Saboteurs

by Michael Dobbs

  Hitler failed to show up, but everyone had a good time nevertheless. Most of the guests—including “Dr. Schmidt” and Lieutenant Kappe—got quite drunk from repeated toasts to the success of Operation Pastorius. The speeches went on until well after midnight. If they were successful, the colonel told the men in his soft Viennese accent, they could do more damage to the enemy than several divisions of fighting men. They might even decide the outcome of the war.

  As leader of the V-men, Dasch thanked the Abwehr officers for their confidence and promised that he and his men would prove themselves worthy of the Fatherland. In between speeches, he asked Lahousen to settle an argument he had been having with Kappe, who had encouraged the saboteurs to try to recruit former German-American Bund members in the United States to assist in their mission. “Promise them heaven on earth if you like,” Kappe had urged.46 “Work on their nationalistic sentiments, their homesickness.”

  To Dasch’s relief, Lahousen was much less adventurous. He told Dasch not to trust anyone, and to bear in mind that Bund members were closely watched by the American authorities and could have changed their political views since the outbreak of war. Dasch should exercise great caution.

  When it was Kappe’s turn to address the saboteurs, he revealed the meaning of the code name “Operation Pastorius.”47 Franz Daniel Pastorius, he explained, had been the leader of the very first group of Germans to arrive in the New World, back in 1683. The immigrants, thirteen families of Mennonites and Quakers, had settled in a place that soon became known as Germantown, now a suburb of Philadelphia.

  If all went well, the nine Nazi saboteurs would be spearheading a new—and much more deadly—wave of German migration to America.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “THE MEN ARE RUNNING WILD” (MAY 22–28)

  AS WALTER KAPPE looked around the breakfast table at the men he had selected for Operation Pastorius, he was in a relaxed, jovial mood. It was May 22, a Friday, and soon they would be leaving Berlin for Paris on the first stage of their journey to America. He had invited the men to the Rankestrasse safe house for breakfast before setting off for the train station. He would accompany them as far as Lorient, a German submarine base on the southern coast of Brittany. If all went well, he planned to join the V-men in the United States in a few months and create an extensive sabotage network to wreak havoc on American industrial production.

  Kappe was pleased by the way the men had responded to five weeks of intensive training. All seemed ready for the adventure. Only Neubauer, the soldier shipped back from the Russian front with pieces of shrapnel in his head, appeared nervous and apprehensive.

  He tried to make a joke out of Neubauer’s sour face. “Everyone else seems to have the right spirit. It’s only Hermann here who doesn’t seem to be enjoying himself.”1

  Kappe was thirty-seven years old. His girth was widening, his hairline receding, his face fuller and more florid than ever, but he finally felt he had found his true calling. It had not been easy. His life had been full of ups and downs. He had been born to a moderately well-off family from Hanover that lost all its possessions in the Great War. Like many alienated and restless young Germans, he joined one of the paramilitary organizations banned by the Versailles treaty that later became the basis for Hitler’s storm troopers. He and his friends spent much of their time traveling around the country, fighting with Communists and breaking up strikes. He belonged to a movement known as the Wandervoegel, the Wandering Birds, a name intended to invoke the medieval tradition of groups of young craftsmen wandering around Germany in search of work. In modern times, the Wandervoegel had become a breeding ground for political fanatics, who had little in common with their predecessors.

  After the failure of the Munich beer hall putsch, thousands of Wandervoegel immigrated to the United States. Kappe arrived in New York in March 1925, and was granted permanent resident status. He found work in a farm implement factory in Bradley, Illinois, where, according to his FBI file, he was “considered a jovial sort of fellow who liked to entertain folks with stories, songs, and piano playing.”2 He considered factory work beneath him: he boasted that he knew six languages and was meant to be “a journalist, not a mechanic.”

  By the following year, Kappe had realized his dream, and was working for Abendpost, a German-language newspaper in Chicago. Colleagues described him as very capable and energetic, but totally without scruples. He joined the Teutonia Club, a forerunner to the German-American Bund, whose members paraded through the streets of Chicago with swastikas and German flags. Instead of translating news agency reports into German, as his superiors wished, he rewrote them with a strong pro-Nazi slant. The editors of Abendpost, which was dubbed “a Jew-sheet” in American Nazi circles, disapproved of Kappe’s political activities and open admiration for Hitler, and found an excuse to fire him.

