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Exchange Student. Herbert Karl Friedrich Bahr, born in Germany, was brought to the U.S. as a boy, grew up in Buffalo, excelled in scholarship and sports at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In 1938 he went to a Technische Hochschule in Hannover as an exchange student. Last week, with $7,000 in his jeans, he came back on the S.S. Drottningholm, the Swedish exchange ship bringing Americans repatriated from Europe. He played craps with the passengers, bought them drinks.
The FBI met the liner as it docked, held all passengers for intensive grilling. Passengers complained noisily, and friends on shore joined in. But the grilling broke down "Refugee" Bahr: he admitted that he had been sent to the U.S. as a spy. He had invisible ink with him, and addresses in Switzerland, Spain and South America to which he was to send information. He had memorized a story to explain the $7,000 in his pockets: a Jewish woman, whose husband had been beheaded, had sold his stamp collection, had given Bahr the money to take to the U.S.
Dark, bespectacled Karl Bahr was taken to court in Newark to face espionage charges.
End of the Bund. Seven months after Pearl Harbor, the Government moved in on the German-American Bund, which had "dissolved" upon American entry into the war, had gone underground in literary, singing and sports societies. In New York, 29 Bundsters and associates were indicted on charges of assisting German-Americans to evade the draft. The time for laughing at the Bundsters' funny accents and cheap uniforms was at last officially over.