Saboteurs

by Michael Dobbs

  AMONG THE people absent from the parade was a small team of experts assembled by the FBI to examine the sabotage materials retrieved by the Coast Guard from Amagansett Beach. That afternoon, they laid out the contents of the wooden crates and seabag on the floor of the basement shooting range of the Federal Court House in downtown Manhattan, and began tagging every single explosive device and item of clothing. Cursing the Coast Guard for ripping open the boxes so unmethodically, they drew up their own meticulous inventory: 15

  Two small bags marked “C. Heinrich Anton Dusburg Reibanzünder” 6.1939, containing ten fuse lighters, pull wire.

  One small paper bag containing five fuse lighters.

  Twenty-five electric blasting caps, .30 caliber.

  Fifty electric match heads contained in small brass tabular adapters.

  Fifteen wooden box containers, approximately 2 × 3 inches, apparently containing five detonators each with threaded ends.

  And so on down the list of seventy-three different items, ending with “coil of detonating fuse approximately 82′ in length.” Assistant FBI Director Eugene J. Connelley, assigned by Hoover to head the investigation, described the haul as the “most impressive” array of sabotage equipment he had ever seen.16 Whoever put it together must have had access to some extraordinary resources.

  The FBI scientists were led by Donald Parsons, an eight-year Bureau veteran and one of the top explosives experts in the country. As he picked up each item, he marveled at its sophisticated construction. He conducted a series of tests on the explosive devices, checking the fuses against a stop-watch and firing bullets into the yellow blocks of TNT to test their explosive velocity. It did not take him long to conclude that there was enough material in the boxes to do millions of dollars’ worth of damage to the American war industry.

  While Parsons and his colleagues were analyzing the bomb-making equipment, other FBI agents were preparing for a night on Amagansett Beach to see if anyone returned to the empty arms cache. G-men took over the Coast Guard observation tower on the beach and accompanied the newly armed sand pounders on their patrols. Shifts of fifteen agents at a time were assigned to foxholes on the beach. Vacation cottages were commandeered as FBI posts, and agents were equipped with telephones and walkie-talkies.

  Despite the evidence of a large-scale sabotage operation, Hoover and Connelley were skeptical of some aspects of the story told by Cullen and other coastguardsmen. The talk about a German submarine stranded on the sandbar seemed too fantastic to be true, an example of the “garbled stories” coming out of the Coast Guard and the navy.17 Hoover and Connelley also found it difficult to accept the claim that Cullen had run into people on the beach burying explosives and had been allowed to tell the tale. They speculated that he might have been accepting money from whiskey runners, “and it was only when he realized that explosives were being cached that he decided to report the matter.”18

  Suspicious of Cullen, Hoover’s men decided to isolate him from his comrades. They took him to the home of an FBI agent in East Hampton, where they questioned him for “hours and hours,” searching for inconsistencies in his version of events.19 It soon became obvious to Cullen that the G-men “figured that I had to be in league” with the men on the beach. But he stuck to his story.

  NIRSCHEL AND FRANKEN were angry about being sidelined by the FBI. On their way back to Long Island, the two Coast Guard intelligence officers decided to do a little sleuthing of their own, beginning with the question of who owned the brown vest they had failed to turn over to the Feds.

  The vest bore the dry-cleaning mark 1167-X11.20 Knowing that most dry cleaners had their own distinctive system for identifying clothes, the two lieutenants decided to consult a Nassau County policeman recognized as “the outstanding authority in the country” for deciphering laundry marks. Without revealing the circumstances of the find, or why they needed the information, they persuaded him to provide a list of laundries in the New York area that used such symbols.

