Екінші дүниежүзілік соғыста АҚШ-тағы неміс диверсиясының сәтсіз әрекеті

1942 failed German sabotage in the U. S. during WWII

Operation Pastorius was a failed German intelligence plan for sabotage inside the United States during World War II. The operation was staged in June 1942 and was to be directed against strategic American economic targets. The operation was named by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the German Abwehr, for Francis Daniel Pastorius, the organizer of the first organized settlement of Germans in America. The plan involved eight German saboteurs who had previously spent time in the United States. The plan quickly failed after two of the agents, George John Dasch and Ernest Peter Burger, defected to the Federal Bureau of Investigation shortly after being deployed, betraying the other six. A military tribunal – whose constitutionality was challenged to the Supreme Court in Ex parte Quirin – sentenced all eight to death later that year. President Franklin D. Roosevelt commuted the sentences of Dasch and Burger, while the other six were executed. In 1948, Dasch and Burger were granted executive clemency, conditional on their permanent deportation to the American occupation zone in Germany by President Harry S. Truman. Sixteen other people were charged with aiding those in charge of the operation.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, followed by Germany's declaration of war on the United States four days later, and the United States' declaration of war on Germany in response, Hitler authorized a mission to sabotage the American war effort and attack civilian targets to demoralize the American civilian population inside the United States. The mission was given to Abwehr chief Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the head of German military intelligence. During World War I he had organized the sabotage of French installations in Morocco, and other German agents entered the United States to attack New York arms factories, including the destruction of munitions supplies at Black Tom Island, in 1916. He hoped that Operation Pastorius would have the same kind of success.

Recruited for Operation Pastorius were eight Germans who had lived in the United States. Two of them, Ernst Burger and Herbert Haupt, were American citizens. The others, George John Dasch, Edward John Kerling, Richard Quirin, Heinrich Harm Heinck, Hermann Otto Neubauer and Werner Thiel, had worked at various jobs in the United States. With the exception of Dasch, all of the men were members of the German American Bund and/or Nazi Party. Neubauer had served in the German Army on the Eastern Front. All eight were recruited into the Abwehr and were given three weeks of intensive sabotage training in the German High Command school on an estate at Quenzsee, near Berlin, Germany. The agents were instructed in the manufacture and use of explosives, incendiaries, primers, and various forms of mechanical, chemical and electrical delayed timing devices. Considerable time was spent developing complete background "histories" they were to use in the United States. They were encouraged to converse in English and to read American newspapers and magazines to improve their English and familiarity with current American events and culture.

Their mission was to sabotage American economic targets: hydroelectric plants at Niagara Falls; the Aluminum Company of America's plants in Illinois, Tennessee, and New York; locks on the Ohio River, near Louisville, Kentucky; Pennsalt Chemicals (then the Pennsylvania Salt Manufacturing Company) in Cornwells Heights (Bensalem), Pennsylvania; the Pennsylvania Railroad's Horseshoe Curve, a crucial railroad pass near Altoona, Pennsylvania, as well as their repair shops at Altoona; the Pennsalt cryolite (a raw material in the production of fluorine and aluminum) plant in Philadelphia; Hell Gate Bridge in New York; and Pennsylvania Station in Newark, New Jersey. The agents were also instructed to spread a wave of terror by planting explosives on bridges, railroad stations, water facilities, public places, and Jewish owned shops. They were given counterfeit birth certificates, Social Security cards, draft deferment cards, nearly $175,000 in American money, and driver's licenses, and put aboard two U boats to land on the east coast of the U. S.

On the night of 12/13 June 1942, the first submarine to arrive in the U. S., U 202 was launched in commanded by Captain Hans Heinz Lindner, landed at Amagansett, New York, about 100 miles east of New York City on Long Island, at what is now Atlantic Avenue beach. It was carrying Dasch and three other saboteurs (Burger, Quirin, and Heinck). The team was launched in inflatable rafts (in which Dasch nearly drowned) and came ashore wearing German Navy uniforms so that, if they were captured, they would be classified as prisoners of war rather than spies. They also brought their explosives, primers and incendiaries, and buried them along with their uniforms, and put on civilian clothes to begin an expected two year campaign in the sabotage of American defense related production. Immediately upon reaching the beach, at around 30 minutes past midnight the saboteurs were discovered amidst the dunes by unarmed Coast Guardsman John C. Cullen, who was accosted by Dasch and offered a bribe of $300. (Cullen had been shortchanged, the money only amounted to $260.) Cullen feigned cooperation but reported the encounter. An armed patrol returned to the site, finding "four crates of explosives and some German uniforms that had been hastily buried in the wet sand", as well as fuses and pre made bombs; but the Germans were gone, having taken the Long Island Rail Road from the Amagansett station into Manhattan, where they checked into a hotel. The FBI, informed of the operation by the Coast Guard, initiated a manhunt for the saboteurs. This group came ashore wearing bathing suits, but wore German Navy hats. After landing ashore, they threw away their hats, put on civilian clothes, and started their mission by boarding trains to Chicago, Illinois and Cincinnati, Ohio.

The failure of Operation Pastorius caused Hitler to rebuke Admiral Canaris and no sabotage attempt was ever made again in the United States. During the remaining years of the war, the Germans only once more dispatched agents to the United States by submarine. In November 1944, as part of Operation Elster, the German submarine U 1230 left two SS Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main Office) spies on the coast of Maine to gather intelligence concerning American manufacturing and technical progress. After a month of high living in New York City, but no espionage gathering, one of the men turned himself in to the FBI, which captured both agents soon afterward. Both were convicted and sentenced to death, with their executions stayed throughout the duration of the war, after which their punishment was commuted by President Truman into life sentences in prison. In 1948, President Harry S. Truman granted executive clemency to Dasch and Burger on the condition that they be deported to the American occupation zone in Germany. In Germany they were regarded as traitors who had caused the death of their comrades. Dasch died in 1992 at the age of 89 in Ludwigshafen, Germany. Burger died in 1975. Sixteen people, including Herbert Haupt's mother and father, were arrested for aiding the saboteurs. The last person to be arrested was Lutheran Pastor Carl Krepper, a member of the German American Bund and the German American Business League, which supported boycotting Jewish businesses. Krepper had helped establish safehouses for the saboteurs. In March 1945, he was found guilty of trading with the enemy and conspiracy to commit sabotage and sentenced to 12 years in prison. Krepper was paroled in 1951, and died in 1972. For his part in the affair, John Cullen was awarded the coxswain insignia, featured on the front page of the New York Times, and received the Legion of Merit medal. His wedding in 1944 made the newspapers and attracted turnout "well beyond the intended guests". Cullen died in 2011, at the age of 90. Sometime during the 1960s or 1970s, the National Socialist White People's Party placed an unauthorized monument to the executed spies in a thicket in southwest Washington, D. C., on National Park Service land. It went largely unknown and ignored for several decades; the Park Service removed it in 2010.