Saboteurs Read online

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Praise

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE - PASSAGE TO AMERICA (APRIL 11–JUNE 13, 1942)

  CHAPTER ONE - SCHOOL FOR SABOTAGE (APRIL 11–30)

  CHAPTER TWO - FAREWELLS (MAY 1–21)

  CHAPTER THREE - “THE MEN ARE RUNNING WILD” (MAY 22–28)

  CHAPTER FOUR - ACROSS THE ATLANTIC (MAY 28–JUNE 13)

  PART TWO - FREEDOM (JUNE 13–27, 1942)

  CHAPTER FIVE - THE BEACH (JUNE 13, MORNING)

  CHAPTER SIX - NEW YORK, NEW YORK (JUNE 13, AFTERNOON)

  CHAPTER SEVEN - HIGH STAKES (JUNE 14–17)

  CHAPTER EIGHT - A STORY TO TELL (JUNE 18–19)

  CHAPTER NINE - THE INVADERS (JUNE 20–22)

  CHAPTER TEN - WIVES AND GIRLFRIENDS (JUNE 23–27)

  PART THREE - CAPTIVITY (JUNE 27–AUGUST 9, 1942)

  CHAPTER ELEVEN - “AS GUILTY AS CAN BE” (JUNE 27–JULY 4)

  CHAPTER TWELVE - MILITARY TRIBUNAL (JULY 6–28)

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN - EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER THE LAW (JULY 29–AUGUST 1)

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN - DEATH ROW (AUGUST 2–11)

  EPILOGUE

  Notes

  Bibliography

  PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PHOTOGRAPHIC CREDITS

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  ALSO BY MICHAEL DOBBS

  Copyright Page

  For Alex

  Acclaim for Michael Dobbs’s

  SABOTEURS

  “Saboteurs is a riveting detective story within an engrossing war story. Meticulously researched and elegantly written, this book is that wonderfully rare thing: a first-rate work of history that is impossible to put down.” —Rick Atkinson, author of An Army at Dawn

  “Their story has been told before, but never so fascinatingly as by Dobbs.” —Chicago Sun-Times

  “Revealing. . . . Dobbs delves, incisively, into the mindset of the different participants, from the saboteurs, with their conflicting back stories, agendas and loyalties, to midlevel FBI operatives, to the legal minds summoned to work the cases. . . . Dobbs fully evokes the relentless pace familiar to readers of traditional thrillers.” —Houston Chronicle

  “Fascinating. . . . Must-reading for true crime and World War II enthusiasts. [H]ighly recommended.” —Tucson Citizen

  “Dobbs expertly deploys the wealth of detail he has unearthed to bring this crew to life. . . . [He] has a knack for historical detective work. . . . Dobbs is the first to tell the full story of a riveting episode that casts some interesting shadows on our current moment.” — Commentary Magazine

  PROLOGUE

  ON THE APPROVED LIST of visitors to Adolf Hitler’s gloomy forest bunker for April 16, 1942, was a short, somewhat stocky German admiral with piercing blue eyes, bustling eyebrows, and a mane of carefully combed white hair. 1 He was accompanied by a very tall, almost cadaverous Austrian colonel. Together, they looked a little like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, except the shorter man was clearly in charge. The admiral exuded a coiled-up energy; his taller colleague had a refined, aristocratic air.

  They had flown that morning from Berlin, a 350-mile journey across the plains of what had been northern Poland, now part of the Third Reich. Their plane landed on a grass airstrip near a little town called Rastenburg, in a remote area of East Prussia covered by a swath of primeval forest, interspersed with lakes and gentle hills. A staff car was waiting to meet them. Soon, they found themselves driving into the woods along a winding cobblestone road, over a railway line and past several small lakes that protected the approaches to the place known as Wolfsschanze, the Wolf’s Lair.

  A succession of roadblocks, each more intimidating than the last, dotted the five-mile route to Hitler’s headquarters. Security arrangements were in the hands of the S.S., the Führer’s Praetorian guard. At each checkpoint, the black-shirted S.S. men ordered the officers to show their papers. There were telephone consultations with superiors further down the road. Once the guards were satisfied that everything was in order, they raised the barrier, giving the visitors a raised-arm, Heil Hitler salute.

