Saboteurs

by Michael Dobbs

  Berg dropped into the store to check on Haupt on the pretext of purchasing a tie clasp. Although he could not see Haupt, he could hear a store clerk conversing with someone in a back room. An hour passed, then two hours. More agents arrived to reinforce Lynch and his men, but nobody resembling Haupt came out of the store. The subject had vanished.

  Exactly how Haupt performed this disappearing act only became clear much later. In the few seconds that Lynch left the front of the shirt shop unobserved to confer with Berg, Haupt walked out the front door and crossed Lake Street to the Chicago Theater. As this was happening, Meech left his post on the El platform to take up a new one under the theater’s light-studded marquee. During the thirty seconds it took Meech to walk down from the El platform and reach the front of the movie palace, Haupt must have slipped into the theater.

  Haupt met Neubauer inside the theater’s vast lobby, with its marble pillars, red-carpeted stairways, Louis XIV–style tapestries and drapes, and enormous chandeliers suspended from the five-story-high ceiling. When the theater was opened in 1921, with seats for five thousand people and a stage big enough for an opera, Billboard magazine proclaimed it “perhaps the most magnificent theater in the world,” a piece of Versailles transported to Chicago.19 The front of the house was decorated by a stained-glass window and dozens of laughing joker faces that seemed to mock the hapless FBI agents frantically looking for their quarry.

  After the show—a Bob Hope movie featuring a gang of evil Nazi spies—the two saboteurs sat down on the faux Louis XIV furniture in the lobby. Neubauer was still a bundle of nerves.20 That morning, he told Haupt, he had jumped out of bed in a cold sweat when someone knocked at the door of his hotel room unexpectedly. It turned out to be an electrician checking a broken light fixture, but Neubauer found it difficult to stop his hands from shaking violently. In addition to his fear of the FBI, he was afraid of running into someone he knew, as he had worked in the Chicago hotel industry before the war. He had decided to move to a hotel with a predominantly Negro staff, who, he reasoned, would be less likely to recognize him.

  Haupt tried to boost Neubauer’s morale by describing how he had sauntered into the Chicago office of the FBI to clear up his draft status. Nothing had happened to him, and he had walked right out again. To Neubauer, this sounded foolhardy. Nevertheless, he agreed to meet with Haupt again on Sunday night at the Uptown Theater.

  After leaving Neubauer, Haupt phoned Gerda Stuckmann. She had completed her blood work for the marriage license, and wanted to know if he had also taken the test. He lied and said yes. They arranged a date for Saturday.

  FBI agents stationed outside the Haupt apartment on North Fremont Street observed the “subject returning to his residence” at 5:30 p.m. Surveillance of the Oxford Shirt Shop was discontinued. Half an hour later, Herbie drove to the Warner Motor Sales Agency with his father to pick up his new car. At 6:30 p.m., the agents observed the younger Haupt leave the dealership in “a black 1941 Pontiac five passenger coupe having red wheels, a radio aerial on the left front side and red sticker on the right side of the windshield.” They spent the rest of the evening chasing him around various Chicago nightspots. It was not until 1 a.m. that he finally returned home.

  BY WEDNESDAY evening, Kerling was cooperating with his interrogators, having concluded there was no point in holding out any longer. He agreed to accompany FBI agents to Florida to locate the spot where he had buried the explosives when he first came ashore. Hoover called Connelley in Chicago, and ordered him to fly to Jacksonville to oversee the recovery of the arms cache. This was a “mighty important” operation and Hoover worried that someone else might mess it up.21

  Kerling arrived in Jacksonville on Thursday morning on the overnight train from New York in the company of his FBI escorts. Connelley flew in by plane. In order not to attract any attention, they set off for the beach in a lone automobile. Four miles south of Ponte Vedra, Kerling told the driver to stop. He walked up and down the beach, carefully examining each clump of trees, without recognizing any of them. After about an hour, he had the FBI men drive him up and down Highway 140, until he spotted a fence next to an abandoned building.

