The Bergdoll Boys, page 55
Berta and Helene testified about Grover’s timeline in the mansion, which matched his testimony and the travel documents. Since multiple subpoenas served on Erwin were not answered, prosecutors wanted him arrested. Neighbors told investigators they had seen Erwin around the Broomall farm during the trial. Finally, both sides agreed to stipulate that Erwin’s testimony would corroborate testimony from Berta, Helene, and Grover. They left him alone.
During breaks in the trial, Alfred patrolled around Governors Island and watched the Army band practicing for funeral marches. He was enthralled by the soldiers practicing throwing hand grenades, and he could hear the rat-tat-tat of machine-gun fire at the range in the deep trench of an old moat. He had the run of the Army fort, but he was not allowed near his father’s jail cell.
During one break, Alfred saw his father in an anteroom of the gymnasium where reporters sneaked a few questions. Still lying, Grover told them the buried gold story was for real but he would not elaborate. He said fellow passengers on the Atlantic crossings would whisper “Bergdoll, Bergdoll” among themselves whenever he moved around the decks. He also told reporters about watching the federal agents in their car watching the Wynnefield mansion.
“They were always outside my house at 52nd and Wynnefield Avenue. Some of them in cars with their headlights out. Every time they lit a cigarette, I could see their faces. I was watching from the third-floor window with powerful [Zeiss] binoculars,” he said before the reporters were shooed away.
Sergeants John O’Hare and Calvin York returned to Governors Island to tell a new crop of judge advocates about Grover’s dramatic escape from them in 1920. Both had been prosecuted for dereliction of duty, found not guilty, and were retired, living on their Army pensions.
Weinberger lost his challenge on the statute of limitations. In his summation, he said, “He [Bergdoll] gave himself up and came back to take his medicine… so he could give his wife a home, and his children an education in the United States. This man should not be punished more than is fair merely because his case has been so publicized. He has already suffered and must spend five years in prison for a youthful folly.”
Prosecutor Lerch said, “Bergdoll thumbed his nose at the U.S. Government for nearly 20 years. This case has attracted an undue amount of publicity, so much publicity that it would seem to have been deliberately planned.”
The publicity was immense. Alfred said his mother seemed to relish it. She agreed to newsreel and network radio interviews with herself and the children, crying on a national radio show, Vox Pop, which gained her much sympathy. Berta appealed to the American Legion on the program, causing it to demand a response the following week, leading to more publicity. Another interview for NBC Radio at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York included little Bubi with the microphone up to his mouth, where a national audience heard him say, “I want my Daddy to come home.”
Berta favored a woman reporter with whom she became friendly and who, she believed, wrote favorable articles about her plight. She revealed personal information to Evelyn Shuler, who had a knack for public relations, providing Shuler’s newspaper scoops about her pregnancies, her challenges as a single mother, and her plans to sell the Wynnefield mansion and buy a farm in Chester County, Pennsylvania, an agricultural region west of Philadelphia.
Berta also told Shuler of her brother Richard’s death in the war.
“He was just 21 and was among the first to be shot. He was killed right after the start of the war in 1914, after less than two weeks of fighting,” she said to great sympathy among Americans, especially women.
These articles generated many comments from readers who loathed and supported the Bergdolls. By the end of 1939, however, the scales were gradually tipping in favor of the attractive German woman with a brood of children supporting her jailed husband and vowing to strike out on her own when he went to prison. Alfred believed Shuler’s sympathetic articles were responsible for his mother’s new public persona. He also believed Shuler helped coach Berta on what to say to other press members, but nothing supports his conjecture.3 The admiration and sympathy Berta received harkened to the past and the venerated old Bergdoll name returning to support her when she needed it.
Grover’s trial ended on October 5, 1939, and the judge advocates deliberated for two hours and 15 minutes. They found Grover guilty of escape and desertion but not guilty of conspiracy to desert with Stecher. Their sentence was similar to the sentence in 1920 but, surprisingly, a bit lighter—three years of hard labor. With the nearly five years he still had to serve from the 1920 sentence, he faced about eight years.
