It’s a foggy night. A young coast guard recruit,
John Cullen patrols the beach near Amagansett, Long Island.
To amuse himself during his chilly walk, Cullen sings the latest hits, including “I’ve Got a Girl
in Kalamazoo”. His singing comes to an abrupt halt when he spots three men holding a small
boat in the surf. Cullen is actually running about 10 minutes behind schedule on his midnight patrol.
Ironically, because of his tardiness he stumbles onto Operation Pastorius,
a Nazi sabotage plot to wreak havoc in America. In the spring of 1942, Germany was riding a wave
of success; several concentration camps were fully operational and the Third Reich had won
huge battles in several countries. However, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the US had
entered the war. Hitler worried about America’s industrial power. The only way the Axis was going
to win was to obstruct America’s ability to make war. Therefore a sabotage program,
Operation Pastorius, was created; named in honor of Franz Daniel Pastorius, leader of the first
German migrants to arrive in the new world. On April 13th, the 9 military intelligence
recruits selected for Operation Pastorius convened at a farm on the shore of Lake Quenz, Germany.
They were split into 2 mission groups: George John Dasch was the leader of the first.
On his team was Ernst Peter Burger, Joseph Schmidt, Richard Quirin and Heinrich Heinck.
The leader of the second group was Edward Kerling. On his team was Herbie Haupt,
Hermann Neubauer and Werner Thiel. All the men had previously spent time in the US,
a few were US citizens. Most had come to Germany compelled to fight for the fatherland.They
all spoke varying degrees of English. Over about 5 weeks of intense training,
the saboteurs learned several skills including how to pick locks, build incendiary devices,
and plant bombs. They created new identities and were provided with false documents.
During downtime, they read old copies of American newspapers and magazines long since banned in
Germany to brush up on American culture, such as the New York Times and the Saturday Evening Post.
As their training progressed, the agents were sent to Berlin. Here they spent several
days taking field trips around the city to see canals, railway systems and industrial
factories. It was a chance to view up close the types of mechanisms they were going to destroy.
Dasch’s team would focus on sabotaging hydroelectric plants and industrial factories.
If the saboteurs could severely disrupt aluminum production, they might be able
to prevent the United States from creating an effective air force to fight the Luftwaffe.
Kerling’s team’s would target transportation systems, destroying crucial railroad passes
and critical bottlenecks such as the Hell Gate Bridge, which connected Long Island to the Bronx.
If there were materials left over from attacking major targets, the saboteurs
would focus on targets of opportunity, such as planting small explosive devices in Jewish-owned
department stores. The point of the small attacks would be to spread panic, rather than kill.
As final preparations were made, each saboteur was handed 3 documents to sign. The first was
a financial contract, stipulating salary and how much his family would receive in the event of his
death. The second document committed the Abwehr or the German military intelligence service to find
appropriate civilian jobs for the saboteurs once the war was over. The third document was a pledge
of secrecy, the saboteurs were never to talk about their work to outsiders on penalty of death.
The saboteurs had a stopover in Paris where they were given money and told to
go out and have a good time. They ran wild, Heinck especially. He got drunk at a bar
and announced that he was “a secret agent.” After 3 days in Paris, the group went to the
coastal town of Lorient to meet the U-boats that would take them to the US. Dasch and Kerling,
the two group leaders, were given $50,000 “for operational purposes” and $5,000 for
each agent. In addition, each saboteur was given a specially designed money belt containing $4,000,
plus $450 in ready cash for immediate use. Ultimately the saboteurs would take over $180,000
with them to the United States, the equivalent of two million dollars today.
However while counting the money, Haupt noticed that some of the bills he’d been given weren’t
green-backs, but so-called yellowbacks, gold certificates withdrawn from circulation in 1934,
after the United States went off the gold standard. The men were furious;
such carelessness could have caused them to be quickly caught.. They searched all the money,
removing the incriminating bills.. The saboteurs’ confidence in the mission was shaken.
Then Dasch accidentally left his identification papers on a train along with a few pictures
of his wife and mother as well as a notebook that contained jottings from sabotage lessons.
Schmidt came down with an STD and had to quit the mission so he could go receive treatment.
Later he would admit that he had injected his genitals with a solution to mimic symptoms
to get out of going on the sabotage mission. Finally on May 28th Dasch’s group departed
from Lorient harbor on U-202. The plan was to drop them off in the Northeast. A few
days later Kerling’s team left on U-584 with plans to be dropped off in Florida. Along with
each team went 4 special waterproof wooden crates containing detonators and explosives.
