“Betrayal”

Federal Bureau of Investigation George Dasch, a Nazi saboteur, turned himself in to the F.B.I. after landing on an Amagansett beach during World War II.

(3/26/2008)    It is a familiar story. On the night of June 12, 1942, four Germans were rowed ashore at Amagansett after a trip across the Atlantic in a U-boat. These were enemy combatants from the Third Reich with a mission to sabotage the United States’ war effort, bringing with them explosives, tens of thousands of dollars in cash, and a sworn intent to do Hitler’s bidding.

    Yet over time, and with the publication of several detailed books about these men, their story has become a lot more complex. As the saga is retold in David Alan Johnson’s “Betrayal: The True Story of J. Edgar Hoover and the Nazi Saboteurs Captured During W.W. II,” the four men were not uniformly committed saboteurs. On the contrary, at least two of the group that landed in Amagansett may have planned to turn themselves in to U.S. authorities upon arrival. Why? They had lived in this country before the war and simply wanted to return.

    George Dasch easily is the central character in this new analysis, but a parallel and perhaps more fascinating story line is that of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s chief, who found in the Germans a perfect way to rebuild a damaged reputation. Hoover, when he is on the stage, is rendered with lightly concealed contempt. He was a man obsessed with the power of his office and expert at taking credit for the accomplishments of others. That the turncoat Dasch was the key to rounding up the German saboteurs had no place in the stage-managed way Hoover publicized their capture.

    Dasch led a team of four men who had been trained at a secret facility outside Berlin in techniques of sabotage. But before returning to Germany from Manhattan in 1939 at his mother’s urging, he had been a waiter and had married a U.S. citizen. Operation Pastorius, as the German command had dubbed the program, was to target the U.S. light metals industry, with the intent to slow the production of military aircraft.

    Franz Daniel Pastorius, for whom the program was named, was the first German immigrant to come to America. Dasch thought it was an odd name coming from the Nazis. He would tell U.S. investigators after he turned himself in that “Operation Siegfried” or “Operation Thor” would have sounded better to his ears.

    Even while still in Germany, Dasch was intent on sabotaging the operation. He asked for reports on German agents’ earlier attempts to damage the U.S. war effort, looking for methods to make the mission fail.

    “Dasch came to the conclusion that he could do one of two things when he landed in America. The most obvious was to forget all about the sabotage operation and just disappear,” Mr. Johnson writes. There would have been a chance that German agents would find him, but that was not a great concern for him.

    But it did not take him long to decide that wrecking Operation Pastorius was his only option. He felt he owed it to his adopted country to do everything possible to stop the Nazi plot. “He had enjoyed his nineteen years in America, had married an American, and had a good life,” Mr. Johnson observes.  

Laura Libby David Alan Johnson

    Dasch and the others spent weeks at a sabotage school in Brandenburg, west of Berlin, learning the techniques that they would need to know to carry out the mission. There were classes on bomb making and improvised fuses, on weakening bridges, and field trips to nearby factories, where engineers show­ed them the most effective means of crippling production. The men were told how to disable a locomotive by throwing sand in its bearings.

    As the training proceeded, they learned that their primary targets in the U.S. were the Aluminum Company of America factories in New York, Illinois, and East St. Louis, the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, the Hell Gate Bridge in New York, and the Newark train station. There would be two teams, one to land along the Gulf Coast, the other somewhere on Long Island. Their leaders, Dasch and Edward Kerling, arranged to rendezvous on July 4 in Cincinnati.

    The arrival of Dasch’s team on the ocean beach at Amagansett is well known now, but at the time, the authorities kept it quiet. A young coast guardsman, John C. Cullen, encountered the men while on patrol. Dasch, who had been ordered to kill anyone they encountered while landing, instead plied Cullen with cash and, babbling, told him, “This is a matter for Washington.”

    Cullen retreated from the encounter, and when he was out of sight on the dark beach, ran the rest of the way back to the Coast Guard station at Atlantic Avenue. Dawn was breaking as the U-boat roared away from the coast, where it had run aground on an outer sandbar.

    Led by Cullen, several coast guardsmen returned to the spot where the mysterious visitors had been seen. They found, deliberately left out in plain view, a shovel Dasch had stuck upright in the sand and “a half-filled bottle of German brandy, a packet of German cigarettes, and a German navy sailor’s cap, complete with swastika insignia.” These items were placed there by Ernest Burger, another would-be saboteur who Dasch would later learn had his own ideas about abandoning the mission.

    Despite these clues, the four men were able to evade detection. They traveled by train from the Amagansett station to New York City, where they disappeared. Just two days after their arrival, Dasch phoned the F.B.I. The agent who took his statement thought him just another crackpot. Wartime had brought them out of the woodwork. The report was filed away and forgotten.

    By this time, Hoover had word of the landing in Amagansett, but had determined that the public would know nothing about it. Dasch, upset that nothing had happened following his initial call to the F.B.I., took a train to Washington, where he phoned the bureau again and, for extra measure, the Army’s General Staff office.

    The F.B.I. agent he talked to was doubtful, but sent two agents to Dasch’s hotel to bring him in to make a statement. Dasch had little success in that interview either, until he dumped a briefcase containing more that $80,000 cash. Placed in protective custody, he dictated his story over eight days to relay teams of agents.

    Information that Dasch gave the F.B.I. in exchange for what he believed was a promise of immunity resulted in the arrests of the rest of his team and the Germans who had landed in Florida. Dasch had hoped his cooperation with the F.B.I. might lead to a job creating anti-Nazi propaganda once the dust had settled. This would not be. Hoover, in announcing the arrests, claimed that they were the result of his department’s hard work, rather than the result of a turncoat’s confession.

    The nation, still furious over the Pearl Harbor attack just six months before, howled for their heads. Life magazine editorialized in July 1942 that “the eight Nazi saboteurs should be put to death.”

    In a move echoed by the current president’s imposition of military tribunals to try suspected Islamic terrorists, President Roosevelt signed an order condemning the men to a charade of a trial. Privately, Roosevelt asked an aide whether the men would be better shot or hanged.

    The trial lasted 20 days, during which the appointed defense lawyers for the accused men made a lackluster case, and the men were found guilty and sentenced to death. However, Attorney General Francis Biddle was able to convince the president to commute Burger’s sentence to life imprisonment and Dasch’s to 30 years. The six remaining men were to die in the electric chair.

    The betrayal of which Mr. Johnson writes is complicated: Dasch betrayed the Nazis who trusted him to help destroy America, he betrayed his comrades, then he, in turn, was betrayed by the F.B.I., which had made assurances to him that he would be rewarded for helping them snare his co-conspirators. In the end, it was perhaps the best outcome he could have hoped for.

    David Alan Johnson’s books about World War II include “The London Blitz” and “Germany’s Spies and Saboteurs.” He lives in New Jersey.