Saboteurs

by Michael Dobbs

  Somehow, from jailhouse gossip, the reporters learned that there would be four executioners.22 The executioner and his chief assistant would receive $50 for each person put to death. Two more assistant executioners would receive half that amount, a total of $150 each. The total bill paid by the Justice Department for “confidential expenses” in connection with the trial—court transcripts, Supreme Court briefs, meals, electrocution services, and burial expenses—would come to $9,525.09.

  It rained heavily all morning.

  TWO PRISON officials escorted Haupt, the first saboteur to face the electric chair, to the execution chamber at 12:01 p.m. as the sound of an air raid siren wailed across the city. After his earlier crying fit, he had fully regained his composure and “walked to the chair like a real man,” a witness later recalled.23 He was strapped into the chair, and electrodes were applied to his head and his leg through a slit that had been cut in his trousers. Seated in a room next to the execution chamber, a dozen government witnesses could see Haupt through a darkened glass window, but he could not see them.

  At 12:03, executioners applied two thousand volts of electricity to Haupt. When the current first hit him, he tightened up, raised his body, and turned slightly to the left. There were some further spasms but, after a minute or so, his body completely relaxed. At 12:11, the coroner walked over to the chair, and pronounced Haupt dead. Orderlies placed the body on a stretcher, covered it up with a sheet, and wheeled it out of the room. The next man, Heinrich Heinck, was then brought in.

  It took just over an hour to complete all six executions. Only Kerling had any comment to make. As he was being led to the execution chamber from the death cell, he told his guards he was “proud to be a German” and would do the same thing again if given the opportunity.

  The bodies were taken down to the basement. When the masks were removed from the men, one of the army witnesses noticed, their faces were “completely white” and “in a horribly contorted condition with their mouths open.” Guards loaded the bodies into ambulances and twenty steel-helmeted soldiers took positions outside the gates to hold back the crowd of the curious. Soon a grim cortège was winding its way through the damp streets, from the D.C. jail on the Anacostia River to Walter Reed Army Hospital in northwest Washington.

  “They’re gone,” a bystander shouted out.24

  “It’s over!”

  “The spies are dead!”

  “Nothing to say, boys, nothing at all,” the coroner told reporters as he hurried to his car.

  “Mum’s the word,” said General Cox.

  THE OFFICIAL announcement of the executions—and the first public word of the verdicts of the military commission—came from White House press secretary Steve Early at 1:27 p.m. Reading from a typewritten sheet, annotated with Roosevelt’s handwriting, Early told reporters that “the sentences were carried out at noon today. Six of the prisoners have been executed. The other two have been confined to prison.” At the president’s insistence, he added, “the records in the eight cases will be sealed until the end of the war.”25

  Half an hour after the announcement, Roosevelt left the White House for his new retreat in the Catoctin Mountains in Maryland, a two-hour drive north of Washington. He called it Shangri-La because of the secrecy that surrounded the place and its isolated, invigorating quality. (Later presidents would know the retreat as Camp David.) Although Roosevelt loved to go to Hyde Park, it was becoming increasingly difficult for him to make the overnight train trip to upstate New York. Shangri-La was close enough to Washington that he could go there most weekends with a few friends, in an atmosphere of informality and relaxation.

  On this particular weekend, the president was accompanied by his usual circle of intimates: Daisy Suckley, his secretary Grace Tully, and his friends Samuel Rosenman and Archibald MacLeish, together with their wives and a few Secret Service men. It was still raining heavily when they got to Shangri-La, and inspected their rustic quarters. Roosevelt “gleefully” informed his guests that they would all have to share a single bathroom with a door that never closed quite securely. As president, he claimed the master bedroom with attached bathroom. They would all share the casual living-dining room and screened-in porch with a magnificent view overlooking a valley.

