The mansion on the corner of Jackson and Laguna streets has seen better days. The front door, atop the stone steps where a dashing Nazi spy once regaled overeager San Francisco reporters, is locked today. The paint on its colossal, curved Romanesque twin towers peels in the sun, exposing the original cinnamon-colored sandstone beneath.

2090 Jackson Street is not like other San Francisco mansions. For starters, it’s big. With 30 rooms covering just under 20,000 square feet of space, it’s one of the biggest private residences in the city. It’s also very old. Built in 1896 for a very rich man named William Franklin Whittier, the home survived the great earthquake and outdates any other building on the block. And perhaps most notably, during World War II, it was a Nazi enclave.

As with most old, storied homes in San Francisco, some say the place is haunted. Ghosts may not be real, but ghost stories are a window into some wild histories of the city, and 2090 Jackson doesn’t disappoint. If a ghost does exist there — the fables say the dim outline of a figure often appears on a wall in the basement of the giant building — then there are a number of former residents who may seek to spook the aging sun-baked palace. Here are the candidates.

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William Whittier moved from Maine to California at the age of 22 and quickly entered the glass and paint business, with huge success. He founded Whittier, Fuller & Company, the paint and glass manufacturer, then built the town of Hemet in SoCal and was generally a rich white man making a fortune in California, which was the thing to do in the 1850s. Whittier was also a man-about-town. The San Francisco Chronicle once called him “one of the most widely known citizens of San Francisco.”

In 1896, architect Edward R. Swain celebrated Whittier built a giant mansion. Some stories say he built it as a gift for his wife, who died in a carriage accident during its construction.

He moved in at the age of 64 with his three children — Billy, Mattie and Jane. (Beyond losing his wife, Whittier lost two other children before the age of ten for undisclosed reasons, but times were indeed tough.)

Within a year of the relocation, all adult children married or moved out and left William alone in the 30-room palace, where he likely spent many lonely hours in the octagonal smoking room on the third floor. What drove Whittier’s children out of the home so soon, beyond marriage, is not clear. The San Francisco Examiner reported on his third child Jane’s lavish wedding in the Presidio a few years later, but noted that her father was not in attendance.

Billy, who is invariably described as the “black sheep” of the family, was reportedly a drunk and an endless disappointment to his dad. Whittier once bribed him with an offer of $300 a month to sober up and move down to sleepy Hemet by the lake to live a good life. Billy turned down the offer and continued to drink and party in San Francisco for the rest of his days. Whittier was so maddened he changed his will, deciding to no longer pass the mansion down to Billy.

2090 Jackson Street, San Francisco.

Andrew Chamings/SFGATE

San Franciscans were intrigued about the old millionaire in his mansion, as were the gossip columns of the era. One decidedly large San Francisco Chronicle article in 1907 eagerly reported that Whittier had left the city to lust after a “vivacious young widow” named Mrs. Tilden, whose husband, a Red Cross volunteer, had been shot dead in his car in the Mission the chaotic days after the earthquake.

Whittier, who was 75 years old at the time, was a “devoted admirer of Mrs. Tilden for some time and had showered favors upon her with the burning intensity of a youth.” Another Pacific Heights society watcher claimed that Whittier’s interest in the young widow was “purely parental.”

Either way, the paper announced that “The Whittier mansion at 2090 Jackson street is closed, and his whereabouts or the date of his homecoming are profound mysteries.”

There are many bizarre stories about the goings on of Jackson Street during the following years.

On a Sunday night in 1912, a chauffeur named HC Freeman working for Whittier at the mansion awoke to shattering glass in his bathroom. He reported to the police that two bullets were fired from the street, through the window, and into the looking glass. Quite curiously, Freeman told the cops that he had a habit of staring into the mirror at himself for long periods of time, and he suspected that the shots “were an attempt on the part of someone familiar with his habits to end his vain career. ” Perhaps coincidentally, Whittier’s glass and paint company is credited with being the first to manufacture mirrors on the West Coast.

Two years later, the archives reveal that during the mysterious and fatal bombing of the Old Vedanta Hindu Temple — a majestic building I once argued may be the most beautiful in the city — a resident at 2090 Jackson got hurt. Morris Walter, likely a tenant of Whittier’s, survived the bombing with a “destroyed right eye” and lacerated face. However, the brief mention in the papers states that Walter merely walked the few blocks up the hill and “went home” rather than to the hospital that day.

Whittier died of pneumonia in his giant home in 1917, and with black sheep Billy spurned from the will, Mattie moved in. The building was a private residence until 1941 when the mansion’s second, even stranger act began.

That year, as was raging in Europe, the mansion was sold to the German Reich. Dozens of Germans diplomats moved in to the new lavish consulate.

The Nazi who ran the operation, Captain Fritz Wiedemann, was a stylish former German soldier who once acted as Hitler’s personal assistant. The Chronicle described him as “Hitler’s most astute diplomatic and espionage agent,” while also complimenting his appearance as “suave and smiling,” just months before the US would join the war.

Fritz Wiedemann and a photo of his boss.

Archival / Unknown

Wiedemann appeared to live two lives in San Francisco. Herb Caen mentioned the Nazi in many columns, painting him as a playboy in the city, who friends referred to as “Bubbles.” At the same time, stories were surfacing that in his position in San Francisco, Wiedemann was directing all Nazis in Central and South America, and was “chief disseminator of all Nazi and German propaganda in the United States.”