  After crossing a no-man’s-land of minefields and pillboxes, the visitors reached the innermost sanctum of Nazi power. Here, surrounded by an electrified barbed-wire fence, lay a fortified encampment of dozens of concrete bunkers and wooden huts hidden behind thick fir trees and elaborate camouflage nets. Within this enclosure was another, even more tightly guarded, compound bristling with antiaircraft guns and constantly patrolled by S.S. men. This area contained the bunker used by Hitler as his living quarters and a single-story wooden barracks where he held his midday conferences while supervising operations against the Soviet Union.

  The compound was bathed in almost perpetual gloom: sunlight rarely penetrated this deep into the woods. Apart from the barking of the Führer’s Alsatian dog Blondi and the occasional shunting of trains along the nearby railway line, the sounds were those of the forest. Most of Hitler’s aides detested the Wolf’s Lair, finding it melancholy and oppressive. General Alfred Jodl, the army chief of staff, described the place as “a cross between a monastery and a concentration camp.”2 To Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer, the Führer’s bunker was like “an Egyptian tomb.” But Hitler felt comfortable here, far removed from the horrors of the eastern front and the political intrigues of Berlin. The dark forest provided an ideal backdrop for his furious tirades against the outside world. He would spend a total of eight hundred days in the Wolf’s Lair, more than in all his other wartime headquarters combined.

  The shorter of the two visitors from Berlin was Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of Hitler’s military intelligence and a man of almost legendary reputation. During the First World War, he had served on a U-boat. Since taking over leadership of the Abwehr in 1934, Canaris had transformed the intelligence operation from a bureaucratic backwater to an important arm of the Third Reich. His spies had helped lay the groundwork for Hitler’s stunning military successes of the last few years, including the unopposed takeover of Czechoslovakia, the blitzkrieg attack against Poland, and the invasion of the Soviet Union. The Abwehr was made up of three divisions: intelligence (Division I), sabotage (Division II), and counterintelligence (Division III).

  Accompanying Canaris was the head of Abwehr II, Colonel Erwin von Lahousen-Vivremont. The scion of a noble Austrian family, Lahousen had been recruited to the Abwehr following his country’s annexation by the Third Reich in 1938. He had responsibility for overseeing covert operations—from issuing German soldiers with Polish uniforms in order to stage a “provocation” on the border between Poland and Germany, to smuggling members of the Irish Republican Army back into Ireland to fight the British.

  As they walked down forest paths lined with metal trees sprouting green Bakelite leaves past windowless bunkers draped with seaweed, Canaris and Lahousen could not help but get a better understanding of the dark passions driving their Führer. Named Wolfsschanze in honor of its master—“Herr Wolf” had been one of Hitler’s political nicknames back in the twenties, when he was just an opposition leader—the Wolf’s Lair was a monument to his paranoia and megalomania. Built by an army of racially pure workers, the fortress in the forest was a Pharaonic project that provided secure accommodation not only for the Führer, but for two thousand of his closest aides and guards. It was here that Hitler put into effect Operation Barbarossa, his plan for the invasion and destruction of the Soviet Union.

  But it was not Barbarossa that Hitler had in mind when he summoned his intelligence chiefs to the Wolf’s Lair on April 16, 1942. For some weeks now, his attention had been drifting away from the eastern front to the challenges posed by the emergence of a n
ew enemy on the other side of the Atlantic, a country whose productive capabilities were so formidable that they threatened to overwhelm the military might of Nazi Germany. Hitler had a scheme that, if put into effect, would wreak havoc on America’s ability to make war.

  The plan was known as Operation Pastorius.

  LOOKING AT a map of the territory he controlled, Hitler had every reason to feel at the peak of his power in the spring of 1942. The failed artist and retired corporal had become the unchallenged master of much of the Old World, from the Caucasus Mountains to the English Channel, from the fjords of Norway to the deserts of North Africa. He saw himself as the “greatest German ever,” the more-than-worthy successor of Bismarck and Frederick the Great. He had more than avenged the humiliations heaped on Germany after World War I. Through a mixture of bullying, bluff, and blitzkrieg, his armies had sliced through supposedly impregnable defenses in Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Balkans, Belgium, Netherlands, France, and finally Russia. His plan for the annihilation of the Jewish race—a long-held dream—was well under way.

