Citizen of the Shadows

The Lives and Lies of Lothar Witzke

  • Author(s): Friedland, Paul and Robert Hornick
  • Series: Legacies of War
  • Imprint: University of Tennessee Press
  • Publication Date: 2025-10-08
  • Status: Not Yet Published - Will Back Order
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“A monumental piece of work . . . an amazing accomplishment and a pleasure to read.”
—David Michaelis, author of Eleanor, the bestselling biography of Eleanor Roosevelt

“History as it should be written, a meticulous, dispassionate examination of complex and often contradictory evidence in which the only objective is to get to the truth . . . Highly interesting and instructive.”
—Michael Kort, professor of history at Boston University

One of the most notorious German spies of the twentieth century, Lothar Witzke lived a life that reads like a thriller. Convicted of espionage in 1918, he was the only German spy sentenced to death by the United States during World War I. After the war, he was pardoned by President Calvin Coolidge, only to be later accused of responsibility for one of the most spectacular acts of sabotage in US history: the Black Tom munitions depot explosion.

After being repatriated to Germany, Witzke lived in Latin America and China as a German expat and later joined the Nazi party. He ran espionage squads in Great Britain during World War II and became a prominent businessman in Hamburg after the war. He was killed in Hamburg in 1962, possibly by an East German agent as payback for suspected double agent work on behalf of the British.

With Citizen of the Shadows, the first full biography of Witzke, Paul Friedland and Robert Hornick trace Witzke’s morally complicated life and show readers how an infamous spy thrived in the interwar years and after. They probe his trial, conviction, and pardon, and analyze whether Witzke was really involved in the Black Tom explosion. In doing so, the authors uncover that many of the details of Witzke’s life—long assumed to be true—were lies.

Paul Friedland is an international lawyer. He was global head of the international arbitration practice at White & Case, LLP from 2002 to 2019. He is the author of Arbitration Clauses for International Contracts (2007).

Robert Hornick is an independent scholar and international lawyer. Now retired, he practiced at Coudert Brothers and Morgan Lewis and taught part-time at the University of Arizona. He is the author of The Girls and Boys of Belchertown: A Social History of the Belchertown State School for the Feeble-Minded (2012) and What Remains: Searching for the Memory and Lost Grave of John Paul Jones (2017).