Unlike in 1920, when Grover was privately read the verdict in his jail cell, the 1939 verdict was revealed in open court. Grover showed no emotion. Berta wept.
Alfred and Emma were not in the courtroom. They got the news at home in Philadelphia. Alfred later wrote that he only wanted his father to go to prison long enough for him and his siblings not to be bullied or beaten by Grover again. From reporters, Emma got the news by telephone at her Broomall farm.
Grover was returned to his cell to await the formalities, including trial review and approval of the verdict and sentence by Governors Island First Army Commander Lt. General Hugh A. Drum.4
Berta was still on a public relations campaign, telling the press she was disappointed in the verdict because Grover “has always been so kind to the children and me.”
Weinberger tried his best to appeal the sentence, saying Grover surrendered himself and was not “captured.” He also pointed to how hapless federal agents failed the government when they sat and watched after getting tips that Grover was inside his mansion. His effort failed.
Alfred concluded, “Weinberger’s brilliant defense almost forced the Army to impose a relatively light sentence.”
Four days later, Berta called a taxi cab and checked herself into Lankenau Hospital just outside the western city limits of Philadelphia. At 1 am, she delivered a healthy baby girl. Expecting a boy, she had planned to name the baby Grover. Instead, she wired Grover with the news, and he insisted she should name the baby Berta.
Late in October, Grover and Weinberger were still trying to find a way out of their predicament. Most likely at Grover’s insistence, Weinberger wrote to Secretary of War Harry Hines Woodring, claiming Grover had information about advancements in German military equipment; something about interchangeability in German guns and details of a new diesel engine that could make German tanks go faster. Their effort for some kind of government intervention in Grover’s case failed. Why Grover waited until after the verdict when the European war was already underway is anyone’s guess. This revelation confused Alfred because his father always claimed to be a devout pacifist.
At about the same time, Berta and then Emma began writing regularly to President Roosevelt and the First Lady, requesting an audience and pardon for Grover.
Also, in late October, Berta received checks from the Army paying for their expenses for appearing as witnesses in Grover’s trial, including the children. Almost simultaneously, she received word that they won the return of 80 percent of Grover’s assets seized or frozen by the Alien Property Custodian. Without the benefit of a court ruling, the attorney general determined that Weinberger had been correct: Grover did not lose his citizenship with conviction, only his citizenship rights. The remaining 20 percent of the seized funds were to go into a special reparations fund for Americans harmed by the war.5
Then, as had happened so many times, Grover’s relationship with his lawyer, Weinberger, soured. Grover was annoyed that Weinberger had agreed with the government to keep 20 percent of the frozen assets, perhaps as a measure for negotiations. He fired Weinberger, who immediately sued Grover and Berta for his legal fees, claiming he was owed about $60,000. He also sued the Alien Property Custodian, claiming that if the seized funds went directly to Berta, she would flee the country and stiff their creditors. It got ugly, but Weinberger later settled for partial payment, the amount unknown.
On October 17, 1939, a sign appeared on the front lawn of the oversized stone chateau with a wide wraparound porch and 12 acres built in 1907 by Charles and later sold to Emma. The 24-room mansion at the farm in Broomall was for sale for $125,000. Erwin still owned his 54-acre farmhouse, barn, and machine shop next door, and Grover and Berta still owned their ramshackle 88-acre farm across West Chester Pike. The surprise For Sale sign may have inspired cooperation among feuding family members.
The family lawsuits were gradually settled, with Emma’s estate put into a trust with her son, Louis Bergdoll Bergson, named the managing trustee. The trust named her five children as the beneficiaries in return for her life use and support to live at her farm in Broomall.
The For Sale sign came down.
One of Louis’ first significant moves as managing trustee was to propose selling the valuable Somerset, Maryland, vacant property on the Washington, D.C. line that the Bergdolls had owned since their father was alive in the late 1800s. Its value had skyrocketed, and its location was a temptation for real estate developers, even the federal government. Once trying to use the choice of property as a bargaining chip for a deal with the federal government to forgive Grover’s draft evasion, Emma had become the sole owner of the plot when her husband died in 1896.
