Michael Dobbs - Saboteurs

Dasch signaled his dismay at the way he was being treated by becoming surly and uncooperative. Hoover felt that his initial 254-page “confession” was too candid and unwieldy to be used in court, and wanted him to agree to a summary prepared by FBI agents. But Dasch refused to sign the new document, saying it was “too cold and bare” and left out many important details. 25Instead, he penned a rambling twelve-page letter, depicting himself as “little Geo. J. Dasch” battling impersonal, bureaucratic forces on both sides of the Atlantic. 26

“I came to this country not as a foe, but as an ally, ready and anxious to do my very best in helping to defeat the present government of Germany,” he wrote. “One thing I could not foresee was the way I was to be received after arriving in the U.S.A. I had all reason to believe that I would be greeted with open arms, befriended as an ally.” Instead, “I was not only thrown into jail but also photographed like a criminal.” He explained his change of heart by arguing that he did not want to expose his relatives in the United States to the “risk of losing their jobs” if he was convicted as a Nazi spy. Above all, he refused to be party to “a lie.”

Any good soldier carries his flag proudly to the battle. I always wanted to be a good soldier, a soldier that carries his flag openly, unashamed into a battle for rightfulness, into the battle to free these poor people of Europe regardless of race, religion, or nationality. Just because I’m so deeply convinced that the battle I pray to take part in is for a just cause makes me proud to carry my flag into the open. Let them rotten gangsters [the Nazis] know that poor little me was able to beat to the punch by not only exposing their rotten plans to the people of the U.S.A. but by coming out in the open and fight with all my knowledge, all that I’ve observed, all the trickeries I’ve learned from them. I do not fear the loss of my beloved ones over there, for mother told, to go right ahead. Their lives rest in the hands of God…

Dasch “wants to be a martyr,” Connelley complained. 27

FRANCIS BIDDLE had the reputation of being the liberal ornament in FDR’s war cabinet. He was descended from a long line of Philadelphia aristocrats, and was married to a well-known poet, Katherine Garrison Chapin. His friends included writers, intellectuals, foreign diplomats—a representative cross-section of the Great and the Good. Some Roosevelt intimates regarded him as too effete and soft to make an effective attorney general during a time of war. The saboteur case was his opportunity to prove them wrong.

The president himself enjoyed ribbing Biddle for his commitment to civil liberties. A few months earlier, over lunch in the cabinet room of the White House, he had played a practical joke on his chief law enforcement officer. Putting on his most serious and solemn face, he said he planned to suspend freedom of speech for the duration of the war, and wanted Biddle to draft a suitable proclamation. “It’s a tough thing to do, but I’m convinced it’s absolutely necessary and I want to announce it in this speech we are working on now.” 28

The other people in the room, who were in on the presidential joke, sat silently as Biddle rose to the bait and passionately defended the right of Americans to express themselves freely, even in a time of war. As he paced back and forth, the attorney general got more and more worked up, making a fervent plea for Roosevelt to reconsider. Biddle’s tirade went on for some five minutes before the other lunch guests burst out laughing.

Now that the Nazi saboteurs were under lock and key, Biddle was as eager as any of his colleagues to make an example of them. Like Roosevelt, he felt they should be tried by military tribunal. It would be difficult to prove a case of attempted sabotage in a civilian court: Dasch and his colleagues had not even gone back to collect the bomb-making equipment cached on the beaches, much less blown anything up. According to civilian law, “if a man buys a pistol, intending murder, that is not an attempt at murder.” 29Legal experts at the War Department believed that a U.S. district court would sentence the saboteurs to a maximum of two years in prison and a fine of $10,000 for “conspiracy to commit a crime against the United States.” 30Under military law, they could be charged with violating the rules of war by crossing the front line in civilian clothes with hostile intent, an offense that carried the death penalty.

Not only was Biddle prepared to hand the saboteurs over to the military authorities; he wanted to prosecute the case himself, a highly unusual step for an attorney general. He was afraid that lawyers for the saboteurs might invoke the ancient tradition of habeas corpus, a procedure that could send the case to the Supreme Court. If this happened, there was a serious risk of army prosecutors messing things up. He was worried that the judge advocate general of the army, Major General Myron Cramer, had limited legal experience and had never appeared before the Supreme Court.

“We have to win in the Supreme Court, or there will be a hell of a mess,” Biddle warned Roosevelt. 31

“You’re damned right, Mr. Attorney General.”

Biddle’s desire to prosecute the case himself was strongly opposed by the secretary of war. A stickler for regular procedures, Stimson thought the trial should be handled as a “routine matter” by the military, with as little fanfare as possible. He had a low opinion of his cabinet rival, whom he regarded as both weak and vain. Already upset by Hoover’s headline-grabbing news conference, Stimson suspected that Biddle had also fallen victim to “the bug of publicity.” 32He told him it was “infra dig” for the attorney general to appear in a case of “such little national importance.”

But Biddle insisted on leading the prosecution team at the trial. Reluctantly, Stimson let him have his way.

NEWS OF the saboteur debacle reached Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair in eastern Prussia as he was preparing a new offensive in the Crimea. In the early morning hours of Sunday, June 28, Berlin time, American radio stations started carrying reports of the arrest of all the participants in Operation Pastorius. The detail contained in the reports—accurate descriptions of the bomb-making equipment, the names of the V-men, as well as an account of how they had received extensive training at a sabotage school outside Berlin—left no room for doubt that the operation had been a complete fiasco.

The Führer was livid. He summoned the Abwehr chiefs, Canaris and Lahousen, to appear at Wolfsschanze the following Tuesday. Once again, they took a military plane from Berlin to Rastenburg, and then a staff car through the woods to Hitler’s military headquarters. That afternoon, Hitler subjected them to one of his most withering tirades, complaining that the Americans had achieved a huge propaganda victory. The only possible quibble with the American account was that some of the sabotage objectives, such as the targeting of the Hell Gate Bridge in New York, had been misrepresented or exaggerated.

Canaris tried to shift the blame onto the Nazi Party, arguing that the saboteurs had not been “trained Abwehr agents,” but Nazi loyalists selected by the party. This only made Hitler more angry.

“Why didn’t you use Jews for that?” he yelled at the stocky admiral. 33Even though the Holocaust was already well under way, Hitler still thought he could force Jews to do his dirty work. Canaris, who was beginning to doubt the Führer’s sanity, would later use Hitler’s remark as an excuse for recruiting a few Jewish agents into the Abwehr, thereby saving them from the death camps.

The commander in chief of the submarine fleet, Admiral Dönitz, was also infuriated by the news from America. He had little confidence in either the Abwehr or the Nazi Party’s Ausland Institut, which had screened the agents in the first place. He had opposed the use of his U-boats for transporting saboteurs, and had only agreed to Operation Pastorius after being assured by the Abwehr that the V-men were all “high-class intelligence agents.” 34This was obviously not the case, and Dönitz angrily withdrew his consent for follow-up operations.