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World War II Operation
Pastorius / St. Johns County
Nazi Saboteurs Landed Here |
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Inscription.
World War II Operation Pastorius Nazi Saboteurs Landed Here On the night of June 16, 1942, German U-boat U-584 landed four trained Nazi agents here dressed as American civilians. After burying four boxes containing explosives and incendiaries in the sand, they boarded a bus en route to New York to rendezvous with another team of saboteurs. Two members of the New York team betrayed the operation to the FBI. All were apprehended, tried and convicted. The informers went to prison and the others were electrocuted on August 8, 1942. St. Johns County On July 21, 1821, Major General Jackson, Florida's first Territorial Governor, established St. Johns County, with St. Augustine as the county seat. It contained all of Florida east of the Suwannee River, approximately 39,400 square miles, with over 1,100 miles of coastline. Since 1821, more than 2/3 of Florida's present 67 counties have been carved from St. Johns County's original boundaries reducing our County to 609 square miles. Erected 1989 by The Beaches Area Historical Society, Inc. In Cooperation With The Florida Department of State. (Marker Number F-326.) Location. 30° 14.529′ N, 81°
22.72′ W. Marker is in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, in
Saint Johns County. Marker is on Ponte Vedra Blvd. (Florida Route 203), on
the right when traveling north.
On the reverse side of the marker there is a duplicate St John's County Marker:
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Operation Pastorius was a failed German 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 leader of the first organized settlement of Germans
in America.
Background
After the
Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor
on 7 December 1941 followed by Nazi Germany's declaration of war on the United States
four days later (and the United States declared war on Germany in
response), Hitler authorized a
mission to sabotage the American war effort as well as terrorist attacks on civilian targets to demoralize
the American civilian population inside the United States. The mission was
headed by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the German Abwehr. Canaris
recalled that during World War I, he
organized the sabotage of French installations in Morocco and entered the
United States with other German agents and planted bombs in 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 he had in 1916.
Agents
Recruited for Operation Pastorius were eight
German residents 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. All eight were recruited into the Abwehr military intelligence
organization and were given three weeks of intensive sabotage training in the German High Command
school on an estate at Quenz Lake, 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 so no suspicion would be aroused if they were
interrogated while in the United States.
Mission
Amagansett
Coast Guard station at Atlantic Avenue Beach in Amagansett, New York.
The station was moved in 1966 to a private residence to protect it from
demolition. In May 2007, the structure was moved back to near its original
location.
Their mission
was to stage sabotage attacks on 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;
the Horseshoe Curve,
a crucial railroad pass near Altoona, Pennsylvania,
as well as the Pennsylvania Railroad's
repair shops at Altoona;[5] a cryolite 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, Jewish-owned
businesses, and public places. They
were given counterfeit birth certificate, Social Security Card, draft deferment card, nearly $175,000 in American
money, and a driver's license
and put aboard two U-boats to land on the east coast of the U.S.
Before the mission
began, it was in danger of being compromised, as George Dasch, head of the
team, left sensitive documents behind on a train, and one of the agents when
drunk announced to patrons at a bar in Paris
that he was a secret agent.
On the night of
12 June 1942, the first submarine to arrive in the U.S., U-202,
landed at Amagansett, New York,
which is about 115 miles east of New York City, on Long Island, at what today is Atlantic Avenue
beach. It was carrying Dasch and three other saboteurs (Burger, Quirin, and
Henck). The team 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 support an expected two-year campaign in the sabotage of
American defense-related production
When Dasch was
discovered amidst the dunes by unarmed Coast Guardsman
John C. Cullen, Dasch seized Cullen by the collar, threatened him, and stuffed
$260 into Cullen's hand Cullen reported the encounter to his superiors after
returning to his station. By the time an armed Coast Guard patrol returned to
the site, the Germans, weary from their trans-Atlantic trip, were gone and had
taken the Long Island Rail Road
train from the Amagansett station
into Manhattan, New York City, where they checked in
and stayed at a hotel. The Coast Guard then discovered German equipment buried
in the beach and reported it to President Franklin D. Roosevelt
and the FBI and a massive manhunt for the
German agents was conducted. However, they did not know where exactly the
Germans were going.
