JANUARY 26, 1948
Sergeant Martin James Monti steps off a plane at Mitchel Field on Long Island. With customary ceremony, he is presented with an honorable discharge.
Minutes later, federal agents clad in their own uniform—dark suits, white shirts, skinny ties—approach. Monti is taken into custody.
Cameras flash, capturing his strong jaw and finely carved features. He is only 23, but his childish softness is long gone. He stands a lean 6-foot-2, his hair wavy and dark against skin made even paler by the flashbulbs. As a teenager in North St. Louis County, he probably drew more admiring glances than he bothered to notice. Quiet, intelligent, and serious, he had no time for frivolity. His mind was consumed with serious ideas, and his convictions were rigid and unshakable. They knotted faith, politics, economics, and ideology into a worldview so vehemently opposed to communism that he deserted his country to join the Nazis.
Monti is the only known member of the U.S. armed services to willingly defect to Germany during World War II. The first U.S. military officer ever to be convicted of treason. The first U.S. citizen to willingly confess, in open court, to betraying his country.
Here’s how it happened.
AWOL
In August 1942, nine months after Pearl Harbor and two months before his 21st birthday, Monti registers for the draft. At first, he tries to enlist in the Navy, like his four brothers. But something goes awry, and in late November, he enlists in the Army Air Force instead. If he cannot sail, he will fly.
Early in 1943, Monti reports for training as an aviation cadet. A year later, he is commissioned as a flight officer and promoted to second lieutenant. In August 1944, he ships out to India, and he spends the next few months on a base in Karachi. Now a first lieutenant, he is waiting to be assigned to a combat squadron.
Maybe he’s scared. Maybe he’s restless, tired of cooling his heels. Or maybe he’s just riled up about communism, which he has long considered the real enemy.
Whatever his mood, Monti gives in to impulse. On October 1, 1944, without authorization, he hitches a ride on a flight to Cairo. Now AWOL, he talks himself aboard a plane to Tripoli, then another to Naples. Supposedly he hopes to get assigned to a combat squadron there, alongside a few of his buddies from flight school, but he has none of the requisite paperwork, and the Army does not act on a whim. So he heads out to Pomigliano d’Arco, northeast of Naples, where the 354th Air Service Squadron repairs and preps aircraft for the line squadrons.
On October 13, Monti—passing himself off as a pilot from the 82nd Fighter Group in Naples—talks his way into doing a test flight for a photographic reconnaissance version of the P-38, one of the planes he has been trained to fly. He climbs into the cockpit and takes off. Two hours later, he lands on a grassy airstrip near Milan—in territory now occupied by Germany—and is taken prisoner. The P-38 is handed off to a Luftwaffe unit that inspects enemy aircraft.
By now, the U.S. has broadcast orders to arrest Monti, which helps convince the Germans that his intentions are genuine. He tells them—earnestly? to win their trust? both?—that the war is a communist plot to enslave the world and the U.S. should be allied with Germany, not the Soviet Union.
Dropping Monti for his mother’s German maiden name, Martin Wiethaupt begins broadcasting radio propaganda for the Nazis. In just seven months, he will hold the rank of lieutenant in an elite Waffen-SS unit, the Standarte Kurt Eggers.
But he will have chosen the wrong side.
In May 1945, when the Nazis surrender, Monti heads back to Italy, making his way through German lines to rejoin the U.S. Army near Milan. When he turns himself in, he is wearing an SS uniform. He says it was given to him by Italian partisans who helped him escape from the Germans.
It was not.
Art by Mike McQuade, from the collections of the St. Louis Mercantile Library at the University of Missouri-St. Louis
“AN EAGER BEAVER”
Awaiting court-martial in Pisa, Monti is as aloof as an impoverished aristocrat. He writes to his parents, complaining of the brutal treatment and remarking, “This is certainly the place to come if you want any ideals you hold to be shattered.” He adds that the prison is run by the “lowest type” of personnel. Because of his rank, he says, he has not been mistreated, but he has seen other men kicked and beaten and punished by being caged outdoors with no shelter.
