Haupt carried a money belt containing $3,900 in American currency, and papers identifying him as Larry Jordan. German intelligence had picked the name from a list of missing GIs. The real Lawrence J. Jordan, a 23-year-old Army sergeant from Chicago, had been captured at Bataan in the Philippines and was a prisoner in Japan.
The trans-Atlantic trip took 15 days, and the saboteurs were literally ripe for action when it came time to be put ashore. No one except food handlers was allowed to bathe in the cramped submarine quarters because of the scarcity of fresh water.
”Schnell! Schnell!” Dasch whispered as the first team went over the side at the stroke of midnight on June 13 and scurried aboard the rubber raft. They put ashore less than 20 miles from the tip of Long Island`s Montauk Point, where they buried four crates of explosives and exchanged their wet uniforms for the civilian clothes they had brought along in watertight seabags.
”Gut,” Dasch said approvingly when the four fishermen, as they now appeared, faced one another on the beach. ”From now on we speak only English. Let`s get the hell out of here!”
Four nights later, a similar scene was repeated on the Florida sands.
Quickly, this second group of men climbed out of their sweaty uniforms and donned civilian clothes with American labels. They buried the military garb (which they wore on landing to avoid being shot as spies in the event of capture)
with their cache of explosives and took off in different directions.
Haupt boarded a train in Jacksonville for Chicago, where the plan called for him to get his old job back at Simpson Optical long enough to put the plant out of commission. He had been gone for more than a year from his home in the 2300 block of North Fremont Street. His father, Hans, a painter and bricklayer, and his mother, Erna, had not heard from him since he wired from Tokyo 10 months earlier. Instead of going home, however, he went directly to the house of an uncle, Walter Froehling, a Nazi sympathizer, who lived in the 3600 block of North Whipple Street. As Haupt confided the grand scheme to his uncle, the mission to knock the guts out of his adopted country`s war effort was already falling apart.
The FBI files suggest that Dasch, the carefully chosen leader of the band of saboteurs, might have been something other than a German espionage agent. Dasch, Burger, Quirin and Heinck had just finished burying their Nazi uniforms and supplies in the sand on Long Island when they were accosted by an unarmed Coast Guardsman patroling the beach.
”Hey! What are you guys doing out here?” demanded Seaman 2C John Cullen.
Inexplicably, the German leader advanced to within a foot of the curly-haired sailor, eyeball to eyeball, and deftly stuffed something into the youth`s pocket. ”Don`t concern yourself with us,” the German said softly.
”Here is something for you. Now, take a good look at me. I want to be quite sure you will know me again.”
With that Dasch backed off, beckoned to his companions, and they disappeared into the night.
Cullen reached into the pocket of his dungarees to see what the man had deposited. His hand came up clutching $260 in cash.
The seaman double-timed back to Coast Guard headquarters and blurted out what happened to Capt. J.S. Bayliss, his commanding officer. Bayliss was already apprehensive. Several other guardsmen had reported the throaty drone of powerful engines shortly after midnight just off shore, but were unable to see anything in the dense fog.
The CO sent an armed detail back with Cullen, but the strangers were nowhere to be found.
At sunup a beach patrol discovered tracks in the sand where the invaders had buried their supplies. The seamen unearthed four wooden crates and a seabag containing German uniforms. The booty was taken back to headquarters, where the crates were pried open. They contained TNT, bombs shaped to resemble lumps of coal, time clocks, fuses and caps, detonators, incendiary pencils and pens, and delayed-action bombs. Bayliss called the FBI.
At 11 a.m. Special Agent T.J. Donegan, head of the New York field office, accompanied by agents C.F. Lanman and E.F. Emrich, sped to Coast Guard headquarters to assume jurisdiction in the case.
The FBI inventoried the contrabrand and launched a search throughout the New York area for the four invaders.
The men in the second sub had not yet landed when, on the evening of June 14th, Special Agent S.D. McWhorter answered the phone in the New York FBI office. ”My name is Frank Daniel Pastorius, and I am calling your office so that an official record can be made of this call. I just arrived from Germany,” said a male voice on the other end.
”Where are you calling from?” McWhorter stalled.
”I can`t tell you that now. I am going to Washington, D.C., on Thursday or Friday. I will talk to Mr. J. Edgar Hoover or one of the officials of the FBI there. It is my desire now only to make a record of this call and to advise you that I am going to Washington.” He hung up before the call could be traced.
The name Pastorius meant nothing to McWhorter, but it was significant to Dasch, who would use it later to identify himself. Several days later he hopped a train to Washington and at 10 a.m. Friday, June 19, telephoned the FBI to arrange his surrender without bombing a single factory or railhead.
”My name is George John Dasch and I just arrived from Germany,” he told Agent Duane Traynor. ”I want to talk to someone with regard to sabotage. I called your New York office earlier.”
”Where are you now?”
”I am in Room 351 in the Mayflower Hotel. I am registered in the name of Davis. I will be waiting for you.”
Within the hour the leader of the Nazi mission was in FBI custody, blowing the whistle on his comrades and telling authorities where they could be found. Dasch also surrendered $82,350 in U.S. currency and handed FBI agents a seemingly insignificant white linen handkerchief. He told them it contained, in invisible ink, the coded names and addresses of four Nazi contacts in the U.S. and the location of a mail drop in Lisbon, through which messages could be relayed to Berlin.
