Duquesne Spy Ring

William Sebold (double-agent) After the Duquesne Spy Ring convictions, Sebold was provided with a new identity and started a chicken farm in California. Impoverished and delusional, he was committed to Napa State Hospital in 1965. Diagnosed with manic-depression, he died there of a heart attack five years later at 70. His life story as a double agent was first told in the 1943 book Passport to Treason: The Inside Story of Spies in America by Alan Hynd. James Ellsworth Special Agent Jim Ellsworth was assigned as Sebold's handler or body man, responsible for shadowing his every move during the 16-month investigation. William Gustav Friedemann William Gustav Friedemann was a principal witness in the Duquesne case. He began working for the FBI as a fingerprint analyst in 1935 and later became an agent after identifying a crucial fingerprint in a kidnapping case. After World War II, he was assigned to Puerto Rico, where he pinpointed the group behind the assassination attempt on President Harry Truman. Friedemann died of cancer on August 23, 1989, in Stillwater, Oklahoma. ==Convicted members of Duquesne Spy Ring==

Fritz Duquesne Born in Cape Colony, South Africa, on September 21, 1877, and a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1913, Fritz Joubert Duquesne was a captain in the Second Boer War and later a colonel in the Abwehr, Germany's division of military intelligence. Duquesne was captured and imprisoned three times by the British, once by the Portuguese, and once by the Americans in 1917, and each time he escaped. He was known as "The man who killed Kitchener" since he claimed to have sabotaged and sunk HMS Hampshire, on which Lord Kitchener was en route to Russia in 1916. In the spring of 1934, Duquesne became an intelligence officer for the Order of 76, an American pro-Nazi organization, and in January 1935 he began working for U.S. government's Works Progress Administration. Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr, knew Duquesne from his work in World War I and he instructed his new chief of operations in the U.S., Col. Nikolaus Ritter, to make contact. Ritter had been friends with Duquesne back in 1931 and the two spies reconnected in New York on December 3, 1937. Duquesne was found guilty of espionage and sentenced to 18 years in prison. He received a concurrent two-year sentence and was fined $2,000 for violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Duquesne served his sentence in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary in Kansas, where he was mistreated and beaten by other inmates. In 1954, he was released due to ill health, having served fourteen years, and died indigent, at City Hospital on Welfare Island (now Roosevelt Island), New York City, on May 24, 1956, at the age of 78. Blank pleaded guilty to violating the Registration Act. He was sentenced 18 months in prison and fined $1,000. Until his arrest, machinist and draftsman Lang had been employed as an assembly inspector by the Carl L. Norden Corp., which manufactured the top secret Norden bombsight. In October 1937 he met Ritter and told him he had overnight access to classified drawings and used it to copy them in his kitchen at home while his family was asleep. The Lotfernrohr 3 and the BZG 2 in 1942 used a similar set of gyroscopes that provided a stabilized platform for the bombardier to sight through, although the more complex interaction between the bombsight and autopilot was not used. Later in the war, Luftwaffe bombers used the Carl Zeiss Lotfernrohr 7, or Lotfe 7, which had an advanced mechanical system similar to the Norden bombsight, but was much simpler to operate and maintain. At one point, Sebold was ordered to contact Lang as it became known that the technology he had stolen from Norden was being used in German bombers. The Nazis offered to spirit him to safety in Germany, but Lang refused to leave his home in Ridgewood, Queens. At the time of his arrest, Roeder had 16 guns in his Long Island home in New York. Paul Alfred W. Scholz A German native, Paul Scholz went to the United States in 1926 but never attained citizenship. He had been employed in German book stores in New York City, where he disseminated Nazi propaganda.) includes a segment on Lilly Stein that presents a highly sympathetic narrative of her life and motivations. In this program, Stein is described as a Jewish woman who fled Nazi persecution to the United States only to be pressured into working as a spy for Germany, with an emphasis on her alleged victimization and marginalization as a woman. The documentary further asserts that she went beyond what her German handlers required by independently cultivating high-society contacts, including sexual relationships, to obtain intelligence. • Regarding her post‑war life, the documentary claims that after her release from U.S. federal prison in 1953 she “fled” to Austria, opened and ran a hotel in a ski resort, and that the establishment became so successful that members of the British royal family stayed there, leading to Stein’s invitation to garden parties at Buckingham Palace. Interviewee Sheila Taylor is presented as a former employee who worked for Stein in the 1980s describing her as kind, generous, and deeply uplifted by royal favor “after what she had been through,” reinforcing the program’s predominantly positive portrayal. • These Austrian ski‑resort and royal‑patronage claims are not supported by standard historical or intelligence-community accounts of Stein’s life, which instead state only that, after her release, she left the United States and found employment at a luxury resort near Strasbourg in France, without mentioning Austria, hotel ownership, or any connection to the British royal family. As of February 2026, no independent archival, scholarly, or contemporaneous documentary evidence has been produced in publicly available sources to corroborate the specific narrative elements introduced by WW2: Women on the Frontline concerning an Austrian ski hotel or royal invitations. Franz Joseph Stigler In 1931, Franz Joseph Stigler, left Germany for the United States, where he became a citizen in 1939. He had been employed as a crew member and chief baker aboard U.S. ships until his discharge from the when the U.S. Navy converted that ship into . He was naturalized as a citizen in 1929 and was employed as a truck driver. Wheeler-Hill obtained information for Germany regarding ships sailing to Britain from New York Harbor. With Felix Jahnke, he enlisted the aid of Paul Scholz in building a radio set for sending coded messages to Germany. Following conviction, Wheeler-Hill was sentenced to serve 15 years in prison for espionage and 2 concurrent years under the Registration Act. Bertram Wolfgang Zenzinger Born in Germany, Bertram Wolfgang Zenzinger went to the United States in 1940 as a naturalized citizen of the Union of South Africa. His reported reason for coming to the United States was to study mechanical dentistry in Los Angeles, California. In July 1940, Zenzinger received a pencil for preparing invisible messages for Germany in the mail from Siegler. He sent several letters to Germany through a mail drop in Sweden, outlining details of national defense materials. Zenzinger was arrested by FBI agents on April 16, 1941. Pleading guilty, he was sentenced to 8 years in prison for espionage and 18 months in prison for Registration Act. ==Liaisons to the Duquesne Spy Ring==