He is court-martialed in Naples, charged with desertion and the theft of a fighter plane. No mention is made of the fact that he landed that plane behind enemy lines or that it was equipped with an important secret war device, one that used radar to distinguish enemy planes from American ones. U.S. pilots were all under orders to destroy this device if there was any chance it could fall into enemy hands. Monti says he probably pushed the Destroy button but can’t be sure: “I had too many other things to think about.”
After his court-martial, he is, amazingly, allowed to reenlist as a private in the American Fifth Army, a trade-off for what remains of his 15-year sentence. Monti’s father has gone to Walter Ploeser, a congressman from St. Louis, to beg for his intercession, and Ploeser has shot the request to the top. “This seems to be the case of an impetuous young man who wanted to fight for America,” Ploeser writes to President Harry Truman.
A February 1946 St. Louis Post-Dispatch article notes that “President Truman has taken cognizance of the plight of Martin J. Monti, Florissant pilot who was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment for seeking action in a ‘stolen’ P-38 fighter.” Monti’s court-martial is now his plight, and quotation marks even cast doubt on the appropriation of the plane.
In other press accounts from this time, Monti falls just short of heroism. A January 25, 1946, Post article says “he bailed out, was captured, escaped, and finally made his way back to American forces… His crime appears to have been that he was, in Army slang, ‘an eager beaver.’” He’d been bored in Karachi, reporters note sympathetically, trusting his assertion that he was eager to “see some action.”
THE TRUTH COMES OUT
In November 1947, columnist Drew Pearson breaks quite a different story in The Washington Post. Pearson’s source is an Army officer charged with criminal investigations. Monti’s story is actually a series of stories, and they do not add up.
At first, Monti tells the U.S. government, his plane was shot down, forcing him to parachute to safety. Then he admits that the plane was intact when he landed it. Now, Monti is saying that he flew over the occupied section of Italy on a lark, got lost, ran out of fuel, and had to land in enemy territory.
His father will tell reporters that the Nazis took his son prisoner and threatened him, so he let them think he had become a Nazi: “After all, they had the guns.” But even as Monti insists that he was intimidated into recording Nazi propaganda, he also maintains that in the pope’s eyes, anyone who cooperates with the Soviet Union must be an enemy of Christianity.
He is now back in the military, rising again through the ranks. But as they investigate other cases of treason, agents in the criminal division of the Department of Justice begin to catch hints of Monti’s treachery. Scraping away the initial fictions and wrist-slap for his little airplane prank, investigators gather evidence far more ominous. In January 1947, the Justice Department issues an alarmed 26-page memorandum. The following November, FBI agents are instructed to find and interview Monti “with a view to subsequent prosecution” for treason.
They approach him at Elgin Field in Florida, where he is now stationed, and grill him at length. Then they track down witnesses who observed him in India before he deserted; prisoners of war who lived alongside him in Germany; German radio personnel; witnesses who watched Monti rejoin the American forces in Italy. They also find recordings of his broadcasts.
In late 1947, Monti tells a Post reporter that he made 10 or 20 radio transcriptions for the Nazis and came up with six of the scripts himself, mainly writing about Allied bombs’ “murdering innocent civilians” in Germany. But, he adds, he wrote these scripts as a wink and a nod to his countrymen, to let them know how effective the bombings had been.
Other scripts that he broadcast were prepared, he says, by Pierre de la Ney du Vair (a.k.a. Peter Delaney). Originally from Louisiana, the former Catholic priest had married the daughter of a St. Louis manufacturer in 1935. Nine years later, he joined an SS unit that had evolved from the Legion of French Volunteers Against Bolshevism. It is thought that de la Ney du Vair was responsible for Monti’s joining the SS.
De la Ney’s wife shared his views. Fired up about “Jewish–Wall Street” control of the U.S., she allegedly took part in Nazi propaganda broadcasts as well. After the war, the FBI searched for her throughout North America, wanting her as a witness in yet another treason trial. By then, she was a widow: De la Ney was traveling through Berlin a few weeks before the Germans surrendered, and an enemy plane bombed his train. He died with his 11-year-old son clinging to him.
Monti will later back away from what the Post reported and deny that he wrote any scripts himself. But in November 1947, he is chatting freely: He tells The St. Louis Star-Times that he let the Germans think he was a Nazi “to gain their confidence. I don’t like communism and I don’t like Russia, but I couldn’t be a Nazi. I couldn’t have become a Nazi in a year.” It was chiefly his fear of the Russians that caused him to join the SS, he adds. He says he was captured by Italian partisans in Milan at the end of the war, on the day Mussolini was hanged. After his capture, he says, he removed the SS insignia from his black uniform, escaped the partisans, and made his way back to the Americans.
