
During
World War II, six German saboteurs who secretly entered the
United States
on a mission to attack its civil infrastructure are executed by the
United States for spying. Two other saboteurs who disclosed the plot to
the FBI and aided U.S. authorities in their manhunt for their
collaborators were imprisoned.

In 1942, under Nazi leader
Adolf Hitler's
orders, the defense branch of the German Military Intelligence Corps
initiated a program to infiltrate the United States and destroy
industrial plants, bridges, railroads, waterworks, and Jewish-owned
department stores. The
Nazis
hoped that sabotage teams would be able to slip into America at the
rate of one or two every six weeks. The first two teams, made up of
eight Germans who had all lived in the United States before the war,
departed the German submarine base at Lorient, France, in late May.


Just
before midnight on June 12, in a heavy fog, a German submarine reached
the American coast off Amagansett, Long Island, and deployed a team who
rowed ashore in an inflatable boat. Just as the Germans finished burying
their explosives in the sand, John C. Cullen, a young U.S. Coast
Guardsman, came upon them during his regular patrol of the beach. The
leader of the team, George Dasch, bribed the suspicious Cullen, and he
accepted the money, promising to keep quiet. However, as soon as he
passed safely back into the fog, he sprinted the two miles back to the
Coast Guard station and informed his superiors of his discovery. After
retrieving the German supplies from the beach, the Coast Guard called
the FBI, which launched a massive manhunt for the saboteurs, who had
fled to
New York City.


Although
unaware that the FBI was looking for them, Dasch and another saboteur,
Ernest Burger, decided to turn themselves in and betray their
colleagues, perhaps because they feared capture was inevitable after the
botched landing. On July 15, Dasch called the FBI in
New York, but they failed to take his claims seriously, so he decided to travel to FBI headquarters in
Washington, D.C. On July 18, the same day that a second four-man team successfully landed at Ponte Verdra Beach,
Florida, Dasch turned himself in. He agreed to help the FBI capture the rest of the saboteurs.



Burger
and the rest of the Long Island team were picked up by June 22, and by
June 27 the whole of the Florida team was arrested. To preserve wartime
secrecy, President
Franklin D. Roosevelt
ordered a special military tribunal consisting of seven generals to try
the saboteurs. At the end of July, Dasch was sentenced to 30 years in
prison, Burger was sentenced to hard labor for life, and the other six
Germans were sentenced to die. The six condemned saboteurs were executed
by electric chair in Washington, D.C., on August 8. In 1944, two other
German spies were caught after a landing in
Maine. No other instances of German sabotage within wartime America has come to light.


In 1948, Dasch and Burger were freed by order of President
Harry Truman, and they both returned to Germany.
taken from:
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/german-saboteurs-executed-in-washington [08.07.2012]
No comments:
Post a Comment