  That evening, Roosevelt busied himself with a much-loved ritual, mixing cocktails. At dinner, he reminisced about his days as governor of New York, when he had to decide whether to pardon murderers with the help of Rosenman, his longtime legal adviser and speechwriter. He also entertained his guests with a series of gruesome stories inspired by the executions of the six saboteurs.26

  One of the stories the president related with gusto was about a barber during the final days of the siege of Paris, in 1871. Everybody was starving, but somehow the barber managed to supply excellent “veal” to the local butcher. Throwing his huge head back with laughter, Roosevelt described how suspicions spread that the “veal” had come straight from the barber’s chair as a number of his customers had gone missing. He piled detail on grisly detail, until Ada MacLeish began to shiver. The wife of the poet and librarian of Congress remarked that she might also make good “veal,” as she was slightly plump.

  The guests understood that telling such stories was a way for the president to unburden himself from the cares and responsibilities of his office. American troops had just landed at Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, on the first stage of what would be a three-year island-hopping campaign in the Pacific. Casualties were high. Reports were also coming in of a disastrous naval engagement near Savo Island, where the Allies had lost four cruisers.

  The next morning, after receiving a briefing from his naval aide, Captain McCrea, about the progress of the war, Roosevelt resumed his macabre tales. He retold one of his favorites, about a wealthy Chicago widow who died in Moscow while on a world tour. Her coffin was shipped back to Chicago for burial but, when it arrived, her relatives were horrified to discover the body of a dead Russian general in full military regalia. They sent a telegram to the U.S. embassy in Moscow to find out what had gone wrong, and received the following reply: “Suggest you close the casket and proceed with the funeral. Your grandmother was buried in the Kremlin with full military honors.”

  Mrs. Rosenman asked the president what would happen to the bodies of the saboteurs. Roosevelt avoided giving her a direct answer. That was one of the matters he had just been talking about with Captain McCrea, he said.

  THE PRESIDENT was determined that no trace remain of the saboteurs. He did not want their graves to become a place of ghoulish pilgrimage for Nazi sympathizers. At his instructions, all the clothing that had belonged to the V-men, including the new suits they had bought in New York, Jacksonville, and Chicago, was incinerated.27 Contrary to normal regulations, no reports of their deaths were filed with the public health authorities in Washington.

  After lying for two days in the morgue of the army medical center, the bodies were placed in plain pine boxes at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, August 11. A light truck took the coffins under armed guard to a graveyard for unclaimed bodies on the southernmost edge of the District of Columbia, on a lonely hill adjoining the sewage disposal facility of Blue Plains. Six graves had been prepared with crude wooden headboards marked only with numbers, from 276 to 281. A six-foot-high wire mesh fence separated the saboteurs’ graves from the paupers’ graves. A stench of sewage wafted up the hill, which lay high over the Potomac River.

  At 7:30 p.m., two army chaplains, one Protestant, one Catholic, said some prayers as the bodies of the six saboteurs were laid to rest. No photographs were taken, and no information given to the press. Only two copies were made of the report on the disposal of bodies. One went to the president, the other to the secretary of war. Both were stamped SECRET.28

  Operation Pastorius—the high-risk gamble that Hitler hoped would lead to the crippling of the American war machine—had come to an ignominious and unmourned end.

  EPILOGUE

  SURVIVORS

  GEORGE DA
SCH and Peter Burger learned about the fate of their six companions when they were taken on their regulation fifteenminute walk around the cell block. The cells previously occupied by the men who had trained with them in Brandenburg were empty. Both Dasch and Burger were tortured by the thought that they had sent their fellow saboteurs to their deaths.

  Dasch kept asking the army guards if he did “the right thing” by reporting the sabotage plot to the FBI. On Saturday night, he had trouble getting to sleep, as he thought about everything he had done since arriving in America eight weeks earlier. “I have died six deaths,” he told one of his guards.1 On Sunday morning, however, he ate a “hearty breakfast” and began talking more coherently to the guards about his own situation.

