the son of Josef Breuer, an associate of Freud’s.
Not only Jews like Gustl came over for cocktails. Dorle was also close with Germans and Austrians who had enjoyed early success during the Third Reich. Often enough Jewish musicians and German/Austrian ones active during the Reich performed together.
Karl Böhm (G/A) conducted Yehudi Menuhin (J).
Lorin Maazel (J) conducted Elizabeth Schwartzkopf (G/A).
Wilhelm Furtwängler (G/A) conducted Jascha Heifetz (J).
Furtwängler, not a believer in Nazism, had nevertheless been Hitler’s favorite Wagner interpreter, and Goebbels championed Elizabeth Schwarzkopf. Very close with Schwarzkopf and well acquainted with the others, Dorle surely had both G/A’s and J’s over for cocktails.
The doorbell rings, and Dorle rushes to answer it, pecking Putzi on both cheeks and showing him into the living room. Dorle and Dario serve him a martini but do not encourage him to play the baby grand that the pianist Rudolf Serkin had inaugurated at a party years before because the amateurish Wagner banging that enthralled Hitler would not pass muster with Dario.
Few people these days (including me) think that we can ignore an artist’s behavior or beliefs (particularly if they’re a Nazi), but Dorle, who wrote romances in her teens glorifying pedophiles like Gauguin and wife-beheaders like Henry Vlll, surely felt otherwise.
She could easily have invited Putzi, but present-day fascists might not have cut impressive enough figures to gain admission for cocktails. Frumpy Steve Bannon, bizarro Roger Stone, preppy Tucker Carlson also lacked other talents to distract us from their evil ideologies, but, along with their leader, our once and future president who enjoys sharing classified Iranian attack plans in country club bathrooms, they’d fit very well in an In-Laws redo set in Trump-era United States.
Where does this leave us, what kind of executive summary like Carter’s ill-conceived one for the Munson Report would fit here? Something about the inextricability of good and evil, comedy and tragedy, fascism and democracy.
At one point in the sixties, Dorle haughtily dismissed my father’s concerns about her old friends’ Nazi involvement with the declaration that great art lay outside the realm of politics as if Nazism were merely some disagreeable political view. Many years later after a book came out revealing Elizabeth Schwarzkopf’s deeper ties with Nazism, I asked Dorle my father’s question and received a very difference response. Learning this about Schwarzkopf had pained her. When my father had asked Dorle, she had been at the height of her powers, a baldly driven ambitious person, but by the time I asked her, she had softened and lost much of her short-term memory. I wonder how she would have responded had I asked her about John Franklin Carter. Or confronted her more explicitly about the Nazis she knew in America and those that she did not in Poland, where members of our family must have died in the Holocaust.
David Winner is the author of Master Lovers (nonfiction, Outpost 19, 2023) and the novels Enemy Combatant (Tablo, 2021), Tyler’s Last (O19, 2015), and The Cannibal of Guadalajara (Gival Press, 2010). His work has appeared in The Village Voice, Fiction, The Iowa Review, The Millions and The Kenyon Review. He is a senior editor at StatORec magazine and a regular contributor to The Brooklyn Rail.