Michael Dobbs - Saboteurs

To Dasch’s relief, Lahousen was much less adventurous. He told Dasch not to trust anyone, and to bear in mind that Bund members were closely watched by the American authorities and could have changed their political views since the outbreak of war. Dasch should exercise great caution.

When it was Kappe’s turn to address the saboteurs, he revealed the meaning of the code name “Operation Pastorius.” 47Franz Daniel Pastorius, he explained, had been the leader of the very first group of Germans to arrive in the New World, back in 1683. The immigrants, thirteen families of Mennonites and Quakers, had settled in a place that soon became known as Germantown, now a suburb of Philadelphia.

If all went well, the nine Nazi saboteurs would be spearheading a new—and much more deadly—wave of German migration to America.

AS WALTER KAPPE looked around the breakfast table at the men he had selected for Operation Pastorius, he was in a relaxed, jovial mood. It was May 22, a Friday, and soon they would be leaving Berlin for Paris on the first stage of their journey to America. He had invited the men to the Rankestrasse safe house for breakfast before setting off for the train station. He would accompany them as far as Lorient, a German submarine base on the southern coast of Brittany. If all went well, he planned to join the V-men in the United States in a few months and create an extensive sabotage network to wreak havoc on American industrial production.

Kappe was pleased by the way the men had responded to five weeks of intensive training. All seemed ready for the adventure. Only Neubauer, the soldier shipped back from the Russian front with pieces of shrapnel in his head, appeared nervous and apprehensive.

He tried to make a joke out of Neubauer’s sour face. “Everyone else seems to have the right spirit. It’s only Hermann here who doesn’t seem to be enjoying himself.” 1

Kappe was thirty-seven years old. His girth was widening, his hairline receding, his face fuller and more florid than ever, but he finally felt he had found his true calling. It had not been easy. His life had been full of ups and downs. He had been born to a moderately well-off family from Hanover that lost all its possessions in the Great War. Like many alienated and restless young Germans, he joined one of the paramilitary organizations banned by the Versailles treaty that later became the basis for Hitler’s storm troopers. He and his friends spent much of their time traveling around the country, fighting with Communists and breaking up strikes. He belonged to a movement known as the Wandervoegel, the Wandering Birds, a name intended to invoke the medieval tradition of groups of young craftsmen wandering around Germany in search of work. In modern times, the Wandervoegel had become a breeding ground for political fanatics, who had little in common with their predecessors.

After the failure of the Munich beer hall putsch, thousands of Wandervoegel immigrated to the United States. Kappe arrived in New York in March 1925, and was granted permanent resident status. He found work in a farm implement factory in Bradley, Illinois, where, according to his FBI file, he was “considered a jovial sort of fellow who liked to entertain folks with stories, songs, and piano playing.” 2He considered factory work beneath him: he boasted that he knew six languages and was meant to be “a journalist, not a mechanic.”

By the following year, Kappe had realized his dream, and was working for Abendpost, a German-language newspaper in Chicago. Colleagues described him as very capable and energetic, but totally without scruples. He joined the Teutonia Club, a forerunner to the German-American Bund, whose members paraded through the streets of Chicago with swastikas and German flags. Instead of translating news agency reports into German, as his superiors wished, he rewrote them with a strong pro-Nazi slant. The editors of Abendpost, which was dubbed “a Jew-sheet” in American Nazi circles, disapproved of Kappe’s political activities and open admiration for Hitler, and found an excuse to fire him.

Kappe then got a job on a Nazi broadsheet in Cincinnati, where he devoted much of his time to Bund politics. He also attracted the attention of U.S. military counterintelligence, which opened a file on him. One government informant reported that Kappe was a “heavy drinker” who talked loudly about his exploits. “He is oversexed,” the informant went on, “consistently seeking the comradeship of prostitutes or women hanging around taverns. With such women, [he] invariably plays the part of a dashing Prussian officer, obviously trying to impress everyone within reach. He has a definite Prussian military bearing, clicking heels when meeting strangers and coming to attention during the introduction.” 3But beneath the “bluff and braggadocio,” the report concluded, Kappe was in reality a coward. Another informant reported that no matter how busy Kappe was with Bund affairs, “he always found time for one or two girls on the side, in addition to his wife.” 4

Soon Kappe had become a full-time propaganda worker for the Bund, and was appointed the organization’s “press and propaganda chief” in early 1933, the year after Hitler attained supreme power in Germany. He corresponded with Joseph Goebbels, persuading the Nazi propaganda minister to donate $50,000 for the establishment of a weekly Nazi newspaper in the United States, to be known as Deutsche Zeitung, or German News. He also spoke at mass meetings in Chicago, Cincinnati, New York, and other cities with a large population of ethnic Germans, drawing crowds of up to ten thousand. Interrupted with repeated chants of “Heil Hitler” and the singing of the Horst Wessel Song, the meetings frequently degenerated into open fighting between Nazis and anti-Nazis; on several occasions, Kappe was beaten up by enraged Communists.

In an article for an American Nazi newspaper in August 1933, Kappe poured vitriol on those German-Americans who refused to accept the swastika. He described them as “neither German nor American.” 5

You are nothing. You are too narrow to conceive what it means to be German; too cowardly to take advantage of your rights as Americans. You have become slaves and vassals of those who spread hatred against the country of your birth. Here in America, the German people will change some day. They must change, if they want to keep in spiritual contact with the Fatherland, for the roots of our strength lie in the homeland. And when change comes, your game will be up, Gentlemen!

As a member of the Nazi inner circle in America, Kappe soon got caught up in the squabbles over who would become the American Führer. An article in the Washington Post in September 1934 referred to Kappe as one of the “Big Three” led by Bund leader Fritz Gissibl. 6Unfortunately for Kappe, Gissibl lost a power struggle with Fritz Kuhn, who wanted to “Americanize” the Bund, replacing German nationals with American citizens. Unlike Kuhn, Kappe had never taken out U.S. citizenship. According to one newspaper account, Kappe was frog-marched out of the New York City offices of the Bund newspaper by Kuhn’s storm troopers in February 1937. 7Kuhn accused Kappe of spying for the German consulate in New York, and fomenting a revolt against him, in addition to financial irregularities. Four months later, the disgraced Bund leader boarded the SS St. Louis, together with his wife Hilde and their two young children, and set sail for Hamburg.

With Germany gearing up for war and America still sitting on the fence, Kappe felt he had returned to the center of the action. He joined the Ausland Institut under Gauleiter Ernst Bohle, churning out anti-American propaganda. After war broke out, he transferred to military intelligence. Abwehr networks in the United States had been virtually wiped out in early 1941 when a renegade German agent named William Sebold went to the FBI and told them all he knew, leading to the roundup of dozens of German spies. In conversations with colleagues, Kappe railed against “that son of a bitch” Sebold, adding darkly, “There is no stone big enough for him to hide under.” 8