Axis Sally
The story of the first woman in the U.S. to be convicted of treason
Two women broadcast as “Axis Sally” during the war, but the original Axis Sally is the one who will be called to testify at Monti’s treason trial, two weeks before her own. Her real name is Mildred Gillars. She is about to become the first woman in the U.S. to be convicted of treason.
Born in Portland, Maine, in 1900, Gillars spent bits of her young adulthood in Greenwich Village, Paris, Algiers, and Dresden. She was an artist’s model and an actress before moving to Germany to work as an announcer with German State Radio. There, she became engaged to Paul Karlson, a naturalized German citizen. He was killed in action on the Eastern Front.
Gillars’ first broadcasts were apolitical. Then she fell in love with the charismatic Dr. Max Otto Koischwitz, program director for the radio’s USA Zone. Under his tutelage, she grew feistier and gathered a few nicknames, among them, because she described herself as looking like an Irish lass, Axis Sally.
Her lover was two years younger than she, born in Germany in 1902. Koischwitz had emigrated to the U.S. and taught German literature at Hunter College. In 1935, he became a U.S. citizen. But students and other faculty noticed ugly dark threads of anti-Semitism woven into his lectures, and in 1939, he was asked to take a leave of absence. He resigned instead and returned to Germany.
Gillars made her most famous broadcast the day before D-Day, acting out a play Koischwitz had written. Her part was that of an Ohio mother dreaming of her son’s terrible death during an attempted invasion of German-occupied Europe.
In her regular Axis Sally broadcasts, Gillars told Americans they were fighting on the wrong side: They should be fighting communism instead, to save Christianity. She told a worried American mother that her son’s leg had been amputated and remarked, “how little did she ever dream that she’d be asked to sacrifice him for Roosevelt and his Jewish cohorts.”
Gillars made her last broadcast in 1945, two days before Germany surrendered.
After the war, Victor Woerheide, the special assistant to the attorney general who would prosecute Monti, was sent to Berlin to find and arrest Gillars. Working together, he and a special agent turned up a single lead: a woman who had visited a prison camp seeking interviews. She called herself Midge at the Mike and was using Barbara Mome as an alias. Soon after, a Barbara Mome turned up selling her furniture at Berlin resell-it shops. After “intensive interrogation,” one of the furniture sellers gave the investigators Gillars’ address. When Gillars was taken into custody, her only request was that she be allowed to bring a photograph of Koischwitz, who had died the previous year of tuberculosis and heart failure.
Tapes of Axis Sally’s broadcasts are played at her treason trial.
In her testimony, reported in the Chicago Daily Tribune on March 1, 1949, she mentions an American Air Force deserter who walked into the Berlin radio studio one day and said hello. “I just looked at him, turned around, and walked out without speaking,” she tells the court. She says she then announced to Adelbert Houben, a Nazi radio official, “That man is a spy or a traitor. Either he must go or I will.”
This rather wrinkles the brain, coming from a 48-year-old woman who sobs, on the stand, that she loves America “at all times,” yet admits taking an oath of allegiance to Hitler.
She is sentenced to 10 to 30 years and slapped with a $10,000 fine for treason. While in prison, she converts to Roman Catholicism; on her release, she goes to live in a convent in Columbus, Ohio.
IN OCTOBER 1948, the U.S. government presents 50 witnesses to a federal grand jury. They return an indictment charging Monti with 21 acts of treason.
On January 17, 1949, the first day of his trial, the federal courtroom in Brooklyn is jammed with photographers, reporters, and spectators. Also present, notes a rather lyrical summary in his FBI file, are members of “a family which had proudly sent four sons to fight and die, if necessary, for the very country their own brother elected to betray.”
The government has spent quite a lot of money preparing for this trial, which is expected to last at least a month. Witnesses have been found and interviewed at length in Germany, Italy, Great Britain, Venezuela, and El Salvador. Many, among them elite SS officers who are expected to confirm that Monti enlisted with them, have been brought over from Europe to testify. The high official of the Nazi radio program, Hans von Richter, will be called to confirm that Monti sought membership in Hitler’s Elite Guard. “Axis Sally” (see p. 69) is to testify about Monti’s propaganda broadcasts…
But none of this will happen.
