Walter Kappe
Walter Kappe (b. 12 January 1905 in Alfeld/Leine, Province of Hanover, Kingdom of Prussia, German Empire; ⚔ 1944)[1] was a German American Bund publisher and Abwehr officer (1st lieutenant) as well as sabotage plotter during World War II.
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United States
Walter Kappe arrived in the United States in 1925 and took a job at a farm implement factory in Kankakee, Illinois. Later he moved to Chicago and began to write for German language newspapers. He became a leader of the Teutonia Society, one of the earliest National Socialist organizations to appear in America.
Kappe was fluent in English and later became the press secretary for the German American Bund. He founded their paper Deutscher Weckruf und Beobachter and its predecessor Deutsche Zeitung. In 1936--the first year the German American Bund was established--Kappe organized the AV Publishing Company and five other Bund corporations. Fritz Kuhn ousted Kappe from his position in the Bund seeing him as a dangerous rival.
Abwehr
After twelve years in America he returned to Germany in 1937. He was attached to Abwehr II (the sabotage branch of German intelligence) where he obtained a Naval commission with the rank of lieutenant.
He was designated by Adolf Hitler to launce a sabotage operation against America shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Known as Operation Pastorius, Kappe began to recruit men for the mission by reviewing records from the Ausland Institute of those who were paid to return to Germany from America. He established a sabotage school at Quenz Farm forty miles west of Berlin to train the new recruits. Once the sabotage network was established and transferred to America, Kappe planned to slip into the US with a new identity and direct operations. However, this grandiose plan for himself never happened. Kappe branched from the Abwehr to head Kameradschaft-USA (Comrades from America).[2][3]
In 1943, the Wehrmacht commanded him as a “connoisseur of American conditions” to the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle of the SS, where he probably worked out a guideline for the special treatment of “German-born prisoners of war from overseas”. In 1944, Kappe fell in action at the front.
