Burger had been fortunate to escape with his life. He had ended up in a concentration camp after making a trip to Poland on behalf of a Nazi Party political science institute, during which he had submitted an incautiously worded report about conditions there. But now he wanted a chance for political rehabilitation, and Kappe was willing to give it to him. Burger, Kappe thought, was a good soldier.
As a concession to Kerling, Kappe agreed to get rid of Zuber and Scottie. But he insisted the others were “all right.”40 So it was decided. Two of the men would be dismissed. Nine would stay.
THE NAVY had agreed to transport the saboteurs to America by U-boat, but the question remained: how would they get from the submarine to shore? Kappe’s first idea was to equip them with collapsible rubber canoes, each of which had room for two men. The trainees practiced assembling and disassembling the boats, and took them out on the lake for practice landings. They quickly concluded it would be foolhardy to use the canoes on the ocean, particularly if the surf was high.
Kappe brushed aside their concerns. “They will be easier to navigate once they are fully loaded and are deeper in the water.” He pointed out that the canoes would also be transporting several boxes of sabotage equipment.41 The men were skeptical, but continued to practice with the canoes.
One day, while Dasch’s group was in the laboratory experimenting with explosives, screams were heard from the direction of the lake. An instructor rushed in with the news that one of the canoes had overturned. Everybody rushed down to the lake, where they saw Kerling and Haupt flailing about in the icy water. The lake had only begun to thaw a few weeks before, and the men were wearing heavy blue uniforms and boots that had been seized from the Polish army. Kerling had the presence of mind to pull his boots and pants off in the water; Haupt was practically drowning.
The instructors and some of the other men pushed a large rubber boat into the lake and mounted a rescue mission. Both men were dragged aboard, teeth chattering, faces blue-white. Back in the farmhouse, the hapless canoeists were rubbed down with alcohol, given some schnapps to drink, and sent to bed.
The next day, Kappe went to Berlin to report. That evening, he called Dasch by phone to announce that the navy had agreed to land the saboteurs in America in large rubber dinghies, to be manned by professional sailors.
THE LAST lesson at Quenz Lake was a two-hour course in secret writing. An instructor from Berlin taught the men some simple techniques, using a variety of everyday tools, such as laxative tablets, aspirin, and toothpicks. He began by demonstrating a method that relied on water, paper, and pencil. 42
First he soaked a piece of paper in a bowl of water. To prevent the paper from becoming wrinkled when he removed it from the bowl, he held it up by the top two corners, allowing the excess water to drain off. He laid the paper on a glass surface, and placed a dry sheet of paper on top of it. Using a black pencil, he then wrote a secret message on the top sheet of paper, pushing down hard enough so that an imprint was left on the wet sheet below. He removed the dry sheet, leaving the wet sheet on the glass until it had thoroughly dried. By this time, the writing had become invisible, and a camouflage letter could be written over it. The instructor showed the class how to get the secret message to magically reappear: simply immerse the now-dry paper in water again.
Other methods of secret writing left a jumbled impression with the men, particularly Dasch, who was confused by the whole business. “You buy a laxative,” he recalled later.43 “You use so many grains, add something, and you have the works. You use a toothpick and cotton and start writing, but you could never see it.”
The idea behind the training in secret writing was to give the men a secure way of communicating with one another in America, particularly if they were living in different cities. But when one of them asked the instructor whether the secret inks they had studied would withstand chemical analysis by the enemy, he replied bluntly, “No.” This set off a round of low muttering.44
Most of the men concluded they were unlikely to have much use for secret writing.
FINAL EXAMS got under way at noon, on Wednesday, April 29. The instructors divided the men into pairs and handed out secret instructions on what to blow up. The targets—symbolizing a factory, an oil refinery, a railroad—were scattered around the estate. The Abwehr sent an additional fifteen observers from Berlin to assist the instructors and act as guards. The goal was to carry out the mission by noon the next day without being caught.
Dasch teamed up with Quirin, one of the men in his group.45 Unlike Dasch, Quirin was good with his hands, having worked as a machinist in the new Volkswagen plant in the town of Braunschweig in central Germany and, before that, as an odd-job man for rich Americans in Westchester County, New York. Together they were ordered to disable a make-believe manufacturing plant. They had twenty-four hours to prepare their materials, sneak into the factory, plant the bomb, and return safely to base. Since this was a trial run, they would use incendiaries rather than explosives such as TNT.
Dasch and Quirin returned to the laboratory to get everything ready. Together, they mixed the chemicals, just like Schulz had shown them. Then they prepared a detonator, fuse, and timing device. For the timer, Quirin chose a cheap pocket watch with a celluloid face. He opened up the watch and drilled a tiny hole in the side. He also removed the minute hand. He threaded some electrical wire through the hole, and attached one end to the hour hand and the other to a battery. He replaced the face of the watch, drilling another hole in the celluloid opposite the position for six o’clock. He inserted a small metal screw in the hole, also linked to the battery by electrical wire. When the hour hand came into contact with the screw, the circuit would be complete. By adjusting the hour hand, the saboteurs could now explode their bomb with a delay of up to eleven hours.
