Michael Dobbs - Saboteurs

WITHIN THE prison system, Burger was known as Special Prisoner A and Dasch as Special Prisoner B. As Nazi saboteurs who expressed their hatred of Nazism, they were anomalies, and it was difficult to deal with them fairly. The Bureau of Prisons wanted to send them to Alcatraz Island to protect them from Nazi sympathizers or an “overpatriotic American prisoner who might feel they got off too easily.” 16This alarmed the FBI, which feared that the harsh penal regime at Alcatraz would turn Dasch into a “mental case” and might cause Burger to attempt suicide.

Instead of Alcatraz, the two special prisoners were sent to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta in February 1943. It was an unhappy experience, particularly for Dasch. The prison psychiatrist diagnosed Dasch as “an obsessive, compulsive, neurotic personality type,” who frequently complained of “depressive trends, nervousness, insomnia, and vague pains.” 17During an interview on November 3, Dasch “cried and rung his hands. He repeatedly stated that he did not mind being in prison but that he was hurt by the way it was done; that he has terrific prejudice and anger and that he feels he cannot go on long this way.”

Dasch was disliked by prisoners and prison authorities alike. “He is a loquacious individual who likes to brag about his activities as an espionage agent and his connections with the Nazis,” reported the Atlanta prison warden, Joseph Sanford. 18“He goes out of his way to antagonize [other prisoners] by belittling their intelligence.” When his fellow inmates staged a prison rebellion in January 1945, they threatened to shove Dasch off the roof unless their demands were met. He was lucky to escape with his life after hours of patient negotiation.

Even Burger, who initially asked to be imprisoned with Dasch because he wanted company, soon began to tire of his endless chatter. By the end of the war, he had come to detest Dasch, and even threatened to kill him if he revealed information that could jeopardize the safety of his family back in Germany. 19Like Dasch, Burger felt aggrieved that the U.S. government had failed to make more use of his talents in the propaganda war against Nazi Germany. But he expressed his complaints more mildly, and retained the respect of everyone who dealt with him.

After the war ended, the Atlanta prison warden wrote a glowing testimonial for Burger, saying he had “cooperated with me and the institutional officials in every respect, and has courage equal to any man I have ever known.” 20Sanford considered Burger to be “straightforward,” “honest,” “diligent,” and “a walking encyclopedia” on the Nazi Party, deserving of better treatment from the United States than he received. By contrast, Sanford had “no confidence” in Dasch, whom he described as “a communist troublemaker” who would likely head for the Russian zone of Germany as soon as he was released.

One of the few people to feel at all sorry for Dasch was his old FBI handler, Duane Traynor, who was perhaps more aware than anybody else of the role he had played in rounding up the other saboteurs. When the war ended, Traynor wrote a letter to Hoover arguing in favor of a presidential pardon for both Dasch and Burger because of the help they had given to the FBI. “As you know,” he told Hoover, “I feel that I personally, and the Bureau as a whole, owe a moral obligation to Dasch.” 21

Traynor received a very cold reply from Hoover, who had long since decided that Dasch was both “communistically-inclined” and “a mental case.” “Your personal opinion… relative to the granting of consideration to Dasch,” the FBI director told his subordinate, “is, to say the least, ill-advised.”

For the time being, both Dasch and Burger would stay in prison.

ONE OF the lessons of the saboteur affair is that it is very difficult to fight a war and respect legal niceties at the same time. From the government’s point of view, much of the benefit of using a secret military commission to try the saboteurs was offset by the speculation surrounding the case and the publicity generated by the Supreme Court hearing. Roosevelt and his advisers believed that the release of any information on how the saboteurs were captured could reveal the porous state of America’s coastal defenses. Despite the secrecy, the Germans were fairly well informed about what happened to their agents on the basis of American press reports and the debate in the Supreme Court. Nazi leaders concluded while the trial was still going on that Dasch and Burger had turned traitor. 22

In retrospect, there was an obvious inconsistency in the way the government handled the saboteurs, as Eugene Rachlis pointed out in his 1961 book on the case, They Came to Kill. 23If Biddle was correct in arguing that America was engaged in “total war” and the saboteurs were “illegal combatants,” then why go to the bother of giving them even the pretense of a fair trial? To take Biddle’s argument to its logical conclusion, the saboteurs should have been arrested, tried, and sentenced in secret, with the press only being informed after the event, if at all. This, in fact, was the way similar cases were handled in Britain, the country where habeas corpus originated. Under British wartime regulations, the press was prohibited from publishing any uncensored information about enemy espionage activity. 24Had such a procedure been followed in the saboteur case, the Germans would truly have been left guessing about the reasons for the failure of Operation Pastorius.

If, on the other hand, Royall was correct in insisting that the saboteurs had legal rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, then surely those rights were flouted by the manner of their trial. The outcome was virtually predetermined, both in the military commission and in the Supreme Court. Rules of evidence that would apply to normal defendants, even before a military court-martial, were ignored. Justice Frankfurter was so prejudiced against the saboteurs that he called them “damned scoundrels” in a memorandum to his fellow justices. President Roosevelt, who appointed himself the court of final appeal for the saboteurs, decided at the outset that they were “as guilty as can be.”

After American soldiers landed in Normandy in June 1944, and fought their way through France and Germany, the U.S. government rethought its attitude toward high-profile trials for saboteurs. Now that American agents were routinely being sent behind enemy lines in civilian clothes, the U.S. Army did not want its own “unlawful belligerents” to suffer the fate of the Nazi saboteurs. A practical test of American attitudes came in November 1944, when two more German agents, William Colepaugh and Erich Gimpel, were landed by U-boat on the Maine coast near Mount Desert Island.

Like their predecessors, Colepaugh and Gimpel arrived with lavish funds—$60,000 in cash plus a cache of small diamonds—which they proceeded to spend away in New York nightclubs. As with the original saboteurs, one agent (Colepaugh) betrayed the other (Gimpel), and turned himself in to the FBI. On this occasion, however, the government decided to deal with them as quietly as possible. Anything resembling the 1942 trial “would be entirely too spectacular,” a Pentagon memorandum noted. “All the fanfare over the last trial is out of place now that thousands of our men are being killed from week to week. It should be on a routine, purely military basis.” 25With a minimum of publicity, a military commission sentenced the two agents to death, but immediately commuted their terms to life imprisonment.

PRESIDENT HARRY S. Truman finally agreed to pardons for Dasch and Burger in April 1948, and they were both deported to Germany. They arrived in Stuttgart handcuffed to one another, amid a blaze of press publicity, despite American assurances that everything would be done to ensure their “quiet absorption” into the German population. 26The country was ruined and it was practically impossible to find jobs. Many Germans regarded Dasch and Burger as traitors for sending their fellow agents to their deaths.