The execution of the Operation Pastorius saboteurs

At noon on 8 August 1942, in the District of Columbia jail in Washington, the authorities began carrying out the sentences on six Germans who had been landed on the American coast by German U-boats two months earlier. Herbert Haupt, Heinrich Heinck, Edward Kerling, Hermann Neubauer, Richard Quirin and Werner Thiel died one after another in the electric chair. The two remaining members of Operation Pastorius, George John Dasch and Ernst Peter Burger, escaped death because it was Dasch who had betrayed the whole group to the FBI. The affair was over in less than eight weeks from the landing: after the arrests, a trial before a special military commission and a lightning ruling by the Supreme Court.

The Abwehr’s plan

After Germany declared war on the United States in December 1941, Hitler demanded operations that would strike at American war industry and intimidate the population. The task fell to military intelligence, the Abwehr of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, which had already organised sabotage in a still-neutral America during the First World War. The preparations were entrusted to Lieutenant Walter Kappe, who had spent more than a decade active among Germans in Chicago and New York. The operation was named after Francis Daniel Pastorius, founder of the first German settlement in North America, Germantown in Pennsylvania (1683).

Kappe looked for men who had lived in the United States, knew the language and customs of the country and had returned to Germany after 1933. He chose eight. Two of them, Burger and Haupt, held American citizenship. Most had previously belonged to the pro-Nazi German American Bund or to the NSDAP; Neubauer had fought on the Eastern Front. In the spring of 1942 they underwent several weeks of training at a sabotage school on the Quenzgut estate by Lake Quenz near Brandenburg: they learned to make explosive charges and time fuses, to use invisible ink and to play the parts of prepared cover stories.

The targets were to be the aluminium plants of the Alcoa company in Tennessee, Illinois and New York State, the hydroelectric plants at Niagara Falls, the locks on the Ohio River, a cryolite plant in Philadelphia, railway junctions and workshops in Pennsylvania and the Hell Gate Bridge in New York. The saboteurs were also to plant bombs at railway stations and in Jewish-owned shops to spread panic. They were given false papers and, according to the FBI, about 175,000 dollars in cash, on which they were to operate for up to two years.

The landings on Long Island and in Florida

The groups sailed from Lorient in Brittany at the end of May 1942 aboard two U-boats, U-202 and U-584, at a time when German U-boats were conducting Operation Drumbeat and its successors off the east coast of the United States. Dasch’s group of four (with Burger, Heinck and Quirin) landed on the night of 12/13 June on a beach near Amagansett on Long Island, about 160 kilometres from New York. They came ashore in a rubber dinghy wearing Kriegsmarine uniforms, so that if they were caught during the landing they would be treated as prisoners of war rather than spies, and then buried crates of explosives and changed into civilian clothes.

Almost immediately they ran into John Cullen, an unarmed Coast Guard seaman patrolling the beach. Dasch tried to bribe him, pressed a few hundred dollars on him and told him to forget the encounter. Cullen pretended to agree and raised the alarm at his station; a patrol soon dug up the crates. The Germans, however, had time to leave for New York on the morning train. The second group of four, led by Kerling, landed without incident on the night of 16/17 June at Ponte Vedra Beach south of Jacksonville in Florida and dispersed to Cincinnati and Chicago. The two groups were to meet in Cincinnati on 4 July.

Dasch’s betrayal

On the very first evening, in a New York hotel, Dasch revealed to Burger that he did not intend to carry out the mission and obtained his agreement to turn himself in to the authorities. According to the FBI’s account, on 15 June he telephoned the Bureau’s New York office, introducing himself as “Franz Daniel Pastorius”, but was treated as a crank. A few days later he went to Washington and turned up at FBI headquarters with a suitcase full of money. The interrogations lasted several days. On the basis of his statements agents arrested Burger, Heinck, Quirin, Kerling and Thiel in New York and Haupt and Neubauer in Chicago; the last were arrested on 27 June.

