"[4] Dan Durning summarizes the Vienna milieu in which Best played a leading role: Best cut a flamboyant figure at his reserved table in the Café Louvre.

A broad-brimmed Stetson capped his 220-pound frame, and his high-laced shoes and wretched German were familiar to other habitués of Ringstrasse.

Scheu, recalling the evenings at Café Louvre, wrote: "Best...sat in a padded loge, with a view of Renngasse, that was reserved for him."

In addition to the foreign journalists in Vienna around him, Best also "assembled a large number of refugees, hangers on, news tipsters, spies -- serious, but questionable people, who sat at his table and populated the surrounding tables at Café Louvre....People who came from abroad were astounded by what they saw at Café Louvre.

When the United States declared war on Nazi Germany on December 11, 1941, Best was arrested along with other U.S. reporters and held for deportation at an internment camp in Bad Nauheim.

[7] There he decided to withdraw from the group of exchangeable Americans[8][6] and remain with his fiancée Erna Maurer, an Austrian reporter for the Associated Press,[9] whom he married on September 2, 1942.

In "one of the most astounding Benedict Arnold cases of modern times,"[4] Best began, in April 1942, as a news editor and commentator for the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft, German State Radio, working in the U.S.A Zone.

"[1]His primary propaganda targets were President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, the Jews and the Soviet Union.

[12] Best was notable for continuously making suggestions to his superiors of ways to heighten the effectiveness of German psychological warfare.

[13] On July 26, 1943, Best along with Fred W. Kaltenbach, Douglas Chandler, Edward Delaney, Constance Drexel, Jane Anderson, Max Otto Koischwitz and Ezra Pound had been indicted in absentia by a District of Columbia grand jury on charges of treason.

[17] The witnesses at his trial included Princess Sofia zur Lippe-Weissenfeld of Austria and fellow American-born Nazi propagandist Edward Vieth Sittler.

[25] Journalist William L. Shirer, author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, in 1942 broke the story of Best's propaganda work for the Nazi regime and in 1948 testified at Best's trial for treason.