  He led the FBI agents along the fence to the tip of the sand dunes, where there was a grove of palm trees. “This is the place,” he told them. By this time, he was exhausted, and could hardly stand. He had not slept for the past two nights, was sick with dysentery, and in a state of shock.22 He was dressed in an open-neck shirt and dark pants; his guards had removed the laces from his shoes to prevent any suicide attempt. As the agents began digging into the sandy soil, the cocksure Nazi Party member who once boasted that the American soldier was no match for the German slumped to the ground, clutching his head between his knees.

  There were four boxes buried in the sand. Connelley had arranged for the FBI’s top explosives expert, Donald Parsons, to carefully examine each box. The contents were virtually identical to the sabotage materials recovered twelve days earlier at Amagansett.

  AS KERLING was scouring Ponte Vedra Beach for the buried boxes, Dasch was completing his marathon, 254-page typewritten statement. “My mind is all upside down,” he told his interrogators, as he signed each page separately, making the occasional correction.23

  The time had come to rid Dasch of the notion that he would play a starring role in the arrest of the other saboteurs. As gently as possible, Traynor explained that his plan assumed that the U.S. government was unaware of the landing on Amagansett Beach. In fact, the FBI had been making extensive inquiries of its own, long before Dasch came to the Washington office, beginning with the questioning of the young coastguardsman, John Cullen. If the Coast Guard knew about the events on the beach, then other government agencies also knew. There was a danger that the newspapers would get hold of the story, causing members of the second group “either to go into hiding or immediately begin their wave of sabotage.” Five saboteurs had already been arrested. Since Dasch was worried about the fate of his relatives back in Germany if it became known that he had betrayed Operation Pastorius, it seemed to make sense to arrest him as well.

  By inventing a clever cover story, Traynor told Dasch, the FBI could make it appear that he had been betrayed by either Quirin or Heinck. In order to make the story convincing, the FBI could not merely pretend to arrest Dasch. It would have to treat him exactly the same as the other arrested saboteurs. While the Bureau would examine ways to allow Dasch to contribute to the propaganda war against Nazi Germany, Traynor would make no promises.

  This was not at all what Dasch had had in mind when he walked into Traynor’s office six days before. “If I am not treated fairly and squarely,” he told Traynor, “I will lose all faith in human nature. I might as well be dead. And if I have to die, I might just take another life to avenge myself.”24 He then began to cry.

  At 12:15 p.m., Traynor informed Dasch he was under arrest, and would be sent to New York to join the other saboteurs. Agents went through his pockets, and confiscated all his personal property, including his gold wristwatch, Schaeffer pen, gold tie clasp, and brown fedora hat. They catalogued his stash of money, which came to a total of $82,710.17, and had him sign a receipt. Before escorting him to the railroad station, they took him to see Mickey Ladd, the assistant FBI director in charge of internal security. Ever since he arrived, Dasch had been pestering Traynor to allow him to meet with Hoover, but had to settle instead for a ten-minute meeting with Ladd.

  “Have you read my stuff?” was Dasch’s first question on entering Ladd’s office.25

  “I have only managed to read part of it so far.”

  “Have you read the part about propaganda?”

  “Not yet.”

  Dasch was crushed.

  He was taken by train from Washington to Jersey City, and then by car ferry to Manhattan, in order to avoid running into crowds of travelers at Pennsylvania Station. After treating him to a final dinner at a restaurant around the corner from FBI headquarters, his escorts took him to a sixthfloor
conference room where they told him to change into his prison clothes. He was then photographed with a prisoner identification tag around his neck and examined by the same doctor who had asked Kerling and Thiel if they had any “complaints” two nights before.

  From this point onward, there was no longer any pretense that Dasch was a free man. FBI agents chronicled his every move. They noted in a logbook that the prisoner “urinated at exactly 11:40 p.m.,” while en route to detention cell number three on the thirtieth floor of the federal courthouse, next to the cells of Burger, Quirin, Heinck, Kerling, and Thiel. “Appears a little depressed.”26

  THURSDAY WAS the day that Herbie Haupt was meant to start work at his old job at the Simpson Optical Company. But that morning he complained to his mother of pains in his hip and heart and said he could not report to work.27 He had something more important than work on his mind. Having registered for the draft the previous Monday, he needed to find a way to avoid being drafted.

