Michael Dobbs - Saboteurs

Gerda showed up at the Haupt apartment around eight, excited and nervous. For the next two hours, she and Herbie sat together awkwardly on the settee in the front room, as his parents sat in the kitchen, wondering what was going on next door. Occasionally, Erna Haupt brought in drinks of whiskey and ginger ale.

Herbie did not tell Gerda about going to Germany, or his trip back on the U-boat. Instead he said he had been to Mexico and the “West Coast,” and had returned to Chicago by train. He seemed “very nervous” to her, and she was at a loss to understand the reason. 8Around 10:30, Herbie offered to drive her back to her apartment on Albion Avenue, in a northern section of Chicago, near Loyola University. They took his old Plymouth, stopping a block from her home, on a darkened, dead-end street leading to a railway embankment. Herbie explained that he did not want to go up to her apartment: her parents might be angry with him for walking out on her. But he had something important to tell her.

“Will you marry me?”

Gerda was stunned. She had been married once before, at the age of twenty, to a man named Herbert Melind, who had subsequently died. She was now nearly twenty-five, more than two years older than Herbie. She had been desperate to marry him when she was pregnant with his child. Now she was not so sure. Although she liked Herbie, she was bewildered by the sudden turn of events. Apart from a single card, postmarked St. Louis, she had not heard from him at all during the year he was away.

Not only did Herbie want to marry her, he wanted to marry her the very next day. He pulled out an engagement ring, and pressed ten dollars into her hand, so she could get the blood tests required by Illinois state law. He insisted he had changed his ways, and planned to get his old job back at the Simpson Optical Company.

“Why the rush?” she asked. But she promised to think it over, and give him an answer by the following Saturday. In the meantime, she would get the blood work done.

Parked inconspicuously around the corner were two black Hudson sedans belonging to the FBI with six agents inside. They watched as “a young lady” got out of the Plymouth “alone” at 12:05 a.m. and walked to “what was believed to be her apartment” at the end of the tree-lined street. They then followed “the subject” as he did a quick U-turn and drove home.

“I’VE BEEN working like hell from daybreak until dawn,” Dasch wrote Burger midway through his interrogation in a letter intercepted by the FBI. “What I have thus far accomplished is too much to describe here. I can only tell you that everything is working out alright. Have faith and patience. You will see and hear me in the near future. Please stick to your job and keep the other boys content and please don’t lose their sights.” 9

By the time Dasch wrote this note, Burger and the “other boys” in his group were all being questioned at FBI headquarters in New York. Dasch, by contrast, had the illusion of being a free man. Although he was accompanied everywhere by FBI agents, he still lived at the Mayflower Hotel, ate breakfast in the coffee shop, and dined at a different Washington restaurant every evening. Traynor was doing his best to keep his prize witness happy, even though he suspected that he would later have to “crucify him.” 10For his part, Dasch felt fine, apart from some “constipation,” which he attributed to the nervous tension of the past few weeks. 11

By Tuesday morning, the fourth day of Dasch’s interrogation, Traynor and the other agents had squeezed out of him most of the details directly relating to the plot. They listened intently as he described plans to send over more teams of saboteurs. One such team, scheduled to arrive in “September or October,” would probably be led by Dempsey, the pugnacious little boxer with the squashed-in nose who dropped out of sabotage school early on. But Dasch could provide few details about what these groups would do.

He was much more expansive when asked questions about his favorite topic, American propaganda to Germany. He described how he would get “mad as a dog” listening to American radio broadcasts that “called the German people Nazis.” 12The way Dasch saw it, American broadcasters were playing into the hands of Nazi propagandists who continually accused America of seeking the destruction of the entire German nation, not just the Nazi regime.

Occasionally, Dasch veered off into a subject that was of little interest to his interrogators, who were focused almost exclusively on the nuts and bolts of the sabotage plot. Before leaving Berlin, he had been sitting in Kappe’s office when a German intelligence officer gave a vivid, harrowing account of the mass execution of 35,000 Jews in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev. According to the officer, the Jews were rounded up in groups of two or three hundred people, ordered to dig a huge pit in the ground, and then shot in the back of the head by S.S. officers so that their bodies tumbled into the pit. Dasch recalled that the officer “laughingly remarked that the trigger finger of the executing officers [often] became tired,” in which case they were replaced by fresh executioners.

“I sat there on my little chair in the corner, my stomach turned. I didn’t know what to do for a moment. I thought they were the dirtiest bastards on earth.” 13After the intelligence officer left the room, Dasch said he turned to Kappe, and remarked, “For Christ sake, this is an awful war and this is an awful way to kill people.” Kappe rebuked him for being “chicken-hearted.” “What kind of a German are you? We Germans have one mission, which is to kill all the Jews.”

The FBI agents changed the subject. They had little time for Nazi atrocity stories. In retrospect, it is evident that Dasch had just given them an accurate description of the early days of the Holocaust.

FBI AGENTS had been following Kerling since Tuesday afternoon, when he met Leiner at Pennsylvania Station. They had obtained Leiner’s name and address from Dasch’s handkerchief, so it was a simple matter of waiting to see if he would contact anyone answering Kerling’s description. They were soon rewarded.

That evening, the G-men followed Kerling to Lexington and Forty-fourth Street, where he entered a bar. He was soon joined by two other men. One of these men was Werner Thiel, who had been named by Dasch as a member of the Florida group of saboteurs. The other was Thiel’s closest friend in the United States, Anthony Cramer, a longtime Bund member devoted to the Nazi cause. Later the FBI found letters written from Cramer to Thiel around the time of Pearl Harbor, while Thiel was back in Germany, denouncing the “Jewish cabal” that ran America and poking fun at Americans for thinking “too little with their brains and too much with their spinal cords.” 14

The agents watched Kerling as he chatted with Thiel and Cramer and then left the bar, at around 10 p.m., heading north on Lexington Avenue, apparently in preparation for his meeting with his wife. They allowed him to pace up and down for a few minutes, and then arrested him, bundling him into a Bureau car and driving him downtown to the federal courthouse in Foley Square.

Back at the bar, Thiel was observed passing a money belt to Cramer which, the agents later learned, contained about $4,000. The G-men permitted Thiel and Cramer to spend another hour and a half together, following the two men as they walked down the street for coffee and pie. They arrested Thiel shortly after he said goodbye to Cramer.

THE INTERROGATION of the two saboteurs began soon after midnight and continued all night. In Connelley’s absence, the interrogations were supervised by the acting special agent in charge of the New York office, Thomas J. Donegan, a tough Irish cop with little patience for prevarication. Donegan summoned Kerling to his office at 1:55 a.m., and sat down with him on the settee.