Saboteurs: The Nazi Raid on America - Hardcover

Dobbs, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375414703 ISBN 13: 9780375414701

Publisher: Knopf, 2004

Synopsis

Shortly after America’s entry into World War II, Adolf Hitler ordered an extensive sabotage campaign against the United States to disrupt the production of tanks and airplanes and blow up bridges and railroads. Eight German saboteurs were dispatched across the Atlantic by U-boat, one team landing in Amagansett, Long Island, the other near Jacksonville, Florida. They brought with them enough money and explosives for a two-year operation and traveled inland to explore potential targets.

The full story of this audacious endeavor is a remarkable account of a terrorist threat against America. Michael Dobbs describes the saboteurs’ training in Nazi Germany, their claustrophobic three-week voyage in submarines, and their infiltration into American life. He explores the reasons each volunteered, and their links to a network of Nazi sympathizers in the United States. He paints a portrait of the group’s leaders: George Dasch, a onetime waiter who dreamed of leaving his personal mark on history, and Edward Kerling, a fanatic Nazi caught between his love for his mistress and his love for his wife. And he shows how the FBI might never have captured the saboteurs had one of them not helped J. Edgar Hoover transform a hapless manhunt into one of his proudest accomplishments. A military tribunal, a historic Supreme Court session, and one of the largest mass executions in American history provide a stunning climax to a dangerous but failed mission.

About this title

About the Author:

Michael Dobbs was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and educated at the University of York, with fellowships at Princeton and Harvard. He is a reporter for the Washington Post, where he spent much of his career as a foreign correspondent covering the collapse of communism. His Down with Big Brother: The Fall of the Soviet Empire was a runner-up for the 1997 PEN award for nonfiction. Mr. Dobbs lives in Bethesda, Maryland.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter 1
School for Sabotage
(April 11-30)

A chance to rehabilitate yourself, they had told him. A chance to fulfill your obligations to the Fatherland.

He had been ordered to report in uniform to the army post in Brandenburg, a slow two-hour train ride from Berlin's Zoo station.1 Stations with names like Wannsee and Potsdam glided past his window as the train chugged westward, packed with soldiers returning home for a few days' furlough with their families as a respite from the hell of the Russian front. From the train, the Prussian countryside seemed reassuringly permanent and serene, almost undisturbed by two and a half years of war, a collage of sparkling lakes, village churches with high steeples, children riding their bicycles down wooded lanes.

He took a streetcar from the station to the military garrison, whose old brick barracks dated back to the time of Kaiser Wilhelm. The regimental clerk took him to a storeroom, handed him a set of civilian clothes to put in his knapsack, and told him to take the Quenz Lake tramway to the end of the line. The farm was a ten-minute walk from the tram stop, along a road bordered by a drainage canal on one side and vegetable gardens on the other. The lakeside estate was impossible to miss, the clerk had insisted. There were no other farms in the vicinity.

He got off the streetcar as instructed, and walked up a country lane to a brick gatepost, beyond which he could see a two-story farmhouse at the end of a driveway lined by chestnut trees. Signs posted along the high metal fence warned intruders to "Keep out under penalty of severe punishment by the Law."

As he wandered up the driveway, he caught glimpses of the lake shimmering through the woods. It was early spring: the chestnuts were not yet in bloom, but shoots of light green had appeared on the trees. Patches of snow still lay on the ground. To his left, he could see a converted two-story barn with a high sloping roof, along with some stables and outbuildings. The main farmhouse, fifty yards from the lake, was neat and well maintained, reflecting the Prussian virtues of thrift, hard work, and order.

Several men were lounging on the porch of the brick building as he approached. He felt a little out of place. They were all in civilian clothes, while he was still in uniform.

"You must be Burger," said one of the men, a wiry fellow with a thin face and a streak of gray running through his dark hair, as he extended his hand. "My name is Davis. George John Davis."

A housekeeper showed him to a room, on the ground floor of the farmhouse, which he would share with one of the other men. After changing into the clothes the army clerk had given him in Brandenburg, he went outside to join his companions. The man who had introduced himself as Davis suggested they take a walk around the estate.

"You will be part of my group," the man explained, as they strolled down to the lake, still half-frozen after a long, hard winter. "Eleven men have been chosen to take part in this course. Only the best will be selected to go to the United States."

To outside appearances, Ernst Peter Burger had arrived at a working farm on the eastern shore of Lake Quenz. There was an apple orchard, a barnyard full of cows, pigs, and chickens, and a hothouse where vegetables were grown. Between the main building and the road, just north of the driveway, was a one-story house occupied by the people who looked after the farm. There were even a few children running around. But it did not take Burger long to discover that nothing was what it seemed at Quenz Lake.

In the first place, his new acquaintance's name was not Davis at all, but George John Dasch. Like Burger, Dasch was a German-American who had returned to the Fatherland to take part in Hitler's great experiment. Davis was merely the code name that he would use for their mission.

