Michael Dobbs - Saboteurs

Quirin wrote to his wife Ann and daughter Rosie. “These are the last lines I can write to you. I should like to tell you that I have always loved you and that I came here to make a better life for you, my dear ones. But, unfortunately, God willed it otherwise… Tell Kappe or one of his people that George Dasch and Peter Burger betrayed us. Begin a new life and think of me often.” 16

“I only have a few hours left in this life,” Hermann Neubauer, the soldier wounded on the Russian front, told his parents. “I and my comrades are dying for you and for Germany. I know that our Führer will bring Germany to victory… When I heard my sentence I could not grasp it at first. But my nerves are strong enough. I am quite at ease now. Just as thousands of German men lay down their lives every day at the front, so also shall I die courageously as a German soldier.” 17

To his American wife, Alma, who had followed him back to Germany, Neubauer wrote, “Never thought they would take our life away. But as I write these lines I have control of my nerves again.” He had lived for Germany, and was going to die for Germany. “If it only would not hurt so much, it would not be so hard. But I shall try to be brave, and take it as a soldier… A priest is with me, and he will be with me to the last minute. So my Alma, chin up, because I want you to, be good and goodbye, until we may meet in a better world, may God bless you! I love you, Your Hermann.”

Eddie Kerling had the most to say in death, as he had in life. “I was not a good Catholic, but I believe in a God,” he told his parents. He permitted the Catholic priest who was with him to formally “reconcile” him to the Church by intoning the last rites. He wrote two other letters, this time in German, to his Nazi Party comrades and the wife he had repeatedly betrayed.

Marie, my wife—I am with you to the last minute! This will help me to take it as a German! Even the heaven out there is dark. It’s raining. Our graves are far from home, but not forgotten. Marie, until we meet in a better world! May God be with you. My love to you, my heart to my country.

After writing their letters, the men underwent final preparations for execution. These included the complete shaving of their heads, a bath, and a last meal, with wine. As Haupt was having his head shaved, he broke down and cried. Neubauer was “so nervous that he had difficulty in holding a cigarette.” Quirin was “calm and reserved during his preparation for the execution, although his hands were shaking slightly.” The other three men displayed no outward emotion at all.

At 10 a.m., Cox ordered that the condemned men be taken to the death cells, in another section of the prison. The walk was quite long, down a flight of stairs and along a hundred-yard corridor. A little procession formed for each prisoner, beginning with Haupt, the first in alphabetical order, and ending with Thiel. “A guard was at either side of each prisoner, a chaplain behind him, and behind the chaplain two guards carrying a litter—just in case,” Cox later wrote. “But there was no hesitancy on the part of any of the prisoners, nor any utterances, as they walked erect to their doom.” 19

OUTSIDE THE jail, the atmosphere was becoming ever more frenzied, with reporters trying to find out what was happening inside. Overnight, three American soldiers and a sailor had arrived at the jailhouse door and volunteered their services as a firing squad, explaining, “We want to see those Jerries die.” 20Guards turned them away. The journalists reported a succession of officials arriving at the jail, including Cox, the chaplains, and the city coroner.

The reporters had learned from friendly guards that the surest sign of an execution taking place would be the momentary dimming of lights in the rest of the jail, because of the sudden diversion of current to the electric chair. But they were deprived of even this source of information when, toward the end of the morning, all lights were turned off at the front of the jail facing the street.

To while away the waiting hours, the reporters fed ham sandwiches to a stray dog they named Jake, and exchanged folklore about the electric chair that would be used for the executions. 21“Old Sparky” had been installed in 1925, replacing the gallows as the standard method for carrying out executions in the District of Columbia, and had been used twenty-four times since then, most recently in 1941. At first, the chair had been stored in an alcove of the prison dining room, in full view of the inmates every time they had a meal. The sight had so sickened a previous attorney general that he ordered it removed to a new, specially constructed death wing of the jail.

Somehow, from jailhouse gossip, the reporters learned that there would be four executioners. 22The executioner and his chief assistant would receive $50 for each person put to death. Two more assistant executioners would receive half that amount, a total of $150 each. The total bill paid by the Justice Department for “confidential expenses” in connection with the trial—court transcripts, Supreme Court briefs, meals, electrocution services, and burial expenses—would come to $9,525.09.

It rained heavily all morning.

TWO PRISON officials escorted Haupt, the first saboteur to face the electric chair, to the execution chamber at 12:01 p.m. as the sound of an air raid siren wailed across the city. After his earlier crying fit, he had fully regained his composure and “walked to the chair like a real man,” a witness later recalled. 23He was strapped into the chair, and electrodes were applied to his head and his leg through a slit that had been cut in his trousers. Seated in a room next to the execution chamber, a dozen government witnesses could see Haupt through a darkened glass window, but he could not see them.

At 12:03, executioners applied two thousand volts of electricity to Haupt. When the current first hit him, he tightened up, raised his body, and turned slightly to the left. There were some further spasms but, after a minute or so, his body completely relaxed. At 12:11, the coroner walked over to the chair, and pronounced Haupt dead. Orderlies placed the body on a stretcher, covered it up with a sheet, and wheeled it out of the room. The next man, Heinrich Heinck, was then brought in.

It took just over an hour to complete all six executions. Only Kerling had any comment to make. As he was being led to the execution chamber from the death cell, he told his guards he was “proud to be a German” and would do the same thing again if given the opportunity.

The bodies were taken down to the basement. When the masks were removed from the men, one of the army witnesses noticed, their faces were “completely white” and “in a horribly contorted condition with their mouths open.” Guards loaded the bodies into ambulances and twenty steel-helmeted soldiers took positions outside the gates to hold back the crowd of the curious. Soon a grim cortège was winding its way through the damp streets, from the D.C. jail on the Anacostia River to Walter Reed Army Hospital in northwest Washington.

“They’re gone,” a bystander shouted out. 24

“It’s over!”

“The spies are dead!”

“Nothing to say, boys, nothing at all,” the coroner told reporters as he hurried to his car.

“Mum’s the word,” said General Cox.

THE OFFICIAL announcement of the executions—and the first public word of the verdicts of the military commission—came from White House press secretary Steve Early at 1:27 p.m. Reading from a typewritten sheet, annotated with Roosevelt’s handwriting, Early told reporters that “the sentences were carried out at noon today. Six of the prisoners have been executed. The other two have been confined to prison.” At the president’s insistence, he added, “the records in the eight cases will be sealed until the end of the war.” 25