In June 1942 the Nazis launched Operation Pastorius, a spy and sabotage mission inside the United States. It ended up being kind of a bumbling clown car of a spy operation.
Operation Pastorius was the brainchild of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the German Abwehr, and named for Francis Daniel Pastorius, the leader of the first organized settlement of Germans in America. Canaris recalled that during World War I, he organized the sabotage of French installations in Morocco, and entered the United States with other German agents to plant bombs in New York arms factories, including the destruction of munitions supplies at Black Tom Island, in 1916. He hoped that Operation Pastorius would have the same kind of success they had then.
Eight Germans who had lived in the United States were recruited. Two of them, Ernst 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. All eight were recruited into the Abwehr military intelligence organization and were given three weeks of intensive sabotage training in the German High Command school on an estate at Quenz Lake, near Berlin, Germany. The agents were instructed in the manufacture and use of explosives, incendiaries, primers, and various forms of mechanical, chemical, and electrical delayed timing devices. Considerable time was spent developing complete background "histories" they were to use in the United States. They were encouraged to converse in English and to read American newspapers and magazines to hone their English and familiarity with current American events and culture.
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; the Horseshoe Curve, a crucial railroad pass near Altoona, Pennsylvania, as well as the Pennsylvania Railroad's repair shops at Altoona; a cryolite plant in Philadelphia; Hell Gate Bridge in New York; and Pennsylvania Station in Newark, New Jersey. The agents were also instructed to spread a wave of terror by planting explosives on bridges, railroad stations, water facilities, and public places. They were given counterfeit birth certificates, Social Security Cards, draft deferment cards, nearly $175,000 in American money, and driver's licenses, and put aboard two U-boats to land on the east coast of the U.S.
The operation lurched forward like a drunk from the very beginning. The head of the team, George Daschl, left sensitive documents behind on a train, and one of the team got very drunk and announced loudly to a Paris bar that he was a secret agent.
On the night of June 12, 1942, the first submarine to arrive in the U.S., U-202, landed at Amagansett, New York, which is about 100 miles east of New York City, on Long Island, at what today is Atlantic Avenue beach. It was carrying Dasch and three other saboteurs (Burger, Quirin, and Heinck). The team came ashore wearing German Navy uniforms so that if they were captured, they would be classified as prisoners of war rather than spies. They also brought their explosives, primers and incendiaries, and buried them along with their uniforms, and put on civilian clothes to begin an expected two-year campaign in the sabotage of American defense-related production.
During the equipment burial, Dasch was discovered amidst the dunes by unarmed Coast Guardsman John C. Cullen, Dasch offered Cullen a $260 bribe. Cullen feigned cooperation but reported the encounter. An armed patrol returned to the site to discover that the buried equipment had not been moved; the Germans had taken the Long Island Rail Road from the Amagansett station into Manhattan, where they checked into a hotel. A massive manhunt was begun.
The other four-member German team headed by Kerling landed without incident at Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, south of Jacksonville on June 16, 1942. They came on U-584, another submarine. This group came ashore wearing bathing suits and German Navy hats. After landing, they threw away their hats, put on civilian clothes, and started their mission by boarding trains to Chicago and Cincinnati.
The two teams were to meet on July 4 in a hotel in Cincinnati to coordinate their sabotage operations, but the wheels came off before that ever happened. Dasch called Burger into their upper-story hotel room and opened a window, saying they would talk, and if they disagreed, "only one of us will walk out that door—the other will fly out this window." Dasch told him he had no intention of going through with the mission, hated Nazism, and planned to report the plot to the FBI. Burger agreed to defect to the United States immediately.
On June 15, Dasch phoned the New York office of the FBI to explain who he was, but hung up when the agent answering doubted his story. Four days later, he took a train to Washington, DC and walked into FBI headquarters, where he gained the attention of Assistant Director D. M. Ladd by showing him the operation's budget of $84,000 cash. Besides Burger, none of the other German agents knew they were betrayed. Over the next two weeks, Burger and the other six were arrested. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover made no mention that Dasch had turned himself in, and claimed credit for the FBI for cracking the spy ring.
Roosevelt issued Executive Proclamation 2561 on July 2, ordering that the spies be tried before a military tribunal. The trial ended on August 1 and two days later, all eight were found guilty and sentenced to death. Because of their cooperation, Roosevelt commuted Burger's sentence to life in prision and Dasch's to 30 years.
The commission found all eight men guilty and sentenced them to death. Because of their confessions and cooperation, President Roosevelt later commuted Burger and Dasch's sentences to life in prison. Arguing that the President exceeded his power in ordering the commission and that the Fifth and Sixth Amendments to the Constitution protect their rights to a regular trial, seven of the eight conspirators, not including Dasch, filed petitions for a writ of habeas corpus in Federal District Court. Their claims were denied, and they appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Before the court ruled, however, they filed for hearing before the Supreme Court and, separately, filed petitions for habeas corpus directly with the Court. The Court, sitting in a special term, agreed to hear the cases.
The remaining six prisoners were electrocuted on August 8 and buried in a potter's field in the Blue Plains neighborhood in the Anacostia area of Washington.
Two and a half months later, on this day in 1942, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in the case, Ex Parte Quirin. In a unanimous opinion authored by Chief Justice Harlan Fisk Stone, the Court concluded that the conspirators, as spies without uniform whose purpose was sabotage, violated the law of war and were therefore unlawful enemy combatants. Noting that Congress had, under the Articles of War, authorized trial by military commission for unlawful enemy combatants, the Court therefore determined that the President had not exceeded his power. Furthermore, the Court asserted that the Fifth and Sixth Amendments "did not enlarge the right to jury trial" beyond those cases where it was understood by the framers to have been appropriate. Therefore, because the amendments cannot be read "as either abolishing all trials by military tribunals, save those of the personnel of our own armed forces, or, what in effect comes to the same thing, as imposing on all such tribunals the necessity of proceeding against unlawful enemy belligerents only on presentment and trial by jury," the rights of the conspirators were not violated.
Some time in the 1960's or 1970's, the National Socialist White People's Party erected an unauthorized monument to the operation on National Park Service land in southwest Washington. It went largely unknown and ignored for several decades, before being noticed and removed in 2010.
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