In 1940, a man in Chestnut Hill had his driver’s license suspended for failing to heed a warning for having parked within 25 feet of an intersection in Newton.

He refused to appear in court to address the matter. In fact, he was taking it to the State Department. For this was no ordinary Chestnut Hill resident, but Herbert Scholz, Nazi Germany’s consul in Boston.

Scholz claimed diplomatic immunity and referenced a 1923 “friendship treaty” between Germany and the United States.

Newton Motor Vehicle Registrar Frank Goodwin did not care.

“An American citizen under the same circumstances would lose his license and he (Scholz) is not any different,” Goodwin said.

The consul’s office warned him this might lead to international complications. Goodwin’s response was that “the only complication that might arise would be if Scholz drives his car in Massachusetts.”

This story appeared in an October 18, 1940, edition of the Daily Journal of Vineland, NJ, with the headline “Nazi Consul Gets Sharp Lesson in American Democracy.”

A minor incident involving a consul in another city seems like an odd choice for news in a New Jersey newspaper, except that Americans were, by 1940, sick of German diplomats.

The United States would not enter WWII until December 1941, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, but Americans were already on edge. Franklin Delano Roosevelt would close all German consulates on June 16, 1941, and demand employees leave by July 10. They “have been engaged in activities wholly outside the scope of their legitimate duties. These activities have been of an improper and unwarranted character,” said the letter from the US Secretary of State’s office to the German embassy. Other German agencies, like the German Library of Information in New York and the German Railway and Tourist Agencies, also had to be closed.

Scholz had, indeed, been engaged in activities outside the scope of his legitimate duties. He was not merely a consul, but also a spy, and he was promoting German propaganda in Boston. This is chronicled in the 2021 book, The Nazis of Copley Square, by Boston College professor Charles Gallagher, who unearths a dismal legacy of anti-Semitism and violence in the 1940s.

Scholz had arrived in Boston in 1938, and was quickly welcomed by the elite set, who enjoyed the company of the well-educated, English-speaking man and his wife, the daughter of a member of the German nobility. A handful of people were suspicious: he had no formal diplomatic training at all. But this was ignored by the FBI, who were still operating under Roosevelt’s policy of trying to not further anger Hitler.

They should not have ignored this because he was, indeed, not a real diplomat: rather, he was an officer in the espionage division of the SS. He was also a skilled propagandist.

Scholz had meetings with many of the leading German emigrés who lived in Boston. Although there was one German emigré he did not like and tried to attack: Heinrich Brüning, the former German Chancellor who had fled and had become a Harvard professor.

But Scholz also met with someone else: Francis Moran, the Irish-American leader of Boston’s chapter of the Christian Front, the anti-Semitic Catholic group that had chapters around the country. The Christian Front was affiliated with notorious radio priest Charles Coughlin of Detroit.

James Michael Curley, the former mayor of Boston, had said Boston was the most Coughlinite city in America. The Christian Front had many members, but because they were largely working class, they were low on money. Scholz’s first known meeting with Moran was in July 1940, and they were joined by Heribert von Strempel, who was in charge of the funds used by the Nazis to pay their American agents.

Scholz had struggled to spread German propaganda in Boston. Boston didn’t have very many German Americans. The US government was also highly suspicious of Germans, who they assumed would be the only ones to spread German propaganda–but this was not true.

Scholz found an ally in Moran. In some ways, this seems odd: Nazi Germany hated the Catholic church in Germany, and he’d had public disagreements with the Vatican. But three thousand miles away in Boston, this was less pertinent. Moran was vehemently opposed to Communism and the secularization of society, and so were they.

“The Nazis were the enemy of Moran’s enemy, and so became his friend,” writes Gallagher.

Scholz and Moran knew that overt anti-Semitism wouldn’t go over well. “You can’t win this fight with terrorism–with storm troopers, or risk just yelling ‘Jew.’ You’ve got to lay the groundwork first. You’ve got to be subtle about it so that they can’t pin an anti-Semitic label on you,” Moran told journalist Arthur Derounian.

One of the ways they did this was to attack communism, which was associated in many people’s minds with Judaism. Later, Moran would change, and was banned from an army camp on Cape Cod for the anti-Semitic comments he made to the soldiers.

But they had another tactic as well: convincing Bostonians that the United States should stay neutral during WWII, because it was a British war. In a heavily Irish-American city, this was a logical tactic. It was joined with anti-Semitism, because according to Moran, the governorship of the Bank of England was all Jews, and England had been duped into fighting for the Jews, not for themselves.

Scholz also tried other angles, like telling Catholic parents that because the army gave its privates condoms, this meant that the army was anti-Catholic, and so they should not let their sons enlist. Moran also showed the German propaganda film, Sieg im Westen, in Boston, for which he was praised by Goebbels.

After the announcement of the closure of German consulates, Scholz seemed unconcerned. The Boston Herald said Scholz merely laughed and grinned, which Gallagher suggests is because he knew his agent Moran would stay to spread his propaganda. Scholz thought he would be back: he put his furniture in storage instead of selling it. He did, however, burn most of his files at the consular office on Beacon Hill.

Scholz would not be back. He moved around various diplomatic positions in Europe, until he was arrested in 1945. He tried various tactics to get out of confinement, including claiming he was a stateless refugee. By 1946 he was in a former concentration camp that was now being used as a displaced persons camp for former SS officers. The winter of 1946-1947 was brutal; undoubtedly this was a much worse punishment than anything that could be dreamed up by Newton traffic enforcement. He wrote to Brüning, who sent him food, as he did for many other former Nazi officers.

Scholz still needed a way out of prison, which he did by testifying against his father-in-law, Georg von Schnitzler. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this led to him getting divorced. He left Europe for Buenos Aires, remarried, had some failed business ventures, and returned to Germany.

He argued for a German state pension on the grounds of having been a diplomat, and he died in 1985.

Moran, too, received no jail time. He enlisted in the U.S. Army, hoping to see combat, but was assigned to a non-combat unit after a telegram from J. Edgar Hoover. After the war, he lived in West Roxbury and worked at the Boston Public Library as a reference clerk until his death in 1971.