Saboteurs

by Michael Dobbs

  The Engemann grocery store was located in the heart of Yorkville, at 1653 Second Avenue, beneath a modest awning advertising “Everything for the Table.” Marie had still not arrived when Leiner pulled up in a taxi, so he was able to spend a few moments conspiring with Hedy about the logistical arrangements for the evening, which were beginning to resemble a French farce, with multiple entries and exits of wives and lovers from adjoining bedrooms. They agreed that Hedy would pretend that she knew nothing about Eddie’s return.

  When Marie finally showed up, Leiner joked that he had arranged a “blind date” for her.2 “But I don’t want to go on a blind date,” Marie complained. Leiner then took her aside and told her the “startling news” that her husband had returned from Germany and wanted to see her that very evening. She was so shocked she started to cry. She had so many questions: How had he come to the United States? Where was he living? What did he intend to do here? When was he going back? Leiner replied that Eddie would explain everything.

  Marie could not believe that her husband was really back in New York. “You’re crazy,” she told Leiner.3 She talked to Hedy, who said she could not believe it either, even though she had seen Eddie twice the previous day. But Leiner insisted it was true, and promised to take them both to see Eddie immediately. Marie asked Hedy to come along. At first she was reluctant, but eventually she agreed—after changing into a more flattering dress.

  Shortly after 10:30, they all climbed into a taxi, and headed down toward Forty-eighth Street, where they entered the Brook Restaurant. They found a private booth and ordered drinks. There was no sign of Eddie, but Leiner kept on saying he was not far away, and would certainly show up in the next few minutes.

  They waited for half an hour, an hour, ninety minutes. Leiner was unable to explain what had happened. At midnight, a very irritated and very confused Marie announced she was going home.

  TUESDAY WAS Herbie Haupt’s fifth day in Chicago. He had resumed what his mother called his usual “lively routine”: visiting friends, hanging out at bars and restaurants, and playing cards and dice.4 He spent the morning shopping for a snap-brim straw hat, and then took in a matinee performance of a new Marlene Dietrich movie, The Lady Is Willing, at the local cinema.

  The future of the sabotage mission was unclear—it made him nervous just thinking about it—but he had made two important decisions about his own future. He wanted to make things up with his old girlfriend, Gerda Stuckmann, and he wanted to buy a new car.

  Before leaving for Mexico, he had owned a 1941 Plymouth that was being used by his father for construction work and was beginning to look “quite shabby.”5 In the early evening, he went with his father to a local dealership to inspect late-model used cars.

  A 1941 black six-cylinder Pontiac sports coupe caught his eye, with a sticker price of $1,045. Herbie agreed to put up $100 of the $410 down payment for the car; his father said he would withdraw the remaining $310 from his saving account. They would pay off the balance in monthly $50 installments. It would take a day or so to get the car properly registered, and to make arrangements with the finance company. Herbie asked the salesman to attach an American flag emblem to the car before delivery.6

  In the meantime, his mother had arranged a date for him with Gerda, a slim brunette with big brown eyes and a pretty face who had worked as a model and beautician. It was their first meeting since he rushed off to Mexico when she was five months pregnant. The baby had died mysteriously a few days after its birth. At least that was her story: there were also suspicions that she might have secretly given it away.7

  Gerda showed up at the Haupt apartment around eight, excited and nervous. For the next two hours, she and Herbie sat together awkwardly on the settee in the front room, as his parents sat in the kitchen, wondering what was going on next door. Occasionally, Erna Haupt brought in drinks of whiskey and ginger ale.

  Herbie did not tell Gerda about going to Germany, or his trip back on the U-boat. Instead he said he had been to Mexico and the “West Coast,” and had returned to Chicago by train. He seemed “very nervous” to her, and she was at a loss to understand the reason. 8 Around 10:30, Herbie offered to drive her back to her apartment on Albion Avenue, in a northern section of Chicago, near Loyola University. They took his old Plymouth, stopping a block from her home, on a darkened, dead-end street leading to a railway embankment. Herbie explained that he did not want to go up to her apartment: her parents might be angry with him for walking out on her. But he had something important to tell her.