Monti has decided to plead guilty.
U.S. District Court Chief Judge Robert Inch refuses to accept this abrupt change of plea unless Monti confesses in open court or two witnesses testify to his treasonable acts. Monti makes his confession in open court that very morning, succinctly and with little emotion.
“The only thing that is not clear is, did you do it voluntarily?” asks Inch.
“Yes,” Monti replies.
“That’s enough for me.”
One of his attorneys pleads for leniency from what could be a death sentence, describing Monti as growing up in a God-fearing family that had perhaps too much influence on him. He attended “schools of his sect” and grew up reading religious magazines and newspapers “reputed to be isolationist in character,” his attorney notes, and his environment was “strongly anti New Dealist.” In the world view that shaped him, Communism was the enemy of both church and state. He was “fanatically imbued” with the notion that the Soviet Union was the real enemy.
A psychiatric evaluation from Kings County Hospital is entered into the court record. It indicates that Monti is exceptionally bright, with an IQ of 131. (Any score higher than 116 is considered above average.) He is emotionally immature, however, and oversensitive, narcissistic, and obsessive-compulsive, the report says. Though he possesses “paranoid traits,” habitually distrusting others’ motives, he does not meet the legal criteria for insanity, the senior psychiatrist notes. He can discuss the charges against him quite rationally. During interviews, his responses were consistently relevant and coherent, and he showed no evidence of confusion, hallucinations, morbid depression, or suicidal tendencies. “He has not been particularly sociable with the other prisoners,” she adds. “He explains this by stating that their topics of conversation do not interest him, since they are not interested in intellectual discussions….He has a superior attitude toward the average individual, but he does not feel secure in his superiority, and the result of this conflict is that he feels hostile toward those who question his judgment and his motives.”
The diagnosis is recorded as “No psychosis, Not Mental Defective, Psychopathic Personality, Paranoid and Obsessive-Compulsive Features.” The psychiatrist theorizes that “the behavior which led to his arrest may be described as the result of idealism and was motivated by his belief that he might be able to correct some of the injustices of society. In behaving in this manner, he demonstrated defects of judgment and distorted ideas as to his ability to influence social thinking”—not because he is delusional but because he has been exposed, throughout his life, to “very strong religious and political influences,” and his “cultural background has not been wide enough to help him attain satisfactory balance.”
The report also notes that the hospital’s staff psychologist administered a Rorschach inkblot test and saw, in Monti’s responses “attitudes of superiority and hostility towards people as a self-protective device against inner feelings of inadequacy, emotional conflicts over homosexual strivings and inability to establish ego-identification at an adult male level.” Is this the root of his conflict, and the reason his family’s beliefs took deeper and more tangled root than they did in his six siblings? No mention is made at any point of a girlfriend or a date; no young woman sits tearful in the courtroom, waiting to learn his fate. He will never marry. And in the conservative Catholicism that holds his life together, homosexuality is the devil’s work. On the other hand, Midcentury psychiatry sees latent homosexuality in every blob of ink, and it could simply be that Monti cares far more desperately about ideas than he does about sex of any sort.
While investigating Monti, FBI agents compile dossiers on several other American citizens suspected of treason. One is Axis Sally, and a German woman brought to the States to testify against her offers the FBI useful information: The woman says she worked for a Kampfsender (a radio station run by the German military, transmitting to the Allied troops). This one, run by an SS officer, announced itself as Krautland Calling. The woman recalls three prisoners of war who came and went freely at Krautland Calling, received spending money, and enjoyed better food and a more interesting social life than did other prisoners of war. Monti claims that he was intimidated into broadcasting propaganda, but all three of the prisoners of war she identifies tell the FBI that no threats or promises were used to make them broadcast.
Indeed, when Special Assistant to the Attorney General Victor Woerheide asks Monti whether he was asked to make broadcasts for the Germans, he replies, “I was, and I consented.” He says he received no spending money, just ration allotments. He says he traveled to Hungary to view evidence of Russian atrocities, then wrote a radio script describing them.