The other
four-member German team headed by Kerling landed without incident at Ponte Vedra Beach,
Florida, south of Jacksonville
on 16 June 1942. They came on U-584,
another submarine. 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 two teams
were to meet on 4 July in a hotel in Cincinnati to coordinate their sabotage
operations.
Mission betrayed
Realizing that
the mission was going to be doomed after the encounter with the Coast Guard,
Dasch decided he had a secret of his own. The day after the landing at Amagansett,
he called 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 Nazi concentration
camp, his own feelings for the party were less than warm. He too had
been planning to betray the mission. They agreed to defect to the United States
immediately.
Shaken but not
discouraged, 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 pay-telephone on Manhattan's Upper West Side explaining who he was and asked
to convey the information to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. When the FBI agent was trying to
figure out if he was talking to a crackpot, Dasch hung up. Four days later, he took
a train to Washington, D.C.
and checked in at the Mayflower Hotel.
Dasch then walked into the FBI’s headquarters carrying a briefcase, asking to
speak with Director Hoover. Dasch bounced from office to office until finally
Assistant Director D.M. Ladd, the agent in charge of the manhunt, agreed to
humor him with five minutes of his time. Dasch angrily repeated his story after
he was dismissed as a crackpot by numerous agents. He finally convinced the FBI
by dumping his mission's entire budget of $84,000 on the desk of Assistant
Director D. M. Ladd. At this point, he was taken seriously and interrogated for
hours. Besides Burger, none of the other German agents knew they were betrayed.
Over the next two weeks, Burger and the other six were arrested.
Trial and execution
Fearful that a
civilian court would be too lenient, President Roosevelt issued Executive
Proclamation 2561 on 2 July 1942 creating a military tribunal to prosecute the Germans.
Placed before a seven-member military commission, the Germans were charged with
1) violating the law of war; 2) violating
Article 81 of the Articles of War,
defining the offense of corresponding with or giving intelligence to the enemy;
3) violating Article 82 of the Articles of War, defining the offense of spying;
and 4) conspiracy to commit the offenses alleged in the first three charges.
The trial was
held in Assembly Hall # 1 on the fifth floor of the Department
of Justice building in Washington D.C. on 8 July 1942. Lawyers for
the accused, who included Lauson Stone and Kenneth Royall, attempted to have the case tried
in a civilian court but were rebuffed by the United States
Supreme Court in Ex parte Quirin, 317 U.S. 1 (1942), a case
that was later cited as a precedent for the trial by military commission of any
unlawful combatant
against the United States.
The trial for
the eight defendants ended on 1 August 1942. Two days later, all were found
guilty and sentenced to death. Roosevelt commuted Burger to life in prison and
Dasch to 30 years because they had turned themselves in and provided
information about the others. The others were executed on 8 August 1942 in the electric chair on the third floor of the District
of Columbia jail and buried in a potter's field in the Blue Plains
neighborhood in the Anacostia area of
Washington.
Aftermath
The failure of
Operation Pastorius led 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, a German submarine,
U-1230, dropped two RSHA
spies off the coast of Maine to gather intelligence on
the Manhattan Project
and sabotage it as well as dozens of important American munition factories. The
FBI captured both men shortly thereafter. These agents benefited from the
calmer state of public nerves in the later years of the war and received prison
sentences rather than execution.
In 1948,
President Harry S. Truman
granted executive clemency to Dasch and Burger on the condition that they be
deported to the American Zone of
occupied Germany. They were not welcomed back in Germany, as they
were regarded as traitors who had caused the death of their comrades. Although
they had been promised pardons by Hoover in exchange for their cooperation,
both men died without ever receiving them, Dasch in 1992 at the age of 89 at Ludwigshafen.
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