On June 12th, U-202 arrived at Long Island. Dasch’s team and their equipment were rowed
ashore. Due to the bad fog and strong surf, the sailors rowed in circles, almost capsizing
the boat and drenching the saboteurs' bags. Once on the beach they quickly hauled the
crates up to the sand dunes, and hastily covered them with sand. Then they laid a raincoat on the
sand and spread out their sodden clothing. While the rest of the team was dealing with
the clothing, Dasch helped the sailors try to launch the dinghy. That was when Coast
Guardsman Cullen stumbled on the scene. Dasch tried to convince Cullen that they
were lost fishermen run aground. As Cullen grew suspicious, Dasch pulled out a wad of bills and
forced them on Cullen, aggressively asking him if he would remember Dasch’s face if he saw it again.
Cullen, who was unarmed, felt outnumbered and threatened. He took the money and backed away,
once he was out of sight in the fog, he ran to the Coast Guard station.
Most of the Coast Guard were asleep and were disbelieving when Cullen woke them
up shouting about Germans--that is until they saw the money. About 30 minutes after the incident, a
Coast guard team returned to where Cullen had met the man. They spread out and searched the beach,
but the strangers were long gone. However, they could smell diesel fumes wafting in from the sea.
Although the fog was still thick, they caught glimpses of a long boat stuck on a sandbar.
U-202 had gotten stranded on a sandbar after getting close to the beach. Over several hours,
the captain tried to make the boat as light as possible and maneuver it free.
Around 3 am the captain began to prep to scuttle the sub, but the tide started to rise. They gave
it a final try and were able to float the U-boat. Though several coast guardsmen and naval radiomen
from the Amagansett Naval Radio Station saw and reported the sub, leaders further up the chain
only logged the sightings and didn’t investigate, allowing U-202 to escape back into the Atlantic.
As they combed the beach, the Coast Guard found clothing, a wet seabag,
a pack of German cigarettes and a freshly turned mound of sand. When they dug, they
came across four wooden crates. Later when Coast Guard intelligence officers opened the crates,
they found a variety of sabotage devices. They counted the wad of bills the mysterious
stranger had slipped Cullen, it was $260.
Meanwhile, the saboteurs managed to trek undetected to the train station just outside
of the village of Amagansett. They cleaned up as best they could, hiding wet swimming
trunks and other clothes in bushes opposite the station. Once the station opened, they bought 4
one way tickets for an express train bound for Jamaica, Queens.
After the train left, the station master discovered the abandoned wet clothes and,
thinking nothing of it, threw them into the incinerator.
After arriving in New York city, the agents split into pairs and went on
shopping sprees to replace the clothes they had left behind on the beach.
Dasch and Burger took rooms at the Governor Clinton Hotel in Manhattan while Quirin and
Heinck took rooms at another hotel. The plan was to lie low for a bit. The team leaders would
meet on July 4th in a hotel in Cincinnati to coordinate their sabotage operations.
Coast Guard intelligence delivered everything they found on the beach to their New York
headquarters. The chiefs decided to bring the FBI into the investigation.
Senior Naval officers were also notified.
Dasch had made a few cryptic statements to Burger during training,
trying to suss out how he felt. Now he put all his cards on the table and told Burger that he wasn’t
going through with the mission. He hated Nazism and was going to report the plot to the FBI.
As it turned out Burger had similar feelings. Both of them had experienced harsh and unfair
conditions in Germany and agreed to the mission as a way to get back to the US.
However, they were afraid to go to the New York office of the FBI because they had been
told that it was under constant observation by the Gestapo. On the other hand, they had
to be careful not to be caught by US authorities before they could turn themselves in. In the end,
they agreed to telephone the FBI in New York, provide a rough outline of their mission,
and announce that one of them would travel to Washington to meet with J. Edgar Hoover “on a
very important matter.” Unfortunately, the agent manning the phone desk at
the New York FBI didn’t take the call seriously. The call was simply logged,
deemed crazy and promptly forgotten, no need to notify Washington.
To calm his nerves, an anxious Dasch turned to gambling. He went to one of
his old gambling clubs and went on a wild high stakes 36-hour card playing binge.
Meanwhile, the saboteurs from U-584 had an easy landing in Florida at Ponte Vedra beach.
They were able to hide their sabotage gear and make their way undetected to Jacksonville.
They also split into pairs, checked into hotels, and went shopping.
In the evening, over drinks, they agreed on a plan of action. Kerling
and Thiel would travel to Cincinnati and New York, Neubauer and Haupt to Chicago.
