Operation Pastorius
Operation Pastorius was a failed plan for a sabotage in series of attacks by Nazi German agents inside the United States. The operation was staged in June 1942 and was to be directed against strategic U.S. economic targets. The operation was named by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the German Abwehr, for Francis Daniel Pastorius, the leader of the first organized settlement of Germans in America.
Agents
Recruited for the operation were eight Germans who had lived in the United States. Two of them, Ernest Burger and Herbert Haupt, were American citizens. The others, George John Dasch, Edward John Kerling, Richard Quirin, Heinrich Harm Heinck, Hermann Otto Neubauer and Werner Thiel, had worked at various jobs in the United States.
Mission
Their mission was to stage sabotage attacks on American economic targets: hydro-electric plants at Niagara Falls; the Aluminum Company of America's plants in Illinois, Tennessee and New York; locks on the Ohio River near Louisville, Kentucky; the Horseshoe Curve, a crucial railroad pass near Altoona, Pennsylvania, as well as the Pennsylvania Railroad's repair shops at Altoona [1] ; a cryolite plant in Philadelphia; Hell Gate Bridge in New York; and Pennsylvania Station in Newark, New Jersey. They were given a quick course in sabotage techniques, given nearly $175,000 in American money and put aboard two submarines to land on the east coast of the United States.
On June 13, 1942, the first submarine (U-202 the Innsbruck) [2] landed in Amagansett, New York. This is about 115 miles east of New York City, on Long Island, at what today is Atlantic Avenue beach. It was carrying George Dasch, who was the head of the team, and three other saboteurs (Burger, Quirin, and Henck). The team came ashore wearing military uniforms so that if they were captured they would be classified as prisoners of war rather than spies. They also brought ashore, and buried, enough explosives, primers, and incendiaries to support an expected two-year career in the sabotage of American defense-related production.[3] The group had not fully changed into civilian clothes when an unarmed Coast Guardsman, John C. Cullen, spotted the Germans. One of them tried to bribe him. Cullen, however, returned to his station and reported the encounter to his superiors. By that time the Germans, weary from their transatlantic trip, had taken a train into New York City.
The second submarine, U-584, with the other four-member team headed by Kerling, landed at Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, south of Jacksonville on June 16, 1942. Without any incident, this second group of Germans started their mission by boarding trains to Chicago and Cincinnati.
Arrest and trial
Two of the Germans in New York, Dasch and Burger, decided to back out of the mission. Dasch went to Washington, D.C., and turned himself in to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. None of the others knew of the betrayal. Over the next two weeks, Burger and the other six were arrested, and all eight were put on trial before a seven-member military commission on specific instructions from President Franklin D. Roosevelt. They were charged with 1) violating the law of war; 2) violating Article 81 of the Articles of War, defining the offense of corresponding with or giving intelligence to the enemy; 3) violating Article 82 of the Articles of War, defining the offense of spying; and 4) conspiracy to commit the offenses alleged in the first three charges.
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 Supreme Court in Ex parte Quirin. The trial was held in the Department of Justice building in Washington. All eight defendants were found guilty and sentenced to death. Roosevelt commuted Burger's sentence to life and Dasch's to 30 years, because they had turned themselves in and provided information about the others. The others were executed on August 8, in the electric chair on the third floor of the District of Columbia jail and buried in a potter's field called Blue Plains in the Anacostia area of Washington. In 1948, President Harry S. Truman granted executive clemency to Dasch and Burger on the condition that they be deported to the American Zone of occupied Germany.
Photographs of targets
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Hell Gate Bridge New York City, New York -
Horseshoe Curve Altoona, Pennsylvania -
Pennsylvania Station in Newark, New Jersey
References
- Dobbs, Michael, Saboteurs: The Nazi Raid on America, New York: Knopf, 2004. ISBN 0-375-41470-3
- Rachlis, Eugene, They Came to Kill: The Story of Eight Nazi Saboteurs in America, New York: Random House, 1961.
- Persico, Joseph E., Roosevelt's Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage, New York:Random House, 2001, pp. 199-205. ISBN 0-375-50246-7
- Federal Bureau of Investigation: George John Dasch and the Nazi Saboteurs
- Lippmann, David H., World War II Plus 55, June 10-13th, 1942
- Montauk Life: The Night of the Nazis
- Cornell University School of Law: Ex Parte Quirin (summary)
- 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., July 8 to July 31, 1942, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2004. [3]