Takeo Ezima Lieutenant Commander Takeo Ezima of the Imperial Japanese Navy operated in New York as an engineer inspector using the name: E. Satoz; He arrived on the Heian Maru in Seattle in 1938. Ezima was filmed by the FBI while meeting with agent Sebold in New York, conclusive evidence of German-Japanese cooperation in espionage, in addition to meeting with Kanegoro Koike, Paymaster Commander of the Japanese Imperial Navy assigned to the Office of the Japanese Naval Inspector in New York. Ezima obtained a number of military materials from Duquesne, including ammunition, a drawing of a hydraulic unit with pressure switch A-5 of the Sperry Gyroscope, and an original drawing from the Lawrence Engineering and Research Corporation of a soundproofing installation, and he agreed to deliver materials to Germany via Japan. The British had made the Abwehr courier route from New York through Lisbon, Portugal difficult, so Ezima arranged an alternate route to the west coast with deliveries every two weeks on freighters destined for Japan. As the FBI arrested Duquesne and his agents in New York in 1941, Ezima escaped to the west coast, boarded the Japanese freighter Kamakura Maru, and left for Tokyo. One historian states that Ezima was arrested for espionage in 1942 and sentenced to 15 years; however, U.S. Naval Intelligence documents state that "at the request [of] the State Department, Ezima was not prosecuted." Nikolaus Adolph Fritz Ritter (Lieutenant colonel) Nikolaus Ritter led spy rings in the United States, Great Britain, and North Africa from 1936 to 1941. Ritter was born in Germany and had served as an officer in the First World War on the Western Front in France where he was twice wounded. He emigrated to New York in 1924, married an American, and returned to Germany in 1936 to join the Abwehr as Chief of Air Intelligence based in Hamburg operating under the code name: DR. RANTZAU. He first met Fritz Duquesne in 1931, and the two spies reconnected in New York on December 3, 1937. Ritter also met Herman Lang while in New York, and he arranged for Lang to later go to Germany to help the Nazis finish their version of the top secret Norden bombsight. Ritter achieved several major successes with the Abwehr, most notably the Norden bombsight, in addition to an advanced aircraft auto-pilot from the Sperry Gyroscope Company, and also intelligence operations in North Africa in support of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. But some of Ritter's recruits became double-agents who catastrophically exposed his spy rings. Ritter recruited William Sebold who later joined the FBI which resulted in the arrest of the 33 Abwehr agents of the Duquesne Spy Ring. In Great Britain, he recruited Arthur Owens, code named JOHNNY, who became an agent for MI5 (British Intelligence) operating under the code name SNOW. Owens exposed so many Abwehr covert agents operating in Britain that by the end of the war MI5 had enlisted some 120 double agents. Although Ritter was never captured, it was the arrest of the Duquesne Spy Ring that ultimately resulted in Ritter's fall from the Abwehr and his reassignment in 1942 to air defenses in Germany for the remainder of the Second World War. ==See also==