Michael Dobbs - Saboteurs

“I don’t think this is him, but it’s the best likeness I have seen so far,” he told Connelley finally. 29

It was hardly a positive identification, but it was enough for Connelley, who excitedly reported the news to Hoover.

HERBIE HAUPT arrived at Chicago’s Union Station around three o’clock on Friday afternoon, after a thirty-hour train ride from Jacksonville via Cincinnati, blissfully unaware that at that very moment one of his companions was meeting with the FBI. It was good to be home. Prior to traveling around the world, he had lived in Chicago for sixteen years, most of his life. He had gone to school in the German-inhabited neighborhoods of the North Side, goose-stepped down Western Avenue with other Bund supporters, got his first job as a messenger boy with the Chicago office of Western Union, and flirted with girls along the shore of Lake Michigan.

Both the city and his own fortunes had changed dramatically in the year he had been away. When he left Chicago in July 1941 in a friend’s rickety 1934 Chevrolet on what promised to be the adventure of his life, he had just $80 in his pocket. America was still at peace. He was returning to a city at war in smart new clothes with a gold watch around his wrist and $10,000 packed away in his suitcase. Headlines about the arrests of Nazi sympathizers in the German-American community stared out at him from newspaper stands.

In many ways, Haupt was the accidental saboteur. Had it not been for a series of chance occurrences, beginning with his girlfriend getting pregnant and Haupt fleeing to Mexico to avoid getting married, he would never have ended up in Germany. Once there, he quickly decided he did not like it very much. Athletic and good-looking, with wavy black hair that he liked to smear with brilliantine, he was a “typical playboy type,” in Burger’s phrase. 30He loved having fun, a commodity in somewhat short supply in Nazi Germany. For the twenty-two-year-old Haupt, Operation Pastorius was a ticket back to the pleasant, carefree life he had once led.

From the railroad station, he took a cab to the home of his uncle, Walter Froehling, at 3643 North Whipple Street, arriving around 4 p.m. In Berlin, Haupt had agreed with Kappe that he would use Froehling as a mail drop and point of contact in Chicago. 31The Froehlings lived in a two-room apartment on the ground floor of a two-story detached house, with a small garden out back. Froehling’s wife, Lucille, answered the door. She was amazed to see Herbie. The last time anyone had heard from him, he was in Japan, working on some farm. He told the Froehlings he had come to their house first because he did not want to give his mother too much of a shock.

His parents would have to come over right away, Lucille and Walter decided. To cushion the surprise, Walter Froehling invented a cover story. He telephoned Herbie’s mother and told her his wife was ill and needed help. When Erna Haupt arrived, she was escorted into the bedroom by a smiling, perfectly healthy Lucille. Her son was waiting behind the door.

“Herbie, where have you been?” she gasped. 32

“Germany.”

“How on earth did you get here from Germany?”

“Well, I’m back” was all he would say.

Suddenly she felt faint, almost “paralyzed.” She had to sit down and rest. A few minutes later, Herbie talked about coming back on “a sub.” The story sounded unbelievable, but she was so pleased to see him she did not press him on the details. She could not get over how well he looked, and what fine clothes he was wearing. “I made some money in Germany,” he explained.

Hans Haupt showed up a couple of hours later, after returning home to find a note from his wife explaining where she had gone. He arrived as everybody was sitting down to dinner. “What would you say if Herbie were here?” Erna asked him softly, putting her hand on her husband’s shoulder.

“Herbie?”

As the elder Haupt walked closer to the table, grabbing a chair for support, his son came out of the bedroom. Hans was so startled he “didn’t know what to think.” It was not until after supper, while his wife helped Lucille Froehling put the children to bed, that he finally confronted his son. “Now, Herbie, tell me from the beginning how you left and how you returned.” 33

It was a long story, but Herbie launched into it with enthusiasm. He had left Chicago on June 16, 1941, with a German-American friend, Wolfgang Wergin. At first they planned to spend a few weeks south of the border and then come back. But their money ran out after a week in Mexico City. After various adventures, they ran into a German-Canadian trapper named Joseph Schmidt, who suggested a way out of their predicament. The German consulate in Mexico City was recruiting laborers for a German-run “monastery” in Japan, Germany’s Axis ally, and would pay their fare to Japan. Together with a dozen other young Germans, including Schmidt, Haupt and Wergin set sail for Japan on July 26.

The “monastery” turned out to be a labor camp run by German monks, with no sanitation and harsh working conditions. The two Chicago boys took one look at it and left for Tokyo, where they again threw themselves at the mercy of the German consulate. They were told that if they did not want to work in the monastery, they could sign on as seamen on a German freighter that would soon be sailing to Europe via Cape Horn. This seemed like the more attractive alternative, although they wondered if they had made the right choice as they rounded the Cape. Hundred-foot waves towered over the 8,000-ton freighter, threatening to crush it to pieces. Wergin later recalled that the boat would “go up so high, half of it would be out of the water, the propeller would spin around like crazy, and then it would crash down. We were scared. You would have to be an idiot not to be scared.” 34

The 20,000-mile trip took 107 days. They reached the French port of Bordeaux, then under German control, on December 11, the day Nazi Germany declared war on the United States. The Gestapo could not decide whether they were American or German and hauled them in for numerous interrogations, before eventually permitting them to visit their relatives. Herbie had a grandmother in the Baltic port of Stettin; Wolfgang’s family was from Königsberg in East Prussia, near the border with the Soviet Union.

Herbie gave his father and uncle a somewhat romanticized account of his recruitment for intelligence work and his trip back to the United States on board a U-boat. He claimed—falsely—that they had sunk several ships on the way across. By now, Hans and Walter were beginning to think that Herbie really had been in Germany. He was using German expressions he had never used before, and seemed to know all about their relatives back home. Their remaining doubts vanished when he produced a green zipper bag with nearly $10,000 concealed beneath a false bottom, and asked his uncle to keep it somewhere safe. When they asked Herbie how he got the money, he replied, “The German Government.” 35

It was nearly eleven o’clock at night, and everyone was tired. Herbie’s joy at seeing his parents was turning to testiness. He became “awfully nervous” when they mentioned that the FBI had been looking for him because he had failed to report for the draft.

“All you do is talk and talk,” he snapped. 36“Leave me alone for a while.”

The Haupts took their son home, driving back toward the Loop to their apartment on North Fremont Street. As Erna prepared a bed for Herbie on the couch, he produced more wads of bills from his money belt. He counted out the money—it came to around $3,600—and transferred it to an envelope, which he hid under the rug in his parents’ bedroom.

Suddenly, Erna and Hans Haupt felt very scared. 37

IN NEW YORK, Burger was trying to keep Heinck and Quirin from worrying too much about Dasch. The best distraction, he decided, was the whorehouse. Around 6 p.m. on Friday, he met the two men on the street near their lodgings, took them out for a meal, and then brought them back to his room at the Governor Clinton. From there, he telephoned Frankie, their friend from the Swing Club, who gave him an address on Eighty-sixth Street.