  He knew just the person to help him: an old Bund acquaintance named William Wernecke. The Wernecke family owned a horse farm outside the city where Herbie liked to take his girlfriends riding. Wernecke had amassed a large collection of rifles, shotguns, dueling pistols, and several thousand rounds of ammunition. Before Haupt left for Mexico, he and Wernecke used to practice their marksmanship at the farm dressed in the Bund uniform of black trousers, brown shirts, and black ties. Wernecke’s ambition was to be a storm trooper following a Nazi victory in the United States, but his views were so extreme that he was expelled from the Bund for factionalism.

  A draft dodger himself, Wernecke was more than willing to help other Nazi sympathizers escape compulsory military service, which had been introduced in the United States in November 1940, more than a year before Pearl Harbor. His techniques included feigning deafness, rheumatism, and heart trouble, and joining an obscure religion, the “Allied Christian Management Army,” whose guiding tenet was a refusal to go to war for reasons of conscience.

  The alliance between Haupt and Wernecke was largely one of convenience. Wernecke considered Herbie a “gigolo” and a “showoff,” and was jealous of his success in picking up girls.28 For his part, the fun-loving Haupt had little interest in the kind of political fanaticism espoused by Wernecke. His own attraction to Nazism was more aesthetic than political: he looked good in a Bund uniform. Since he did not fully trust Wernecke, Haupt avoided any mention of his trip to Germany. But he did say that he had been in Mexico City, and that he had put in a good word for his friend with the German consulate. This pleased Wernecke, who was afraid that his services to the Nazi cause had gone unnoticed in the Fatherland.

  Trailed by an FBI car, the two men went first to the office of Wernecke’s doctor, a Nazi sympathizer named Fred Otten. “We’ll fix him up,” Otten declared cheerfully, after Wernecke introduced his “sick” friend. The doctor immediately diagnosed high blood pressure, “probably due to nervousness,” and agreed that Haupt should get a cardiograph. He gave him some pills to help him sleep and then wrote out a prescription, advising against “any undue physical exertion.”29

  That evening, Wernecke invited Haupt for a drive in the country. Wernecke’s car was a black Hudson sedan virtually identical to the model used by the FBI. As they drove along a deserted country road, they noticed another car just like theirs a few hundred yards behind. When they stopped, the other car also stopped. They turned around and drove back alongside the other Hudson. Two men in dark suits were sitting in the front. Soon afterward, the second car turned off the road. Haupt and Wernecke breathed a sigh of relief. They decided they were mistaken. Nobody was following them.

  The following day, Friday, Haupt resumed his draft-dodging quest. The doctor’s prescription was only a temporary solution. He needed something more definitive to get a deferment. Wernecke suggested nitroglycerin pills, three of which would cause the heart to beat rapidly for a few minutes, long enough to mislead a cardiograph. Herbie ordered six pills from a pharmacy on the way to Grant Hospital, and was taken aback to discover that they were only sold in batches of a hundred. The good news was that a hundred pills only cost thirty-nine cents. A worthwhile investment, he decided.

  By themselves, the pills were sometimes insufficient to significantly affect the results of the cardiograph, Wernecke explained. As Haupt was undergoing his examination, Wernecke stood behind the door, making frantic hand motions to signal his friend to hold his breath and beat his chest. Herbie was unable to beat his chest without alerting the nurse administering the cardiograph, but he did succeed in holding his breath. He paid his five-dollar fee and made arrangements to pick up the results the following day.

  That left the religion option. Wernecke explained that founding one’s own religion was easy: with three or four like-minded people, you could even appoint your own ministers. Alternatively, Haupt could join the Allied Christian Management Army.30 While Herbie was in the bank changing some money, Wernecke went across the street to his church. He returned a short while later to say the “head man” was willing to help. His reasoning was simple. Since Roosevelt was “against God,” it was the church’s duty to help anyone who wanted to stay out of Roosevelt’s army. For a donation of $100, it would even be possible to ordain Haupt as a Bible student dating back to 1941. While not as cheap as nitroglycerin tablets, Wernecke’s religion was certainly worth considering.

  BY SATURDAY morning, Hoover and Connelley decided that Haupt had been enjoying himself in Chicago for long enough. It was time to reel him in. They would deal with Neubauer later.

