Saboteurs

by Michael Dobbs

  “The prosecution rests its case,” Biddle concluded.

  DEPRIVED OF news from the trial, Americans devoured information about sabotage plots, real or imagined. Books about saboteurs and subversives shot to the top of the best-seller lists. Suddenly, everyone in the country was on the lookout for German agents. The FBI was swamped with offers of assistance, tips, derogatory information about next-door neighbors, and suggestions on how to deal with the “Nazi rats.”

  “Why waste bullets or electricity on them?” was a typical sentiment, expressed by Theodore Piaszczyk of South Carolina soon after the trial began.26 “I am not rich, just a shipfitter at the Charleston navy yard, but I will donate $5 a head to the government, if you will give me the privilege of putting the rope around their necks, by my own hand. I am not the man to kill a chicken, but I would like to get my hands on those rats.”

  An anonymous message from New York City apologized for bothering Hoover on the July 4 holiday, and then added: “We don’t want to be alarmists. But please investigate 306 West 99th Street. Hates women tenants. Lets men with shortwave sets keep them on all night.”

  “The entire country owes you a big vote of thanks,” a Miss M. R. Shaeffle wrote Hoover from San Francisco. “When I think of the damage these men could have done if you hadn’t caught them, it fairly makes me sick. I sincerely trust they get what is coming and get it quickly!” E. C. Newman, a Baltimore businessman, called for the saboteurs to be given a “fair trial” and then be “shot at sunrise.”

  Hoover kept a file of cartoons and newspaper editorials about the case. When a cartoon struck his fancy, he requested the original to hang in his den at home. One drawing he particularly liked showed a Hoover vacuum cleaner labeled “FBI” sucking up panicked enemy agents across a map of the United States. The FBI director made sure that the more blood-curdling editorials—such as “Shoot them” (New Orleans States) or “Give them death” (El Paso Times)—were forwarded to Biddle.

  Anyone who expressed the slightest sympathy for Germany or the saboteurs was marked down as a possible subversive. A Los Angeles woman named Alice Haskell wrote a letter urging the president “to show that we have not lost all sense of justice and decency in our treatment of the fine German people who have not harmed us in any way, but who on the contrary have helped this nation mightily since revolutionary days.” Hoover instructed his agents to investigate the woman for security violations and report back “in the immediate future.”

  Opinion polls showed the American public turning even more strongly against ethnic Germans. Fifty-one percent of those questioned in a government survey in July described German-Americans as the “most dangerous” ethnic group in the country, up from 46 percent in April.27 By contrast, 26 percent of those questioned were most concerned by Japanese-Americans, and only 1 percent by Italian-Americans.

  First to feel the brunt of public outrage were the family members and friends of the saboteurs. Anyone who had dealt with the V-men during their two weeks of freedom was called in for questioning. On July 13, Biddle announced the arrest of “fourteen individuals” who “provided shelter” to the saboteurs or served as their “immediate contacts.” 28 Those arrested included Kerling’s wife, Marie; his mistress, Hedy Engemann; his Bund friend, Helmut Leiner; most of Haupt’s relatives in Chicago; and the Jaques couple, who had agreed to look after Neubauer’s money belt. Dozens of Bundists and suspected Nazi sympathizers were rounded up for questioning.

  Haupt’s parents took their disgrace particularly badly. A tearful Hans Haupt told reporters that it never entered his head that Herbie was a spy. “We cannot believe that our boy would turn against the country we taught him to love,” he pleaded.29 After his own arrest, he broke down completely, suffering hallucinations, refusing to eat, and slashing his wrists in a suicide attempt. One of the main accusations against the elder Haupt was that he purchased an automobile for his son, to be used for “sabotage activities,” including the recovery of the Florida arms cache.

  The paranoid public mood affected ethnic Germans who had nothing at all to do with the saboteurs. Soon after the trial began, the Justice Department issued an order for the dismissal of German, Italian, and Japanese waiters, barbers, and busboys in the Washington area for fear they might overhear gossip from their well-connected clientele. The Washington Post reported that high officials were “deeply concerned about the amount of loose talk in Washington.”30 The front-page story noted that Germans were likely to be particularly hard hit by the dismissal order, as they were considered the “best waiters and are to be found in all firstclass hotels.”

