He was strikingly handsome, even in his last years, when he was not well and his hair had turned white and his waist had thickened. He spoke English in his deeply pitched voice with a faint German accent. He was one of the best raconteurs and conversationalists I have ever listened to, although this excellence led him to the sin of pontificating, and when there was no one well-informed enough for him to sharpen his wits against, he could be really insufferable." Shortly before her death in 1985, Maggie Potter recorded her thoughts about Koehler, "As I look back, it is evident that after Hugo's resignation from the Navy, I was his confidante; he would talk and I would listen.... In his apartment in Washington, when I first knew him, there was a bookcase and its three or four shelves were filled, not with books, but with photographs of women. I do not think they were trophies; he genuinely liked and appreciated women and never denigrated ability in a female as many men of that period did.... He said it was stupid for us in Washington to associate with only our friends, who think as we do. One should seek out the obscure midwestern congressman and find out what he thinks, what his motives are. Of course, Hugo was right.... I think I saw him truly. I saw him as he appeared to most people: worldly, flamboyant, out of scale with Matilda's New York and Newport milieu; but also I saw what was behind his protective exterior, a deeply loving man, full of compassion and insight, always ready to help someone else...." For further reading In 1992 a collection of Koehler's letters and dispatches to the State Department and the Office of Naval Intelligence, painstakingly researched, compiled and edited by P. J. Capelotti was published as Our Man in the Crimea: Commander Hugo Koehler and the Russian Civil War. The book expands upon Capelotti's earlier research and doctoral dissertation on the subject. It represents the culmination of years of research by Capelotti, and also Koehler's extant writings and the correspondence that Maggie Wood Potter had compiled before her death. Both Potter and Capelotti took on their respective projects at the behest of Koehler's stepson, Senator Claiborne Pell. Capelotti's anthology of Koehler's writings focuses largely on his time in Russia in the years immediately after the First World War. pell remained