  FBI agents had established a command post at 2231 North Fremont Street in a rented room on the first floor, with a view of the Haupt apartment directly opposite. They were waiting for Haupt as he came out of the house at 9:08 and climbed into his Pontiac sports coupe. They allowed him to drive one block south, in the direction of the Loop, and then one block west on Webster Avenue. As his car passed under the elevated station, they pulled him over.31

  At first, Haupt denied all knowledge of Operation Pastorius, although he admitted knowing Hermann Neubauer. He later conceded that he had arrived in America by U-boat, and had been part of a sabotage plot, but claimed he was planning to turn his seven comrades in to the FBI. “What took you so long?” the agents wanted to know. Haupt said he feared one of the other saboteurs might try to kill him if he betrayed the plot, so he decided to wait until they were all “in one place” where they could be easily rounded up by the FBI. Now that he was under arrest, it seemed obvious to Haupt what had happened.

  “Peter Burger beat me to it,” he said bitterly. “I knew all the time he would turn us in.”32

  Burger, Haupt went on, had never hidden his hatred of the Gestapo for mistreating his wife and causing her to lose her baby. “He hates the Gestapo more than anything else on earth. He told me about the horrors he suffered in a concentration camp and the horrors he saw other people suffer.”

  Haupt told the FBI agents about his meeting with Neubauer at the Chicago Theater, and said he believed Neubauer was registered at the Stevens Hotel, “under the name of Smith.”33 G-men promptly raided the luxury hotel overlooking Grant Park and Lake Michigan, but there was no sign of the eighth saboteur. Haupt then recalled that Neubauer had said something about moving to either the Sheridan Plaza or Edgewater Beach on the North Side. Dispatched to these hotels, agents immediately focused on “an individual using the name H. Nicholas” who had checked in to the Sheridan Plaza the day before.34 A search of his room turned up numerous items purchased in Jacksonville, Florida, and a Jacksonville–Chicago rail ticket.

  Neubauer was arrested as he returned to his hotel room at 6:45 p.m. after watching yet another movie. He struck his captors as exceptionally nervous. He had changed hotels twice in three days, and was planning to move again on Saturday. The previous evening, he had paid another visit to Harry and Emma Jaques, who had mentioned hearing a radio report of the landing of German agents in the United States.35 Neubauer did his best to brush the report
aside, saying he had read something similar in the newspapers. But he was seriously rattled.

  An FBI doctor noted that Neubauer’s pulse was “very rapid, being approximately 125 beats,” and that he complained of continual headaches, caused by a head wound received on the eastern front.36 By the following morning, he had calmed down somewhat, although his nerves remained “twitchy.”

  After eleven days of freedom, it was a relief to be in captivity.

  PART THREE

  CAPTIVITY (JUNE 27–AUGUST 9, 1942)

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “AS GUILTY AS CAN BE” (JUNE 27–JULY 4)

  GEORGE JOHN DASCH posed a difficult dilemma for Hoover’s G-MEN. On the one hand, there was no denying that he had performed a valuable service for the United States by betraying an ambitious, and potentially deadly, Nazi sabotage operation. On the other hand, his megalomaniac personality, tendency to ramble, and refusal to do what was expected of him were all likely to make him a poor witness in court. In this particular production, there could be only one starring role. The more credit Dasch received for exposing Operation Pastorius, the less would redound to J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI.

  After being left to ponder his predicament in a solitary detention cell for some thirty-six hours on the thirtieth floor of the federal courthouse in Manhattan, Dasch was permitted to change out of his prison clothes into a suit. He was then taken to meet the head of the FBI’s New York office, Thomas Donegan. With Donegan was Dasch’s original interrogator, Duane Traynor. Together they played “good cop, bad cop”: Traynor the solicitous lawyer doing his best to look after the interests of his client, Donegan the tough policeman warning Dasch of the consequences of noncooperation.

  “I am very upset. I didn’t expect to be left all this time alone in a cell. It seems you don’t believe me,” Dasch began. 1 He felt that he had already played his part by allowing himself to be led in prison clothes past the cells of the other saboteurs, in order to dispel any suspicion that he was the traitor. Looking at Traynor, he said he hoped he would now be taken “out of here.”