  He was still “extremely pale and haggard looking,” almost ghostlike, when the two FBI agents who had most to do with his case, Duane Traynor and Mickey Ladd, visited the D.C. jail on Wednesday morning. 2 He could not get used to the idea that he had been sentenced to thirty years in prison, and broke down when he realized that the agents had not come to let him out of jail. “You may think you came over here to help us, but you have to understand the attitude of the American people and the U.S. government,” they told him. “As far as Americans are concerned, you were a saboteur who landed from an enemy submarine.”

  Burger also felt remorse about informing on his comrades. The two FBI men tried to allay his conscience by claiming they knew in advance that Dasch was coming over to America. They told Burger that it was only a “question of time” before they rounded everybody up, and therefore he should not feel responsible for the deaths of his comrades. Hearing this, Burger felt better.

  Both the surviving saboteurs said they wanted to do everything in their power “to fight Hitler.” The agents promised to pass their ideas “to the right places,” but gave them little hope of early release from prison. A few days later, the prisoners were transferred to the newly vacated “death house” of the D.C. jail, where they occupied adjoining cells.3 They were allowed to talk to each other and their guards—in English—but otherwise were kept isolated from the rest of the prison. After a few weeks, they were sent to the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut.

  In October, Burger appeared as the star prosecution witness in the treason trial in Chicago of the Haupts, the Froehlings, and the Wergins. (Dasch was considered too unreliable to testify.)4 All six defendants were found guilty, largely on the basis of their incriminating statements to the FBI. Judge William Campbell sentenced the three men to death, and the three women to twenty-five years in prison and $10,000 fines. The harsh sentences earned Campbell, a hard-line former U.S. attorney, the plaudits of the press and the nation, but were reversed on appeal, partly because of the controversy over whether FBI statements could be admitted as evidence. Haupt was eventually sentenced to life imprisonment, but was released in 1957; Walter Froehling and Otto Wergin got five-year prison terms; Erna Haupt was interned; the other two women were released.

  Trials of people who cooperated with the saboteurs also took place in New York. Anthony Cramer and Hermann Faje were sentenced to nine and five years respectively for “trading with the enemy.” Kerling’s friend Helmut Leiner received eighteen years for trading with the enemy and concealing treason, and was released on parole in 1954. Hedwig Engemann spent three years in prison on a similar charge.

  Marie Kerling was freed without a trial. Fortunately for her, the FBI had arrested her husband half an hour before she was due to meet with him. She had no case to answer.

  ONE OF the justices involved in the Ex parte Quirin ruling, William O. Douglas, liked to quote the dictum of one of his predecessors: in the Supreme Court, cases are decided 90 percent on emotion, only 10 percent on the law. 5 There are few better illustrations of what he meant than the case of the Nazi saboteurs. Eight months after Pearl Harbor, none of the justices was willing to dispute the extraordinary war powers claimed by the president. In denying habeas corpus to the saboteurs, and partially overturning Ex parte Milligan, they first decided what they should do, and then searched for the legal texts to support their decision.

  As chief justice, Harlan Stone assigned himself the task of writing a unanimous opinion that would keep all his “wild horses” riding together. Immediately after the saboteur ruling, he returned to his summer retreat in New Hampshire. Drafting the opinion was an agony for him, both physically and mentally. He was suffering from a severe bout of lumbago, contracted from “an extremely cold Pullman car” on the train from Washington and two days of strenuous mountain hiking.6 By the time he started work on the opinion, he was in such pain he had to dictate his correspondence to his wife.

  Sorting through the intricacies of the Constitution, the Manual for Courts-Martial, and various international conventions codifying the practices of war was “a mortification of the flesh” for the chief justice.7 He was unimpressed by the hastily written briefs that Biddle and Royall had submitted to the Supreme Court, and wanted to establish a more solid legal ground for a ruling in favor of the government than the attorney general had been able to provide. “I certainly hope the military is better equipped to fight the war than it is to fight its legal battles,” he wrote his law clerk, Bennett Boskey, in some irritation. Since Stone did not have a proper law library at his country retreat, he relied on Boskey, who was still in Washington, to document his conclusions with the relevant legal footnotes.