  “Will you marry me?”

  Gerda was stunned. She had been married once before, at the age of twenty, to a man named Herbert Melind, who had subsequently died. She was now nearly twenty-five, more than two years older than Herbie. She had been desperate to marry him when she was pregnant with his child. Now she was not so sure. Although she liked Herbie, she was bewildered by the sudden turn of events. Apart from a single card, postmarked St. Louis, she had not heard from him at all during the year he was away.

  Not only did Herbie want to marry her, he wanted to marry her the very next day. He pulled out an engagement ring, and pressed ten dollars into her hand, so she could get the blood tests required by Illinois state law. He insisted he had changed his ways, and planned to get his old job back at the Simpson Optical Company.

  “Why the rush?” she asked. But she promised to think it over, and give him an answer by the following Saturday. In the meantime, she would get the blood work done.

  Parked inconspicuously around the corner were two black Hudson sedans belonging to the FBI with six agents inside. They watched as “a young lady” got out of the Plymouth “alone” at 12:05 a.m. and walked to “what was believed to be her apartment” at the end of the tree-lined street. They then followed “the subject” as he did a quick U-turn and drove home.

  “I’VE BEEN working like hell from daybreak until dawn,” Dasch wrote Burger midway through his interrogation in a letter intercepted by the FBI. “What I have thus far accomplished is too much to describe here. I can only tell you that everything is working out alright. Have faith and patience. You will see and hear me in the near future. Please stick to your job and keep the other boys content and please don’t lose their sights.” 9

  By the time Dasch wrote this note, Burger and the “other boys” in his group were all being questioned at FBI headquarters in New York. Dasch, by contrast, had the illusion of being a free man. Although he was accompanied everywhere by FBI agents, he still lived at the Mayflower Hotel, ate breakfast in the coffee shop, and dined at a different Washington restaurant every evening. Traynor was doing his best to keep his prize witness happy, even though he suspected that he would later have to “crucify him.”10 For his part, Dasch felt fine, apart from some “constipation,” which he attributed to the nervous tension of the past few weeks.11

  By Tuesday morning, the fourth day of Dasch’s interrogation, Traynor and the other agents had squeezed out of him most of the details directly relating to the plot. They listened intently as he described plans to send over more teams of saboteurs. One such team, scheduled to arrive in “September or October,” would probably be led by Dempsey, the pugnacious little boxer with the squashed-in nose who dropped out of sabotage school early on. But Dasch could provide few details about what these groups would do.

  He was much more expansive when asked questions about his favorite topic, American propaganda to Germany. He described how he would get “mad as a dog” listening to American radio broadcasts that “called the German people Nazis.”12 The way Dasch saw it, American broadcasters were playing into the hands of Nazi propagandists who continually accused America of seeking the destruction of the entire German nation, not just the Nazi regime.

  Occasionally, Dasch veered off into a subject that was of little interest to his interrogators, who were focused almost exclusively on the nuts and bolts of the sabotage plot. Before leaving Berlin, he had been sitting in Kappe’s office when a German intelligence officer gave a
vivid, harrowing account of the mass execution of 35,000 Jews in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev. According to the officer, the Jews were rounded up in groups of two or three hundred people, ordered to dig a huge pit in the ground, and then shot in the back of the head by S.S. officers so that their bodies tumbled into the pit. Dasch recalled that the officer “laughingly remarked that the trigger finger of the executing officers [often] became tired,” in which case they were replaced by fresh executioners.

  “I sat there on my little chair in the corner, my stomach turned. I didn’t know what to do for a moment. I thought they were the dirtiest bastards on earth.”13 After the intelligence officer left the room, Dasch said he turned to Kappe, and remarked, “For Christ sake, this is an awful war and this is an awful way to kill people.” Kappe rebuked him for being “chicken-hearted.” “What kind of a German are you? We Germans have one mission, which is to kill all the Jews.”

