(Mug shots of the eight German Saboteurs, six of whom were executed in the DC jail and whose remains are in unmarked graves in the Potter’s Field near Boundary Stone SE8).
It was a relief to pull off the smooth pavement of Virginias Route 3, after passing the big bunker at Mount Pony, where the Federal Reserve once kept all the cash that would be used to finance the post-apocalypse economy. I was headed for the farm, and a chance to examine some strange material that came to me in the search for the Original Boundary Stones of the Disctrict of Columbia.
There were some odd coincidences between America’s oldest monuments, and some brand new ones, associated with some despicable characters.
There are panics, after all, there are panics. The Bunker on Mt. Pony represented an artifact of the Cold War, and the panic that would ensure after a nuclear exchange. Recent developments in the Middle East suggest we could have as much as a decade before we need to stat worrying about it again, and who knows? I might be lucky enough not to have to worry about it at all.
It is useful keep everything in perspective. There was once a time when your government assumed that Washington and New York might suddenly become molten radioactive slag, and people would have to start all over again. A compelling case for a stock of dried food and plenty of ammunition, in some homes.
When Mt. Pony was created, the Government made prudent and expensive plans, and when the nightmare passed, they gave the money back to Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers and declared the mountain vaults surplus.
The big panic before that was the rise of Fascism in Europe and Militarism in Japan. That turned into the single largest conflict in the history of mankind, and so many stories that they cannot all be told. Nor were some of them anything that the Government- and particularly the complex man named J. Edgar Hoover wanted told.
I will have to narrow that down for you a bit, since that too is an extraordinarily large number.
In short, the Abwehr- the Military Intelligence Directorate of the Third Reich- was headed by the enigmatic Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, who had devised a scheme to throw America into a panic through the use of saboteurs here in the homeland. Recruited from the ranks of German men who had spent time in the States, the prospective unconventional warriors were fluent in idiomatic American English, and were to poison reservoirs and attack aluminum plants to cripple aircraft production.
(Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of German military Intelligence).
Canaris dubbed the operation “Pastorius.” The men would be intensively trained by the Abwehr, divided into two teams of four, and would embark in two sleek dark Unterzee Boats- U-Boats- for the passage across the Atlantic. They would land on the beaches at Ponte Vedra, Florida, and at Amagansett on Long Island, New York. Overall command was entrusted to the New York team, headed by George John Dasch and the other Ernst Burger.
In June of 1942, both teams were successfully landed, though the party that arrived on Long Island was greeted by a Coast Guard Petty Officer named John C. Cullen. George Dasch attempted to bribe Cullen with $260 of the nearly $175,000 dollars the saboteurs brought to bankroll their terror.
(Petty Officer Cullen, who foiled Operation Pastorious).
Cullen ran the two miles down to the Life Saving Station, but the Germans were gone by the time he returned. Still, the report had been made and the wheels of justice began to feebly turn.
Realizing that the mission was fatally compromised, Dasch decided he had to save his skin. The day after the landing, he called Ernst Burger, the most guarded and disciplined member of the team, into the upper-story hotel room the two men shared. He walked over to the window and opened it wide. “You and I are going to have a talk,” Dasch said, “And if we disagree, only one of us will walk out that door—the other will fly out this window.” He then revealed the truth to Burger: he had no intention of going through with the mission. He hated the Nazis and wanted Burger on his side when he turned the entire plot over to the FBI. Burger smiled. Having spent seventeen months in a concentration camp, his own feelings for the Nazi Party were ambiguous. They agreed to defect to the United States immediately.
Dasch ordered Burger to stay put and keep an eye on the other men. On 15 June, Dasch phoned the New York office of the FBI from a payphone in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, demanding to speak to Director Hoover. The FBI special agent to whom he told the improbable tale had no idea if he was being hoaxed. Dasch hung up and resolved to travel to Washington, DC, and confront Hoover with evidence of the plot in person. Four days later he arrived at Union Station, took a cab to the Mayflower Hotel and checked in. The next day, he walked into the FBI’s headquarters carrying a briefcase, asking to speak with the Director.
(George John Dasch, the leader who decided to defect).
The Bureau did not know quite what to make of the German agent with the bizarre story. He was passed from office to office before finally arriving before the government-issue desk of Assistant Director D.M. Ladd, who agreed to give Dasch five minutes of his valuable time. Dasch angrily repeated his story and finally convinced Ladd he was for real when he dumped $84,000 in cash from his briefcase onto the desk.
Hours of interrogation followed, and with the full resources of the Bureau now engaged, the rest of the team was arrested over the next two weeks.
This might be one of the greatest stories you never heard. Hoover was alarmed- it was clear that the Germans could land agents virtually anywhere along the East Coast, and that a significant Homeland Security Vulnerability could not be acknowledged to the American People for fear of causing a panic.
(Day three of the Military Tribunal held at the Justice Department).
Working with the Office of the President and the Supreme Court, a military tribunal was authorized to try the “unlawful combatants” under Executive Proclamation 2561. In early July, a panel of seven military officers was convened in Assembly Hall #1 on the fifth floor of the Department of Justice Building to dispense justice.
The trial for the eight defendants ended on 1 August 1942. Two days later, all were found guilty and sentenced to death. President Roosevelt commuted Ernst Burger’s sentence to life in prison and George Dasch’s to 30 years, since they had turned the team in. The rest were executed in rapid-fire order in the electric chair on the third floor of the DC Jail. After certification of their deaths at Walter Reed Army Hospital, the six Germans were buried in unmarked graves in the potter’s field adjoining the DC Home for the Aged and Infirm. And there the matter rested for the next seventy years.
Then another stone appeared, not far from the Boundary Stone at SE8. It had an inscription that alarmed the District Government, and for good reason:
Copyright 2016 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303