Michael Dobbs - Saboteurs

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.” 4His 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.

As he watched the rise of Nazism across the Atlantic, Dasch initially had little sympathy for Hitler. But his views began to change in the late thirties as friends and relatives arrived from Germany with stories of how life was getting better under the Führer. After the turmoil and hyperinflation of the Weimar years, the country was moving forward once again. Everybody had a job and a sense of direction. The humiliations heaped on Germany after World War I by the Treaty of Versailles were being overcome and the Fatherland was regaining international respect. The dictatorship imposed by Hitler seemed a small price to pay for the return of prosperity and national self-esteem.

To Dasch’s great surprise, even his mother “praised the work of Hitler” when she arrived in the United States in early 1939 on a brief visit. 6The former Social Democrat political activist described how workers and farmers were protected by new labor laws, how living conditions had improved, and how “people in general were very happy.” She supported Hitler’s quest for “Lebensraum” in eastern Europe. When Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia signed their non-aggression pact in the summer of 1939, thereby sealing the fate of Poland, Frances Dasch hurried back enthusiastically to Germany, telling her son that “this means war.”

Confronted with these arguments, Dasch began to rethink his opposition to Nazism. “I said to myself that perhaps I had been wrong all along about Hitler; perhaps I had a prejudiced mind that had been closed to the truth.” His political views now underwent a 180-degree turn. From viewing Nazism with hostility and suspicion, he decided he should follow his mother to Germany, even though this meant abandoning an application for U.S. citizenship, then in its final stages. To stay in America at a time when his own country was threatened by so many enemies would be like a rat deserting a sinking ship, he reasoned.

There was an additional and perhaps determining reason for Dasch’s decision to leave America: his own fortunes had recently taken a sharp turn for the worse. His clashes with the group that controlled the Waiters’ Union, and his attempts to set up a new union, had led to an expensive lawsuit. 7He was forced to sell his wife’s beauty parlor and move out of his Bronx home for nonpayment of rent. After eighteen years in America, he was almost back to where he started, forced to take whatever menial job he could find. The experience left him “disgusted” and “nearly a nervous wreck.” 8

Since it was very difficult to book passage back to Germany, and he could not afford to pay for his own ticket in any case, he pestered the German consulate in New York for assistance to return home and perform his duty “as a German citizen.” He also needed a passport, because his previous one had expired. At first, the officials just laughed at him, saying there was no way to get back to Germany in the middle of a war. Dasch was sure he could find a way, even if it meant smuggling himself aboard an Italian steamer as a stowaway. After months of pleading, he finally discovered the real reason for the consulate’s refusal to help him get back to Germany: he was not Nazi enough.

Dasch would later recall that the doubts about his political soundness “got my fighting Dutch up.” 9He went to the German embassy in Washington, and stated his case to a higher official. After questioning him at length about his political beliefs, the official finally agreed to issue him a new German passport and sponsor his return home. The passport came through in January 1941. Now it was just a question of waiting for a ship to take him from America to Japan, on the first stage of a very roundabout trip back to Germany via California, Japan, China, and Russia. (Most Atlantic ports were closed to German ships.)

The only remaining snag was his wife, Rose Marie, known to Dasch as Snooks. She was an American citizen. She was also gravely ill with an infected uterus and was admitted to a hospital in the middle of February, her life threatened by dangerous blood clots. By the time Dasch got word of the imminent departure of a Japanese ship from San Francisco, his wife was getting better but was still in no condition to travel.

The consulate gave him ten hours to make up his mind. Having overcome so many obstacles to get this far, he decided it was now or never. “I thought of my wife in the hospital and at the same time I also remembered the hell I had raised with the consulate for the chance of going home… I reached a quick decision to sail.” 10His wife would have to follow later. He did not even have time to say goodbye, instead asking his brother and sister “to go to Snooks at the hospital the next day and explain the circumstances of my sudden departure.”

He took a bath and packed two suitcases, the maximum permitted for the journey across Russia on the trans-Siberian railroad. His brother drove him down to the New York bus terminal for a five-day trip across the country to San Francisco. He arrived just in time to catch a Japanese steamer, the Tatuta Maru, bound for Yokohama, giving a California acquaintance the impression that he was “overjoyed” to return to Germany and enthusiastic about assisting the Nazi war effort. “If I don’t succeed in Germany, I will kill myself,” Dasch insisted. 11

Most of his fellow passengers were German-American Bund members returning home to fight for Hitler. They greeted him with a chorus of Sieg Heils. As he boarded the steamer on March 27, and sailed through the Golden Gate Bridge, Dasch had few regrets about leaving America. His failure to advance beyond waiting on tables was a recurring source of annoyance and grievance. While some Americans had been kind and hospitable, others had been “cold and rude.”

DASCH’S INITIAL attempts to find fulfillment in Germany were as unsuccessful as they had been in America. He told Nazi officials he wanted “to do my duty for my country,” by which he meant something more elevated and patriotic than the mundane jobs he had held in America. 12But when he approached the army for a job that would draw on his experiences traveling around the world, he received a sharp rebuff. “What do you think?” a colonel asked sarcastically. “You want us to fry an extra fish for you?” 13He got a similar response from Dr. Goebbels’ propaganda ministry when he suggested that he could help improve Nazi propaganda efforts in the United States, which were “not correct.” It was more or less the same story everywhere: Nazi bureaucracy, he concluded, was even more obtuse than the American variety.