  The FBI agents changed the subject. They had little time for Nazi atrocity stories. In retrospect, it is evident that Dasch had just given them an accurate description of the early days of the Holocaust.

  FBI AGENTS had been following Kerling since Tuesday afternoon, when he met Leiner at Pennsylvania Station. They had obtained Leiner’s name and address from Dasch’s handkerchief, so it was a simple matter of waiting to see if he would contact anyone answering Kerling’s description. They were soon rewarded.

  That evening, the G-men followed Kerling to Lexington and Forty-fourth Street, where he entered a bar. He was soon joined by two other men. One of these men was Werner Thiel, who had been named by Dasch as a member of the Florida group of saboteurs. The other was Thiel’s closest friend in the United States, Anthony Cramer, a longtime Bund member devoted to the Nazi cause. Later the FBI found letters written from Cramer to Thiel around the time of Pearl Harbor, while Thiel was back in Germany, denouncing the “Jewish cabal” that ran America and poking fun at Americans for thinking “too little with their brains and too much with their spinal cords.” 14

  The agents watched Kerling as he chatted with Thiel and Cramer and then left the bar, at around 10 p.m., heading north on Lexington Avenue, apparently in preparation for his meeting with his wife. They allowed him to pace up and down for a few minutes, and then arrested him, bundling him into a Bureau car and driving him downtown to the federal courthouse in Foley Square.

  Back at the bar, Thiel was observed passing a money belt to Cramer which, the agents later learned, contained about $4,000. The G-men permitted Thiel and Cramer to spend another hour and a half together, following the two men as they walked down the street for coffee and pie. They arrested Thiel shortly after he said goodbye to Cramer.

  THE INTERROGATION of the two saboteurs began soon after midnight and continued all night. In Connelley’s absence, the interrogations were supervised by the acting special agent in charge of the New York office, Thomas J. Donegan, a tough Irish cop with little patience for prevarication. Donegan summoned Kerling to his office at 1:55 a.m., and sat down with him on the settee.

  “Tell us where the explosives are buried,” he demanded, pointing at a large map of Florida he had with him in his office.

  Kerling denied any knowledge of explosives.

  “Tell us about the submarine you came in.”

  Kerling said he did not come to America in a submarine. He had come overland from Mexico.

  “You dirty Nazi rat,” Donegan exploded. “I know you came in a submarine. You are a fool if you think that I am going to sit here and listen to that kind of story from you.”15

  What happened next is disputed. Kerling later claimed that Donegan reached across the settee, pulled his hair down until his head was in his lap, and punched him several times on the left side of the face. After a few minutes, a doctor came in and asked him how he was being treated. When Kerling complained that he had been struck in the face, Donegan took him outside the room, and asked in a menacing tone of voice, “Did I hit you?” Fearing another beating, Kerling replied, “No, you didn’t.” He then told the doctor that he wished to withdraw his complaint. The doctor pronounced him “fine.”

  Thiel, who was interrogated after Kerling, would later tell a similar story. The only difference was that when the doctor asked whether he had been mistreated, he said right away that he had no complaints. “I thought there was no use telling the doctor that I was mistreated.” Donegan acknowledged using “strong language” with both Kerling and Thiel, but denied any physical abuse.

  Neither saboteur got any sleep that night. Whenever it looked as if they were about to drop off, an FBI agent was in their face, asking questions and demanding answers. At first, Kerling replied with monosyllabic grunts, refusing to talk about Thiel until he knew that he was also in police custody. He also did his best to protect his wife and mistress. Slowly, however, they dragged the details out of him.

  “What were you meant to do in the United States?”

  “Let me answer those questions tomorrow.”

  “We want to get this in general, not in detail. Just a few of these things now.”

  “I gave you enough. That was the arrangement. You said you’d let me sleep for a while and talk later.”

  “We must get a little more amplification than we have now.”

  “I can’t think. What’s the use?”

  “You want water or a cup of coffee?”

  “No.”

  “Where did you go to school then?”

  “Brandenburg.”

  “How many were in the school?”