  AMERICANS TOO GARRULOUS

  Loose Patrons’ Tongues to Cost

  Alien Waiters Here Their Jobs

  Quiet, Please

  Roosevelt shared the nation’s concerns about the dangers of subversion, and understood the thirst for retribution. The maneuverings of Royall and the other defense lawyers did not matter very much to him. If necessary, he told Biddle, he was prepared to follow the example of Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, and simply refuse to recognize the authority of the civilian courts.31 The fact that the president was meant to review any sentences issued by the military tribunal did not prevent him from discussing the verdict with members of his inner circle while the trial was still in progress.

  “What should be done with them?” he asked his aide, William Hassett, when they got back to Hyde Park. “Should they be shot or hanged?”32 “Hanged by all means,” replied Hassett, who knew that George Washington had turned down a request by the British spy Major John André to be shot by firing squad because it was “too honorable” a death.

  “What about pictures?” the president asked.

  “By all means,” said Hassett enthusiastically, recalling the photographs of Mrs. Surratt and the other Lincoln conspirators swinging from the gallows in the hot summer sun. A good picture was worth “a million words.”

  “Hope the findings will be unanimous,” FDR concluded. Hassett did not doubt he meant “unanimously guilty.”

  FOR THE first two weeks of the military tribunal, the eight saboteurs had sat quietly along the corridor wall of room 5235, barely reacting to the arguments between Biddle and Royall. Now, for the first time, it was their turn to speak.

  Royall decided to put Herbie Haupt on the witness stand first, depicting him as a naïve American boy who got dragged into the sabotage plot through a series of chance occurrences. Prodded by his attorney, Haupt described how he had run away from home to avoid getting married and wound up in the bureaucratic nightmare of Nazi Germany. He recalled the seemingly insane questions of the police and Gestapo—“how many fillings did I have in my teeth, where did I get them”—the impossibility of finding work, and finally the seemingly providential chance of returning to America on a secret mission.

  He never intended to go through with the sabotage plan, Haupt insisted. Instead he planned to turn the other saboteurs over to the FBI on July 6, when Dasch and Kerling were due to arrive in Chicago following their meeting in Cincinnati. As for his purchase of a car, it had nothing to do with traveling back to Florida to pick up the sabotage gear, as the prosecution alleged. He wanted it for pleasure and to take his girlfriend Gerda on a honeymoon, after they got married. He had missed having an automobile in Germany.

  Why wait until July 6 before going to the FBI, Biddle wanted to know when the time came for cross-examination. It was the obvious question, and Haupt’s answer was complex. In part, he said, he was “nervous” and did not want to be bothered. He also wanted to talk the matter over with the others when they came to Chicago. He did not believe that any of them—at least the members of the Florida group—intended to blow anything up. “After what Neubauer told me in Chicago, I knew he was not going through with it. I knew how nervous Kerling and Thiel were, and knew they would not go through with it. I would be a lovely fellow to go to the FBI and save my neck, and have these men shot.”

  “Were you going to have your honeymoon after July
6 or before?” Biddle asked incredulously.

  “After.”

  “You thought, of course, that the FBI, after you had given the confession, would say, ‘Go off on your honeymoon.’ ”

  Why not? If he told the FBI everything, Haupt said, “there would be no reason to be guilty of anything.”

  Gerda Stuckmann was one of several witnesses called by the defense to support Haupt’s claim that he did nothing to implement the sabotage plot while in Chicago. She described how he had asked her to marry him, and had given her $10 for a blood test. She had been playing for time, she told the judges. “I wanted to talk to him a little more about where he had been.” 33 At Haupt’s insistence, Royall also called his mother to the witness stand. Speaking in a voice so soft that the judges could scarcely hear, Erna Haupt said she knew nothing about her son’s activities in Chicago, except that he had registered for the draft and tried to get his old job back at the Simpson Optical Company.

