Michael Dobbs - Saboteurs

Soon Burger was feeling nostalgic for prison. In an October 1948 letter to Hoover from the southern German town of Würzburg, he described scrounging for food from garbage cans, and doing without winter clothes, underwear, and shoes. He was sharing a room fifteen feet by ten feet with his sister and brother-in-law. His entire prison savings of $250 had been converted into German marks at a very unfavorable exchange rate, and were now worth less than a carton of cigarettes. His wife, Bettina, had disappeared into the maw of the Russian concentration camp system. He was interrogated by German denazification courts, and was “pushed around by anyone who feels like it.” 27

Dasch, meanwhile, had crossed illegally into the Russian zone in October 1948, exactly as the Atlanta prison warden had predicted. 28His motives for leaving the American zone were not so much ideological as personal. He wanted to collect affidavits from people he had known during the war, testifying to his anti-Nazi credentials, as part of his campaign to secure a full rehabilitation in the United States. By telling his story to the Russians, he might also be able to secure a measure of revenge for the way American authorities had treated him. The Cold War was beginning to heat up, and Dasch believed Moscow might be interested in exploiting his story for propaganda purposes. But the Soviets soon tired of their difficult guest, and ordered the East German secret police to keep a close watch on him. “We are firmly convinced that this man is an American agent,” a supervisor noted in Dasch’s secret police file. “He should not be permitted to move freely.” 29After debriefing him fully, and holding out false promises of a job, the Soviets expelled him back to the American zone in January 1949.

“Everybody mistrusts me,” Dasch complained to acquaintances before leaving Berlin.

THE FBI tried to track down the masterminds of Operation Pastorius after the war ended, but U.S. government interest in the case was almost exhausted by the time Dasch and Burger returned to Germany. The Bureau formally closed its investigation of Walter Kappe and his associates in December 1946. This created a strange anomaly. The men who sent the Nazi saboteurs to America were able to go free, while the men who betrayed the operation to the American authorities were kept in prison for another sixteen months.

In December 1948, eight months after he returned to Germany, Burger was surprised to wander into a U.S. government office in Stuttgart, and come face to face with Kappe’s right-hand man, Reinhold Barth, one of his instructors at the Quenz Lake sabotage school. He did some investigating, and found out that Barth had used his excellent knowledge of English and background with the Long Island Rail Road to get a job as a U.S. Army liaison officer with the German railway system. The impoverished, jobless Burger—who had received lessons from Barth in blowing up American railroads—was chagrined to learn that his former instructor occupied a “splendid office” in Stuttgart and was on the U.S. government payroll.

This was too much for even the phlegmatic Burger to take. “You will see the humor in the situation,” he wrote Hoover. 30While Burger found it “impossible to make a living,” Barth had a job that allowed him to monitor the movement of U.S. troops and military supplies all over Germany. If he wanted to carry out acts of sabotage against the United States, the former Abwehr official was now in an ideal position to do so.

Burger told everybody he could about Barth’s dubious past—the FBI, military intelligence, the U.S. occupation authorities—but no one was interested. It was difficult to find Germans who spoke good English with as much expertise in their field as Barth. Operation Pastorius belonged to the past. A new Germany was rising from the ashes of history.

IN THE fall of 1950, Dasch was struggling to come to terms with a lifetime of soaring dreams and bitter defeats. He was forty-seven years old, and he had failed at practically every endeavor he had ever undertaken. His disappointments ran the full arc of the ideological spectrum. He was raised as a Catholic, only to be thrown out of seminary; he pursued the American dream but left America bankrupt and disillusioned; he came to see Hitler as a savior but then turned against him; he was selected to lead a sabotage expedition but betrayed his own men; he dreamed of using the money he had been given for Operation Pastorius to lead a propaganda war against Nazism, only to be rebuffed by the Americans; he offered his services to the Soviets as a lecturer and writer, but was thwarted in that dream too.

He now divided his time between writing petitions to Washington for his readmission to the United States, a totally futile effort, and trying to earn enough money to survive from day to day. Most days, he could be found standing in a busy shopping street in Mannheim, a German city south of Frankfurt, hawking wool to housewives from a collapsible table covered by an umbrella.

One day, Dasch was walking through the streets of Mannheim when he came across someone who looked very familiar. The middle-aged man was gaunt and disheveled, but the outlines of his fleshy jowls and thick bull neck were still quite visible. He was balder than Dasch remembered, and he waddled rather than walked. It was Walter Kappe.

Kappe seemed startled to see his former agent, and shivered a little as he looked at him. Ever talkative, Dasch invited him to visit his “store,” but Kappe showed no interest in conversation, and soon slipped back into the crowds. “He was surprised and shaky like hell,” Dasch recalled. 31

Since the end of the war, Kappe had lived on the lam, convinced that the Americans were hunting him down. 32He enjoyed the conspiratorial life, holding meetings in the forest with former associates and members of his family. He later changed his name to König, and got a job with the British army as a personnel officer. When he met Dasch on the street, he was still running away from the Americans, even though they had lost interest in him.

One of the most puzzling aspects of Operation Pastorius is why the Nazi spymasters placed so much trust in Kappe, and why Kappe in turn put so much trust in Dasch. For all the energy that he had displayed as a leader of the German-American Bund, the affable, fun-loving Kappe was a terrible judge of men. By selecting Dasch to lead the first team of saboteurs to land in America, he practically guaranteed the failure of the sabotage operation.

Part of the answer to the conundrum probably lies in Nazi bureaucratic politics. Kappe wore a gold button in his lapel, meaning that he joined the Nazi Party long before it achieved political power. He rose to prominence as a Nazi propagandist in America, which meant that his enemies were in America, rather than in Germany. His personal failings were largely unknown to his fellow bureaucrats at the Nazi Party’s Ausland Institut in Berlin, which enthusiastically supported his plan for a sabotage operation in the United States and lobbied for it with Hitler.

Dasch was adept at playing on Kappe’s vanity and taste for high living. In Berlin, he plied Kappe with gifts of wine and rum and flattered him shamelessly, in addition to impressing his boss with his intimate knowledge of American ways. 33In return, Kappe brushed aside criticism of Dasch from the other V-men. By the time the saboteurs reached the French port of Lorient, where Dasch lost his identity papers, Kappe had probably realized his mistake. By then, however, it was too late for him to get rid of Dasch without exposing himself to ridicule and jeopardizing the entire operation. All he could do was hope for the best.

During the seventeen-day submarine voyage, Dasch spent much of his time lying in his bunk worrying that the captain of U-202 would receive a message from navy headquarters ordering him to return to Lorient. He was convinced that Kappe suspected him of planning to turn traitor. But his luck held, and the message never came.