After the defense attorney closes his argument for leniency, the prosecutor rises. “This man did everything he could to commit treason,” says Woerheide. “He left no stone unturned.”
When this sentence is announced, Monti is inscrutable, his features as smooth as marble. He is to serve 25 years in Fort Leavenworth for treason and pay a $10,000 fine.
He has “set a precedent in the courts of the United States,” an FBI memo to the agency’s director later notes, “inasmuch as he is believed to be the only person in American history to confess openly to this heinous crime.”
IN JULY 1951, two years after his guilty plea, Monti walks into U.S. District Court and withdraws it. He says he pleaded guilty to avoid the death sentence—and also for his parents’ sake. Yes, he says, he wrote some propaganda for the Nazis, but without treasonable intent; his attorneys coerced him into the guilty plea and limited his statements so the court could not realize his innocence. He insists that he did not say that the German government was superior to the U.S. government.
“Well, did you say that Germany was on the right side and the U.S. was on the wrong side?” he is asked.
“Possibly.”
He acknowledges that the Germans gave him civilian clothes and a pistol. As for motive, he says, he was hoping to help the U.S. prepare for the dangers of communism.
At one point, Monti’s father jumps to his feet, yelling that one of his son’s attorneys, Harold Shapero, lied.
Shapero blinks: About what?
The aggrieved father is escorted from the courtroom by a federal marshal. The occasion for the “lie,” reporters learn, was a 1948 conference with the Monti family in St. Louis. (By then they had moved to Howdershell Road in Florissant.) Two St. Louis lawyers and a Catholic priest, Reverend Joseph Tetzlaff, were also present at this meeting. Monti’s mother sobbed that she could not bear for her son to be sent to a mental institution; she would rather see him die a martyr.
“Marty was not a martyr,” Shapero told her. “The facts have been misrepresented to you.”
He added that with an insanity defense, there would be no trial. If there was a trial, and the facts were as Shapero understood them to be, only a miracle would save Monti. His best chance would be to plead guilty and confess in open court.
The conference ended with what Shapero thought was a consensus that Monti should do just that. Tetzlaff urged Monti to accede to his parents’ wishes because they were in his own best interests. Pleading guilty would prevent the three worst outcomes: a death sentence, a life sentence, and a stint in an asylum.
Now, though, Monti is saying that he does not approve any action on his attorneys’ part implying that he is guilty. He also argues that he should not have been arrested and tried in New York, because he had already been assigned to Elgin Field, in Florida.
His efforts to undo his sentence—in the same federal court, before the same judge—are unsuccessful. Inch finds that Monti was not coerced by either of his attorneys into a guilty plea.
A week later, the Post reports that Monti told one of those attorneys, Shapero, that the U.S. was on the wrong side. How could he think that, Shapero countered, when tens of thousands of Catholics—including his own brothers—had served in the U.S. military effort?
The Post also reports that Monti confided his beliefs to his childhood friend Edward Maguire, who lived on St. Catherine Street in North St. Louis County. Supposedly they agreed that if Monti wound up in Germany, he would write in code to Maguire, who was by then teaching at Saint Louis University.
DEEP BACKGROUND
The first Martin Monti, this one’s grandfather, sailed to St. Louis from Italy in the late 1800s. He did well for himself, stayed loyal to his Catholic faith, stayed connected to his homeland. After an earthquake there in 1908, he served on a committee to raise money for the survivors; Adolphus Busch donated a chunk of cash.
Monti’s son, Martin Jr., was busy at the time having fun: He won a trip to Europe at a Knights of Columbus carnival, and he was sufficiently charismatic that a newspaper society page noted his attendance at a basket picnic at Creve Coeur Lake in 1911. By 1920, he was a salesman with the real estate loan department of Mercantile Trust, and he owned property downtown. He became an investment broker and provided well for his wife and their seven children.
The Montis had two sons right away. Six years later, on October 24, 1921, Martin was born. He was followed by two more brothers and two sisters, and the children’s voices animated a big redbrick house at the corner of Oakmont and Augusta in Normandy. An odd incident was reported in the Post in September 1938: Monti’s father asked police to search for his 17-year-old son Martin, “who disappeared after leaving his home yesterday morning for Chaminade College,” a college prep high school where he was a senior. Supposedly he’s missed the bus; when last seen, he’d been riding a bike.