  But the Führer was astute enough to understand that the propaganda accounts of an almost unbroken succession of military triumphs did not tell the whole story. Problems were surfacing that threatened the very foundations of the Third Reich and his own ability to hold on to absolute power. On the western edge of Europe, Great Britain remained a stubborn holdout, refusing to recognize the New Order Hitler had established for the rest of the continent. In the east, on the Russian front, the German juggernaut had ground to a halt in the depths of the Russian winter after a series of sweeping advances the previous summer. Ill prepared for blinding snowstorms and forty degrees of frost, tens of thousands of German soldiers had frozen to death on the windswept Russian plain, or had fallen in hand-to-hand fighting with a seemingly reinvigorated Red Army. Despite the easy capture of dozens of Soviet cities, including Kiev, Minsk, and Kharkov, Hitler’s soldiers had been unable to penetrate the defenses of Moscow and Leningrad, the two grand prizes.

  More troubling still, Hitler now faced a powerful new adversary following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor the previous December. America’s entry into the war posed few immediate dangers to Germany: despite rapid mobilization, the U.S. Army was in no condition to fight a much more seasoned German army, even supposing it could somehow gain a foothold on the European continent. Over the long term, however, American involvement was likely to shift the balance of industrial, and therefore military, power in favor of the anti-Nazi coalition. It promised to provide Britain and Russia with an almost inexhaustible supply of war matériel and manpower that Germany was unable to match, even with the help of its allies, Japan and Italy.

  In the end, victory was likely to go to the side that produced the largest number of airplanes, tanks, and ships. And here Germany was at a huge disadvantage. By December 1941, the third winter of the war, Hitler’s armies were in the throes of a logistical crisis. Thousands of tanks and airplanes had been lost on the Russian front. Equipment that performed well in Belgium or France seized up on the frozen Russian steppes; the mighty Wehrmacht was reduced to using horses to drag its guns toward Moscow. It was not just tanks and guns that were in short supply. German soldiers fighting in Russia lacked coats, gloves, and boots, and were even showing signs of malnourishment. Their commanders made frantic appeals to civilians back home for warm clothing. In January 1942, Hitler reversed earlier statements about Germany’s invincible industrial might and gave his fellow countrymen an inkling of the gravity of the situation:

  The people at home know what it means to lie in snow and ice at a temperature of 35, 38, 40, and 42 degrees below zero, in order to defend Germany. And, because they know it, they are anxious to do whatever they can. It is my duty to issue the summons: Germans at home! Work, produce arms, produce munitions. More arms, and more munitions! By doing so, you will save the life of many a comrade at the front. Produce, and work at our means of transportation, so that everything will get to the front.3

  In the meantime, on the other side of the Atlantic, America was dramatically increasing the production of iron, aluminum, and steel, the first step to churning out the tanks, airplanes, and submarines needed to win the war. At the end of 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had held out a vision of America as “the great arsenal of democracy,” using its “industrial genius” to “produce more ships, more guns, more planes, more of everything.”4 By 1942, the United States was well on the way to fulfilling Roosevelt’s goal, producing 60,000 planes, 45,000 tanks, 20,000 antiaircraft guns, and six million tons of shipping in a single year. If these trends continued, Germany would be overwhelmed by the sheer weight of America’s industrial power.

