Michael Dobbs - Saboteurs

From this point onward, there was no longer any pretense that Dasch was a free man. FBI agents chronicled his every move. They noted in a logbook that the prisoner “urinated at exactly 11:40 p.m.,” while en route to detention cell number three on the thirtieth floor of the federal courthouse, next to the cells of Burger, Quirin, Heinck, Kerling, and Thiel. “Appears a little depressed.” 26

THURSDAY WAS the day that Herbie Haupt was meant to start work at his old job at the Simpson Optical Company. But that morning he complained to his mother of pains in his hip and heart and said he could not report to work. 27He had something more important than work on his mind. Having registered for the draft the previous Monday, he needed to find a way to avoid being drafted.

He knew just the person to help him: an old Bund acquaintance named William Wernecke. The Wernecke family owned a horse farm outside the city where Herbie liked to take his girlfriends riding. Wernecke had amassed a large collection of rifles, shotguns, dueling pistols, and several thousand rounds of ammunition. Before Haupt left for Mexico, he and Wernecke used to practice their marksmanship at the farm dressed in the Bund uniform of black trousers, brown shirts, and black ties. Wernecke’s ambition was to be a storm trooper following a Nazi victory in the United States, but his views were so extreme that he was expelled from the Bund for factionalism.

A draft dodger himself, Wernecke was more than willing to help other Nazi sympathizers escape compulsory military service, which had been introduced in the United States in November 1940, more than a year before Pearl Harbor. His techniques included feigning deafness, rheumatism, and heart trouble, and joining an obscure religion, the “Allied Christian Management Army,” whose guiding tenet was a refusal to go to war for reasons of conscience.

The alliance between Haupt and Wernecke was largely one of convenience. Wernecke considered Herbie a “gigolo” and a “showoff,” and was jealous of his success in picking up girls. 28For his part, the fun-loving Haupt had little interest in the kind of political fanaticism espoused by Wernecke. His own attraction to Nazism was more aesthetic than political: he looked good in a Bund uniform. Since he did not fully trust Wernecke, Haupt avoided any mention of his trip to Germany. But he did say that he had been in Mexico City, and that he had put in a good word for his friend with the German consulate. This pleased Wernecke, who was afraid that his services to the Nazi cause had gone unnoticed in the Fatherland.

Trailed by an FBI car, the two men went first to the office of Wernecke’s doctor, a Nazi sympathizer named Fred Otten. “We’ll fix him up,” Otten declared cheerfully, after Wernecke introduced his “sick” friend. The doctor immediately diagnosed high blood pressure, “probably due to nervousness,” and agreed that Haupt should get a cardiograph. He gave him some pills to help him sleep and then wrote out a prescription, advising against “any undue physical exertion.” 29

That evening, Wernecke invited Haupt for a drive in the country. Wernecke’s car was a black Hudson sedan virtually identical to the model used by the FBI. As they drove along a deserted country road, they noticed another car just like theirs a few hundred yards behind. When they stopped, the other car also stopped. They turned around and drove back alongside the other Hudson. Two men in dark suits were sitting in the front. Soon afterward, the second car turned off the road. Haupt and Wernecke breathed a sigh of relief. They decided they were mistaken. Nobody was following them.

The following day, Friday, Haupt resumed his draft-dodging quest. The doctor’s prescription was only a temporary solution. He needed something more definitive to get a deferment. Wernecke suggested nitroglycerin pills, three of which would cause the heart to beat rapidly for a few minutes, long enough to mislead a cardiograph. Herbie ordered six pills from a pharmacy on the way to Grant Hospital, and was taken aback to discover that they were only sold in batches of a hundred. The good news was that a hundred pills only cost thirty-nine cents. A worthwhile investment, he decided.

By themselves, the pills were sometimes insufficient to significantly affect the results of the cardiograph, Wernecke explained. As Haupt was undergoing his examination, Wernecke stood behind the door, making frantic hand motions to signal his friend to hold his breath and beat his chest. Herbie was unable to beat his chest without alerting the nurse administering the cardiograph, but he did succeed in holding his breath. He paid his five-dollar fee and made arrangements to pick up the results the following day.

That left the religion option. Wernecke explained that founding one’s own religion was easy: with three or four like-minded people, you could even appoint your own ministers. Alternatively, Haupt could join the Allied Christian Management Army. 30While Herbie was in the bank changing some money, Wernecke went across the street to his church. He returned a short while later to say the “head man” was willing to help. His reasoning was simple. Since Roosevelt was “against God,” it was the church’s duty to help anyone who wanted to stay out of Roosevelt’s army. For a donation of $100, it would even be possible to ordain Haupt as a Bible student dating back to 1941. While not as cheap as nitroglycerin tablets, Wernecke’s religion was certainly worth considering.

BY SATURDAY morning, Hoover and Connelley decided that Haupt had been enjoying himself in Chicago for long enough. It was time to reel him in. They would deal with Neubauer later.

FBI agents had established a command post at 2231 North Fremont Street in a rented room on the first floor, with a view of the Haupt apartment directly opposite. They were waiting for Haupt as he came out of the house at 9:08 and climbed into his Pontiac sports coupe. They allowed him to drive one block south, in the direction of the Loop, and then one block west on Webster Avenue. As his car passed under the elevated station, they pulled him over. 31

At first, Haupt denied all knowledge of Operation Pastorius, although he admitted knowing Hermann Neubauer. He later conceded that he had arrived in America by U-boat, and had been part of a sabotage plot, but claimed he was planning to turn his seven comrades in to the FBI. “What took you so long?” the agents wanted to know. Haupt said he feared one of the other saboteurs might try to kill him if he betrayed the plot, so he decided to wait until they were all “in one place” where they could be easily rounded up by the FBI. Now that he was under arrest, it seemed obvious to Haupt what had happened.

“Peter Burger beat me to it,” he said bitterly. “I knew all the time he would turn us in.” 32

Burger, Haupt went on, had never hidden his hatred of the Gestapo for mistreating his wife and causing her to lose her baby. “He hates the Gestapo more than anything else on earth. He told me about the horrors he suffered in a concentration camp and the horrors he saw other people suffer.”

Haupt told the FBI agents about his meeting with Neubauer at the Chicago Theater, and said he believed Neubauer was registered at the Stevens Hotel, “under the name of Smith.” 33G-men promptly raided the luxury hotel overlooking Grant Park and Lake Michigan, but there was no sign of the eighth saboteur. Haupt then recalled that Neubauer had said something about moving to either the Sheridan Plaza or Edgewater Beach on the North Side. Dispatched to these hotels, agents immediately focused on “an individual using the name H. Nicholas” who had checked in to the Sheridan Plaza the day before. 34A search of his room turned up numerous items purchased in Jacksonville, Florida, and a Jacksonville–Chicago rail ticket.