The reporter might have gotten the school wrong: Chaminade shows no record of a Martin James Monti attending, though his older brother John did graduate from Chaminade several years earlier. An article in the St. Louis Star-Times describes Martin as attending both Chaminade and Christian Brothers College high schools, as well as Campion, a Catholic boys’ boarding school founded by German Jesuits in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin.
In any event, there is no way to know where he went that day on the bike. The newspaper did no follow-up, and there were no further mysterious reports. The family was thoroughly respectable—Martin’s maternal grandfather, John Wiethaupt, was a judge in St. Louis County—and deeply Catholic, Martin especially. For him, Catholicism was what made the world make sense. The imperative of isolationism and the evils of communism swirled through that idealistic young brain, structuring the chaos of news flashes from a destabilized world. This perspective also offered entrée to grown-up conversations with his parents, and he regularly attended meetings of America First, an isolationist organization, with his father.
Monti also listened avidly to the sermons and opinions of the Reverend Charles Edward Coughlin, “the Radio Priest.” Coughlin was anti-communist—and so anti-Semitic and pro-fascist that he was silenced by the Vatican in 1936. Three years later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt—whom Coughlin had originally endorsed, then grown critical of—forced the cancellation of his radio program and stopped him from distributing his newspaper, Social Justice, by mail. FDR had tried a softer approach, sending Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. as his emissary, but there was no influencing Coughlin. He wanted a redistribution of wealth and taxation of the wealthy, and he considered the “money-changers” (Jewish bankers) anathema. Folk singer Woody Guthrie would soon write, “Yonder comes Father Coughlin, wearin’ the silver chain, gas on the stomach and Hitler on the brain.”
In young Monti’s eyes, the silencing and scorn only burnished the priest’s reputation. The fall that Monti registered for the draft, he also made his way to Detroit to meet his idol.
How does such a stew of ideas combine? Why would the anti-communist fervor of that era’s Catholicism stretch into anti-Semitism and fascism? And how could priests and quixotic young Americans wind up sanctioning a movement that ended in death camps?
There was a fairly large American Nazi Party organization before the war. Some members had German parents; others were ideological recruits. Monti had both the ideology—fanatically anti-communist—and a German mother, Marie Antoinette Wiethaupt Monti. Still, nothing suggests that he was a Nazi before he defected and wound up an officer in the Waffen-SS. He had a different enemy, one he had demonized for years as the enemy of Christianity itself. Did he see such evil in communism that no other evil even registered? Was becoming a Nazi a moral tradeoff, a matter of indifference, or an active preference?
WEARING THE RUNES
Paroled in 1960, Monti returns to the world as quietly as he left his post in Karachi 16 years earlier. He lives another 40 years, dying September 11, 2000, at the age of 78.
Etched into his tombstone are only his name and the dates 1921–2000. Nearby are the graves of his father, his mother, and two of his brothers, along with several members of the Wiethaupt family. The lot is in the Victorian section of Florissant’s Sacred Heart Cemetery—which for years was known as the German Catholic Cemetery—established in 1874 after St. Louis’ German Catholics asked for their own separate burial ground.
Few people visit that plot; few know the story of Martin Monti. The country’s first freely confessed traitor has eased into history, a somber memory of old ideals twisted awry.
Except in the minds of those who call him a hero.
A blog called American National Socialist was stripped from WordPress but is still cached online, and in a November 2016 entry, Monti is described as the “first American to wear the runes.” (The Nazis appropriated ancient runic symbols to reinforce their ideal of Aryan blood.) After a brief summary of his story, recounted no differently than Wikipedia tells it, comes a boldface afterword:
“This is an unusual true story about a REAL Christian and a REAL American patriot who was demonized by the jews in our new judized IsraHELL West. This young man should have been lauded as a patriot hero for ALL freedom loving Americans as well as a role model for our children…. The true evil of the period was of course the jew run Soviet Union—the mortal enemy of ALL freedom loving people. The Communist jews had murdered more Christians in the period leading up to the war than all the wars in history and young Lt Monti was eager to fight the REAL monsters—the communists in the USSR. Lt Monti had it figured out correctly since day one.”
This is a story that does not end.