  Having served in the trenches in World War I, Hitler was unimpressed by the fighting qualities of Americans, whom he regarded as hopelessly pampered and effete. “I’ll never believe that an American soldier can fight like a hero,” he told his associates one evening soon after America’s entry into the war, as they sat around the dinner table at the Wolf’s Lair. 5 American ideas of democracy and free-market capitalism filled Hitler with “hatred and repugnance.” He thought of America as a “decayed country” with no future. “Everything about the behavior of American society reveals that it’s half Judaised, half negrified. How can one expect a state like that to hold together—a country where everything is built on the dollar?”6 He was even more scathing about the leadership abilities of the American ruling class, particularly Roosevelt, “a tortuous, pettifogging Jew” with a “sick brain.”7

  For all his contempt for America and Americans, Hitler had enormous respect for American industry. He admired the auto manufacturer Henry Ford, and not just because of their shared anti-Semitism. Germany had a lot to learn from the techniques of mass production pioneered by Ford, he told his subordinates. “The great success of the Americans consists essentially in the fact that they produce quantitatively as much as we do with two-thirds less labor . . . In America, everything is machine-made, so they can employ the most utter cretins in their factories. Their workers have no need of specialized training, and are therefore interchangeable.” 8 And if America could produce cars in such vast numbers, at much less cost than Germany, what was there to prevent it from achieving a similar feat with tanks?

  If Germany was to win the war, it would have to find a way of counteracting America’s industrial power. This was not just Hitler’s opinion. It was also the view of his most trusted aides, including Hermann Göring, the head of the Luftwaffe, and Heinrich Himmler, head of the Gestapo and the S.S., the shock troops of the Nazi regime.9

  For months, both men had complained about the Abwehr’s failure to establish reliable agents in the United States. Göring, in particular, was constantly warning Hitler about the threat posed by American industry. Something had to be done to sabotage the U.S. war machine.

  In a series of meetings with Canaris, before and after Pearl Harbor, Hitler demanded action.10 The Abwehr chief was skeptical of the value of sabotage operations in the United States, not for deep-seated moral qualms, but because he feared they would be counterproductive. The history of German sabotage attempts against America in World War I—such as blowing up the Black Tom ammunition depot in New York Harbor— suggested that any short-term gains were likely to be outweighed by propaganda losses and heightened anti-German sentiment. Even successful sabotage operations, Canaris felt, were unlikely to have a decisive impact on the outcome of the war.

  As long as the United States remained an ostensibly neutral country, the German foreign ministry under Joachim von Ribbentrop was also opposed to acts of sabotage on American soil. Ribbentrop hoped that skillful diplomacy would keep America out of the war, but this was hardly possible if Americans found out that the Abwehr was trying to destroy American factories. Canaris was able to cite Ribbentrop’s objections to sabotage as an excuse for doing nothing.11 He told Hitler that the foreign ministry had categorically forbidden the Abwehr to build an intelligence network in the Unit
ed States that could be used for sabotage operations.

  The diplomatic arguments against sabotage disappeared as a result of the U.S. entry into the war. After Pearl Harbor, Hitler stepped up his demands for large-scale action against the American aircraft industry to prevent the Luftwaffe from losing control of the skies. Canaris understood that he could not procrastinate indefinitely without risking his own position. The British and American press were already talking about the Abwehr chief as a possible leader of a homegrown German opposition to Hitler. In conversations with Nazi officials, Canaris laughed off these reports as wishful thinking by the enemy and an attempt to sow high-level dissension in Berlin. All the same, he felt a need to demonstrate his loyalty to the Führer.

  In the meantime, Nazi officials had produced their own scheme for infiltrating agents into the United States. The plan was the brainchild of Walter Kappe, the former propaganda chief of the German-American Bund, an American offshoot of the German Nazi Party. Kappe had lived in America for twelve years but returned to Germany in 1937 after losing a power struggle with other American Nazis. He had joined the Abwehr at the beginning of the war, with the rank of lieutenant. His real influence, however, derived from the gold button he wore in his lapel, signifying that he was one of the Nazi Party’s first hundred thousand members, a Hitler loyalist dating back to the early twenties, when it was far from obvious that the Nazis would come to power.

  Kappe was a loud, bombastic man—he talked like someone “trying to sell you a washing machine,” in the opinion of the aristocratic Lahousen— with a grandiose vision of establishing a large network of saboteurs to cripple American industry. The core of this network would be German-Americans like himself who came back to the Fatherland prior to the outbreak of World War II full of enthusiasm for the “New Germany.” Many of these returning exiles were former Bund members disillusioned with their prospects in Depression-era America who nevertheless spoke good English and had an intimate knowledge of American ways.