Operation Pastorius was a failed Germanintelligence plan for sabotage inside the United States during World War II. The operation was staged in June 1942 and was to be directed against strategic American economic targets. The operation was named by AdmiralWilhelm Canaris, chief of the German Abwehr, for Francis Daniel Pastorius, the organizer of the first organized settlement of Germans in America. The plan involved eight German saboteurs who had previously spent time in the United States.
All eight were recruited into the Abwehr and were given three weeks of intensive sabotage training in the German High Command school on an estate at Quenzsee, near Berlin, Germany. The agents were instructed in the manufacture and use of explosives, incendiaries, primers, and various forms of mechanical, chemical and electrical delayed-timing devices. Considerable time was spent developing complete background "histories" they were to use in the United States. They were encouraged to converse in English and to read American newspapers and magazines to improve their English and familiarity with current American events and culture.[6]
Even before the mission began, it was in danger of being compromised, as George Dasch, commander of the team, left confidential documents on a train, and one of the agents, while drunk, announced to patrons in a Paris tavern that he was a secret agent.[10]
On the night of 12/13 June 1942, the first submarine to arrive in the U.S., U-202 commanded by Captain Hans-Heinz Lindner,[11] landed at Amagansett, New York, about 100 miles east of New York City on Long Island, at what is now Atlantic Avenue beach. It was carrying Dasch and three other saboteurs (Burger, Quirin, and Heinck). The team was launched in inflatable rafts (in which Dasch nearly drowned) and came ashore wearing German Navy uniforms so that, if they were captured, they would be classified as prisoners of war rather than spies.[12][13][14] They also brought their explosives, primers and incendiaries, and buried them along with their uniforms, and put on civilian clothes to begin an expected two-year campaign in the sabotage of American defense-related production.[15]
Immediately upon reaching the beach, at around 30 minutes past midnight the saboteurs were discovered amidst the dunes by unarmed Coast Guardsman John C. Cullen, who was accosted by Dasch and offered a bribe of $300. (Cullen had been shortchanged, the money only amounted to $260.)[16] Cullen feigned cooperation but reported the encounter. An armed patrol returned to the site, finding "four crates of explosives and some German uniforms that had been hastily buried in the wet sand", as well as fuses and pre-made bombs;[17] but the Germans were gone, having taken the Long Island Rail Road from the Amagansett station into Manhattan, where they checked into a hotel. The FBI, informed of the operation by the Coast Guard, initiated a manhunt for the saboteurs.[12]
U-202 itself remained stuck in the sand merely 200 metres (660ft) offshore until daybreak; only when the tide came in was the submarine able to free itself and return to the depths of the ocean.[12] Later that month, U-202 would sink two civilian ships: the Argentine steamer Rio Tercero and the American passenger liner City of Birmingham, before returning to Europe.[18]
The other four-member German team commanded by Kerling landed without incident at Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, south of Jacksonville on 16 June 1942. They came on U-584.[19] This group came ashore wearing bathing suits, but wore German Navy hats. After landing ashore, they threw away their hats, put on civilian clothes, and started their mission by boarding trains to Chicago, Illinois and Cincinnati, Ohio.[14] Additional breaches of secrecy occurred; Kerling had boasted to a colleague about their mission, and in Chicago, Herbert Haupt had asked his father to buy him a sports car claiming he needed it while traveling on business for the German government.[12]
The two teams were to meet on 4 July in a hotel in Cincinnati to coordinate their sabotage operations.[20]
Betrayal
While in the Manhattan hotel, Dasch — clearly unnerved by the encounter with the Coast Guard — called Burger into their upper-story hotel room and opened a window, saying they would talk, and if they disagreed, "only one of us will walk out that door—the other will fly out this window." Dasch told him he had no intention of going through with the mission, hated Nazism, and planned to report the plot to the FBI. Burger agreed to defect to the United States immediately.[16][21][18]
On 15 June, Dasch phoned the New York office of the FBI, gave his name as "Franz Pastorius" (the namesake of the operation), and explained the plot, but ended the call when the agent answering doubted his story and thought he was a crackpot.[22] Four days later, he took a train to Washington, DC and walked into FBI headquarters, where he gained the attention of Assistant Director D.M. Ladd by showing him the operation's budget of $84,000 cash.[18][22] None of the other six German agents were aware of the betrayal. During the next two weeks, Burger and the other six were arrested. Dasch hoped that he would be hailed as a hero for exposing the plot, but the FBI had other plans; J. Edgar Hoover made no mention of him and claimed credit for the FBI for capturing the saboteurs.[17]
Trial and executions
Since they were caught before they could do anything, officials were initially unsure on how to proceed against the saboteurs. Attorney General Francis Biddle estimated that at best, the German saboteurs could be convicted of conspiracy and face up to three years in prison, while Burger and Haupt could be tried for treason. His alternative proposal was imprisoning them as POWs for the remainder of the war. However, Roosevelt deemed these proposals unacceptable. He said the Americans were guilty of treason and thus liable to courts-martial. As for the Germans, he said they'd forfeited their right to civilian trials since they were "waging battle within our country." Roosevelt then said he wanted all of the saboteurs to be immediately executed. To accomplish this, he told Biddle that he would use his presidential powers to convene a military tribunal to prosecute the saboteurs, something not done on American soil since the end of the American Civil War. He sent another memo to Biddle, reaffirming his expectations.[23]
"I want one thing clearly understood, Francis. I won't hand them over to any United States marshal armed with a writ of habeas corpus. Understand?"
