Saboteurs

by Michael Dobbs

  Roosevelt had heard from Biddle two weeks earlier that Dasch and Burger “were helpful in apprehending the others and in making out the proof.”3 He was unaware of the full extent of their cooperation, although Biddle had suggested that it might be useful to make Dasch “somewhat of a hero, thus encouraging other German agents to turn in their fellows, and making all agents suspect each other.” The attorney general noted that Burger did not want any publicity at all, and “prefers death to endangering his family.” By the end of the trial, Biddle was so exasperated with Dasch that he dropped the idea of turning him into a hero.

  The president mulled over what to do with the saboteurs on the overnight train back to Washington. When he reached the White House on Tuesday morning, he summoned his legal advisers for a review of the case, which lasted much of the afternoon. By this time, he had already decided to accept all the military commission’s recommendations, including use of the electric chair as the means of execution, despite his earlier preference for hanging. He had no intention of submitting the trial record to the judge advocate general’s office, as the defense lawyers were urging. But appearances had to be maintained. When the meeting with his lawyers wound up at 4:10 p.m., Roosevelt called reporters into the Oval Office and told them he was busy reviewing the “voluminous” evidence in the case. It would likely take “two or three days” to “finish my labors.” 4

  “Are you more or less, sir, putting everything else aside during that period?” a reporter wanted to know.

  “Oh my, no,” replied Roosevelt cheerfully, looking the picture of relaxation in a tieless white shirt and seersucker trousers.

  By this time, the Justice Department had already alerted General Cox, the provost marshal, that the president would order “execution by electrocution” for six of his prisoners.5 Cox would be in charge of the most dramatic mass execution in American history since the hanging of the Lincoln conspirators. He had to find executioners, chaplains, and medical officers; arrange for a supply of additional electric current; and make sure that “Old Sparky,” as the D.C. jail’s venerable electric chair was known, was in good working order. He also had to plan for disposal of the bodies.

  What was more, everything had to be done in total secrecy.

  AS THEY waited in solitary confinement in the women’s section of the D.C. jail, the prisoners were fast losing hope. They displayed little outward emotion and spent long periods of time alone in their cells, smoking and staring at the walls. Occasionally, against prison regulations, the guards asked them to sign souvenirs. “To a fine American soldier,” Richard Quirin scrawled on a paper cup presented to him by a military policeman.

  Early on in the trial, some of the saboteurs complained they could not get to sleep because of the harsh lighting in their cells.6 Cox ordered the lighting to be dimmed, but never entirely turned off, as he was determined to keep the prisoners under twenty-four-hour observation to prevent suicide attempts.

  The saboteurs tried to put their affairs in order as best they could while waiting for the verdict. The most energetic was Eddie Kerling. Always a prolific correspondent, he wrote lengthy farewell letters to his wife, his mistress, his best friend, and to Miriam Preston, the American girl living in Massachusetts with whom he had been friendly. “Our fate is up to the President,” he told his wife Marie, who was herself in FBI custody in New York City.7 “This means the end of my life. We have to part. I know you can’t grasp that. Neither can I.” He had always been ready to die a soldier’s death for the Fatherland. His only regret was that he was sent on “a hopeless mission where we could not be of any service to our country.”

  As he prepared for his death, Kerling tried to make sense of the confused love triangle between himself, Marie, and Hedy Engemann. He blamed himself for “not being a better husband while I had the chance” and asked Marie’s “forgiveness for all the headaches and sorrow I have caused you.” He admitted his feelings for Hedy, but insisted that his wife remained dearer to him than anyone in the world. “When I have to go on my last walk, I’ll think of you, my Marie. I know you’d give your life to see me happy. I was a fool not to have seen it. When I realized what I had left behind, it was too late.” His final advice to Marie was to stick close to Hedy.

