Free Double Agent by Peter Duffy Page B

only machine gunners.” He spent eight months suffering along with hundreds of thousands of others from the malnutrition, infectious diseases, and mustard-gas poisoning that helped spell the doom of the German war effort, marking the beginning of physical maladies that would also remain constant until his dying days. “Every soldier was gassed, to a certain extent,” he said.
    But Sebold neither surrendered nor deserted as so many did during the miserable final onslaught. Afflicted with the influenza that was ravaging the ranks, he was transported to a military hospital at Göttingen “a couple of days or a week” before the end of the fighting on November 11, 1918, which means that, like his fellow soldier Adolf Hitler in Pasewalk Hospital, he was recuperating from injuries when he was informed of the outbreak of nationwide revolution, dissolution of the House of Hohenzollern, declaration of a republic, and signing of the armistice. Sebold supported the Kaiser’s monarchy and was opposed to its usurpation. But his abiding purpose over the next three months at Göttingen was to recover his health with a steady regimen of medicine, nutrition, and sweat baths. “I was in the war, and a soldier is entitled to a rest,” he said.
    He returned to the Ruhr Valley, which, in keeping with its role as the nation’s industrial heartland, was in the midst of the proletarian uprising. In Mülheim, the municipal government had been taken over by a workers’ and soldiers’ council (or soviet), which was serious enough about seizing the means of production that it arrested the elderly August Thyssen, the steel magnate in slouch hat known around town as King Thyssen and to American journalists as the Rockefeller of the Ruhr. Sebold began his journey from the military hospital in Göttingen in February or March 1919, which means that he would’ve arrived at about the time a battalion of the Freikorps, the right-wing militia of fearsome reputation that was helping put down the revolution on behalf of the Social Democratic government, marched into town and arrested the council without the bloodshed then occurring in neighboring cities. He stayed close to home for the next three tumultuous years, working in a machine shop and helping his mother maintain a business she was operating, a difficult proposition in a municipality that was prominent enough in the Communist movement to serve as the command headquarters for the second regional uprising in March–April 1920. A self-proclaimed Red Army of the Ruhr, composed of at least fifty thousand combatants, occupied the main cities of the region for less than two weeks before the army and its Freikorps allies ended the takeover in a five-day campaign of slaughter that left more than a thousand Communists dead, most of them shot after they had been taken prisoner. The Ruhr Valley of the immediate postwar period was a nightmare of wildcat strikes, fiery public meetings, running street battles, and worsening employment prospects. Asked about the political beliefs he held at the time, Sebold said, “I did not have any complaint about President Ebert’s government, but in our industrial district we had a lot of Communists and there was a lot of shooting, and nobody knew what was what.”
    He sought escape to a more peaceful land. At age twenty-three, he signed on as a junior engineer on a Schindler Oil tanker that plied between Hamburg and Galveston, Texas, although he only stayed aboard long enough to reach American soil. “When I left Germany, I had in mind never to go back,” he said. He jumped ship with five dollars in his pocket, using three or four of them to take the train from Galveston to Houston, where he sauntered over to the fire department. “I did not get a steady job, but I made a dollar or two a day cleaning engines and carrying the lunches for the firemen,” he said. A German American member of the force, part of an ethnic community that had been represented in significant