Operation Pastorius

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The Operation Pastorius was in rough outlines of the German defenses designed commando raid during World War II , in which German sabotage groups in the industrial centers of the United States should commit attacks.

The ambitious Abwehr officer Oberleutnant Walterkap , who had done propaganda work in Chicago and New York for twelve years in the foreign organization of the NSDAP, was entrusted with the individual preparations . His plan consisted of recruiting Germans who had lived and worked in the USA and who were familiar with the language and the way of life to smuggle them into the USA, and to let them destroy important industrial plants, dams and rail connections in order to cause as much panic as possible produce.

In June 1942, eight men were dropped off by German submarines on the Atlantic coast of the USA. One of the men wanted to get out and immediately contacted the FBI , whereupon the group was arrested and tried by a military court.

Attendees

George John Dasch

In the winter of 1941 cap began looking for suitable candidates. He approached possible applicants at congresses of the foreign institute, checked personnel files of the Wehrmacht and also looked for possible candidates on lists of re-naturalized Germans of the Gestapo . On April 10, 1942, a group of volunteers was brought together on the Quenzsee estate near Brandenburg an der Havel , including:

  • George John Dasch , a 39-year-old who entered the United States illegally in 1922, worked as a waiter in New York and served briefly in the US Army Air Forces before returning to the German Reich in 1941
  • Werner Thiel , who emigrated to the USA in 1927, had applied for naturalization and had also returned to the German Reich in 1941
  • Hermann Neubauer , a former cook
  • Edward Kerling , who had worked as a driver and servant in the USA for eleven years and was a staunch Nazi
  • Herbert Hans Haupt , a 22-year-old with a US passport, child of German parents in Chicago who had legally acquired American citizenship and who had lived outside the United States for six years
  • Ernst Peter Burger , also a US citizen and former member of the SA, who worked in the US as a machinist and in the National Guard in Michigan and Wisconsin had served
  • Richard Quirin , who emigrated to the USA in 1927 and accepted the offer of the German Reich to return

In Quenzsee they received special training in explosives , incendiary devices , hand grenade throwing , target practice, close combat , sabotage techniques and secret writing . They were taught that in every drugstore materials readily available are suitable for their purposes, how to deal with primitive means Zeitzündeeinrichtungen manufactures, with a rifle shot at a transformer paralyzes weeks an entire aluminum plant and transmitted secret messages. On April 29, they were subjected to an examination by the order that the dummy of an armaments factory guarded by guards from the sabotage school, a marshalling yard and other targets should be scouted out and destroyed within 36 hours.

After all but two members had passed their exams, they were divided into two groups by Cap: Burger, Heinck, and Quirin were to run the aluminum plants in Alcoa , Tennessee , East St. Louis , Illinois, and Massena , New York as well , under Dasch's leadership sabotage the cryolite works in Philadelphia , but also blow up the locks on the Ohio River between Pittsburgh and Louisville . Neubauer, Thiel and Haupt, under Kerling's orders, had to destroy the railway tunnels and bridges, the Hellgate Bridge over the East River and the water supply of New York City.

Each and every one of them had a mandate fromkap to recruit more German-Americans and to carry out their orders with them if possible. If anyone should go soft, everyone would have to shoot everyone from the command. Cap himself wanted to come to the United States as soon as the command had recruited a network of agents. Encrypted advertisements in the Chicago Tribune were intended for communication. Each of the agents received $ 4,400  and the two leaders another $ 50,000. However, Dasch noticed that a significant portion of the cash consisted of gold dollar bills that had not been in circulation since 1933.

procedure

Amagansett Coast Guard Station (located on the loading beach)

On May 28, 1942, they boarded the German submarines U 202 and U 584 in Lorient , Brittany . U 202 dropped them off shortly after midnight on June 14, 1942 off Amagansett on Long Island with a rubber dinghy and four watertight boxes with explosives as well as time and remote detonators. U 584 withdrew its command off Ponte Vedra Beach , south of Jacksonville, on June 17 with a rubber dinghy and boxes.