  Most troubling of all to Stone was the thought that the saboteurs might have been executed illegally, without the mandatory review stipulated by the Articles of War. He very much regretted agreeing to drop the paragraph in the per curiam ruling that indirectly urged the president to comply with the review procedures. The paragraph in question would not have been eliminated, he told Boskey, “if we had had a little more time to consider it; as it was, we went into Court a little late.”8 But it was too late to do anything about this now, and none of the justices wanted to give the two surviving saboteurs grounds for appealing their sentences. In the end, Stone decided to pass over the matter in his final opinion “to avoid indecent exposure of some very worthy gentleman.”9

  On the central issue of why the Milligan ruling should not apply to the saboteurs, the chief justice described them as “unlawful belligerents,” in contrast to Milligan, who was neither a belligerent nor a member of the enemy armed forces.10 The fact that at least one of the saboteurs, Haupt, was a U.S. citizen was irrelevant, he decided. Haupt’s offense, Stone wrote, was that he entered the country as an unlawful belligerent for a hostile purpose, “which constitutes a violation of the law of war.” Unlike Haupt, Milligan did not cross enemy lines.

  While supporting the president’s right to establish a military commission to try the saboteurs, Stone also upheld the saboteurs’ right to appeal to the civilian courts. He did so, however, in an extremely cryptic way, claiming there was “nothing” in the presidential proclamation that precluded the petitioners from taking their case to the Supreme Court. In order to maintain the court’s unanimity, Stone deleted a much stronger sentence from an earlier draft explicitly asserting the saboteurs’ constitutional right to a hearing. “There were so many eggs in the case which I felt it necessary to avoid breaking,” he wrote a friend, “that I am afraid the opinion was not good literature. I hope you noticed that the opinion flatly rejected (as unobtrusively as possible) the President’s comment that no court should hear the plea of the saboteurs. That, I thought, was going pretty far.”11

  Formally issued on October 29, 1942—twelve weeks after Quirin and his five comrades walked to the electric chair—Stone’s opinion in Ex parte Quirin has reverberated through the decades. In the aftermath of the ruling, Biddle wrote to Roosevelt claiming that the inconvenient Milligan precedent was “out of the way” for all practical purposes and “should not bother us any further.”12 Once the war was over, however, several justices had second thoughts about the case. The saboteur trial was “not a happy precedent,” Justice Frankfurter noted in 1953, after casting
a losing vote in favor of a stay of execution for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.13 In 1962, Justice Douglas told an interviewer that the saboteur case showed it was “extremely undesirable” to announce a decision without issuing an opinion to explain it. Once the search for grounds to justify a decision gets under way, Douglas noted, “sometimes those grounds crumble.”

  The sharpest criticism of Ex parte Quirin came from a legal scholar who served as law clerk to Justice Black at the time of the saboteur hearing. John P. Frank complained that Black and the other justices had allowed themselves to be “stampeded” by the executive branch. If judges are to “run a court of law and not a butcher shop,” Frank wrote in a 1958 book, “the reasons for killing a man should be expressed before he is dead; otherwise the proceedings are purely military and not for [the] courts at all.” This contrasted with the opinion of a leading constitutional scholar, Robert Cushman, a few months after the six saboteurs were executed. “The Supreme Court stopped the military authorities and required them, as it were, to show their credentials. When this had been done to the Court’s satisfaction, they were allowed to proceed.”14 Cushman hailed the court’s action as “a wholesome and desirable safeguard to civil liberty in time of war.”

  Views about Quirin and Milligan tend to veer back and forth, depending on whether America is at war or at peace. In times of peace, pressure mounts for curbs on executive power. In times of war, the pendulum swings in the opposite direction. After the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, the Bush administration cited the Quirin decision as a legal basis for establishing military tribunals to try al-Qaeda terrorists.