Michael Dobbs - Saboteurs

Kappe decided that Burger and Haupt could keep their own names as they were naturalized American citizens and would therefore arouse less suspicion than German immigrants. Burger would pretend to be a Jewish refugee who had spent time in a Nazi concentration camp. His name sounded vaguely Jewish anyway. During his time in the hands of the Gestapo, he had met many German Jews, so it would not be difficult to come up with supporting details for this story. Burger wanted to know whether he should pose as an Orthodox or Reform Jew. Since he knew nothing about Jewish religious ceremonies, Kappe and Dasch decided he would be better off as a Reform Jew.

Haupt would simply keep his old identity as a German-American boy brought up in Chicago who had run off to Mexico on a lark, to avoid getting married to a pregnant girlfriend. If questioned, he would say he had spent the last year in Mexico, and deny that he had been anywhere near Germany. The only problem was that he had failed to register for the draft before he left home, even though he was of draft age. His superiors decided that when he got back to Chicago he would go to the local draft board and clear the matter up. In the meantime, he would be issued a false draft card in the name of Lawrence Jordan, a young man he had once known in Chicago.

The other men would variously claim to be Polish, Lithuanian, and even Portuguese. They would have jobs requiring very little documentation, such as painter, dishwasher, or farmhand, which were not too far from their actual occupations. Because Schmidt spoke English with a Swedish accent and had a vaguely Scandinavian appearance, he would pose as a Swede, Jerry Swensen.

Kappe cross-examined the men on their new identities, firing off questions like “Where was your father born?” “What schools did you attend?” and “Where were you last week?” 31

Often, the stories would then begin to fall apart. That is what happened with the slow-witted and unimaginative Heinck. Because Heinck’s English was not that good, Dasch had suggested he pose as Henry Kaynor, the son of a Polish coal miner from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. His cover story was that he left Wilkes-Barre at the age of fifteen after his mother died, working in a series of Polish restaurants.

“How do you spell Wilkes-Barre?” Kappe asked Heinck one evening in the classroom.

Heinck—who had never left New York during his thirteen years in the United States—was stumped. Although he made a valiant attempt to spell the name of the town where he supposedly grew up, it was clear he either was lying or was illiterate.

“You’ve done a poor job,” Kappe scolded Dasch. “You must get the boys together and go over their stories so there are no more holes.”

Dasch promised to create better stories for the men as soon as they got to America.

AS THE most committed Nazi among the saboteurs, Edward Kerling prided himself on his optimism and positive outlook. “This war is won for us already,” he liked to boast to anybody who would listen. 32“With these soldiers, we can’t lose.” He felt America had been tricked into going to war with Germany by “a small group of Jews,” and did not really have the will to fight. 33But now, perhaps for the first time since returning to Germany, Kerling began to have doubts about German invincibility. Halfway through the course, he went to Kappe with a series of complaints about his fellow trainees.

“These fellows you’ve got to do this job, they’re useless. Some of them haven’t been in America for years. Some of them are mentally unfit.”

“Who do you think is unfit?”

Take Dasch, for example, Kerling replied. You only had to be around Dasch a little while to have doubts about him. 34Dasch was the kind of person who seemed to take pleasure in doing the opposite of what was expected. His greatest passion was playing cards: whenever they got any time off, Dasch could be relied upon to organize a game of pinochle. He seemed uninterested in the sabotage lessons. 35He would arrive at classes late and affect a superior air. In conversation, he talked like a true Nazi. But there were times when everybody else snapped to attention and shouted “Heil Hitler” and Dasch would just smirk and keep his hands in his pockets.

Or Burger. Kerling conceded that Burger was an excellent student. Unlike Dasch, he paid great attention in class, memorizing the different formulas and taking elaborate care with the experiments. On the other hand, there were rumors that Burger had spent time in a concentration camp, which raised questions about his political reliability.

Kerling went on down his list. Neubauer had “splinters on top of his brain” as a result of the injuries he had suffered in Russia. 36If the pieces of metal moved around, he would have to go to the hospital, and his cover would be blown immediately, endangering everybody. Zuber had also served on the Russian front and was now “a mental case.” He knew little about America, having been away for five or six years, and had expressed a marked antipathy to sabotage work. Then there was Thiel, whose knowledge of English was very limited, and Haupt, who could barely look at a pretty girl without chasing after her. Finally, there was the man known as Scottie, who drank so heavily that he was a danger to the mission.

Kappe had heard enough. He told Kerling that he had checked Dasch and Burger out carefully, and had confidence in both men. In fact, Dasch had been Kappe’s first recruit, plucked out of the foreign broadcast monitoring section of the German foreign ministry the previous year. The previous December, he had written a long memorandum outlining various kinds of sabotage work and suggesting possible targets in America. 37The memorandum had greatly impressed Kappe, who asked Dasch to help him go through the Nazi Party files of German-American returnees to find suitable candidates for a sabotage mission. Dasch’s intimate knowledge of American ways was also a major plus, in Kappe’s view. For example, he was thoroughly familiar with baseball, in contrast to Kerling, who had never been to a ball game during his eleven years in America. 38

Kappe knew that Dasch had difficulty applying himself to the lessons on sabotage techniques. 39One of the instructors had complained about this as well. When Kappe asked Dasch what was the matter, his protégé had replied that he was preoccupied with his responsibilities as group leader. He did not have to know all the technical details. It would be sufficient if his subordinates learned their lessons perfectly. Kappe accepted the explanation.

As for Burger, Kappe conceded that he had been in trouble with the Gestapo, but that did not mean that he was disloyal. In order to understand Burger, you had to understand the history of the fratricidal split between the storm troopers—also known as Sturmabteilung, or S.A.—and the S.S., which had come to a head soon after his return to America in 1933. Burger had been a follower of Ernst Röhm, the S.A. leader and one of Hitler’s closest associates in the early days of the Nazi movement. The Führer had concluded that Röhm had become too powerful, and was threatening to undermine the new regime with his bullying storm trooper ways and wild rhetoric about the betrayal of the “German revolution.” Tactics that were appropriate for the period when the Nazis were struggling to gain power were counterproductive now that Hitler was master of Germany. So he ordered the S.S. to crush the storm troopers, murdering Röhm and hundreds of his top aides during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934.

Burger had been fortunate to escape with his life. He had ended up in a concentration camp after making a trip to Poland on behalf of a Nazi Party political science institute, during which he had submitted an incautiously worded report about conditions there. But now he wanted a chance for political rehabilitation, and Kappe was willing to give it to him. Burger, Kappe thought, was a good soldier.