  His next letter was to Hedy, “my very dear friend.” He told her that he had just finished a long letter to Marie in which “I tore my heart out to let her know how much I love her.” His main reason for taking part in Operation Pastorius was to “help” his wife and “win her back.” He knew from the beginning that the sabotage mission would fail. “I cannot explain why! Yet I hoped to be able to hide until the war blew over.” He thanked Hedy for testifying on his behalf before the military tribunal. “Hedy, you have helped me, but our case was too hopeless. So it is all over now . . . Remember me as you have known me in happier days, forget the tragic end.”

  He apologized to Helmut Leiner, the tuberculosis patient from Astoria, for getting him in trouble with the FBI “after those two years you have spent in a hospital bed fighting for your life.” Leiner was one of several dozen German-Americans accused of cooperating with the saboteurs. “I tried to keep you out of it, but they already knew about you.” After thanking Leiner for arranging meetings for him in New York with Marie and Hedy, he gave him one final piece of advice. “Helmut, get that girl [Hedy] for yourself. You both will be happy.”

  Writing to his friend Miriam, he asked that she not judge him too harshly. “I did bring some dynamite, but not any hate for America or Americans.” He complained of the power of propaganda—in both Germany and the United States—and pleaded for her respect and understanding. “I have done my duty to my country as any American would for his [and now] we have to take the punishment for it. It is foolish to say that it is easy to take. But I hope that we manage to make a decent show of it.”

  Quirin, who had left a wife and twenty-month-old daughter behind in Germany, struck a note of resigned stoicism in a farewell letter to a German-American friend. “Just at the time when my life started to look bright for me with my little girl and all, I was approached by these men, and of course I couldn’t say no,” he wrote. “I think that fate meant this for me.”8 The former Volkswagen worker asked his friend to pass a message to his wife after the war was over. “The people who sent me here on this mission have promised to take care of her and the child and I hope they will live up to their promise. In the event that the worst should happen, which I hope against hope won’t, tell her good buy for me.”

  Herbie Haupt wrote to his girlfriend, Gerda Stuckmann, mentioning the baby he never saw and relatives who “froze to death” on the Russian front. Just as Kerling had done with Marie, he told Gerda he had come back to America in order to make things up to her and his parents. “But I brought nothing with me but Horror for my Parents and trouble for you. I have managed to put my Mother, Father, and Uncle into jail, decent People who never have done a thing wrong in their life.” He had learned a bitter lesson from his time in Germany. “Dearest Gerda, it breaks my heart to write you this, but I will not be able to see you any more. You see, Gerda, this is war. You people in this country don’t realize that yet, but we who have been in Europe have felt it. You see Gerda those people face Death every day, they know it and finally they don’t fear it at all.”

  Outside the jail, excitement was mounting. Newspapers and radio stations competed frantically for any scrap of news about the saboteurs. Neither the White House nor the War Department had provided any indication about the verdict from the military commission. It was generally agreed they would be found guilty, but opinions were divided over how they would be executed, and who might receive a pardon. The reporter with the best information about the case was Jack Vincent of the International News Service. Early on Thursday morning, Vincent reported that the military commission had sentenced all eight saboteurs to death, but had recommended clemency for two or three.

  Reporters kept a vigil outside the jail all night, looking for telltale signs su
ch as the appearance of lights in the corridor leading to the death chamber. On Friday morning, Vincent wrote that six saboteurs would die in the electric chair, but that the president had commuted the sentences of Dasch and Burger. The executions were to have taken place overnight on Thursday, but there was a twenty-four-hour postponement at the last moment.

  Vincent’s information was substantially correct, although he did not know exactly when the executions would occur. As Cox later noted, it was “impossible” to keep news of an imminent electrocution from spreading around a prison.9 An early tip-off was a request to the prison kitchen for a large bag of salt. Longtime inmates knew that executioners use a salt solution to paint the legs and shaven heads of condemned men to ensure a proper electrical contact when the electrodes are attached. “Among old prison hands,” Cox wrote, “the secret spread, but not to our prisoners.”

