Johannes Steel (bornHerbert Stahl; 1908–1988) was a German-born American author, best known for his 1934 bookThe Second World War. His wife was sculptorRhys Caparn.

The son of a German-Dutch landowner, Steel grew up inElberfeld on the border of the two countries. He studied inHeidelberg,Oxford,Geneva, andBerlin, and then worked as a journalist. He fled to France and then Britain when the Nazis took power and later emigrated to the United States. He continued to work as a journalist, writing forThe Nation and theNew York Post, for which he was foreign news editor.

Steel's bookThe Second World War predicted the war based on an assessment ofNazi intentions and historical parallels. Though the book had the war starting in 1935 rather than 1939 as it actually did, it became highly regarded after the start of the war, proving him essentially correct. Because of his prescience, he became widely followed, with a popular radio commentary in the U.S. during the war.

Steel ran forCongress in a1946 special election inNew York's 19th district, triggered by the resignation of incumbentDemocratSamuel Dickstein.^[1] Running on theAmerican Labor Party ticket, Steel came in second place with 38% of the vote.^[2]

Steel was alleged to have had a covert relationship withSoviet intelligence duringWorld War II; a decipheredVenona cable of Soviet intelligence traffic from July 1944 reveals Steel toldVladimir Pravdin of the New YorkKGB that Roman Moszulski, the director of thePolish Telegraphic Agency, was secretly pro-Communist and told Moszulski that he should remain in place with the Polish Telegraphic Agency, which was aligned with the London-basedPolish government-in-exile, and set up a meeting with the KGB. At the meeting Moszulski told Pravdin he believed Poland should have good relations with the Soviet Union and, "having thought over the full seriousness and the possible consequences of his step, he was putting himself at our disposal and was ready to give the Communists all the information he had and to questions concerning his activities." To prove hisbona fides to Soviet intelligence, Moszulski conveyed a list of Polish exiles and Polish-Americans, including an evaluation of how they stood on Polish-Soviet relations.

Steel's cover name assigned by Soviet intelligence and deciphered byArlington Hall cryptographers is DICKY, DICKI and DIKI.

• Hitler as Frankenstein
• The Second World War
• Men Behind the War
• The Future of Europe
• The John Steel Report on World Affairs

• Obituary,New York Times, December 3, 1988
• Judy Holiday's Explanation,FBI File
• John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr,Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), pg. 240.
• References to Steel in the following Venona project decryptions:

  734 KGB New York to Moscow, 21 May 1944; 1039–1041 KGB New York to Moscow, 24–25 July 1944; 1393 KGB New York to Moscow, 3 October 1944; 1814, 1815 KGB New York to Moscow, 23 December 1944.

• W. E. B. DuBois,The Autobiography of W.E.B. DuBois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century. New York, NY: International Publishers Co. Inc., 1968, pp. 343–360.Excerpt
• Johannes Steele Stories Listed by Author.

• 1908 births
• 1988 deaths
• People from Elberfeld
• Emigrants from Nazi Germany
• Immigrants to the United States
• German reporters and correspondents
• German male journalists
• The Nation (U.S. magazine) people
• New York Post people
• Venona project
• German male writers
• 20th-century American writers
• 20th-century American male writers
• Writers from Wuppertal
• American Labor Party politicians