Michael Dobbs - Saboteurs

“Tell us where the explosives are buried,” he demanded, pointing at a large map of Florida he had with him in his office.

Kerling denied any knowledge of explosives.

“Tell us about the submarine you came in.”

Kerling said he did not come to America in a submarine. He had come overland from Mexico.

“You dirty Nazi rat,” Donegan exploded. “I know you came in a submarine. You are a fool if you think that I am going to sit here and listen to that kind of story from you.” 15

What happened next is disputed. Kerling later claimed that Donegan reached across the settee, pulled his hair down until his head was in his lap, and punched him several times on the left side of the face. After a few minutes, a doctor came in and asked him how he was being treated. When Kerling complained that he had been struck in the face, Donegan took him outside the room, and asked in a menacing tone of voice, “Did I hit you?” Fearing another beating, Kerling replied, “No, you didn’t.” He then told the doctor that he wished to withdraw his complaint. The doctor pronounced him “fine.”

Thiel, who was interrogated after Kerling, would later tell a similar story. The only difference was that when the doctor asked whether he had been mistreated, he said right away that he had no complaints. “I thought there was no use telling the doctor that I was mistreated.” Donegan acknowledged using “strong language” with both Kerling and Thiel, but denied any physical abuse.

Neither saboteur got any sleep that night. Whenever it looked as if they were about to drop off, an FBI agent was in their face, asking questions and demanding answers. At first, Kerling replied with monosyllabic grunts, refusing to talk about Thiel until he knew that he was also in police custody. He also did his best to protect his wife and mistress. Slowly, however, they dragged the details out of him.

“What were you meant to do in the United States?”

“Let me answer those questions tomorrow.”

“We want to get this in general, not in detail. Just a few of these things now.”

“I gave you enough. That was the arrangement. You said you’d let me sleep for a while and talk later.”

“We must get a little more amplification than we have now.”

“I can’t think. What’s the use?”

“You want water or a cup of coffee?”

“No.”

“Where did you go to school then?”

“Brandenburg.”

“How many were in the school?”

“Nine. No, eleven.” 16

HERMANN NEUBAUER felt so lonely cooped up in his hotel room that he bought himself a bottle of rum for company, even though he did not much care for alcohol. Like Haupt, he had relatives in Chicago, including his father-in-law, a Republican precinct captain on the North Side. But he steered clear of his wife’s family, fearing that they might be under FBI observation.

On Tuesday evening, on the spur of the moment, Neubauer decided to take a chance and visit some old friends of his wife. Although he had never met Harry and Emma Jaques, he had seen quite a bit of Emma’s sister and brother-in-law in Germany. He trusted them not to give him away. They were simple people, first-generation German-Americans who had arrived in the United States in the mid-twenties. Harry worked as a painter and decorator.

“I guess it looks kind of funny for me, a stranger, to drop in on you when you don’t know me,” he told them, before announcing that he was the husband of Alma Wolf. 17Emma was dubious, as she had heard that Alma’s husband was in a hospital in Stuttgart, having been seriously wounded on the Russian front. To prove his identity, Neubauer displayed the scars on his leg and cheek.

The couple sat Neubauer down in a chromium chair in the living room and offered him beer and cigarettes. They talked about various shared friends, including Eddie Kerling and his wife, Marie. While Emma was in the kitchen fixing sandwiches, Neubauer told Harry that he had arrived on a submarine on a mission for the German government. Jaques cut him off, saying he did not want to hear any more.

He did, however, agree to look after two envelopes containing around $3,600, which he placed on the coffee table in their living room. After Neubauer finally left, around two in the morning, Harry and Emma carefully placed the money in a five-pound coffee can, hid it on a shelf in the pantry, and went to bed.

BY THE morning of Wednesday, June 24, the FBI had six of the eight Nazi saboteurs in custody. Only two remained at large: Haupt and Neubauer. Agents were keeping a twenty-four-hour watch on Haupt, and could arrest him at any time. The only reason for waiting was the belief he would lead them to Neubauer. Connelley reported to Hoover that he had fifteen places in Chicago under observation, including the home of Neubauer’s in-laws. That afternoon, the FBI would get its best chance of grabbing Haupt and Neubauer in one swoop.

The only sign of activity in the Haupt household that morning had been the 7:05 a.m. departure of Hans Haupt, dressed in a blue shirt and suspenders. Herbie was inside the house, sleeping off his marriage proposal to Gerda the night before. He emerged from the ground floor apartment at precisely 1 p.m. The surveillance team noted that he was wearing a light tan suit with a red V-for-Victory pin in the lapel, dark brown tie and matching pocket handkerchief, brown and white sports shoes, and the light brown straw hat he had purchased the day before. After “loitering” in front of his front gate for a few minutes, he entered a Checker cab, and headed toward the Loop, Chicago’s downtown district. 18

Haupt got out of the cab at the State-Lake Building, on the corner of State and Lake Streets opposite the Chicago Theater, and entered Liggett’s drugstore on the ground floor. FBI agent John Lynch supervised the surveillance operation from the lobby of the State-Lake Building, directly adjoining the drugstore. He could see “the subject” reflected in the shiny marble walls of the lobby: Haupt was sitting at the wooden lunch counter of the drugstore munching a sandwich. A second agent, James Berg, stood by the soda fountain, nonchalantly sipping a cup of coffee and stealing occasional glances at Haupt in a mirror. Agent Frank Meech stood on an elevated train platform with a commanding view of State Street. A fourth agent, Elmer Fletcher, sat in the FBI pursuit car around the corner on Lake Street.

At 1:35 p.m., Haupt came out of the drugstore’s revolving wooden door and walked slowly down State Street, which was lined with wooden huts and construction equipment for the building of a new subway. Lynch followed closely behind, and watched Haupt enter the Oxford Shirt Shop, two doors down from the drugstore. In accordance with standard FBI procedures, Lynch then checked to see if there were any rear exits from the shirt shop. He asked Berg to relieve him in front of the store to watch for Haupt’s reappearance. After Lynch established that there was only one way out of the store, he returned to his previous post.

Berg dropped into the store to check on Haupt on the pretext of purchasing a tie clasp. Although he could not see Haupt, he could hear a store clerk conversing with someone in a back room. An hour passed, then two hours. More agents arrived to reinforce Lynch and his men, but nobody resembling Haupt came out of the store. The subject had vanished.

Exactly how Haupt performed this disappearing act only became clear much later. In the few seconds that Lynch left the front of the shirt shop unobserved to confer with Berg, Haupt walked out the front door and crossed Lake Street to the Chicago Theater. As this was happening, Meech left his post on the El platform to take up a new one under the theater’s light-studded marquee. During the thirty seconds it took Meech to walk down from the El platform and reach the front of the movie palace, Haupt must have slipped into the theater.