  Kappe then got a job on a Nazi broadsheet in Cincinnati, where he devoted much of his time to Bund politics. He also attracted the attention of U.S. military counterintelligence, which opened a file on him. One government informant reported that Kappe was a “heavy drinker” who talked loudly about his exploits. “He is oversexed,” the informant went on, “consistently seeking the comradeship of prostitutes or women hanging around taverns. With such women, [he] invariably plays the part of a dashing Prussian officer, obviously trying to impress everyone within reach. He has a definite Prussian military bearing, clicking heels when meeting strangers and coming to attention during the introduction.”3 But beneath the “bluff and braggadocio,” the report concluded, Kappe was in reality a coward. Another informant reported that no matter how busy Kappe was with Bund affairs, “he always found time for one or two girls on the side, in addition to his wife.”4

  Soon Kappe had become a full-time propaganda worker for the Bund, and was appointed the organization’s “press and propaganda chief” in early 1933, the year after Hitler attained supreme power in Germany. He corresponded with Joseph Goebbels, persuading the Nazi propaganda minister to donate $50,000 for the establishment of a weekly Nazi newspaper in the United States, to be known as Deutsche Zeitung, or German News. He also spoke at mass meetings in Chicago, Cincinnati, New York, and other cities with a large population of ethnic Germans, drawing crowds of up to ten thousand. Interrupted with repeated chants of “Heil Hitler” and the singing of the Horst Wessel Song, the meetings frequently degenerated into open fighting between Nazis and anti-Nazis; on several occasions, Kappe was beaten up by enraged Communists.

  In an article for an American Nazi newspaper in August 1933, Kappe poured vitriol on those German-Americans who refused to accept the swastika. He described them as “neither German nor American.”5

  You are nothing. You are too narrow to conceive what it means to be German; too cowardly to take advantage of your rights as Americans. You have become slaves and vassals of those who spread hatred against the country of your birth. Here in America, the German people will change some day. They must change, if they want to keep in spiritual contact with the Fatherland, for the roots of our strength lie in the homeland. And when change comes, your game will be up, Gentlemen!

  As a member of the Nazi inner circle in America, Kappe soon got caught up in the squabbles over who would become the American Führer. An article in the Washington Post in September 1934 referred to Kappe as one of the “Big Three” led by Bund leader Fritz Gissibl. 6 Unfortunately for Kappe, Gissibl lost a power struggle with Fritz Kuhn, who wanted to “Americanize” the Bund, replacing German nationals with American citizens. Unlike Kuhn, Kappe had never taken out U.S. citizenship. According to one newspaper account, Kappe was frog-marched out of the New York City offices of the Bund newspaper by Kuhn’s storm troopers in February 1937.7 Kuhn accused Kappe of spying for the German consulate in New York, and fomenting a revolt against him, in addition to financial irregularities. Four months later, the disgraced Bund leader boarded the SS St. Louis, together with his wife Hilde and their two young children, and set sail for Hamburg.

  Wit
h Germany gearing up for war and America still sitting on the fence, Kappe felt he had returned to the center of the action. He joined the Ausland Institut under Gauleiter Ernst Bohle, churning out anti-American propaganda. After war broke out, he transferred to military intelligence. Abwehr networks in the United States had been virtually wiped out in early 1941 when a renegade German agent named William Sebold went to the FBI and told them all he knew, leading to the roundup of dozens of German spies. In conversations with colleagues, Kappe railed against “that son of a bitch” Sebold, adding darkly, “There is no stone big enough for him to hide under.”8

  One of Kappe’s goals in launching Operation Pastorius was to repair the damage caused by the traitor.

  TWO COMPARTMENTS had been reserved for the saboteurs on the noon express from Berlin to Paris with a sign RESERVED FOR OKW, the German High Command. They were an incongruous sight: nine young men in an assortment of ill-fitting American clothes, led by a rotund, heavyset Wehrmacht lieutenant, accompanied by a pile of wooden boxes and seabags. Had a fellow passenger been able to look into their luggage, he would have discovered an array of sophisticated sabotage equipment, naval uniforms and shovels, and a small fortune in American dollars.