But only weeks after moving into the consul’s new home, on June 16, 1941, the US government kicked all German diplomats out of the country.

Reporters gathered in Pacific Heights that day to interview Wiedemann. “I like the city and the scenery. Without politics, I would like to live here,” he said on the front steps of 2090 Jackson.

When asked if he would be heading back to Germany to fight for his fuhrer, Wiedemann replied, “No idea,” though consular staff said they were all being sent to South America.

The saddest Nazi that day may have been Wiedemann’s 15-year-old son, Eduard, a Lowell High School student who loved life in the city. “I like it here,” Eduard told reporters in his distinctly Californian accent while “sulking” around the grounds. “It’s swell.”

Young Eduard Wiedemann stars longingly over the Bay from his family’s residence at 2950 Vallejo Street, after being told he must leave America due to his dad being a Nazi.

San Francisco Examiner / Archival

Outside of San Francisco, Wiedemann’s story took many more turns. Years later, it was revealed that as early as 1940, Hitler’s former right-hand man was spurned by the dictator after he had an affair with a Hungarian princess, who the fuhrer had been using for secret missions. Wiedemann then betrayed Hitler and urged the British to attack the Nazis, warning them that Adolf had a “split personality and numbered among the most cruel people in the world.”

Wiedemann didn’t make it to South America, but instead spied for the Germans in China, where it’s unclear if he worked for or against the Third Reich.

Back on Jackson Street, after the war, life normalized. The mansion was seized from the Germans in 1950 and became a private residence again. From 1956 to 1991, its tall wooden doors opened to the public as the home of the California Historical Society. It sold to a private resident in 1991 for $3,000,000 and hasn’t changed hands since. Its current worth is estimated at around $17,000,000.

So who haunts the basement on Jackson Street? Maybe one of Whittier’s children who died before adolescence, or maybe Billy the drunk who died just a few years after his father, returning to claim what was his. Maybe it’s the vain chauffeur, back to get one last look in the mirror, or maybe the one-eyed Hindu temple visitor, who crawled up the hill after the bombing. My money, however, is on Eduard, the sulking son of the double-crossing Nazi, back from exile in the swell city he loved.

The post The unusual San Francisco mansion that was as soon as a Nazi enclave appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

Robert Schwentke’s devastating “The Captain”, a black and white widescreen film from World War II, is a diabolical variation on Nikolai Gogol’s classic “The Inspector General” from the 19th century.

Based on an astonishing true story of the “hangman of Emsland”, the film tells the story of Willi Herold (a great Max Hubacher), a very Aryan-looking, 19-year-old German soldier who pretends to be the captain of the air force in command of his three-axle service car, the two Weeks before the end of the war, gathered a gang of crazy Nazi murderers and wreaked havoc behind the lines. The real Willi, a chimney sweep by trade, was brought to justice by the British and guillotine executed after the war.

We meet Schwentke’s Willi for the first time when he is fleeing from other German soldiers who are chasing him and shooting him from an open truck, provided he’s a deserter. Willi hardly escapes, finds the company car with its uniform in a suitcase and puts it on, if only to warm up. But the impressively tailored garment soon takes over and transforms Willi into an officer with the commanding demeanor, voice and gestures of the Air Force elite. He even has a monocle.

Captain Herold and the diabolical gang he gathers enter a Nazi labor camp and pretend to be on a mission for the Furher himself to report on conditions behind the lines. After Herold and the other Nazi soldiers raised the bloodlust of one of the commanding officers and threw drunken dinner parties where starving prisoners provide entertainment and fighting breaks out and spreads across the premises, they execute most of the camp’s inmates.

“The Captain” is the story of a con man who leads a group of armed sociopaths in a reign of terror made possible by the pandemic that was sparked in the late stages of an evil war. It’s a cautionary story for these demagogic, saber-rattling times. While the Gogol touch is there, “The Captain” also suggests a feature film version of Francisco Goya’s “Los disastres de la guerra” from World War II. In one scene, Willis barbarians open fire on prisoners in a trench with an anti-aircraft gun and tear the victims to pieces. In another, Herold steps through a forest over a carpet of human skeletons.

That this grueling masquerade could ring so many artistic and psychological bells makes it all the more remarkable. The young Swiss actor Hubacher makes Willi’s transformation from a weak, frightened private man into an imperious, absolutely merciless “Captain Herold” absolutely credible. Frederick Lau is frighteningly memorable as one of Herald’s maniacs. Some later scenes play out like a dinner-theater version of Luchino Visconti’s “The Damned” (1969). But nothing that the writer and director Schwentke (“Allegiant”, “Red”, “RIPD”) has done indicates that he had such a great film as “The Captain” in him.

The fact that Schwentke, who was born in Stuttgart, used the seal of approval he had earned in Hollywood for this real World War II story with Florian Ballhaus-Linsen, would almost give hope if the film wasn’t so deeply dark and disturbing. The ending is very different from the real story. But it’s a fitting conclusion for the larger-than-life antihero. A parade during the credits suggests that Willi lives on in a colorful modern Germany and thus in all so-called civilizations of the West.

(“The Captain” contains extreme violence, cruelty and nudity).

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