  Haupt was followed to the stand by Neubauer, who depicted himself as a victim of circumstance. “As a soldier, you are not supposed to think,” he told Royall. “I just got the order. I didn’t know what for.” When he learned that he was being sent to the United States as a saboteur, he didn’t like it. “In the first place, my wife was born here in the States, and the family of my wife is here in the States. And another thing, if you have been a soldier or are a soldier, you don’t think much of an agent or saboteur.” When Biddle asked Neubauer why he didn’t immediately go to the FBI, he said he feared that word would get back to Germany and his family would suffer reprisals.

  Next was Thiel, who also insisted he was “just following orders.” His mind had been very muddled when he accepted Kappe’s invitation to go on a mission to America. One of his brothers had lost an eye fighting the Germans and another had been killed in the Ukraine. At first, he thought Kappe planned to use him as a propaganda agent. It was only after he got to the school in Brandenburg that he realized he was to be trained as a saboteur. By then it was too late to back out.

  Kerling, the leader of the Florida group, was the most forthright and unrepentant. He described how he joined the Nazi Party in 1928, with a membership number of around 70,000, making him part of the Old Guard. But even Kerling had his doubts and hesitations. He had privately told his defense lawyers that the sabotage plot was doomed to failure as long as “a crackpot” and “egomaniac” like Dasch was in charge.34 His plan had been to stay in the United States long enough to convince his superiors in Germany that he had made an attempt at sabotage and failed, and then escape to a country like Argentina, where the Nazis were “running the show.” He repeated much the same story to the tribunal, without the explicit criticism of Dasch.

  When Biddle asked Kerling to say whether or not he was “a loyal Nazi,” he squirmed. “I would say I am a loyal German.” He did not like the way old party members had been pushed aside by newcomers and careerists, and he also felt let down by the slipshod preparations for Operation Pastorius. “I can say that I have tried to be a loyal party member until I got into this thing, but when they used me, used the power they held over me, I doubt my loyalty.”

  The tribunal tried to untangle the story of Kerling’s complicated love life by listening to testimony from both his wife and his mistress. Marie Kerling had little to add as she had not even seen Eddie since his return from Germany: he was arrested while on his way to a meeting with her. Hedy Engemann confirmed that Kerling had asked her to go to Florida with him, a potentially damaging admission since the prosecution contended that the purpose of the trip was to retrieve the explosives from Ponte Vedra Beach. Kerling was able to meet briefly with both women after they testified. “There was so much to say, and no chance to let you know how I felt,” he wrote Hedy later. “But it was good to hold your hand, trembling as it was.” 35

  Neither Heinck nor Quirin added very much to their previous statements to the FBI; each was on the stand for only about an hour. Heinck said that the day before his arrest, he had dreamed of “Dasch standing in the FBI office” and revealing everything. Quirin acknowledged he was a loyal Nazi, but claimed he had no intention of blowing anything up. This provoked a series of questions from McCoy, as president of the commission, about the Nazi chain of command.

  “George Dasch was your leader, I take it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you obeyed all his orders?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Would you have obeyed his orders to spy in this country?”

  “No, sir.”

  “He was your führer, was he not?”

  “Yes.”

  “You would have obeyed all his orders to commit sabotage?”

  “I am not sure about that.”

  Biddle wanted to know what Quirin would have done if Hitler personally had ordered him to blow up American factories.

  “I don’t know. I never met the Führer. I don’t know what kind of man he is. How can I answer that?”

  THE LAST defendants to testify were Dasch and Burger, the two turncoats. Royall had saved Burger for last, as he was the most impressive witness, both factual and concise. Dasch, by contrast, was verbose and had trouble answering questions without making long speeches. “We will be here for a week if this kind of thing goes on,” Biddle complained. “I have never heard any evidence like this in my life.”

