World War II Database

Contributor: C. Peter Chen

ww2dbaseBernard Julius Otto Kuehn was an associate of German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. Despite lacking formal training as a spy, Goebbels sent Kuehn to the US Territory of Hawaii in 1935 to work with Japanese intelligence agents. Kuehn began collecting intelligence for the Japanese immediately, with assistance from his wife Friedel Kuehn, his daughter Susie Ruth Kuehn, and even his young son Hans-Joachim Eberhard Kuehn. He linked up with Japanese spy Takeo Yoshikawa after Yoshikawa arrived in Honolulu, and the two communicated by occasional flashed messages across the city. A Japanese consulate staff member who received intelligence from Kuehn later noted that the intelligence shared by Kuehn were generally low in value. On the day of the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941, his flashes to Yoshikawa was observed by the Americans. Subsequent investigations led to the arrest of Kuehn, his wife, and his daughter on 21 Feb 1942. He was found guilty as a spy and was given a death sentence; it was later commuted to 50 years of hard labor at the Hawaiian Island Detention Camp on Sand Island. Dr. Bernhard Hormann of the University of Hawaii looked after Hans-Joachim Eberhard Kuehn for the remainder of the war. After the war, the Kuehn family was deported back to Germany in 1948.

Bernard Kuehn Timeline

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