Operation Pastorius
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Operation Pastorius was a failed attack by Nazi Germany on the United States staged in June 1942. It 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.
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 Kerling, Richard Quirin, Heinrich Heinck, Hermann Neubauer and Werner Thiel, had worked at various jobs in the United States. 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. Their mission was to stage sabotage attacks on American economic targets: hydroelectric 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; a cryolite plant in Philadelphia; Hell Gate Bridge in New York; and Pennsylvania Station in Newark, New Jersey.
On June 13, 1942, the first submarine, U-202, the Innsbruck, carrying Dasch at the head of a team of three other saboteurs, landed in Amagansett, New York about 115 miles east of New York City on Long Island. A Coast Guardsman, John C. Cullen, spotted the Germans coming ashore, and one of them tried to bribe him. Cullen, however, returned to his station and reported the encounter to his superiors; but by that time the Germans, weary from their transatlantic trip, had taken a train into New York City.
The second submarine, U-584, with another 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.
Two of the Germans in New York, Dasch and Burger, decided to back out of the mission. Dasch went 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 attempted to have the case tried in a civilian court, but were rebuffed by the Supreme Court in Ex parte Quirin. The trial began July 8 in Assembly Hall #1 on the fifth floor of 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. 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.
[edit] References
- Dobbs, Michael, Saboteurs: The Nazi Raid on America, New York: Knopf, 2003.
- 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 Minnestoa, 2004. [1]