That night, when they thought the coast was clear, Dasch and Quirin crept up to the imaginary factory, an abandoned building at the edge of the estate. They reached the designated spot, and placed their bomb, hooking up the fuse and timer. But as they were leaving, instructors jumped out of the shadows, throwing firecrackers at them.
At least they had completed most of the assignment. Some of the others did not get that far. Heinck set off a loud explosion when he stepped on a booby trap as he approached his target.46 Another man was overcome by tear gas as he pried open the door of a small stone house, representing some kind of industrial plant. Throughout the night, the farm reverberated with the sound of firecrackers, explosives, and Molotov cocktails.
The most successful pair was Burger and Schmidt, alias Swensen. 47 Their assignment was the destruction of a fictitious oil tank, located in a cellar of one of the buildings on the estate. First, they had to get into the cellar without being seen and find out the exact dimensions of the oil tank, which had been marked on the floor with chalk. After completing this part of the test, they returned to the laboratory to prepare the timing devices and explosives. Even though the cellar was guarded, they managed to sneak back inside a second time and set off their miniature bomb without being detected.
Kappe pronounced the exercise a success. Not everybody had done as well as Burger and Schmidt, but they had all been exposed to something approaching real-life conditions. Their nerves had been tested, and they had approached their tasks with enthusiasm. A lieutenant colonel who came from Berlin to observe the final exam was generous in his congratulations, remarking, “Never since the school started have I seen a bunch of men so eager.”48
ON THE final day of class, Thursday, April 30, everyone gathered in the classroom to hear Kappe reveal their assignments in America. He produced a series of maps of the United States, with a detailed list of targets, along with graphs of American industrial production and photographs of bridges and railroads.49
The first map showed the locations of aluminum and magnesium plants along the eastern seaboard, marked with blue and red crosses. Several of the crosses were clustered around the town of Alcoa, Tennessee, center of the American aluminu
m industry and site of the largest aluminum plant in the world. Kappe explained that aluminum was the basic material in the construction of modern aircraft: its outstanding property was its light weight, roughly one-third that of steel. He pointed to a graph that showed that American aluminum production had increased from under 300,000 pounds in 1937 to more than 600,000 by 1941. The 1942 target was 1.2 million pounds. If the saboteurs could cripple or severely disrupt aluminum production, they might be able to prevent the United States from ever developing an effective air force to fight the Luftwaffe.50
Disrupting aluminum production was simpler than it sounded. The process for manufacturing aluminum—invented by a young American chemist named Charles M. Hall in 1886—was heavily dependent on the supply of huge amounts of electricity. In fact, aluminum was formed through a process known as electrolysis, a kind of electric bath in which aluminum oxide was dissolved in melted cryolite ore. If the power supply was interrupted for long enough during this procedure, the molten metals would congeal, wrecking the stoves and baths in which the aluminum was manufactured. By downing critical power lines for a period of eight hours, saboteurs could permanently disable an aluminum plant.
An American pamphlet produced at the beginning of World War II summarized what was at stake in a neat formula:
Electric power → aluminum → bombers → victory. 51
It was the task of the Nazi saboteurs to reverse this formula:
Sabotage of power lines → less aluminum → fewer American planes → defeat.
Kappe assigned the job of attacking aluminum plants to group number one, which would consist of Dasch, Burger, Schmidt, Quirin, and Heinck. Dasch, at least, already understood the importance of aluminum to the war effort, and America’s ability to vastly increase its production of war matériel. Back in January, while still working at the foreign broadcast monitoring center, he had jotted down U.S. war production plans announced by Franklin Roosevelt in his State of the Union address to Congress. According to Roosevelt, America would increase its production of planes from 60,000 a year in 1942 to 125,000 in 1943.
“Kids, this war has not even begun,” Dasch warned his friends.52
If there was any time left over from these activities, Kappe suggested several targets of opportunity, such as planting small explosive devices in Jewish-owned department stores or in the baggage-claim rooms of large railroad stations. The idea was not to kill and maim, he emphasized, merely to spread panic.
Group two, Kappe announced, would be made up of Kerling, Haupt, Thiel, and Neubauer. Their primary objective would be the transportation system. He turned the floor over to his assistant, Reinhold Barth, a former employee of the Long Island Rail Road, who produced maps of the American railroad and canal systems and photographs of critical bottlenecks such as the Hell Gate Bridge, connecting Long Island to the Bronx, and the great Horseshoe Curve of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Putting the Hell Gate Bridge out of action should not prove too difficult, Barth insisted. It was constructed out of metal plate rather than cast iron.