FBI technicians brought out the message with ammonia fumes. Among the Nazi contacts was the name of Haupt`s uncle, Walter Frohling, in Chicago.
Acting on Dasch`s information, FBI agents rounded up Burger, Quirin and Heinck the following day in New York City. Burger was found in a room at the Governor Clinton Hotel. Heinck and Quirin had spent the night in a house of prostitution.
Kerling and Thiel, who made their way to New York from Florida, were picked up in Manhattan on June 23. Haupt and Neubauer were arrested in Chicago on June 27.
The game was over before the first bomb was pitched. All eight men
admitted the purpose of their mission, and Kerling led authorities to the Florida beach, where the remaining explosives and Nazi uniforms were recovered. The suspects surrendered a total of $174,588.62.
Dasch told federal agents he never intended to carry out the mission of destruction. He said that once back on American soil, as he and Burger dined in New York City the night after they landed, Burger broke into tears and blubbered that he, too, wanted no part of sabotage. That was the evening Dasch made the first call to the FBI. On the morning of June 18, the day after the second group paddled ashore in Florida, Dasch bought a leather briefcase, into which he stuffed the $82,350 he had brought from Germany and headed for Washington to blow their cover.
Why did he do it? Reading between the lines of the 43-year-old FBI documents, it seems possible that the supposed Nazi agent could well have been operating on orders from Moscow.
Dasch was an articulate man with polished manners, a snappy dresser. He liked to play cards for money, and he helped found the first German-American soccer club in New York. He received the equivalent of a high school education in Catholic schools in Germany and spoke French and Italian as well as English and his native tongue.
One of his last jobs as a waiter before returning to Germany was at the Glen Island Casino in New York`s Westchester County, where he was fired for union activities. A fellow waiter who was among many interrogated by the FBI said Dasch had boasted to other German waiters that he was going back to the Rhineland ”to carve a niche for myself.”
Yellowed FBI records from before the war list Dasch`s name among possible Nazi sympathizers; however, the files indicate he told fellow workers before his departure in March of 1941, ”I am going to Russia to study espionage.”
In ”Hitler`s Spies and Saboteurs,” a book based on the diary of a top Nazi spy, Dasch is reported to have traveled from Japan to Vladivostok and on to Moscow before continuing on to Germany. If that is true, it would explain when and where Dasch could have been indoctrinated as a double-agent.
FBI reports recorded before Dasch left the U.S. quote a man named Adolph Reicher of the Bronx as advising authorities that Dasch was going to Moscow
”to study Communism.”
In all, no less than 17 persons questioned by the FBI after Dasch`s arrest offered similar impressions of the hazel-eyed German with graying hair. It was the ”general consensus,” the FBI concluded, that Dasch was a Communist, had been to Russia, and had a brother ”high in the Communist government.”
The late John F. Glenville, a rookie FBI agent in Chicago when the case broke in 1942, discussed it shortly before his death this summer at age 75.
”I remember Haupt when he was in custody,” said Glenville, who retired from the Bureau in 1965. ”Haupt attempted suicide by electrocution. We put a steel cage over the ceiling light in his cell . . . to prevent him from removing the bulb and touching the electrical circuit.”
Haupt was sent from Chicago to New York to join his fellow would-be saboteurs. On the night of July 3, accompanied by 25 federal agents, all eight were taken by train to Washington. They arrived in the capital at dawn on the Fourth of July.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt personally ordered them turned over to the Army. Trial before a top secret commission of eight generals commenced on July 8. ”The trial was held on the fifth floor of the Justice Department Building where I worked, and security was very tight,” recalled another retired FBI agent, Robert K. McQueen, now in private law practice in Waukegan. ”It was the talk of the entire Justice Department. I can still see the prison vans coming and going.”
Wartime justice was swift. All eight men were convicted, mainly on testimony by Dasch and Burger. Dasch was sentenced to 30 years in prison, and Burger got life. The other six were sentenced to death.
On Aug. 12, 1942, just two short months after the first German landing on the Atlantic coast, Herbert Haupt, Richard Quirin, Werner Thiel, Hermann Neubauer, Heinrich Heinck and Edward Kerling were led one by one to the electric chair in the District of Columbia jail. They rest today in a Potter`s Field beneath numbered wooden markers.
In April of 1948, the war over and the Nazis defeated, Dasch was taken from his cell in Leavenworth Penitentiary and Burger from prison in Atlanta, and both were deported to Germany.
According to resettlement records, Burger returned to his native Bavaria and resumed his craft as a tool maker in the town of Augsburg. There he drifted into obscurity.
As for Dasch, the records show a somewhat itinerant existence as he traveled in both the Allied and Soviet zones of divided Germany, and to Switzerland where four of his nine sisters lived. When last heard of in the 1950s, he had settled in Germany`s southern Rhineland and appeared to prosper, first as the owner of a small cafe selling frankfurters and later as a trader in a commodities market.
If Dasch is alive today, he would be 82. If not, he took to his grave the answer to the mystery he left behind. Was George Dasch a coward, a traitor to the Third Reich who got cold feet and turned in his fellow conspirators to save his own skin? Or could it be that the leader of the saboteurs was a Soviet double-agent, bent on foiling the Nazi plot so as to inflame U.S. public opinion against Germany and hasten the opening of a second front to take pressure off Russia?
William Carter, FBI public affairs specialist in Washington, will say
only that the dusty old government files in the case ”speak for themselves.”