  IN BERLIN, Nazi leaders were scrambling to repair the damage caused by the saboteurs. The news from America could hardly have been worse. Colonel Lahousen noted in his war diary for August 4 that on the basis of American radio reports “it must be assumed that all participants in Operation Pastorius have been sentenced to death by a special court instituted by President Roosevelt. No news yet about the passing of the judgment.”10 He added that all Abwehr agents had been instructed to draw the necessary lessons from the “failure” of the sabotage plot. The Rankestrasse safe house would have to be given up.

  In the meantime, belated efforts were under way to save the saboteurs from their seemingly inevitable fate.11 Legal experts for both the Abwehr and the Foreign Ministry did the best they could to make the case that the V-men should be treated as prisoners of war. A Foreign Ministry lawyer suggested informing the U.S. government that the V-men were regular soldiers who had somehow become detached from their units and landed on American soil by mistake.

  According to reports filtering back to Berlin via the U-boats that transported the saboteurs to America, the eight men had all worn German military caps when they went ashore. In the opinion of the German legal experts, these caps should have been sufficient to identify them as soldiers if they got into trouble. They believed they could make an argument that all eight men were lawful combatants. Burger and Neubauer were German soldiers, while the other six V-men were acting under the orders of the German High Command, signed by Admiral Canaris.

  Should these arguments fail to convince Washington, Berlin had another card to play. The High Command had been keeping a list of American citizens convicted in Germany on a variety of offenses. If the Americans refused to treat the V-men as prisoners of war, the Abwehr could use these American prisoners as bargaining chips for the saboteurs.

  The Foreign Ministry lawyers drafted a diplomatic protest, accusing the United States of violating the 1929 Geneva Convention. The note would be dispatched to the Department of State via a Swiss diplomat in Washington responsible for looking after German interests in the United States. American legal experts had already anticipated such protests. Under the U.S. interpretation of the Geneva Convention, the saboteurs were “unlawful belligerents,” as they were caught behind the lines in civilian clothes.12 Furthermore, they had been given a “full and fair trial,” in contrast to the “arbitrary executions” that took place in Nazi Germany.

  The German protests would prove to be academic. By the time they were delivered, it would be too late.

  LATE ON Friday evening, Roosevelt’s naval aide, Captain John McCrea, phoned General Cox at his home to give him his orders. The executions would take place at noon the following day, Saturday, August 8. The president’s order specified that each of the six condemned saboteurs would “suffer death by electrocution by having a current of electricity of such intensity pass through his body to cause death, the application to be continued until he is dead.”13

  Cox arrived at the jail at dawn and assembled his team, which included six military chaplains, three Catholic, three Protestant. Beginning at 7:30, he visited the prisoners in their cells to inform them of their sentences. He started with Herbie Haupt. The youngest saboteur seemed to freeze as Cox read out the president’s order, but said nothing. One of the chaplains stayed with him in his cell. Cox repeated the same procedure with the other condemned men. The only one to display any emotion was Werner Thiel, who “looked as though an electric current went through him,” after which he dropped his head and closed his eyes.14

  Next, Cox visited Dasch and Burger, to tell them that their death sentences had been commuted to long prison terms. Dasch immediately began babbling incoherently about his family, until Cox silenced him and walked out of his cell. He then became “very morose.” His moroseness eventually turned to bitterness. He could not understand why the military commission had found him guilty at all.

  Since the end of the trial, Burger had withdrawn almost completely to himself. He was lying on his bed reading the Saturday Evening Post when Cox entered his cell. He looked up from his magazine long enough to say “Yes, sir” as the provost marshal informed him that he had been sentenced to life in prison, and then resumed reading his magazine.