On the same day the director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, announced his agency’s success. The announcements made no mention of the fact that the plot had been revealed by one of its participants; the press and the public assumed that the Bureau had tracked down the saboteurs on its own. Dasch, who had hoped to be presented as an anti-Nazi and released, ended up in the dock with the others.

The military commission and the Supreme Court

Attorney General Francis Biddle feared that a civilian court might convict the Germans only of conspiracy, for a few years’ imprisonment, since they had not had time to blow anything up. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt wanted the death penalty and had no intention of allowing disputes over habeas corpus. On 2 July 1942 he issued Proclamation 2561, denying enemy saboteurs access to the civilian courts, and an order appointing a seven-member military commission of generals, chaired by Major General Frank McCoy. Such a procedure had not been used on the territory of the United States since the Civil War. The prosecution was conducted by Biddle himself and the Judge Advocate General of the Army, General Myron Cramer; the accused were defended by appointed officers, Colonel Kassius Dowell and Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Royall.

The trial was held behind closed doors in the Department of Justice building from 8 July to 1 August. The charges were violation of the law of war, aiding the enemy, espionage and conspiracy. The defence challenged the commission itself: citing the ruling in Ex parte Milligan of 1866, it argued that where the civilian courts were functioning, no one could be tried before a military tribunal. The Supreme Court met in a special summer session, heard the parties on 29 and 30 July and on 31 July, unanimously and in a brief order, ruled that the commission was lawful (the case of Ex parte Quirin). The full opinion, the writing of which caused Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone a great deal of trouble, was published only on 29 October – when the six condemned men had long been dead. In it the Court held that enemies who pass through the lines without uniform in order to commit sabotage are “unlawful combatants” and are not entitled to the rights of prisoners of war, and that American citizenship does not protect against the consequences of such belligerency.

The sentences and the execution

On 3 August the commission found all eight guilty and sentenced them to death, passing the record to the President. Roosevelt confirmed the sentences but, in line with the commission’s own recommendation, commuted Burger’s to life imprisonment and Dasch’s to 30 years, for revealing the plot and cooperating with the investigation. On 8 August the other six were executed one after another; the entire execution was completed in little over an hour. Only after it was over did the White House announce the sentences. The bodies were buried in unmarked graves in a paupers’ cemetery at Blue Plains in south-east Washington.

More than a dozen people who had helped the saboteurs were also arrested, among them Haupt’s parents in Chicago and friends of the others; their treason trials dragged on for years. John Cullen was awarded the Legion of Merit and became a press hero. In Germany the failure discredited the Abwehr, and Hitler is said to have rebuked Canaris sharply. For the rest of the war the Germans sent agents to the United States by U-boat only once more: in November 1944 U-1230 landed two spies on an intelligence mission in Maine, and they too quickly fell into the hands of the FBI.

Place in the war

Operation Pastorius did the Americans no harm at all, and its defeat brought the FBI prestige and strengthened the public’s sense of a threat from a “fifth column”. This was at a time when U-boats were sinking ships within sight of American beaches; in July 1942 Karl Dönitz began withdrawing them from the US east coast. Dasch and Burger were released in April 1948, when President Harry Truman granted them clemency on condition of deportation to the American zone of occupied Germany. In their homeland they were regarded as traitors, and Dasch tried in vain until his death to return to America and be rehabilitated.

The most lasting consequence of the affair proved to be the ruling in Ex parte Quirin. Lawyers and historians criticised the haste with which the Supreme Court had approved the procedure imposed by the President without yet knowing its own reasoning. After 11 September 2001 the administration of George W. Bush invoked precisely this case when it set up military commissions for the prisoners at the Guantánamo base, and in 2006 the Supreme Court (Hamdan v. Rumsfeld) held those commissions in their original form to be unlawful. The Pastorius case remains an example of how quickly a democratic state at war was prepared to suspend ordinary procedures against an enemy on its own territory.