The first command with Dasch was seen by a young, attentive security guard on the beach before it had time to make the dinghy and boxes disappear. The four agents slipped him cash and asked him to forget about the incident, which of course aroused his suspicion. Before the security guard could call for assistance, they had already disappeared, had taken the commuter train to New York and stayed in Manhattan at the Hotel Governor Clinton on 31st Street or one block away at the Hotel Martinique . They later wanted to take the boxes by car to a hiding place in the Catskill Mountains northwest of New York. But Dasch had concerns about the whole company on the first evening, and he felt at Burger how to get out of it.

The second command had taken a bus to Jacksonville and then a train to Cincinnati , Ohio, where Kerling and Thiel went into hiding, while Haupt and Neubauer traveled to Chicago, Illinois .

Dasch called the FBI's New York office to announce his arrival in Washington for the following week. The officer did not take the call very seriously and put down a short note. Dasch played a bit of poker with his old colleagues from waiter days in New York and then five days later drove to Washington, DC , where he gave his listeners extensive and detailed two full days of information about their assignment, their identity, their education, the German food supply, the housing shortage, the military situation and the diving depths of German submarines. In return for his willingness to provide information, he expected to be able to speak on the propaganda radio broadcasts spread across Germany.

Instead, Burger, Heinck and Quirin were arrested in the hotel, Kerling together with Thiel at his wife's home in New York. Haupt had asked an FBI office in Chicago after he was called up, where he was to be cradled with "all right" in order to shadow him. After a week he led his minder to Neubauer's hiding place.

Legal consequences

The case was tried in a military tribunal because the prosecution feared that the evidence would not be sufficient for a proper criminal trial . The court consisted of seven judges, all of whom were generals , but none of them was a lawyer ; the Federal Prosecutor General Francis Biddle - later chief judge of the Nuremberg trials - personally represented the indictment.
Although all of the defendants made amazingly detailed confessions and had not attempted to commit acts of sabotage up to this point , the fact that they had brought explosives into the country as Germans was interpreted as a violation of the prevailing war laws. Neither their confessions nor the manifestation of their alleged disgust for the dictatorship in Germany nor their assertions that they had never actually intended to carry out an explosives attack helped them: The sentence announced on August 8, 1942 for Dasch was 30 years in prison , that for burgers life sentence; all of the rest were sentenced to death by the electric chair and executed that same day. However, Dasch and Burger were pardoned in April 1948 by the US President Harry S. Truman , who had been in office since 1945 , and deported to the American zone of occupied Germany .
Furthermore, proceedings were opened against six family members and friends of the alleged main culprit Haupt. Two women were brought to trial after a legal battle over the use of confessions obtained through unfair means; a friend pleaded guilty to a minor offense and was sentenced to imprisonment, which, however, could quickly be suspended on probation because of the pre-trial detention that had already been served. Haupt's mother, on the other hand, was interned , she lost her US citizenship, and after the end of the war she was also deported back to Germany . The trial against Haupt's father was fully carried out and he was sentenced to life imprisonment at the end ; but then he too was deported to post-war Germany .

The transfer of the accused to a military tribunal had been challenged by the defense attorneys before the Supreme Court of the United States , but without success. This decision by the Supreme Federal Judges was subsequently strongly criticized in the legal literature. Years later, however, three of the judges involved regretted their judgment, which decades later - in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and in the US " war on terror " - was to be used as a precedent for the establishment of military tribunals in Guantánamo .

literature

  • Michael Dobbs: Saboteurs - the Nazi Raid on America . Knopf, New York 2004, ISBN 0-375-41470-3 .
  • Louis Fisher: Nazi Saboteurs on Trial: a Military Tribunal and American Law . University Press of Kansas, Lawrence 2003, ISBN 0-7006-1238-6 .
  • Billy Hutter: Doppelkopp . Llux Agentur & Verlag, Ludwigshafen 2013, ISBN 978-3-938031-44-5 (biography about George John Dasch in Palatinate dialect)
  • Richard Cahan: A Terrorists Tale . Chicago Magazine, February 2002 (also online)
  • J. Francis Watson: The Nazi Spy Pastor. Carl Krepper And The War In America , Santa Barbara, California: Praeger 2014, ISBN 978-1-4408-2807-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Unless otherwise stated, this chapter is based on Abraham Cahan , 2002.