  The men were given paper and pencil and a last chance to communicate with their loved ones. Instead of writing another letter, Haupt told the chaplain that he wanted to bequeath his diamond ring to Gerda Stuckmann, a wish that was later fulfilled by the FBI. Haupt also sent greetings to his mother and father. “I was with your son, Herbert Haupt, as spiritual adviser until the last moment,” the chaplain, Lieutenant William B. Adams, later wrote Hans Haupt. “Through me, he sends his love, requests that you not take it hard, and that his last thoughts were of his mother.” 15

  Quirin wrote to his wife Ann and daughter Rosie. “These are the last lines I can write to you. I should like to tell you that I have always loved you and that I came here to make a better life for you, my dear ones. But, unfortunately, God willed it otherwise . . . Tell Kappe or one of his people that George Dasch and Peter Burger betrayed us. Begin a new life and think of me often.”16

  “I only have a few hours left in this life,” Hermann Neubauer, the soldier wounded on the Russian front, told his parents. “I and my comrades are dying for you and for Germany. I know that our Führer will bring Germany to victory . . . When I heard my sentence I could not grasp it at first. But my nerves are strong enough. I am quite at ease now. Just as thousands of German men lay down their lives every day at the front, so also shall I die courageously as a German soldier.”17

  To his American wife, Alma, who had followed him back to Germany, Neubauer wrote, “Never thought they would take our life away. But as I write these lines I have control of my nerves again.” He had lived for Germany, and was going to die for Germany. “If it only would not hurt so much, it would not be so hard. But I shall try to be brave, and take it as a soldier . . . A priest is with me, and he will be with me to the last minute. So my Alma, chin up, because I want you to, be good and goodbye, until we may meet in a better world, may God bless you! I love you, Your Hermann.”

  Eddie Kerling had the most to say in death, as he had in life. “I was not a good Catholic, but I believe in a God,” he told his parents. He permitted the Catholic priest who was with him to formally “reconcile” him to the Church by intoning the last rites. He wrote two other letters, this time in German, to his Nazi Party comrades and the wife he had repeatedly betrayed.

  Marie, my wife—I am with you to the last minute! This will help me to take it as a German! Even the heaven out there is dark. It’s raining. Our graves are far from home, but not forgotten. Marie, until we meet in a better world! May God be with you. My love to you, my heart to my country.

  Heil Hitler!

  Your Ed, always.18

  After writing their letters, the men underwent final preparations for execution. These included the complete shaving of their heads, a bath, and a last meal, with wine. As Haupt was having his head shaved, he broke down and cried. Neubauer was “so nervous that he had difficulty in holding a cigarette.” Quirin was “c
alm and reserved during his preparation for the execution, although his hands were shaking slightly.” The other three men displayed no outward emotion at all.

  At 10 a.m., Cox ordered that the condemned men be taken to the death cells, in another section of the prison. The walk was quite long, down a flight of stairs and along a hundred-yard corridor. A little procession formed for each prisoner, beginning with Haupt, the first in alphabetical order, and ending with Thiel. “A guard was at either side of each prisoner, a chaplain behind him, and behind the chaplain two guards carrying a litter—just in case,” Cox later wrote. “But there was no hesitancy on the part of any of the prisoners, nor any utterances, as they walked erect to their doom.”19

  OUTSIDE THE jail, the atmosphere was becoming ever more frenzied, with reporters trying to find out what was happening inside. Overnight, three American soldiers and a sailor had arrived at the jailhouse door and volunteered their services as a firing squad, explaining, “We want to see those Jerries die.”20 Guards turned them away. The journalists reported a succession of officials arriving at the jail, including Cox, the chaplains, and the city coroner.

  The reporters had learned from friendly guards that the surest sign of an execution taking place would be the momentary dimming of lights in the rest of the jail, because of the sudden diversion of current to the electric chair. But they were deprived of even this source of information when, toward the end of the morning, all lights were turned off at the front of the jail facing the street.

  To while away the waiting hours, the reporters fed ham sandwiches to a stray dog they named Jake, and exchanged folklore about the electric chair that would be used for the executions.21 “Old Sparky” had been installed in 1925, replacing the gallows as the standard method for carrying out executions in the District of Columbia, and had been used twenty-four times since then, most recently in 1941. At first, the chair had been stored in an alcove of the prison dining room, in full view of the inmates every time they had a meal. The sight had so sickened a previous attorney general that he ordered it removed to a new, specially constructed death wing of the jail.