In the early morning hours of June 17, 1942, under the misty cloak of darkness, the slick, dark form of a submarine broke the surface of the choppy Atlantic and cruised along the coast of Florida, midway between Jacksonville and St. Augustine.
Quickly and silently 22-year-old Herbert Haupt, a former Lane Tech High School student from Chicago, and three companions emerged from an open hatch and clambered aboard a rubber life raft. They reached up instinctively as four heavy crates were handed down to them, and pushed themselves free of the mother ship.
Mission completed, the sub blew its tanks and slipped back beneath the waves, leaving the tiny raft in a churning wake of mist and diesel fumes as its occupants paddled furtively toward the landfall some 500 yards away.
As they neared shore, Haupt leaped into the surf and, puffing and sweating, pulled the landing craft up onto the sands of Ponte Vedra Beach.
The young Chicagoan wore maroon swim trunks and a Nazi military cap. His comrades, Edward Kerling, 33, Hermann Neubauer, 32, and Werner Thiel, 35, were attired in German military work clothes.
The Florida landing was a carefully planned sequel to a tense operation executed just four days earlier at a sandy spit near Amagansett Beach on Long Island where another sub, the U-202, clandestinely put four men in Nazi uniforms ashore in New York.
At that time in 1942, the British and Germans were engaged in deadly combat at El Alamein and Tobruk, and the Russians were fighting the Germans at Stalingrad. On this side of the broad ocean the United States–still smarting from the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor–was just cranking up its war effort when the first German forces waded ashore on the Atlantic coast.
The Nazi invasion of North America, microscopic as it was, was one of the best kept secrets of World War II. The full story lay buried for more than four decades in a file in Federal Bureau of Investigation headquarters in Washington, D.C., before the documents, including military reports and court records, were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Although the twin invasion pincers consisted of only eight men in all, their mission, if successful, could have crippled America`s frantic war effort.
The venture, conceived in Berlin and rehearsed at a secluded estate near the German capital, was led by George John Dasch, a 39-year-old waiter who had once worked in Chicago. A German soldier, Ernest Peter Burger, 35, one of three military men on the tiny task force, was second in command. The other two who went ashore with Dasch and Burger in New York were Richard Quirin, 34, and Heinrich Heinck, 35. The German invaders were highly trained saboteurs, operating under direct orders of the Nazi high command. Each had lived in the United States, and each man spoke fluent American English without a trace of a German accent.
Their mission was called Operation Pastorius, after Franz Daniel Pastorius, who led the first German immigrants to America`s shores in the early 1700s. Their objectives were significantly different, however. The modern-day Pastorians, armed with sophisticated tools of destruction, were assigned to:
— Bomb Hell Gate bridge spanning the East River as well as all other bridges leading to metropolitan New York.
— Blow up Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA) plants in Massena, N.Y., Alcoa, Tenn., and East St. Louis, Ill., and the Cryolite Co. aluminum base plant in Philadelphia.
— Knock out the New York City water supply system.
— Disrupt inland waterways by blowing up locks and canals in the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers between Cincinnati and St. Louis.
— Destroy the Niagara Falls hydroelectric plant.
— Bomb key rail facilities, including the Pennsylvania Station in Newark, N.J., the Horseshoe Curve near Altoona, Pa., and bridges and other vital points along the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway.
— Plant time bombs in lockers at railroad stations and in department stores to create panic and break down civilian morale.
It was a dangerous and ambitious undertaking for these eight men who just a few months before had never heard of one another. The group leader, Dasch, was born in Speyer, Germany, on Feb. 7, 1903. He first came to America in 1922 as a 19-year-old stowaway aboard ship. He made several more sea voyages to and from Germany, spending most of his time in the United States between trips, before settling in New York, where he worked as a waiter in 1930. Though he remained a German citizen, he took an American wife, Rosemarie Guilli, of Walston, Pa. They met and married in New York City, where she operated a beauty parlor in the Bronx.
Records show that from September, 1928, until he left for Germany in the spring of 1941, Dasch spent most of his time in Brooklyn. He also traveled to such cities as San Francisco, St. Louis and Chicago, where he lived for two months in the fall of 1933 during the Century of Progress Exposition.
For the most part he was a law-abiding citizen. Criminal court records show he was arrested on Long Island in 1926 on suspicion of operating a house of ill fame and selling liquor in violation of Prohibition laws, but was never prosecuted. He was fined $2 for driving with improper headlights in 1933 in New York City, and in 1936 he paid a $2 parking fine.
Dasch`s petition for U.S. citizenship was denied on Dec. 19, 1941, when he failed to appear at a hearing in New York City. Little wonder. He already was back on German soil. Using a variation of his first and middle names, Dasch had sailed aboard the Japanese liner Tatuta Maru the previous March from San Francisco to his homeland, via Yokohama. He landed a job with the German Foreign Office in Berlin, monitoring American radio broadcasts for 450 marks
(about $200) a month. Dasch`s American wife was interned in 1942 by the British in Bermuda, where she was captured while apparently trying to join her husband in Europe.
Late in November of 1941 Dasch was summoned by Walter Kappe, a lieutenant in the German Army High Command`s intelligence branch. Kappe, a puffy-faced officer identified in FBI reports as head of all espionage and sabotage activities abroad, asked Dasch, ”George, how would you like to go back to America?”
”What do you mean, America? That`s a peaceful country, isn`t it?” Dasch replied.
”Yes, it is a neutral country, but they are indirect enemies today because they are helping our enemies with their supplies,” Kappe said.
”Therefore it is time for us to attack them.”
