On Monday morning, June 15, Dasch and Burger made their plans. Dasch would go to Washington, drop in on J. Edgar Hoover and tell him everything. Burger would wait at the hotel and pacify Heinck and Quirin.

Dasch was worried about contacting the FBI, however. During sabotage training, Kappe had boasted to his recruits that they would be safe in America because the Gestapo had infiltrated the FBI. To protect himself, Dasch called the FBI in New York. Agent Dean McWhorter answered the phone. Dasch said he had arrived from Germany the day before and had information for J. Edgar Hoover. He planned to deliver it in a couple of days, and he wanted the agent to alert Hoover.

McWhorter must have heard about the spy hunt, but he apparently did not connect it with the call. He asked Dasch to come to the FBI office, but Dasch said he needed to speak to Hoover personally, then hung up.

Now Dasch began working up his nerve to go to Washington. He chose an odd way to gain courage–he went to a waiter’s club he knew and played pinochle from Monday night until early Wednesday morning. Then he went back to his hotel and slept until midday. The next morning, he took a train for Washington.

That same day, Thursday, June 18, Edward Kerling and his team landed without incident on Ponte Verdra Beach, 25 miles southeast of Jacksonville. They buried their crates, walked to Route 1 and caught the Greyhound bus for Jacksonville. Within hours, all four were on trains–Kerling and Thiel bound for Cincinnati, Haupt and Neubauer for Chicago.

George Dasch arrived in Washington by midmorning, checked into the Mayflower Hotel and called the FBI. The agent he reached, Duane Traynor, thought it was another crank call but, on the outside chance it was somehow connected with the Amagansett investigation, he sent a man to pick up Dasch.

At the Justice Department, as Dasch later told the story, he was shunted from office to office, finally getting an audience with D.M. ‘Mickey’ Ladd, the man in charge of the spy hunt. Despite the news blackout, Ladd at first believed Dasch had somehow heard about the landing and was trying to cash in on it. Finally, Dasch dumped all of the money Kappe had given him on Ladd’s desk–$84,000 in all. Ladd became a believer.

Now Dasch repeated his request. He wanted to tell his story to Hoover. He fully believed he would be treated as a hero, perhaps even brought in to help make the arrests. Dasch did get to see J. Edgar Hoover, briefly, but he ended up telling his story, 254 pages of it, to Ladd and Traynor. He rambled on for 13 hours, beginning by revealing where Burger was staying.

Before he finished talking, FBI agents had staked out Burger’s hotel room. Burger led them to a clothing store, where he met Quirin and Heinck and the agents arrested all three men. Burger told the FBI he was in on Dasch’s surrender and intended to cooperate fully.

So much for the first team.

On June 22, Hoover proudly wrote President Franklin D. Roosevelt that the FBI ‘had already apprehended all members of the group which landed on Long Island,’ adding that he expected to have the rest in custody soon. He failed to mention that without Dasch’s unexpected surrender and confession the FBI might never have found the saboteurs. Roosevelt could have drawn only one conclusion from Hoover’s memo: that Hoover and his men had succeeded in tracking down the spies on their own.

The FBI had a little more trouble rounding up the second team, since Dasch knew only that both groups were supposed to meet in Cincinnati on July 4. The only help he could offer was the handkerchief that listed German contacts in America, written in invisible ink. Dasch could not remember how to bring out the script, but the FBI lab figured it out. Agents were then dispatched to watch all the contacts.

Edward Kerling, who was traveling with Werner Thiel, had gone to New York by way of Cincinnati. There, he had contacted a trustworthy friend, Helmut Leiner, one of the names on the handkerchief. Leiner arranged for Kerling to see his mistress. Kerling told her a little of what he was doing, and she agreed to travel with him.Within a couple of days of Dasch’s surrender, FBI agents spotted Kerling talking to Leiner. They followed Kerling to a bar, where he met Werner Thiel. Both men were arrested shortly afterward–two down and two to go.