  The officers also made a careful examination of the bills given to Cullen as a bribe. They noted that the bills had been issued by Federal Reserve Banks in San Francisco, Chicago, Cleveland, and New Jersey, “indicating the possibility that the pay-off men had come from California and had either cashed large bills or checks en route.” This suggested “a California connection” to the plot.21

  In the meantime, other Coast Guard intelligence officers were fanning out around Amagansett. The FBI insisted that they keep away from the beach, but this did not prevent them from trying to make themselves useful by going undercover in “strategically important jobs.”22 One German-speaking agent got himself hired as a waiter in a restaurant known to be frequented by Bund sympathizers; a second found a position at a wholesale fish business; a third went to work for a gas station at Montauk Point.

  They quickly began to tire of their assignments. As the Eastern Sea Frontier war diary noted, “FBI agents were in control of the man hunt and the [Coast Guard] intelligence officers were shunted off without being given any information as to developments.” The supposedly glamorous undercover life turned out to consist mainly of pumping gas and waiting on tables.

  AFTER THEIR shopping expedition to Macy’s, Dasch and Burger went back to the Governor Clinton for a bath and a nap followed by dinner. The hotel boasted “two delightful restaurants and a coffee shop”; they chose the Coral Room on the ground floor. Dasch ordered a couple of rare steaks and a bottle of wine, a meal virtually unobtainable in wartime Germany.23

  Over dinner, they talked about the harsh times back home and their assignments in America. Emboldened by the wine and fine food, Dasch mentioned the hardships experienced by some of his relatives under the Nazi regime. 24 He was thinking in particular of the father-in-law of his sister Johanna—a man he had visited in Germany—who had spent nine months in a concentration camp at the age of seventy-three because of his devout Catholicism. During the time the old man was in prison, his wife had died.

  Dasch’s stories prompted the more reserved Burger to open up about his own experiences with the Gestapo. He described how he had got into trouble with Nazi Party officials over a report he had written for a Berlin political science institute on social conditions in occupied Poland; the party hacks were already suspicious of him because of his close association with the murdered S.A. chief, Ernst Röhm, and were not prepared to tolerate even mild criticism of their activities. As a result, Burger spent seventeen months in Gestapo prisons, first in Poland and then in Berlin, accused of “falsification of documents.”25

  While the Gestapo investigated his case, Burger was confined to a cell with sixty other inmates and no open windows. His assistant was also arrested. But the worst part, he told Dasch, was the harassment of his wife, whom Burger had recently married and who was pregnant with their first child. The Gestapo urged Bettina to file for a divorce, telling her that her husband had stolen money from the state and would be sentenced to eight years on a chain gang. As it turned out, the Justice Ministry eventually dropped the charges against Burger and ordered him to report to the army. But Bettina was so shaken by the Gestapo’s tactics she had a miscarriage. In return for his freedom, Burger had to sign a declaration promising never to speak of his experiences in prison.

  Although Dasch knew about Burger’s prison record, he had never heard the full story, nor understood the depth of his hatred for Himmler and the Gestapo. They both sensed they were feeling each other out, dancing around a previously taboo subject.

  “Boy,” Dasch said finally. He habitually called anyone whom he perceived as junior to him “Boy,” even at the risk of causing offense. “Boy, I have a lot to talk to you about. There’s something I need to tell you, but I need to put you through some tests first.”

  “I know what you are going to tell me.”

  “If you know what I want to tell you, then you will have to kill me.”26

  Burger smiled. “I am quite sure that our intentions are very similar,” he said.

&
nbsp; By this time, the restaurant was getting crowded, and the diners at the next table could hear their conversation. They decided to leave. Dasch suggested a stroll through Manhattan to see the sights. They walked north in the direction of Times Square and Radio City.

  As they joined the crowds of New Yorkers, wandering away from the tail end of the big parade along Fifth Avenue, the two men did not resume their unfinished conversation from the restaurant. Instead, Dasch began telling Burger about his political beliefs, and the “socialist ideals” inculcated in him by his mother. He was vague about what these ideals actually meant, other than a belief in the power of well-led masses to effect human progress.