As Burger walked around the lakeside estate with Dasch, it became clear to him that it was not a farm at all. The barnlike building he had noticed as he came up the drive contained a classroom and a chemical laboratory above a garage. Next door was a gymnasium equipped with parallel bars and weight-lifting equipment. Beyond these buildings, on the other side of a bridge leading across a pond, was an area that looked like an abandoned movie set. It included a hundred yards of railway tracks leading nowhere, an observation tower, and a deserted house, pockmarked with bullet holes and traces of explosives. Next to the railroad tracks, bulldozers had torn a large hole in the ground. The pit was reinforced with concrete and was evidently used for setting off high explosives. At the southernmost end of the estate, beyond the explosives pit, was a shooting range.

The meaning of all this was still a puzzle for Burger. He had volunteered for intelligence work in America, for which he believed he was well suited. During the six years he had lived in the United States, he had learned good English, even though he retained a strong German accent. He felt comfortable among Americans. He had received an honorable discharge from the Michigan National Guard, and had become an American citizen. With his swarthy complexion and slightly elongated nose, he could pass himself off as a Jewish refugee. But how he would get to America-and what he would do once he got there-remained unclear.

The mystery unraveled as he talked to Dasch, who explained that Burger was the last of eleven students to arrive at the farm. Over the next three weeks, they would learn how to blow up factories. They would then be sent to America by submarine in two groups, landing somewhere along the eastern coast. Was he still interested?

Burger barely hesitated. Yes, of course, he was still interested.

They ate dinner on the ground floor of the farmhouse, in a large room overlooking the lake. They then set off through the woods for a drink at a nearby tavern. It took about half an hour to reach the place, and once again Burger found himself walking with Dasch, who began quizzing him about his past. Since Dasch was going to be his new chief, Burger thought it better to admit he had been in trouble with the Gestapo. To his relief, Dasch said he was already aware of that. He had studied the files.

"Tell me your side of the story. The other side I know."

There was so much to tell that Burger scarcely knew where to begin. He was thirty-six years old, and his life had been in turmoil since his return to Germany from America nine years previously. Readmission to the Nazi Party. The elation of rejoining the storm troopers and taking part in Hitler's triumphant parades. The Night of the Long Knives. Clashes between the storm troopers and the S.S. Trips to Czechoslovakia and Poland. Marriage. A trumped-up charge. Imprisonment. His wife's miscarriage. Release from jail.

Burger found it difficult to talk about his seventeen months in Gestapo prisons without indignation. He began to curse Heinrich Himmler, the head of the Gestapo, and "the dirty bastards who beat me up." Dasch cut him short.

"That's enough. Don't say anything more. We'll talk about this later."

They changed the subject. A slip like that could have serious consequences. To Dasch, Burger seemed suddenly fearful, "a man haunted by a terrible past, happy and elated one minute and given to moody spells and silence the next."

Despite the secrecy that surrounded the Quenz Lake camp, little effort was made to hide the identity of the school. Burger was surprised to hear his fellow trainees chatting in English when they visited the local tavern or took walks in the countryside, even though Germany and America had been at war with each other for the past five months, ever since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. They would often burst into songs like "Oh! Susannah" and even "The Star-Spangled Banner," which they remembered from their days in the States.

The fact was that the people of Brandenburg-like the people of any small German town-had lost all sense of curiosity after a decade of Nazi rule. They had learned to keep their heads down, refusing to notice the most outrageous things that were being done in their name. On Sunday, April 12, the day after Burger passed through Brandenburg on his way to Quenz Lake, the remnants of the town's Jewish population were herded to the train station by half a dozen Prussian gendarmes on the first stage of a journey to the Warsaw Ghetto. As several dozen Jewish families trudged through the town in their heavy winter overcoats, hauling bags crammed with their possessions, local people simply averted their gaze.

It was not just Germans who preferred to ignore what was happening around them. Beginning in 1940, the local Opel plant, a wholly owned subsidiary of General Motors, had been using slave labor from conquered German territories to replace workers conscripted into the Wehrmacht. Every day, thousands of Poles, Belgians, and Russians were marched through the streets of Brandenburg in long columns to the Opel factory, where they worked fourteen hours a day for starvation wages. Although the American managers knew all about the use of slave labor in their Brandenburg plant, they made no effort to divest themselves of their German holdings, and acted as if nothing were amiss.

It was hardly surprising, then, that nobody would pay much attention when, as Nazi Germany geared up for war in 1939, the country estate of a wealthy Jewish shoe manufacturer on the edge of town was turned over to the Abwehr and transformed into a training camp for saboteurs.

In order to get his chance at rehabilitation, Burger had called in his Nazi Party connections, ties that dated back to his experiences as a street brawler before and after the Munich beer hall putsch of 1923. The coup had been quashed, and Hitler sent to prison, but in retrospect it marked the first big step on the Führer's road to supreme power. The putsch had become part of Nazi folk...

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0375414703
• ISBN 13: 9780375414701
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336