They would meet again on July 6, two days after the planned July 4 rendezvous between Kerling
and Dasch in Cincinnati. For now they would leave their explosives hidden. At some point,
Kerling and Haupt would return to Florida and retrieve them.
In New York, Quirin and Heinck became suspicious
when Dasch skipped check-in meetings. Burger tried to smooth things over.
Dasch went to Washington. After some frustrating phone calls where he was
passed from person to person, he was finally able to get a meeting with Duane L.Traynor,
head of the FBI’s antisabotage unit. A skeptical Traynor only took the meeting because of a strange
story making the office rounds about German agents landing on Long Island.
For the next several days, Dasch dictated a statement that eventually grew to 254
single-spaced typewritten pages. Once Traynor realized that Dasch could be telling the truth,
he rushed regular summaries of what Dasch was saying to Edgar J. Hoover,
the director of the FBI. Hoover ordered Dasch’s hotel room searched.
Agents found a briefcase full of money and other clues which seemed to confirm Dasch’s story.
The FBI tracked Burger down and placed him under surveillance,
figuring that he would lead him to the other saboteurs. They were right and within a few days,
all three men were arrested. When interrogated, Burger was very cooperative and helpful. By
June 24th, the FBI had surveilled and arrested the team 2 saboteurs also.
Lastly, Dasch was taken into custody. Traynor gently explained to Dasch that his confession
plan assumed that the U.S. government was unaware of the landing on Amagansett Beach. In fact,
they had been investigating the case since then. Dasch was just as criminal as the others.
Worried that other agencies would claim jurisdiction over the matter, Hoover quickly held
a press conference announcing the plot and arrest of the saboteurs. He emphasized the central role
played by the FBI in cracking the case. There was no mention of Dasch’s confession which actually
cracked the case or the role the Coast Guard had played. The press ate up the dramatic story.
Shortly thereafter, American radio stations in Europe started carrying reports of Operation
Pastorius arrests. The details discussed revealed that the Americans had clearly uncovered the
full plot and gotten the agents to confess, making the operation a catastrophic failure
as well as giving the Americans a large propaganda victory The Führer was livid. He summoned the
Abwehr chiefs and subjected them to tirades, before ending sabotage programs for America.
On July 2nd President Roosevelt issued Executive Proclamation 2561 creating a
military tribunal to prosecute the Germans. It was thought that a civilian court would go too
easy on them and there were worries that lawyers for the saboteurs might invoke habeas corpus,
a procedure that could send the case to the Supreme Court. Furthermore,
President Roosevelt wanted to use the case to send a clear warning to Hitler to refrain from similar
plots in the future. At this time, Director Hoover had kept from Roosevelt the assistance provided
to the FBI by Dasch and Burger; the president believed all the saboteurs to be equally guilty.
The Germans were quickly charged and tried for 4 offenses: 1) Violating the law of war.
2) Violating Article 81 of the Articles of War, defining the offense of corresponding
with or giving intelligence to the enemy. 3) Violating Article 82 of the Articles of War,
defining the offense of spying; and 4) Conspiracy to commit the offenses alleged in the first three
charges. The trial was swift and all 8 saboteurs were found guilty and sentenced to death.
Because of their confessions, President Roosevelt commuted Dasch’s sentence to a 30-year prison term
and Burger’s to life. Dasch became extremely bitter about his plight,
he felt that he was treated unfairly and he shouldn’t have to serve prison time at all.
On Saturday, August 8, the 6 saboteurs were executed by electric chair and quietly
buried in a graveyard for unclaimed bodies in the District of Columbia.
In April of 1948, President Harry S. Truman pardoned Dasch and Burger. They were deported
to Germany. The country was wrestling with economic collapse and it was difficult to find
employment. Also, many Germans regarded Dasch and Burger as traitors. Both men struggled.
Several months after he returned to Germany, Burger went to a U.S. government office in
Stuttgart, and came face to face with Reinhold Barth, one of his instructors at the Quenz Lake
sabotage school. Barth had once worked with the Long Island Rail Road before being repatriated
to Germany to fight for the fatherland. Now, he had parlayed his fluent English and background to
get a job as a U.S. Army liaison officer with the German railway system. A man who had given lessons
in blowing up American railroads was making a good living at a job monitoring the movement of U.S.
troops and military supplies throughout the German transport system. Ironically, if Barth wanted to
carry out acts of sabotage against the United States, he was now in an ideal position to do so.
Burger tried to alert US authorities to Barth’s dangerous background, but his words fell on deaf
ears. Operation Pastorius was over, the FBI had long since given up on trying to track down the
masterminds behind the plot. The powers that be were focused on reconstructing a new Germany.
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