  By way of illustration, Dasch suggested they look at the murals in the entrance of the seventy-story RCA building in Rockefeller Center, one of the most impressive of the skyscrapers rising from the center of Manhattan. The murals depicted “The March of Civilization,” and there was quite a history behind them. Originally, John D. Rockefeller Jr. had commissioned the Mexican artist Diego Rivera to paint the murals, but he became upset over Rivera’s inclusion of a portrait of Lenin, symbolically clasping the hands of a Red Army soldier and an American Negro. This was unacceptable to the apostle of American capitalism, and he ordered Rivera’s murals to be ripped out of the ceiling.

  In place of the communist morality tale, Rockefeller commissioned a capitalist morality tale from another Mexican artist, José Maria Sert. As they looked at the soaring ceiling, Dasch and Burger could see the figures of Lincoln and Emerson in the place previously occupied by Lenin. On one part of the ceiling, planes circled in ever-tighter loops, causing spectators below to feel almost giddy. Elsewhere, oppressed slaves were rising up against their masters and well-muscled workers were building a futuristic city in the sky. The overall effect was a paean to the productive capabilities and industrial might of a free society.

  The paintings, Dasch informed Burger gravely, illustrated “the history of mankind from the early days of slavery to the present.”27 The two of them were destined to be part of the never-ending struggle for a better world.

  They did not get back to their hotel until nearly midnight. It had been an extraordinarily full day, beginning nearly twenty-four hours earlier on a deserted beach, and they were both exhausted. As they headed up to their rooms, Dasch said he would explain his ideas more fully in the morning.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  HIGH STAKES (JUNE 14–17)

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Sunday, Dasch invited Burger to his room for breakfast. After they finished eating, he pushed the breakfast cart out into the hall, locked the door, tossed the key into the bathtub, and closed the bathroom door as well. Then he walked over to an open window, fourteen stories above the Manhattan street, and announced that if the two of them were unable to come to an understanding, “either I go out the window or you go out the window.”1

  “I want the truth, nothing else, regardless of what it is. If we can’t agree, we will have to fight it out.”

  Burger, accustomed by now to Dasch’s melodramatics, looked at him with the same knowing smile as the evening before. “There is no need for either of us to go out the window because we both feel very much the same way.”2

  They still had to tell each other their life stories, Dasch insisted. Only then would they find out whether they had similar opinions about the mission on which they had been sent. Ever loquacious, he launched into his own biography, beginning with his experiences as a fifteen-year-old guard at a German prisoner of war camp in northern France during World War I. In the camp, he told Burger, he became friendly with a Corporal Fensch, a man more than twice his age who, prior to the war, had been a philosophy student at the University of Munich. Fensch converted the impressionable young Dasch to communism.

  After arriving in the United States in 1922, Dasch went on, he tried his hand at various jobs and became actively involved in union politics. He soon became disillusioned with the American Communists he met, despite sharing many of their ideals. He investigated various political ideologies, finally concluding that the ideology of Hitler’s National Socialist Party most closely matched his own. When World War II broke out, he thought it would be “yellow” to remain behind in America, and decided to return to Germany “to find out what it was all about.” 3

  It did not take him long to realize he had made a big mistake. Disenchantment began to set in on the long boat trip from San Francisco to Japan and Russia, on the first leg of his journey back to Germany. There were many enthusiastic Nazi Party members on the boat, among them Werner Thiel, now a member of the second group of saboteurs that would be landing in Florida. At first, the Nazis were relatively subdued. But after the boat left Honolulu en route to Japan, they grew bolder and started “singing German songs and boasting of the way they were going to fight the English.” Dasch, whose English was better than his German, found the regimented atmosphere on board the Tatuta Maru “distasteful” and refrained from joining the other passengers in their enthusiastic Heil Hitlers. A self-appointed gauleiter for the rest of the group denounced him as a spy and threatened to report him to the authorities on their return to Germany.

  Arriving in Berlin in May 1941—eighteen months into the war—he was dismayed by living conditions in Germany, which were much worse than he had expected. Even though the German army had won some spectacular military victories, Berliners seemed “suspicious and afraid” of each other. 4 Food shortages were already quite noticeable and graft and terror were rampant. Dasch told Burger about an accountant friend who worked in a bank and was reprimanded when he raised questions about the bank accounts of high Nazi Party officials.