  The prosecution could hardly deny an obvious fact: Dasch had reported voluntarily to the FBI and blown the whistle on Operation Pastorius. The question was, what had led him to betray the others? Biddle argued that his decision was essentially opportunistic, made on the spur of the moment, after running into the Coast Guard on Amagansett Beach and realizing that the sabotage plan would not work. He pointed to Dasch’s intimate involvement in the planning stages of the operation back in Berlin, when he worked closely with Kappe in selecting the saboteur teams. Dasch maintained that he had intended to betray Operation Pastorius right from the start, in order to fight Nazism, and had only pretended to cooperate with Kappe to protect himself and ensure he became part of the mission.

  Without knowing Dasch’s state of mind while he was still in Germany, it was impossible for even the most fair-minded judge to fully resolve this dispute. Ristine emphasized that his client had never been a member of the Bund and had phoned the FBI office in New York the day after his arrival on Long Island. In his concluding arguments, Ristine also mentioned an important detail that seemed to support Dasch’s claim that he decided to betray the sabotage operation long before landing on Amagansett Beach. Back in Berlin in mid-May, Kappe had asked Dasch to give Kerling an address through which he could be contacted in the United States. In response, Dasch provided a fictitious address for his younger brother Ernst in New London, Connecticut, rather than Astoria, New York, where he actually lived. Kerling had written the false address for Ernst Dasch in secret ink on his pocket handkerchief.36 It is difficult to explain why, if Dasch was really committed to Operation Pastorius, he would make it impossible for the other group leader to reach him in an emergency.

  In his cross-examination, Biddle zeroed in on the weakest point in Dasch’s defense: the delay of six days before he finally turned himself in. Why, Biddle wanted to know, didn’t he go to the FBI “right away”?

  “I had three reasons, sir. May I explain all three reasons?” 37

  “Surely, do them quickly—all three.”

  First, said Dasch, he was “a mental and nervous wreck.” Second, he wanted to be “human” toward members of the Kerling group, particularly “this little kid Haupt” who had family in the United States. He could not just run to the police and deprive Haupt of the chance to demonstrate his innocence. “That would have been merely for the sake of my own self-protection. That would have been the rottenest thing in the world. To be a real decent person I had to wait.”

  Dasch never got to explain his third reason, as Biddle returned to his favorite line of questioning. “Are you a loyal German or a loyal American?”

&nb
sp; “I am loyal to the people of Germany.”

  “How about the people of America? Are you loyal to them, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are loyal to everyone, aren’t you?”

  Dasch’s version of events was supported by Burger, who testified that Dasch was a most unlikely leader of a sabotage mission. He would routinely do the opposite of whatever he was asked to do by his superiors. He was both contrary and incompetent. He had even lost his papers on the train from Paris to Lorient. Put simply, Dasch was no soldier and no saboteur. The other V-men were all suspicious of Dasch because he acted so “queerly.”

  Royall succeeded in showing that Burger had plenty of reason to hate the Nazis. Asked how he was treated by the Gestapo, Burger choked up, and was unable to answer. He finally replied that it was not the way he was treated that hurt him, but the way his wife was treated.

  “They knew my wife expected a baby. They had her come down to [Gestapo headquarters] several times and told her that I had stolen money; that I [could get] eight years on a chain gang, that she should get a divorce.” He went on to describe how his wife had had a miscarriage, but still refused to get a divorce. “They told her she should bring my uniform down to Gestapo headquarters so I could wear it and they could rip off my epaulets. She refused that also. After that, they made me write a farewell letter to my wife, telling her I would never come back.” At that moment, Burger told the judges, he had decided to find some way out of Nazi Germany.

  Royall questioned Burger about a trail of evidence he had left on Amagansett Beach—a half-smoked pack of German cigarettes, a bottle of schnapps, a raincoat, a vest—that had helped lead the Coast Guard to the arms cache. This suggested a premeditated decision to sabotage the sabotage operation. The defense lawyer noted that his client’s version of events was “corroborated one hundred percent by the Coast Guard.” Burger had mentioned leaving the items on the beach in his original statement to the FBI, at a time when he had no way of knowing they had already been found by the Coast Guard.