  When the train pulled into the Gare de l’Est at eight o’clock the next morning, a representative of the Paris branch of German military intelligence was on the platform to meet them. He took the V-men to the Hotel des Deux Mondes, a fin de siècle establishment near the opera house,9 one of several hotels in Paris that had been commandeered by the German occupation authorities. After the men were assigned their rooms, Kappe handed them wads of francs and told them “to go out and have a good time.” 10

  Compared to drab, oppressive Berlin, Paris was magical. Even under wartime occupation, the half-deserted city had a melancholy charm. The chestnut trees were in bloom along the Champs-Elysées and the banks of the Seine. There was still plenty of food around. The famous landmarks— the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, Montmartre—were as beautiful as ever. Even the girls seemed prettier and better dressed than in Germany.

  Armed with Kappe’s money, they raced around the city, seeing the sights and visiting nightclubs. Several of them got into trouble. Heinrich Heinck, the dour-looking Volkswagen worker assigned to Dasch’s group, got drunk at the Deux Mondes bar, and announced that he was “a secret agent.”11 There was a disturbance at the hotel late one night when Herbie Haupt, who never had any difficulty picking up girls, refused to pay a prostitute who had accompanied him back to his room. Either he had run out of money or he imagined she had fallen for his charms, like the girls back home in Chicago, and had no right asking for payment. After she began screaming at him in French, a language he did not understand, one of the other V-men settled his debt.

  Some of the saboteurs found time to have serious conversations about their mission. Kerling and Burger were strolling past the navy ministry on the Place de la Concorde, watching the German guards march up and down, when Kerling suddenly blurted out, “What do you think of your group?” 12

  “Not very much,” Burger replied cautiously. “Heinck is not what you would call a hundred percent saboteur, and Dasch is not the ideal leader for this kind of mission.”

  Kerling, the most committed Nazi of them all, nodded his head, and said vaguely, “Well, perhaps there will be a way to get out of this.”

  Burger did not ask what he had in mind.

  Normally tolerant of loose behavior, Kappe tired of his subordinates’ antics after a weekend in Paris. When a naval intelligence officer came to his hotel and told him the U-boats were ready, Kappe breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank God! The men are running wild with booze and girls.” 13

  KAPITÄNLEUTNANT Wilhelm Ahlrichs, of the Security and Intelligence Office of the German High Command, had top-secret orders from Berlin to put the saboteurs on board the U-boats that would take them across the Atlantic. He joined the V-men in Paris, and escorted them on the overnight train to Lorient. Prior to transferring to intelligence work after the outbreak of war, Ahlrichs had been a captain in the German merchant navy, and knew both America and England well. A pessimist by nature, he was unimpressed by the overall quality of the saboteurs.

  There were some exceptions. Kerling was obviously an idealistic Nazi. Haupt—who was dressed in an open-neck silk shirt and flashy, light-green checkered coat—looked like a decent kid, a real American boy, Ahlrichs thought. Burger seemed depressed. The other men struck Ahlrichs as incompetent. The worst impression of all was made by their leader. When Ahlrichs asked Dasch what his men would be doing in America, he boasted, “Just look inside our boxes. We’re going to blow up factories.”14

  After their three-day break in Paris, the V-men were getting more tense. On the train to Lorient, the normally reticent Schmidt taunted Dasch and Burger, saying Dasch did not deserve to be in charge and Burger could not be trusted because he had been in a concentration camp. As he talked, Schmidt became flushed and angry, thrusting out his jaw. It seemed to Burger that he was attempting to foment an insurrection against Dasch and replace him as leader.15

  In Lorient, the men were taken to the Jour de Rêve hotel, which was reserved for U-boat crews. The leaders—Kappe, Ahlrichs, Dasch, and Kerling—met to go over final details of where the two groups would land in the United States. The plan was for Kerling’s group to leave for America that very evening; the others would follow two days later.

