Glenn Beck - Miracles and Massacres - True and Untold Stories of the Making of America

The caravan that carried him included six police motorcycles, an army truck packed with machine-gun-bearing soldiers, two vans with soldiers on the running boards, another truck, and more motorcycles. Along the procession, thousands of onlookers shouted lines like “there go the spies” and “Nazi rats.”

When George walked into Room 5235, where he would be tried for war crimes, he expected to find something that looked like a courtroom. Instead, he found a long and narrow area of bland office space that had once been a classroom. It sat along a hallway easily closed off from the rest of the building. Glass doors connecting other corridors were boarded up and watched by armed guards. The room’s windows were covered in black curtains to preserve secrecy, and as George looked around, he was surprised to see that there were no members of the press. He badly wanted to tell his story to the public, but he was beginning to wonder if powerful people in the U.S. government had something else in mind.

No sooner had the commission begun to swear in the officers of the court than a six-foot, five-inch-tall colonel rose to speak. He wore a green, loose-fitting Class A uniform and spoke with a soft country drawl. The colonel had a Harvard law degree and a skillful courtroom manner. He was George’s best hope.

“This entire proceeding is invalid and unconstitutional,” said Colonel Kenneth Royall, who also represented the other seven defendants. “In 1866, the Supreme Court was clear. Civil courts have jurisdiction when they are open in the territory in which we are now located.”

George, for the first time since his arrest, began to get his hopes up. Perhaps, he thought, the commission would be dissolved on its very first day.

After a lengthy discussion and a short recess, the general in charge of the commission ruled on his attorney’s plea: “The commission does not sustain the objection of the defense. Proceed.”

The general then read the charges against them—espionage and sabotage—and when his name was called, George stood up, looked at the presiding general, and answered the charges with the same plea as the other defendants.

“Not guilty.”

Hyde Park, New York

Sunday, July 12, 1942

“What should be done with them?” the president asked his aide. The tribunal had not yet decided the saboteurs’ guilt or sentences, but the president was thinking ahead.

His aide wondered, but only for a moment, if the president was considering clemency.

FDR turned back to his aide and clarified his question. “Should they be shot or hanged?”

United States Supreme Court

Washington, D.C.

Wednesday, July 29, to Thursday, July 30, 1942

The spectators in the packed impromptu courtroom sat in rapt silence as Colonel Royall rose before them. Like the colonel, everyone there—including J. Edgar Hoover, and the gentleman beside him, the associate director of the FBI, Clyde Tolson—believed the argument that Colonel Royall was about to make would be the difference between life and death for his clients.

“Mr. Chief Justice,” Royall began, “and may it please the court.”

Royall had challenged the authority of the military tribunal, which had not yet rendered its verdict, all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States. For three days, Royall quoted from the court’s precedents and appealed to its highest ideals. Citing a seventy-six-year-old case called Ex Parte Milligan , Royall explained to the justices that Abraham Lincoln had attempted to try a southern sympathizer in a military tribunal. The defendant had been arrested in Indiana in 1864, and the Supreme Court had ruled it was unconstitutional to convene a military tribunal in a territory where the civil courts were open.

When it was the prosecution’s turn, Attorney General Biddle approached the podium. “The United States and the German Reich are now at war,” he told the Court. “That seems to be the essential fact on which this case turns and to which all our arguments will be addressed.” He argued that the “Indiana of 1864” bore no resemblance to the “East Coast of today.” Modern war is “fought on the total front, on the battlefields of joined armies, on the battlefields of production, and on the battlefields of transportation and morale, by bombing, the sinking of ships, sabotage, spying, and propaganda.”

Speaking on behalf of the commander in chief, Biddle told the court, “Our whole East Coast is a theater of operations in substantially the same sense as the North Atlantic or the British Isles.”

Countering that Biddle’s notion of “total war” was broad enough to cover any crime by any person committed anywhere in wartime, Royall did his best to fight back. There must be some limit to Biddle’s theory, he said, “or we have very few constitutional guarantees left when we go to war.”

Royall could tell from the justices’ cold reception and hostile questions that he was losing. But he was unaware of something even more dismal: Some of them had already made up their minds. As Justice Felix Frankfurter told his colleagues behind closed doors, Royall’s clients were “damned scoundrels” and “low-down, ordinary, enemy spies who, as enemy soldiers, have invaded our country and therefore could immediately have been shot by the military when caught in the act of invasion.”

Justice Frankfurter did not plan to tie the president’s hands. This was war.

Washington, D.C., Jail

Saturday, August 8, 1942

9:00 A.M.

The clanging of the keys woke George up from a nap. He hadn’t been sleeping well at night ever since the Supreme Court had publicly denied his appeal and sent the case back to the military tribunal. Brief, restless naps were his best chance to sleep.

The provost marshal entered his cell—with a stern look on his face. Despite all of the disappointments and betrayals he’d experienced over the previous months, George still expected to be told that he was a free man; that the tribunal and, in fact, the country, had come to its senses and realized that he was not a spy or a saboteur; he was a hero.

“George John Dasch,” the marshal began, “I am here on behalf of the government of the United States of America to inform you that you have been found guilty of espionage and sabotage and sentenced to thirty years in prison.”

George, arms flailing, began rambling about his family, words sputtering out of his mouth faster than he could control them. The provost marshal turned and left. He couldn’t understand what the convicted spy was saying and, like many before him, he really didn’t care.

• • •

The provost marshal preferred the reaction of Peter Burger, whom he found lying in bed reading a magazine. When told he would spend the rest of his life in prison, Pete looked up, said, “Yes, sir,” and went back to reading the Saturday Evening Post .

• • •

The other six defendants were not so lucky. The provost marshal entered each of their cells and recited the same line: “You have been found guilty of espionage and sabotage and your sentence is death. Your execution is scheduled for later today.”

Among the six who received that news was Herbie Haupt, a twenty-two-year-old American citizen, who had recently written a letter from prison to his parents in Chicago.

Please don’t judge me too hard.

While I was in Germany I worried night and day wondering how you were getting along. I tried to get work in Germany but I could not, and when they told me that they had chosen me to go back to the United States you don’t know how happy I was. I counted the days and hours until I could see you again and probably help you.

Dear Mother, I never had any bad intentions. I did not know what a grave offense it is to come here the way I did in wartime. They are treating me very well here, as good as can be expected.