The remote farmhouse in Chester County, Pennsylvania offered a separate section, left, for Grover, when he got out of prison. Berta kept horses for the children. When Grover completed his sentence, their life together on the farm turned into family and marital strife with highly abusive behavior from Grover, who began a long spiral into mental illness. (Chester County Historical Society, Historical Society of Pennsylvania)
When Grover was consulted about approving the Washington land sale plan, he forbade it. He thought real estate values would climb higher. Berta had to deliver the bad news to the trust. Louis then sued Berta as manager of Grover’s affairs.
When 1939 ended, Berta and the children spent their last Christmas in the dingy old Wynnefield mansion. Despite being listed for sale, there were no takers. Berta wished to buy a farm for her and the children to live on while Grover served his sentence. She harkened back to her youth living on the grounds of the Weissenhof mental hospital in Weinsberg when her father was the head gardener.
Alfred said his mother may have known about raising vegetables in a garden, but she knew little about the agriculture business. However, buy a farm, she did. Just before Valentine’s Day, 1940, Berta settled on three contiguous properties consisting of more than 260 acres of forest and fields, with farmhouses and barns on each property between West Chester and Downingtown, Pennsylvania, in Chester County, a rural farming region 30 miles west of Philadelphia. The historical Brandywine Creek flowed through a valley south of the farm, and a smaller stream, Valley Creek, flowed through another valley north of the farm. Because it was on a hill at the top of Skelp Level Road, the property had been named Harmony Hill Farm.
Berta may have bought the farm more for the seclusion it would bring in the woods. There wasn’t much open land for cultivation. Alfred called it “as picturesque as New England.”
The price for all three parcels was $45,000. Grover approved the expenditure, but the farm was purchased in Berta’s name because he was a convicted felon. The children didn’t see the farm until they moved in on April 5, 1940.
Their father remained imprisoned at Governors Island but wouldn’t stay there much longer.
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1 The hundreds of pages of documents about the 1939 court-martial trial in the National Archives in St. Louis include testimony from Grover’s oldest children. Press photographs at Governors Island were available from newspaper archives kept at Temple University Urban Archives in Philadelphia.
2 Although Treasury records revealed that Emma had purchased some Liberty bonds, her version of the amounts varied widely and could not be trusted, even in sworn testimony.
3 Evelyn M. Shuler worked as a features reporter from 1922 until 1942 for the Philadelphia Public Ledger and Evening Ledger. She covered other big stories such as the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, the crash of the Hindenburg, and presidential inaugurations. She later became a public relations executive for Penn Mutual Life Insurance Company.
4 Lt. Gen. Drum had risen from the youngest officer in the Army and General Pershing’s chief assistant in France to command the First Army headquartered at Governors Island. He was the general for whom Pine Camp was named Camp Drum, then Fort Drum in Northern New York State.
5 Grover turned down the deal for the return of his seized assets, hired a Washington lawyer to regain the remaining 20 percent, and won. The total amount was about $407,000; $8.6 million in 2023.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Final Flight
Harmony Hill, Pennsylvania–River Edge, Virginia 1941–19661
Berta Bergdoll trudged uphill on a rocky lane beneath heavy limbs from trees that shrouded her farm from Skelp Level Road in East Bradford Township, Chester County, Pennsylvania. It was on the top of a long ridge, and, already in early December 1941, the cold air of approaching winter was creeping into southeastern Pennsylvania. Opening her mailbox along the gravel road, she pulled out a letter she had been expecting. Ripping it open, she read the disheartening news. Parole was denied for her husband, Grover, now held in the federal penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
Berta may have immediately thought of writing again to President Roosevelt in Washington or Hyde Park, New York, begging to appeal the decision. Before she could organize her thoughts and sit at her typewriter, however, the world changed. Two days after she received the letter from Fort Leavenworth, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
There would be no sympathy in Washington for draft dodgers.