The youngest member of the team, Herbert Haupt, had gone back to his parents in Chicago and told them everything. He used some of his sabotage money to buy a new car, and he proposed to his girlfriend, who had had a miscarriage. Then he dropped into the local FBI office to clear up his draft problems. He explained that he had been away when he should have registered and had since reported to his draft board.

The FBI seemed to accept the explanation, but when Haupt left the office, agents followed him. They trailed him for three days in hopes he would lead them to Neubauer. When that did not happen, they arrested him, and he told them where they could find the last member of his team.

Hermann Neubauer, who was staying at the Sheridan Plaza hotel, had gotten so lonely that he visited a couple he barely knew–friends of his wife. He told them he had come to America aboard a German submarine on assignment from the German government, and he left his money in their care. Meanwhile, he spent most of his time in movie theaters. When he got back to his hotel Saturday night after a film, FBI agents were waiting for him.

Only after all his colleagues were in jail did the FBI officially arrest George Dasch. To his great dismay, they considered him just as guilty as the others. Dasch begged to be jailed with his colleagues, so they would not realize he had turned them in. Hoover, who did not want Germany or even the president of the United States to know how the saboteurs had been captured, was only too happy to comply.

On Saturday, June 27, exactly two weeks after Dasch and his team had landed at Amagansett, Hoover wrote Roosevelt to tell him all eight German agents had been caught. ‘On June 20, 1942,’ he said, ‘Robert Quirin, Heinrich Heinck and Ernest Peter Burger were apprehended in New York City by Special Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The leader of the group, George John Dasch, was apprehended by Special Agents of the FBI on June 22, 1942, at New York City.’ Actually, of course, Dasch had surrendered to the FBI in Washington four days earlier. It was his surrender that led to the other arrests, not the other way around.

After the news of the arrests broke, Roosevelt got dozens of letters and telegrams urging that Hoover get the Medal of Honor. The president settled for a congratulatory statement.

Roosevelt realized that neither the death penalty nor secrecy could be guaranteed in a civilian trial, so he issued a proclamation that established a military tribunal consisting of seven generals, the first to be convened in the United States since Lincoln’s assassination. The prosecutor was Attorney General Francis Biddle. The chief defense lawyer was Colonel Kenneth Royall, a distinguished attorney in civilian life and later President Harry Truman’s secretary of war.

The trial, which was held in secret at the Justice Department, occupied most of the month of July 1942. Biddle accused the Germans of coming to America to wreak havoc and death, basing his accusations on their own confessions. The would-be saboteurs pleaded innocence, denounced Hitler and insisted they had had no intention of actually engaging in sabotage.

The prosecution asked for the death penalty, the punishment required of spies during wartime, but it had a hard time making its case against Dasch and Burger, who had confessed so quickly and collaborated so completely.

On July 27, the defense rested. The seven generals quickly prepared a report and sent it–and the 3,000-page trial transcript–to Roosevelt who, under his proclamation, was responsible for determining the time and place of execution if that was the tribunal’s sentence. Now, finally, Roosevelt found out exactly how Hoover had managed to catch the saboteurs so quickly. He never made any public comment about it, however.

On August 8, six of the eight German agents were electrocuted at the District Jail in Washington, D.C. Burger was sentenced to hard labor for life; Dasch was given 30 years. Meanwhile, fearing more landings, the FBI put out an alert for Walter Kappe and others at the German sabotage school. Late in 1944, the Abwehr did manage to place two spies on the Maine coast, but they were quickly picked up. If other such attempts were made, they have never come to light.

In 1948, Dasch and Burger were deported to Germany, after five years and eight months in prison. In 1953, Der Stern magazine published articles obviously based on information supplied by Burger, which condemned Dasch for causing the deaths of his six colleagues. Vilified in Germany, Dasch unsuccessfully tried to get a pardon from the United States and return to America. In 1959, Dasch published a book that attempted to justify his behavior; he then disappeared from the public eye.

---

This article was written by Harvey Ardman and originally appeared in the February 1997 issue of World War II magazine. For more great articles subscribe to World War II magazine today!

Pages: 1 2