  He went on to describe how he had got a job monitoring American propaganda broadcasts for the German Foreign Office. He was amazed to find out how many people listened to these broadcasts, despite the risk of imprisonment if they were caught. It was an important lesson in the power of propaganda. At the same time, he felt that American propaganda to Germany could be much more effective. Instead of trying to win over ordinary Germans disillusioned with the hardships of life under Hitler, American broadcasters insulted them by lumping all Germans together as “Nazis.” Dasch’s dream, he told Burger, was to “lick the Nazis with their own weapons” by persuading the Americans to employ more sophisticated propaganda techniques.

  The mention of propaganda techniques struck an immediate chord with Burger, who had been working for the Nazi Party’s propaganda bureau when he was arrested by the Gestapo. He readily agreed that the German people were thirsting for the “right type” of foreign propaganda that would create conditions for the downfall of the Nazi regime.

  Dasch told Burger about observing Walter Kappe recruit German-American returnees for “special missions” to the United States. At first, Kappe had kept him in the dark about the nature of the work in America, but eventually let him in on the secret. Dasch had then helped Kappe recruit the other saboteurs, including Burger. In fact, he had been planning to sabotage the sabotage mission all along.

  He reminded Burger of their first meeting, at Quenz Lake back in April, when Burger cursed Himmler and the other “dirty bastards who beat me up.” Sensing that the conversation was headed in a dangerous direction, Dasch had cut Burger short. He now encouraged him to finish the story.

  There was a silence as Burger gathered his thoughts. Outside in the street, New Yorkers were going to Sunday morning church services, travelers were streaming to and from Pennsylvania Station, news vendors were shouting the latest headlines from Russia and the Pacific. Unlike Dasch, Burger spoke in slow, halting sentences. But once he began talking, his hatred of the Nazis and the Gestapo came tumbling out.5

  When World War I ended with Germany’s humiliating defeat, Burger had been even younger than Dasch—just twelve years old—and even more disoriented politically. By the age of fifteen, he had been swept up in the politics of the extreme right, rushing off to fight the Poles in Upper Silesia. He joined the National Socialist Party in February 1923,
nine months before the ignominious Munich beer hall putsch that ended with Hitler’s arrest and imprisonment. While he was an admirer of Hitler, he owed his true allegiance to Ernst Röhm, a former army officer and organizer of the paramilitary groups that paved the way for the Führer’s eventual seizure of power.

  After moving to the United States in 1927, Burger had let his Nazi Party membership lapse; he had to apply for readmission when he returned to Germany in 1933. Back in Munich, he was assigned to the office of Röhm’s chief of staff, a job that offered a ringside seat to the Nazi fratricide that broke out the following year. Many Röhm supporters were murdered in the Night of the Long Knives, but Burger had an incredible piece of luck. A few days earlier, he was transferred to the staff of one of the few S.A. men who still had Hitler’s confidence. Over the next few years, he had kept his head down as old comrades stood to attention at Nazi Party meetings, shouted “Long live Röhm,” and then shot themselves in protest. Like many former storm troopers, Burger had held on to a ceremonial dagger presented to him by Röhm with a few words of dedication, despite orders to hand the dagger back or scratch Röhm’s name off the inscription.

  Burger told Dasch he had been planning his escape from Germany for a long time. He had thought about organizing former storm troopers scattered around the world into a volunteer corps to fight the Nazis. His hatred of the S.S. had been strengthened by his encounters in prison with Jews, Catholic priests, and other opponents of the Nazi regime. He desperately wanted to get out of Germany, but it was difficult to leave in a way that would not expose his wife to retribution. When he found out that he could travel to America as part of a group of Nazi saboteurs, he leapt at the chance.

  “I never intended to carry out the orders,” he said.