Everyone has a story about their family they’d rather not share.

None may be like Christine Kuehn’s. Her grandparents and her aunt were Nazi spies working against America at the dawn of World War II.

They were sleeper agents. Living an idyllic life in Hawaii while secretly gathering information for Japan as it planned its Dec. 7, 1941, surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.

In Annapolis, the 2,403 casualties of that attack are remembered every year with rose petals cast on the harbor and the somber sound of a ringing bell. I had to wonder if I wanted to read her family history.

A conversation with Kuehn near her Montgomery County home convinced me that her book, “Family of Spies: A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal, and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor,” is an important one.

By making herself vulnerable, Kuehn has written an essential guide to understanding how one family and one nation could fall under the spell of fascism, and the possibility of redemption for some.

“We don’t carry the sins of our fathers, right?” she said. “We don’t have to. We’re not a reflection of our ancestors’ past transgressions.”

Kuehn will talk about her work at The Banner Book Club at 6 p.m. Tuesday in Baltimore. You can sign up for the club and reserve a space for our conversation about the book. Membership and the event are free.

“Family of Spies” follows two timelines.

The first traces her family’s journey to becoming true believers in Adolf Hitler’s vision and his rise to power in Germany after World War I. She tracks her grandparents, Otto and Friedel, through the disruptions of the 1920s and ’30s. She examines their close connections to some of the most notorious Nazi figures.

Her aunt, Ruth, was a mistress of Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. Her uncle, Leopold, worked for him in ministry offices.

And she follows Otto and Friedel as they were sent by Germany to Hawaii in 1935 to help its ally, Imperial Japan.

Nazi connections are common in Germany, where most families have to reckon with a past that includes genocide, war and oppression. What makes this different — what makes it an American story — is Kuehn’s father, Eberhard.

As she was growing up in Florida, Kuehn and her father were close, more so after her mother died.

Her book recounts how he would tell her tales from his childhood in Hawaii that were vague, even fantastical. There was the big house on the windward side of Oahu, horseback riding and even dancing with child actress Shirley Temple.

Eventually, Eberhard told his daughter some of the truth, but as he began experiencing symptoms of dementia, she pursued decades of on-again, off-again research to fill in the blanks.

“Doing this research and really understanding what his childhood was like, and what happened to him at 15 ... now I understand why he made up all these stories, because they were just too hard,” Kuehn said.

In 1994, a letter from a filmmaker researching her grandparents sent her on a decades-long quest through government records, scholarly works and family correspondence.

She learned that the Japanese paid her grandparents more than $1.5 million in exchange for covert observations, details gleaned from conversations with naval officers and even answers to specific questions. The money paid for a grand home with servants, cars and a high-society profile.

When their infamy was exposed after the attack, her grandfather went to prison. Her grandmother, aunt and her father’s younger brother, Hans, were sent to internment camps. They were sent back to Germany in an exchange of civilian detainees near the end of the war.

Eberhard stayed in Hawaii, committing to America in a break with his family. He joined the Army, fought on Okinawa in 1945 and became a citizen.

He saw his father once after his release from prison in 1948, but never spoke to his mother or his surviving brother again. Otto returned to Germany and died in 1955.

Kuehn went years without meeting her aunt, and when they finally did, Ruth refused to talk about what she and her parents had done.

The courage shown by Kuehn’s father as a teen in Hawaii gives her family story its power. The book follows her grandparents as they became enthralled by Hitler, but can’t explain how they could risk three of their children in an espionage plot.

“My dad had to go through multiple interrogations by the FBI trying to determine what he knew,” Kuehn said. “They thought he was just as big a security risk to the United States as his parents at 15.

“And I think, who does that? Who puts their kids in that line of fire?”

It was never Kuehn’s plan to write a book on her history. Then came records hidden by her aunt, her grandmother’s letters and a book about their espionage that led her to a family in Germany she didn’t know existed.

Even after she started writing in 2020 — even after it was published in November — doubts kept creeping up.

“You know, my family were Nazis, and they were part of Pearl Harbor — up till 9/11 one of the biggest defeats on American soil that we’ve ever experienced, right?”

The response has been better than she could have hoped for. The book earned a spot on the New York Times Bestseller lists, and even Jewish readers, some with ties to Nazi death camps, have been welcoming.

Best of all, the book has given her a window into her father’s life, the details he wanted desperately not to pass on to her. Turns out, even the Shirley Temple story had truth in it.

Kuehn wishes she had the chance to tell him that she understood.

“I think realizing what he had gone through ... understanding the sacrifice he made, unfortunately, some of that has come after he’s gone.”