On 2 July 1942, President Roosevelt issued Executive Proclamation 2561, creating a military tribunal to prosecute the Germans.[24][25] Placed before a seven-member military commission, the Germans were charged with the following offenses:
Violating Article 81 of the Articles of War, defining the offense of corresponding with or giving intelligence to the enemy;
Violating Article 82 of the Articles of War, defining the offense of spying; and
Conspiracy to commit the offenses alleged in the first three charges.
The trial was held in Assembly Hall #1 on the fifth floor of the Department of Justice building in Washington, D.C., on 8 July 1942.[26] Lawyers for the accused, who included Lauson Stone and Kenneth Royall, attempted to have the case tried in a civilian court but were rebuffed by the United States Supreme Court in Ex parte Quirin,[27] a case that was later cited as a precedent for the trial by military commission of any unlawful combatant against the United States.
The trial for the eight defendants ended on 1 August 1942. Two days later, all were found guilty and sentenced to death. Roosevelt commuted Burger's sentence to life in prison and Dasch's to 30 years because they had surrendered themselves and provided information about the others. The others were executed on 8 August 1942 in the electric chair on the third floor of the District of Columbia jail and buried in a potter's field in the Blue Plains neighborhood in the Anacostia area of Washington.
Aftermath
The failure of Operation Pastorius caused Hitler to rebuke Admiral Canaris and no sabotage attempt was ever made again in the United States. During the remaining years of the war, the Germans only once more dispatched agents to the United States by submarine. In November 1944, as part of Operation Elster, the German submarine U-1230 left two SS-Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main Office) spies on the coast of Maine to gather intelligence concerning American manufacturing and technical progress. After a month of high living in New York City, but no espionage gathering, one of the men turned himself in to the FBI, which captured both agents soon afterward.[28] Both were convicted and sentenced to death, with their executions stayed throughout the duration of the war, after which their punishment was commuted by President Truman into life sentences in prison.[29]
Sixteen people, including Herbert Haupt's mother and father, were arrested for aiding the saboteurs. The last person to be arrested was Lutheran Pastor Carl Krepper, a member of the German-American Bund and the German-American Business League, which supported boycotting Jewish businesses. Krepper had helped establish safehouses for the saboteurs. In March 1945, he was found guilty of trading with the enemy and conspiracy to commit sabotage and sentenced to 12 years in prison. Krepper was paroled in 1951, and died in 1972.[31]
For his part in the affair, John Cullen was awarded the coxswain insignia, featured on the front page of the New York Times, and received the Legion of Merit medal. His wedding in 1944 made the newspapers and attracted turnout "well beyond the intended guests".[22] Cullen died in 2011, at the age of 90.[16]
Sometime during the 1960s or 1970s, the National Socialist White People's Party placed an unauthorized monument to the executed spies in a thicket in southwest Washington, D.C., on National Park Service land. It went largely unknown and ignored for several decades; the Park Service removed it in 2010.[17]
The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was an intelligence agency of the United States during World War II. The OSS was formed as an agency of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) to coordinate espionage activities behind enemy lines for all branches of the United States Armed Forces. Other OSS functions included the use of propaganda, subversion, and post-war planning.
Francis Beverley Biddle was an American lawyer and judge who was the United States Attorney General during World War II. He also served as the primary American judge during Nuremberg trials following World War II and a United States circuit judge of the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
William Curtis Colepaugh was an American who, following his 1943 discharge from the U.S. Naval Reserve, defected to Nazi Germany in 1944. While a crewman on a repatriation ship that stopped off in Lisbon, Colepaugh defected at the German consulate. Colepaugh had attended Admiral Farragut Academy in Pine Beach, New Jersey.
Ex parte Quirin, 317 U.S. 1 (1942), was a case of the United States Supreme Court that during World War II upheld the jurisdiction of a United States military tribunal over the trial of eight German saboteurs, in the United States. Quirin has been cited as a precedent for the trial by military commission of unlawful combatants.
