Imprisoned for months as spy and released — 50 years ago
A man imprisoned for months in an authoritarian country — accused of being an American spy — is unexpectedly released, to the relief of his family and the praise of officials involved in the negotiations.
It happened last month, when Josh Holt returned to the United States after being imprisoned for two years on spying and weapons charges in Venezuela, after he’d gone to the South American country to get married.
But it also happened to a Milwaukee man in June 1968 — all because of some pictures taken for a doctoral thesis.
Ronald V. Wiedenhoeft had gone to St. John’s Military Academy in Delafield and, after graduating from Cornell University, earned a master’s degree in art history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In 1967, he was 30 years old and teaching art history at Columbia University in New York City, working on his doctoral dissertation on Berlin architecture of the 1920s and ’30s. As part of that work, he traveled to Germany to gather more data and images for his research; his wife, Renate, and their two children joined him on the trip.
Snapshots of the wrong building
At the time, Berlin was divided into East and West, the remnant of the post-World War II occupation. West Berlin, the part of the former German capital occupied by the United States, Britain and France, was an island inside communist East Germany.
Wiedenhoeft and his family went to West Berlin, and on Sept. 5, 1967, he took a side trip into East Berlin to take pictures of some of the sector’s older buildings. He had permission from the East German government to take photos in the city but “forgot to take the permission slip with him,” his father, Kurt W. Wiedenhoeft, told The Journal in a Sept. 13, 1967, story.
The younger Wiedenhoeft picked a bad day to forget. He was taking a picture of an apartment development designed by early modernist Bruno Taut.
“Unknown to Wiedenhoeft,” The Journal wrote in a Sept. 10, 1968, story, the apartment building “was next door to the headquarters of the Ministry for State Security, the East German equivalent of the CIA,” also known as the Stasi.
The U.S. government confirmed on Nov. 14, 1967, that Ronald Wiedenhoeft was being held in an East German jail, and was to be tried by the government as an American spy.
After getting confirmation that their son was being charged with spying, Wiedenhoeft’s parents waited in Milwaukee, while his wife stayed in West Berlin. He wasn’t allowed to write, so they had no word on how he was doing.
8-hour-day interrogations
Then on June 3, 1968, seemingly out of the blue, he was released.
It wasn’t really out of the blue. Behind the scenes, Maxwell Rabb, an attorney and president of the United States Committee for Refugees, had been working to secure Wiedenhoeft’s release.
At a press conference on June 4 in West Berlin, Wiedenhoeft described his arrest: “A man who looked as innocent as a Sunday school teacher asked me if I would come along with him to answer a few questions,” he said, according to a Journal story published June 4. “I went along, and the few questions stretched over nine months.”
In an interview at his parents’ home on North 42nd Street on Sept. 9, 1968, Wiedenhoeft said the thing he was most worried about was his captors’ “lack of logic and reasoning.”
“It was a topsy-turvy world,” Wiedenhoeft told The Journal, in a story published Sept. 10, 1968. “The more you would explain, the more they thought you were covering something up.”
Wiedenhoeft, who with Renate founded a company that provides high-quality images for art-history classes, went on to complete his doctorate at Columbia, wrote several books on architecture and housing, and taught at several universities. According to a post written by Renate for the College Art Association of America, Wiedenhoeft died on Sept. 10, 2010, at age 73, after a lengthy illness.