Kappe and Barth had done their homework. Among the targets they selected were two cryolite processing plants in Pennsylvania, which produced the aluminum oxide used to produce aluminum. The U.S. War Department had given the cryolite plants a P-3 classification, indicating a relatively minor importance for national defense. A subsequent investigation by American military intelligence showed that destruction of the two plants would practically halt aluminum production throughout the United States. The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover, would later comment that the German High Command was “better informed as to the importance of these two plants to our war production than was the United States Army.” 53
Because of difficulties in arranging U-boat transportation, Kappe had decided to grant the men two weeks’ furlough, to allow them to say goodbye to their families. Before they left Quenz Lake, however, there were a couple of personnel matters to be addressed.
The rumors about Burger’s problems with the Gestapo were true, Kappe said. But he repeated what he had already told Kerling: Burger was working toward his political rehabilitation and deserved their support. Besides, Kappe had special plans for the former concentration camp inmate.54 He wanted Burger to establish himself in Chicago either as a draftsman or as a violin teacher: he had talents in both directions. After renting a studio, he would signal to the spymasters back in Germany that all was well by taking out an advertisement in the Chicago Tribune. Burger’s studio would serve as a point of contact for subsequent sabotage groups arriving in America.
Kappe also confirmed the appointment of Dasch and Kerling as group leaders. Schmidt and Quirin were aghast at the choice of Dasch, and could not understand why Kappe had so much confidence in the garrulous former waiter. Privately, they talked about killing Dasch if he didn’t change his attitude by the time they reached America. When speaking to Kappe, they were more diplomatic: how should they deal with someone who proved untrustworthy?
This time, Kappe told the saboteurs what they wanted to hear. If there were grounds to suspect anyone of betraying Operation Pastorius, he replied, that person must be removed, if necessary by force.55
CHAPTER TWO
FAREWELLS (MAY 1–21)
MOST OF THE MEN spent the furlough with their relatives. Peter Burger helped his wife move out of their small apartment in Berlin to his parents’ home in Bavaria. Dasch visited his parents in Speyer, in southern Germany; Quirin and Heinck returned to the Volkswagen plant in Braunschweig, where their wives and children were living in factory-supplied housing; Kerling went back to his family home in Wiesbaden.
Herbie Haupt took a train to the Baltic port of Stettin to visit his grandmother, who had given him a place to live after his around-the-world adventures. Having been in the United States as recently as June 1941, he was taken aback by the austerity and paranoia of life in Nazi Germany. From the land of plenty, he had arrived in a country where everything was rationed, and people had to make do with two cigarettes a day. He learned how to smoke the cigarettes down to a butt of a quarter of an inch and extract the remaining tobacco to put in a pipe. Fuel was in such short supply that his grandparents only heated one room of their house, and spent most of their waking hours there. Haupt resented the frequent visits from Gestapo officials checking up on the suspicious German-American. He “counted the days and hours” until he got back home to his family in Chicago.1
The food shortages seemed to get more severe as the war progressed. At the sabotage school on Quenz Lake, Haupt and his fellow trainees had been relatively well fed, eating meat or some kind of stew four or five times a week. Much greater sacrifices were required of ordinary civilians. The official weekly ration per person was ten ounces of meat, four and a half ounces of butter and margarine, three ounces of cheese, three pounds of potatoes, and three-quarters of a pound of sugar. Eggs were only distributed at Easter, Christmas, and other special holidays. Frequently, food supplies were so tight that shops were unable to sell customers even their official rations.
Most of the men did not tell their families where they were going. Some invented cover stories, saying they were being drafted into the army. Others said they were being sent on a mysterious top-secret mission. The most candid was Burger, who told his wife he was going to America, but not what he would be doing there. As a communication system, he instructed her in one of the methods of secret writing he had learned at sabotage school. He also gave her a password to authenticate a message sent through a trusted intermediary.2 If someone introduced himself to her with the password, she was to immediately follow that person’s instructions.
Dasch told his parents he was being transferred to Chile to do propaganda work for the foreign ministry. It must have been difficult for him to display such restraint. His mother—a “battleaxe,” in Dasch’s word—had always insisted that her children tell her everything.3
GEORGE JOHN DASCH was the fifth of thirteen children, known in the family as Knöppel,
German slang for “short, wiry boy.”4 His mother, Frances, was a social worker elected to the Speyer city council on the Social Democratic ticket following Germany’s defeat in World War I. At her insistence, he entered a Catholic seminary to study for the priesthood, but was expelled for “utterances and acts which were in conflict with teachings of the Church.” She later encouraged him to fight for the rights of his fellow workers. Throughout his life, he venerated his mother as the person who had influenced him most, describing her as the “teacher” who had given him his “basic socialist ideas.”5
Dasch retained his socialist ideals after moving to America in 1922, working his way up the ladder from soda fountain clerk to busboy to waiter. Although he made several attempts to get out of the restaurant business—he dreamed of becoming a pilot, and worked for a few months as a traveling salesman selling Catholic missionary supplies—he kept coming back to waiting on tables. During the Depression, Dasch spent much of his free time trying to unionize his fellow waiters. He became obsessed by union politics, and got into frequent battles with both the far right and the far left. The bosses viewed him as a Communist troublemaker; the Communists in Local 17 of the Bartenders’ and Waiters’ International Union detected Nazi sympathies.