Generalmajor Erwin Heinrich René Lahousen, Edler von Vivremont was a high-ranking Abwehr official during the Second World War, as well as a member of the German Resistance and a key player in attempts to assassinate Adolf Hitler on 13 March 1943 and 20 July 1944.
British Security Co-ordination (BSC) was a covert organisation set up in New York City by the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) in May 1940 upon the authorisation of the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill.
Cramer v. United States, 325 U.S. 1 (1945), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States reviewed the conviction of Anthony Cramer, a German-born naturalized citizen, for treason.
George John Dasch was a German agent who landed on American soil during World War II. He helped to destroy Nazi Germany's espionage program in the United States by defecting to the American cause, but was tried and convicted of espionage.
The American Theater was a theater of operations during World War II including all continental American territory, and extending 200 miles (320 km) into the ocean.
The Free Society of Teutonia was one of the earliest Nazi organizations in the United States. It was officially a German American organization, but also publicly expressed a strong support for the Nazi movement in Germany and Nazi ideology in general.
Herbert Hans Haupt was an American spy and saboteur for Nazi Germany during World War II under Operation Pastorius. Haupt would become the only American to be executed by the United States for collaborating with the Axis powers.
The Duquesne Spy Ring is the largest espionage case in the United States history that ended in convictions. A total of 33 members of a Nazi German espionage network, headed by Frederick "Fritz" Duquesne, were convicted after a lengthy investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Of those indicted, 19 pleaded guilty. The remaining 14 were brought to jury trial in Federal District Court, Brooklyn, New York, on September 3, 1941; all were found guilty on December 13, 1941. On January 2, 1942, the group members were sentenced to serve a total of over 300 years in prison.
Operation Elster was a German espionage mission intended to gather intelligence on U.S. military and technology facilities during World War II. The mission commenced in September 1944 with two Nazi agents sailing from Kiel, Germany on the U-1230 and coming ashore in Maine on November 29, 1944. The agents were William Colepaugh, an American-born defector to Germany, and Erich Gimpel, an experienced German intelligence operative. They spent nearly a month living in New York City, expending large amounts of cash on entertainment, but accomplishing none of their mission goals.
Operation Pelikan, also known as Projekt 14, was a German plan for crippling the Panama Canal during World War II. In mid-late 1943 the Wehrmacht had completed preparations to haul two Ju 87 Stukas with folding wings on two U-boats to an unnamed Colombian island near the coast of Panama, reassemble the planes, arm them with "special bombs", and then send them to attack the Gatun Dam. After completing the mission, the pilots would fly to a neutral country and seek internment. However, Germany called off the plan, for unknown reasons, at the last minute. Rumors among the Germans who planned the sabotage were that it had been called off due to betrayal.
Lauson Harvey Stone, son of US Chief Justice Harlan Stone, was an American lawyer and civic leader.
Ernest Peter Burger was a German-American who was a saboteur for Germany during World War II who defected to the United States. A naturalized citizen of the United States who returned to Germany during the Great Depression, Burger was recruited along with seven others by the Abwehr for Operation Pastorius, which sought to sabotage targets in the United States in 1942.
Richard Quirin was a German agent executed as a spy for Nazi Germany in World War II. He was one of eight agents involved in Operation Pastorius, and gave his name to the Supreme Court decision on the trial, Ex parte Quirin.
They Came to Blow Up America, also known as School for Sabotage and School for Saboteurs, is a 1943 American war spy film directed by Edward Ludwig and starring George Sanders and Anna Sten. It is based on the World War II Operation Pastorius.
Edward John Kerling was a spy and saboteur for Nazi Germany and the leader of Operation Pastorius during World War II.
Carl Emil Ludwig Krepper was a German-American Lutheran pastor and Nazi collaborator who assisted the Nazi saboteurs in Operation Pastorius during World War II.
↑ John Craig (2 February 2004). Peculiar Liaisons in War, Espionage, and Terrorism of the Twentieth Century. Algora Publishing. p.170. ISBN0-8758-6331-0.
Samaha, Joel, et al. (eds.), Transcript of Proceedings before the Military Commission to Try Persons Charged with Offenses against the Law of War and the Articles of War, Washington D.C., 8 to 31 July 1942, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2004.
Abella, Alex & Gordon, Scott, Shadow Enemies: Hitler's Secret Terrorist Plot Against the United States, Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2002. ISBN1-58574-722-X
Further information
The Facts Don't MatterArchived 21 April 2009 at the Wayback Machine An hour-long This American Life radio episode (original air date 3/12/2004) about the events leading up to Ex parte Quirin
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