  “Nine. No, eleven.”16

  HERMANN NEUBAUER felt so lonely cooped up in his hotel room that he bought himself a bottle of rum for company, even though he did not much care for alcohol. Like Haupt, he had relatives in Chicago, including his father-in-law, a Republican precinct captain on the North Side. But he steered clear of his wife’s family, fearing that they might be under FBI observation.

  On Tuesday evening, on the spur of the moment, Neubauer decided to take a chance and visit some old friends of his wife. Although he had never met Harry and Emma Jaques, he had seen quite a bit of Emma’s sister and brother-in-law in Germany. He trusted them not to give him away. They were simple people, first-generation German-Americans who had arrived in the United States in the mid-twenties. Harry worked as a painter and decorator.

  “I guess it looks kind of funny for me, a stranger, to drop in on you when you don’t know me,” he told them, before announcing that he was the husband of Alma Wolf.17 Emma was dubious, as she had heard that Alma’s husband was in a hospital in Stuttgart, having been seriously wounded on the Russian front. To prove his identity, Neubauer displayed the scars on his leg and cheek.

  The couple sat Neubauer down in a chromium chair in the living room and offered him beer and cigarettes. They talked about various shared friends, including Eddie Kerling and his wife, Marie. While Emma was in the kitchen fixing sandwiches, Neubauer told Harry that he had arrived on a submarine on a mission for the German government. Jaques cut him off, saying he did not want to hear any more.

  He did, however, agree to look after two envelopes containing around $3,600, which he placed on the coffee table in their living room. After Neubauer finally left, around two in the morning, Harry and Emma carefully placed the money in a five-pound coffee can, hid it on a shelf in the pantry, and went to bed.

  BY THE morning of Wednesday, June 24, the FBI had six of the eight Nazi saboteurs in custody. Only two remained at large: Haupt and Neubauer. Agents were keeping a twenty-four-hour watch on Haupt, and could arrest him at any time. The only reason for waiting was the belief he would lead them to Neubauer. Connelley reported to Hoover that he had fifteen places in Chicago under observation, including the home of Neubauer’s in-laws. That afternoon, the FBI would get its best chance of grabbing Haupt and Neubauer in one swoop.

  The only sign of activity in the Haupt household that morning had been the 7:05 a.m. departure of Hans Haupt, dressed in a blue shirt and suspenders. Herbie was insid
e the house, sleeping off his marriage proposal to Gerda the night before. He emerged from the ground floor apartment at precisely 1 p.m. The surveillance team noted that he was wearing a light tan suit with a red V-for-Victory pin in the lapel, dark brown tie and matching pocket handkerchief, brown and white sports shoes, and the light brown straw hat he had purchased the day before. After “loitering” in front of his front gate for a few minutes, he entered a Checker cab, and headed toward the Loop, Chicago’s downtown district.18

  Haupt got out of the cab at the State-Lake Building, on the corner of State and Lake Streets opposite the Chicago Theater, and entered Liggett’s drugstore on the ground floor. FBI agent John Lynch supervised the surveillance operation from the lobby of the State-Lake Building, directly adjoining the drugstore. He could see “the subject” reflected in the shiny marble walls of the lobby: Haupt was sitting at the wooden lunch counter of the drugstore munching a sandwich. A second agent, James Berg, stood by the soda fountain, nonchalantly sipping a cup of coffee and stealing occasional glances at Haupt in a mirror. Agent Frank Meech stood on an elevated train platform with a commanding view of State Street. A fourth agent, Elmer Fletcher, sat in the FBI pursuit car around the corner on Lake Street.

  At 1:35 p.m., Haupt came out of the drugstore’s revolving wooden door and walked slowly down State Street, which was lined with wooden huts and construction equipment for the building of a new subway. Lynch followed closely behind, and watched Haupt enter the Oxford Shirt Shop, two doors down from the drugstore. In accordance with standard FBI procedures, Lynch then checked to see if there were any rear exits from the shirt shop. He asked Berg to relieve him in front of the store to watch for Haupt’s reappearance. After Lynch established that there was only one way out of the store, he returned to his previous post.