The Foreign Service Journal, January-February 2022

48 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2022 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL in search of information, and one officer, in particular, left a com- plicated, yet intriguing legacy that continues to unfold. Agnes Schneider served as the consul for passport services in Paris from October 1944 until her retirement in 1960. Serving as hostess for any- one who was anyone (among her guests were General Dwight Eisen- hower and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor) at frequent salons at her home in Paris’ Hôtel de Crillon, she was well known throughout the expatriate community in France. Ms. Schneider was infamous for summoning Americans she suspected of harboring communist sympathies to the consular section at Embassy Paris on a pretext, then confiscating their passports. Known throughout the local com- munity as Spider Schneider, she also took a dim view of anyone requesting to renounce their U.S. citizenship and was conse- quently named in several lawsuits during the era. Her actions mirrored those of the infamous Passport Office Director Frances Knight, a close friend of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Sena- tor Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.), who made sure those at home with rumored communist ties would not receive a passport at all. While we may find these actions reprehensible today, Agnes Schneider’s backstory is far more complicated than one might expect. Raised in the small town of Shamokin, Pennsylvania, as the fifth of eight children in her parents’ large boarding house, Agnes was a gifted soprano soloist and was sent to Berlin at age 17 to train for the opera. In Berlin, she was taken in by the Israel family, wealthy owners of one of the largest and oldest depart- ment stores in the city and patrons of the arts, who essentially raised her from then on as part of their family. When the outbreak of World War I dashed her opera dreams, Ms. Schneider took a job at Embassy Berlin as a clerk in the consular section, where she worked for most of the next two decades. In fact, when the United States entered World War II, she was one of the last Americans left working at the embassy, staying until she was also arrested and interned by the Nazis with other U.S. diplomatic staff in Bad Nauheim. She remained in detention until they were exchanged for German prisoners in May 1942. Instead of sailing for New York with the rest of her colleagues, Ms. Schneider sailed for London, where she began work at the U.S. embassy and reconnected with the Israel family, who had relo- cated to London after their oldest son, Wilfrid Israel (a friend of Albert Einstein), coordinated and helped finance the Kindertrans- port, which relocated German Jewish children to the United Kingdom in 1938-1939. Sadly, Wilfrid Israel’s plane was shot down off the coast of Portugal in March 1943 while he was working on plans to save Jewish children in Vichy France. The last person he was known to have spoken with in London on the evening prior to his final departure was Agnes Schneider. Given their close relationship, it is likely that Ms. Schneider had a role in helping with the Kindertransport effort, although we have not yet been able to discover any proof. Her obituary also mentions that she had helped several Jewish families escape Germany. What is evident from our research is that she was very human, and her legacy is far more complicated than the “Spider Schneider” moniker from 1950s Paris would suggest. b Have we piqued your interest? If you have a great depart- ment history story or item to share, if you are willing to do research at your post, or transcribe handwritten antique docu- ments, or if you simply enjoy department history trivia, please join us on Facebook in the “CA History Project” group (we ask that you answer the security questions so we know who you are). Not on Facebook? Feel free to contact me by email, and I will gladly introduce you to the rest of the team. A healthy community needs a shared understanding of its history—both the positive and negative aspects of it—to chart a course forward. Through researching and documenting the lives of those who came before us—and making that informa- tion digitally accessible to ourselves and to the public—we can strengthen our understanding of who we are, how we got here and where we are going next. n Before her days as “Spider Schneider” in 1950s’ Paris, here is a 1920 passport photo of Agnes Schneider, who would work at U.S. Embassy Berlin as a clerk in the consular section for the better part of the next two decades. ANCESTRY.COM