Grover had been transferred to Fort Leavenworth near the end of 1940 when the Castle Williams prison on Governors Island was closed. In preparation for his first parole hearing in October 1941, three outstanding indictments against him since 1920 were dismissed by the federal court in New York. At Leavenworth, Grover grew comfortable, as had Erwin many years earlier, in a prison cell by himself, with a radio, his books, and regular visits by train from Berta and the children. Despite the long, arduous journey westward, they could see him for only three hours at a time. It inspired Berta’s regular correspondence with the Roosevelts—or her one-way letter writing. The Roosevelts didn’t reply.
“I am with my children on a Chester County farm, and they all and myself want to be good American citizens, and we are thankful to live in this country, which we love,” she wrote of her quest for a presidential pardon for Grover. She explained that her husband should be home so that Alfred, at age 14, “should have the stronger hand of his father. Thank you with all my heart for anything you can do to help us.”
Berta also suggested to the Roosevelts, so wrapped up in American policy and preparation for war, that Grover “would like to build on the Bergdoll property in Washington [Somerset, Maryland], which lies in the defense area, houses for defense workers. And he will do anything to serve his country.”2
With Grover’s 1941 parole rejection, Berta may have realized she was in for a long slog on the Harmony Hill Farm with the children alone. Not that Grover would have been much help, but her dream of a quiet family life on the farm surrounded by cows, pigs, sheep, chickens, and horses was dashed again.
“I can’t understand what happened,” she told a reporter. “I thought my husband was to be released. Now we are heartbroken. We were all looking forward to having him back for Christmas. The children were making so many plans, but now I have had to say to them he won’t be home.”
Berta’s effort to have Grover released early employed a New York attorney, Joseph C. Thomson, who appealed to the attorney general for a pardon or commutation of Grover’s sentence. Thomson wrote to Washington, reminding officials of Grover’s accomplishments 25 years earlier and his potential usefulness for the military in the war.
“That prior to 1917, he was an accomplished aviator. In 1914, he was flying his plane. That he was pro-German from 1914–1917, and it was not fear that drove him to violation of the draft laws, but it was his unalterable opposition, at the time, to our war with Germany.”3
Thomson said Grover would be helpful to the United States during the war because he was well-known in Germany and “could help the German people unshackle themselves from the vicious grip of the Austrian paper hanger [Hitler].”
And, with words that Grover may have written, Thomson stated to the attorney general, “He is ready at this moment to enlist in the Air Corps or any other branch of the Army, Navy, or Marine Corps, to prove his Americanism if released. Mr. Bergdoll is not a coward.”
Grover even elicited the help of U.S. Army General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, a fellow Pennsylvanian raised in the Main Line communities simultaneously with the Bergdolls. As young men, Arnold, and Grover both trained to fly on the Wright B airplane in Dayton, Ohio, under the Wright Brothers, but months apart. On a goodwill tour of military bases as chief of the Army Air Corps, General Arnold was in Leavenworth and arranged to see his old friend, Grover. There is no record of Arnold ever supporting Grover’s effort at early release, and there is no record of the meeting except for Grover passing along the chance encounter to his son, Alfred.
Grover was 48, growing overweight, and somewhat comfortable in prison. He hadn’t been around an airplane in decades and knew nothing of modern technology. No one in Washington considered his “usefulness” in the war whatsoever.
Attorney Thomson was correct, however, with his final statement to the Attorney General. Grover was the only person in prison during the second European war for dodging the draft in the first war.
Meanwhile, Berta and the children hired farmhands to operate Harmony Hill Farm, installing them in cottages on the properties. They purchased a small herd of Guernsey cows, sheep, pigs, chickens, and ducks. The main Pennsylvania stone and wood frame barn was also filled with horses for the farmwork and for Berta and the girls to ride and jump. The classic Pennsylvania farmhouse was small but had a large porch and additions that expanded the interior. Berta spent liberally on a tractor and farm implements for the workers to operate. However, corn, hay, and grain production were complex because there was so much rock, poor soil on the hillside, and limited fertile valley land.4