  In the afternoon, Kappe assembled Kerling’s men to distribute the money they would take with them to America. As previously arranged, each received a wad of $50 bills in a specially designed money pouch to go around his waist, as well as $450 in smaller denominations. As Haupt was going through his pile of $50 bills, he noticed that some were not green-backs at all, but so-called yellowbacks, gold certificates withdrawn from circulation in 1934, after the United States went off the gold standard.

  The men were furious with their Abwehr superiors, but particularly with Kappe. Such carelessness could cost them their lives. They imagined trying to use the yellowbacks in America to make purchases and immediately being turned over to the FBI as German spies. They clawed through the money belts, removing the incriminating bills. Kerling took Kappe into the next room and told him bluntly he did not feel like going ahead with the operation: it was too dangerous.

  It was too late to back out now, Kappe insisted. “You have enough money anyway, even without the gold certificates. Just throw those bills out.”16 Kappe argued that it was a trivial matter, nothing to worry about. Ahlrichs wanted to phone Berlin for instructions. The men eventually calmed down, but their confidence in Kappe had been severely shaken.

  Dasch, meanwhile, had gone missing. He had disappeared, without saying a word, on the way to a lunch hosted by Ahlrichs after suddenly remembering that he had left his identification papers on the train. His American Social Security card was in a notebook that also contained jottings from lessons at Quenz Lake, along with some snapshots of his mother and wife. He had taken the notebook out of his pocket during the night as he lay in his bunk on the train trying to get to sleep. In the rush to unload the boxes at Lorient, he had forgotten all about it.

  As soon as Dasch could get away from his colleagues, he rushed back to the railroad station and asked to see the German official in charge. In his excitable fashion, he explained he had left some “hot papers” on the train, which must on no account fall into the hands of the enemy. 17 The official told him to come back later that afternoon: the train was now at a depot further down the line. When Dasch returned, he found another official on duty who demanded his papers. Unimpressed with Dasch’s attempt at a Heil Hitler salute and his explanation that he was traveling incognito, the official reported him to the Gestapo.

  Dasch realized that the only way out of the mess was to call Kappe at the hotel. Kappe arrived at the station at about the same time as a major from the Gestapo. After insisting that everybody else leave the room, Kappe gave the officer a rough outline of Operation Pastorius and let
him inspect the orders issued by the High Command. The Gestapo major berated everybody for being so careless, but permitted Dasch to leave with Kappe. Dasch’s documents were never found.

  Up until this point, Dasch felt he had the trust of Kappe, who had always defended him against the complaints of others. In some ways, the two men were rather alike: loud-mouthed, ingratiating, quick-witted, always coming up with grandiose ideas, but also careless, even clueless about certain things. But now Kappe’s confidence seemed to be waning rapidly.

  As they drove back to the hotel, Kappe said it would be very dangerous for Dasch to travel around America as George John Davis, the name on his mislaid Social Security card. Not to worry, Dasch replied cheerfully, he would use the name of George John Day.

  Kappe was exasperated, but too exhausted to argue.

  THE U-584—with Kerling, Haupt, Neubauer, and Thiel aboard—left Lorient harbor late that evening in the pouring rain. Ahlrichs made sure that the crew was confined to barracks while the V-men boarded the boat with their equipment. Once Kerling’s men were safely below deck, the crew returned to the U-boat. From that point onward, nobody was allowed to leave the submarine until it sailed.

  That left Dasch, Burger, Quirin, Heinck, and Schmidt. The next day, Schmidt complained to Ahlrichs that he had caught some kind of sexual disease, probably from a prostitute in Paris. The intelligence officer had Schmidt lie down on a bed and pull out his penis, which was covered with a nasty brown foam. Ahlrichs took one look at the foam, decided that Schmidt was suffering from gonorrhea, and ordered him to report to Berlin immediately for treatment.

  When Ahlrichs told Kappe of his diagnosis, the Abwehr officer was beside himself. Schmidt was the toughest member of the group and, with the possible exception of Burger, the most resourceful. A burly outdoorsman with years of experience farming and trapping in Canada, he was the obvious choice to run the farm that they planned to use as the hiding place for their explosives. Without him, the whole mission might be at risk.