Kappe himself had lived in America, where he fanned pro-German sentiment as a German language newspaper editor and organizer of often-violent rallies in Chicago and Milwaukee by the German-American political group Bund. As a German intelligence officer he now recruited Dasch to lead the underground attack on the United States. He assigned Dasch the code name Stritch, meaning short dash.
Together, over the ensuing months, they pored over voluminous files of former American residents who had recently returned to Germany to select the other seven saboteurs.
Burger, Dasch`s chief lieutenant on the mission, was a machinist by trade and a naturalized American citizen. A former member of the German Socialist Party, he was with Adolf Hitler in the Munich Beer Hall putsch of 1923.
He fled to the U.S. four years later when the party came under government attack. Always military minded, Burger served in the National Guard in Wisconsin and Michigan while holding factory jobs in Milwaukee and Detroit. Ultimately he settled in the Chicago suburb of Harvey, where he became an American citizen in February of 1933.
The Great Depression had left him unemployed, however, and five months later he returned to Germany, rejoined the Socialist Party, and became an aide to Ernest Roehm, head of Hitler`s Storm Troopers.
Burger fell from grace upon Roehm`s overthrow by Heinrich Himmler, and ended up as a writer for the government`s bureau of propaganda. In the spring of 1940 he was jailed for 17 months because of writings critical of Gestapo activities against civilians in Poland. After his release in July of 1941, he spent nine months as an army guard at a prisoner of war camp near Berlin.
In April of 1942 Burger was abruptly ordered to turn in his uniform and report to Lt. Kappe at Nazi command headquarters. There he met Richard Quirin, a locksmith, who had emigrated to America in 1927. Quirin married in 1939 and returned to Germany with his wife later that same year as war clouds began to form over the Continent. Quirin was given the new name of Richard Quintas for his return trip Stateside.
The fourth recruit was Heinrich Heinck, 35, a seaman who arranged his arrival in the U.S. in 1926 by jumping ship. During his 12 years in the United States he became an active member of the German-American Bund. He remained in America until 1939, when he joined the procession of loyal Germans returning home. Heinck was working in a German war plant when selected for his role in the sabotage mission. His knowledge of factory operations was considered essential to planting destructive devices where they would do the most harm. Heinck was given the Americanized name of Henry Kayner.
These four men comprised Group One.
Group Two, the Florida invasion group, would be led by Edward Kerling, 33, who was redesignated Ed Kelly for his return to the United States. Kerling first arrived in America in 1928, got a job smoking hams and married in New York City in 1931. In 1939 he joined a group of Germans in purchasing a sloop, the Lekala, which they hoped to sail home from Florida. They were cut off by the Coast Guard, however, which was assisting in the British blockade of vessels bound for Germany. Kerling found other means to slip back home and joined the German army as an English translator and organizer of stage shows to entertain Hitler`s troops.
Werner Thiel was rechristened John Thomas for the undercover operation. Like Quirin, he was a locksmith. He originally came to the Unites States in 1927 to visit an uncle in Chicago and decided to stay. In 1933 in Hammond, he helped organize a chapter of ”Friends of New Germany.” Thiel returned to the New Germany in March of 1941 on the same ship as George Dasch, although it is not known if they knew each other at the time.
Hermann Neubauer, 32, a world traveler, first arrived in the U.S. in 1931. He worked as a cook at Chicago`s Century of Progress world`s fair in 1933 and 1934 and in three hotels and restaurants in the city. In January of 1940 he married Chicagoan Alma Wolf. Neubauer, too, was blocked by the Coast Guard when he tried to sail home at the outbreak of World War II. Determined, he got back by other means and was drafted into the German army.
Neubauer was wounded on the Russian front three days after Hitler`s forces invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. An ardent admirer of Der Fuhrer, he quickly caught Kappe`s eye because of his patriotism and battle wounds. He was given the American name of Herman Nicholas for the operation.
The ”baby” of the group was 22-year-old Herbert Johannes William Godlove Haupt, the Lane Tech dropout and the only one, beside Burger, who was an American citizen. Conceived just after the end of World War I, Haupt was born in Germany in 1919. His family came to Chicago when he was five, and he grew up a typical American boy in the Lincoln-Belmont area. He automatically became a citizen in 1930 when his father was naturalized. Haupt attended Amundsen High School, and then transferred to Lane Tech, where he became an officer in the ROTC. He dropped out before graduating and got a job as a messenger for Western Union. A short time later he was hired as an apprentice optician by the Simpson Optical Co., 3200 W. Carroll Ave., which manufactured precision parts for the famed Norden bombsight.
Haupt abruptly quit his defense-plant job on June 14, 1941, two weeks before he was scheduled to register for the draft, and went to Mexico. He procured a German passport and travel expenses from the German consulate in Mexico City and sailed for Japan, arriving in August. There he was given seamanship training by the German navy and placed aboard a ship for France. He arrived in Bordeaux on December 11, the day Germany declared war on the United States.
Young Haupt was staying with relatives in Germany when Kappe contacted him and asked him to write a story about how his ship ran the British blockade. The assignment was apparently a ruse to give Kappe a chance to look him over. If so, he passed the test, and shortly thereafter was recruited as the youngest member of the sabotage team.
The men were intensively trained at an estate near Brandenburg, where they were given courses in explosives and chemical and incendiary devices. They studied maps of American transportation lines, and learned strategic points in fuel and water supply systems.
The eight men made their rendezvous in Berlin on May 12. They took a train to Paris and then to the seaport of Lorient on the southern coast of Brittany, where they boarded the two U-boats that would take them across the Atlantic.
