Oscar Carl Pfaus (born Oskar Karl Pfaus; born January 30, 1901) was a German immigrant who became an American citizen through military service. He had a succession of jobs before becoming involved in pro-Nazi organizations in Chicago in the early 1930s and becoming a full-time Nazi propagandist there. He was also active in New York.
He returned to Germany in 1938 to work in propaganda for the Deutscher Fichte-Bund with responsibility for Ireland, the United States, and Canada, attempting to cultivate ties in the U.S. through correspondence with Irish-Americans and anyone who might be sympathetic to German interests. His letters were extensively quoted in the proceedings of the Dies committee on Un-American Activities in 1939.
He was recruited to the Abwehr, the German military intelligence agency, which sent him to Ireland in 1939 to make contact with the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and others who might help Germany. The Abwehr eventually sent an agent to the United States who arranged for the IRA to carry out acts of sabotage there.
Pfaus was active in espionage in Paris in 1941 and 1943, and in 1944 he was at Stalag 357, a prisoner of war camp in Thorn, Poland, where he described his role as "camp leader and interpreter". He later served in Czechoslovakia. In 1949, he said he was anti-Nazi and described the Nazi regime as "the former Prussian regimes of terror".
Early life
Oskar Karl Pfaus was born in Illingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany, on January 30, 1901. He emigrated to the United States in 1924 and anglicised his name. In 1929, an Oscar C. Pfaus is recorded as having married Sybilla C. Grutler in Cook County, Illinois.
In his letters, Pfaus said he had served in the United States Army, in the Sixth Corps at Fort Sheridan, Illinois, and at Camp Custer, Michigan. According to author Ladislas Farago, he had also been a hobo and had worked as a forester, a prospector, a cowboy, and a policeman in Chicago where he learned about undercover work in the fight with organized crime.
At the time of the 1930 census, he was living in Chicago and working as a machinist. He had filed papers for naturalization as an American citizen and according to evidence later given in Congress, obtained it due to his military service.
Activities in the United States
Pfaus became active in pro-Nazi activities in the early 1930s and at least initially was not an official agent of the German government which at that time was not interested in developing spies in the United States. According to Ladislas Farago, in Nazism he at last found a cause "worth fighting for" and he accompanied his devotion to it with the development of a philosophy of "Global Brotherhood" for which an acolyte was said to have nominated him for the 1932 Nobel Peace Prize. He does not appear, however, in the official list of nominations.
In Chicago he was a member of the Germania Club of Chicago along with ardent Nazis Walter Kappe and Heinz Spanknöbel and was the Chicago leader of the Friends of New Germany that was founded by Spanknöbel in 1933.
In New York, he joined Ignatz Griebl's not very secret cell of fledgling spies there in 1934 with Axel Wheeler-Hill and another man. The cell was created on the initiative of Grieb who had written to Joseph Goebbels in Germany offering his services as a spy. None of the members had access to secret information at that time and according to Ladislas Farago they were jokingly known among the wider circle of Nazi sympathisers as "Dr. Griebl's undercover boys", although Wheeler-Hill later became a member of the more significant Duquesne Spy Ring. Pfaus also started a Nazi group in New York with the Swedish-born Olov Edvin Tietzow, founder of The American Guard.
He edited the Chicago Weckruf und Beobachter, a forerunner of the Deutscher Weckruf und Beobachter, the official newspaper of the German American Bund, the successor organization to the Friends of New Germany, and was a columnist for Pittsburgh's Der Sonntagsbote. Records of the NSDAP (Nazi Party) show that in 1936 he was an informant for the Reichspressestelle (Reich Press Office) on German matters in the United States.
Pfaus returned to Germany in 1938 at the suggestion of Tegeliss Tannhaeuser, the German consul in Chicago, to head the American-Canadian-Irish section of the Deutscher Fichte-Bund, the Nazi propaganda agency in Hamburg. Around the same time, he became an agent for the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service, with the code name "Stier" ("Bull").