Cover image of "Code Name Edelweiss," a novel about Nazis in America

Few remember them today, but in the 1930s there were Nazis in America. Lots of them. And tens of millions of Americans supported them in the depths of the Depression. The Silver Shirts. German-American Bund. Friends of the New Germany. And Father Charles Coughlin‘s weekly pro-Nazi and antisemitic screeds on the radio. With generous subsidies from Berlin, local pro-Nazi groups established a noisy presence throughout the country—but nowhere more loudly than in Hollywood. And there a courageous lawyer named Leon Lewis established an amateur spy network to infiltrate the pro-Nazi movement and find the evidence to convict them of treason. Author Stephanie Landsem tells a story inspired by Lewis’s real-life organization in her new novel, Code Name Edelweiss.

A real Nazi plot to take over Hollywood

Landsem leads her story with a quotation from Adolf Hitler in 1933: “Once there is confusion and after we have succeeded in undermining the faith of the American people in their own government, a new group will take over. This will be the German American group, and we will help them assume power.” I can find no evidence Hitler ever uttered those words. But they do convey the reality of the extensive campaign subsidized by Joseph Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry to take over the Hollywood studios, ensuring they never produced any film that criticized the Nazis. And Landsem dramatizes Leon Lewis’s campaign to foil Goebbels’s scheme.

Code Name Edelweiss by Stephanie Landsem (2023) 432 pages ★★★☆☆

Photo of Leon Lewis, the real-life hero of this story about Nazis in America
Leon Lewis, the real-life hero who spent years and his fortune to expose pro-Nazi operations in Hollywood in the 1930s. Image: Agat Films

Two spies at the heart of the Nazi conspiracy

Landsem’s story revolves around two central characters, Liesl Weiss (“Edelweiss”) and an anonymous operative for Leon Lewis code-named Agent Thirteen. Chapters alternate between the two. But Liesl is the center of attention. Landsem tells her story in the first person, while she relates Agent Thirteen’s in the more distant third person.

Operating separately and reporting only to Lewis, the two amateur spies insinuate themselves into the uppermost reaches of the Hollywood branch of the Friends of the New Germany. They’re both blond, blue-eyed, and radiant with health, fitting the “Aryan” stereotype. Liesl, a German-American who is a speed demon at shorthand and typing, works as a secretary to the husband-and-wife team who run the chapter. Agent Thirteen, a former Pinkerton private eye, becomes attached to the movement’s paramilitary forces, the Silver Shirts. He observes them training for “Der Angriff” (“the attack”), which the Friends plan to unleash against the Jewish heads of Hollywood’s film studios.

Fact versus fiction

Will Liesl and Agent Thirteen succeed in foiling the Nazi plot? This is fiction, so we know they will. Of course, the reality was far more complicated.

Leon L. Lewis (1888-1954) was no low-profile Los Angeles attorney. He was the son of German-Jewish immigrants who settled in Wisconsin. After graduating from law school, he became the first national secretary of the Anti-Defamation League and, later, the national director of B’nai B’rith. In Los Angeles, where he and his family moved in the late 1920s, he took up the fight against Henry Ford’s rampant antisemitism. And when pro-Nazi organizations proliferated in America following Adolf Hitler ascension to power, he recruited non-Jewish veterans of World War I and a few others into a spy network in Los Angeles to investigate them.

As Rachel Maddow details in her excellent nonfiction account of Lewis’s work, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism, Lewis struggled for years to persuade law enforcement to act on the evidence his spies uncovered. The Los Angeles police were notoriously antisemitic as well as corrupt. And J. Edgard Hoover’s FBI insisted that Communists were the threat, not the Nazis. Only years later, once the United States became engaged in World War II, did a pair of courageous Justice Department officials successfully prosecute some of the Nazi leadership on the basis of the evidence Lewis brought to light.

Assessing the novel

Landsem has chosen a terrific hook for her novel. Unfortunately, what she makes of it is less than satisfying. Representing Leon Lewis’s spy network through only two idealized agents doesn’t do justice to the complex reality of the operation. And she devotes an inordinate amount of time and space to writing about the clothing Liesl and the other women wear. Even when the plot demands that Liesl rush out the door, Landsem dwells at length on the blouse, skirt, and shoes her heroine puts on. I imagine some readers must enjoy this sort of thing. I don’t. And I enjoyed even less discovering that the big reveal in Landsem’s plot was no surprise at all. I saw it coming almost from the outset.

About the author

Photo of Stephanie Landsem, author of this novel about Nazis in America
Stephanie Landsem. Image: Amazon

Stephanie Landsem is the author of six works of historical fiction, including two set in Biblical times. According to Google Books, “In real life, she’s explored ancient ruins, medieval castles, and majestic cathedrals around the world.” Landsem lives in Minnesota with her husband and four children.

For a terrific nonfiction account of Leon Lewis’s protracted fight to expose the pro-Nazi Right, see Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism by Rachel Maddow (America’s home-grown fascism).

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