New Book Reveals Nazi Plot To Blow Up U.S. Targets With Help From Local Minister
By Pat Loeb
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - A little-known chapter of World War II history -- involving a womanizing Philadelphia minister-turned-Nazi-spy -- is the subject of a new book.
This is the culmination of 12 years of detective work by a New Jersey clergyman.
Reverend Francis Watson was working in the Lutheran Archives in Mt. Airy, where he's board president, in 2002.
"...and I opened up an envelope that had been sealed," he tells KYW Newsradio.
Inside was a single newspaper clipping.
"It told of the arrest of a man name Pastor Klepper," says Watson.
Carl Krepper was a Lutheran minister in Philadelphia, until he ran off with the wife of a parishioner, then served in New Jersey before going back to Germany in a nationalist fervor. Watson says he was sent back to Jersey with a mission to help Nazi saboteurs blow up American factories:
"But he was no James Bond because the FBI was on to him."
All this Watson found out through previously sealed FBI files and records here and in Germany.
The full tale is recounted in "The Nazi Spy Pastor: Carl Krepper and the War in America."