In March, 1940, Edmund Carl Heine, a forty-nine-year-old American automobile executive, reached an understanding with a company then known as Volkswagenwerk GmbH. Heine, who immigrated to the United States from Germany as a young man, had spent years at Ford, first in Michigan and then in its international operations in South America and Europe, landing finally in Germany. In 1935, two years after the Nazi regime came to power, Ford fired him, for reasons that are unclear. Heine next signed on with Chrysler, in Spain, but the Spanish Civil War was tough on the car business. And so he was out of a job again.
Volkswagen offered to pay Heine, who was an American citizen, to collect information on the production of airplanes in the U.S., including military planes. This was odd. Volkswagen had been founded only a few years earlier, as a Nazi Party-managed project for building a people’s car”; it hadn't even mass-produced that automobile yet, let alone a plane. And Heine was instructed to send the information not to its headquarters but to addresses that included a mail drop in Peru and an apartment on East Fiftyfourth Street, in Manhattan, occupied by a sometime artist’s model in her twenties named Lilly Stein, whose transportation-industry credentials were scant.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der December 18, 2023-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
Bereits Abonnent ? Anmelden
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der December 18, 2023-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
Bereits Abonnent? Anmelden
A Critic at Large - Off the Leash
The wacky and wonderful world of the Westminster Dog Show.
A Campus in Crisis
Dissent and defiance at Columbia's pro-Palestine protests.
Consolation
Five years before my mother died, we had a violent argument—a thing that had never happened before.
THE INSTIGATOR
How Miranda July starts again.
LOADED
We used to think the rich had a social function. What are they good for now?
BLAME GAME
“Baby Reindeer” and Under the Bridge.”
OUT OF THE DARKNESS
Zemlinsky, Schulhoff; and other neglected Jewish composers of Central Europe.
BOOKS - FORGET IT
A neuropsychologist says that we're thinking about memory all wrong.
PERSONAL HISTORY - TABULA RASA
THE WORDLE PHILOSOPHY
NEIGHBORLY
My name is Margaret Jo Stinson, and I’d like to share my own perspective on this sort of thing.