Vic Socotra

18 September 2009

Jackpot

(Graves 276-281, Potters Field, Blue Plains, Washington, DC)

It is the end of the week, and I was reminded at the bar last night that this story has been all over the map. Part of it is dry recitation of fact, part of it is action adventure and part was heading for a noir detective story.

I am not sure that is not where it is going to ultimately go. But let’s sum it up simply:

Nazi saboteurs landed in America a long time ago. They were turned in by one of their party. The FBI promptly arrested them. The stoolie, George Dasch, wanted to tell his story in open court.

FBI Director Hoover had already taken credit for foiling the plot. He realized the revelation of the vulnerability of America’s shores was a matter of the Bureau’s reputation and hence a matter of national security.

He pressured the President to have them tried by a military commission and executed. The President agreed, and the legal precedent that later permitted the Guantanamo Military Tribunals was set. All eight saboteurs, including the stoolie, were convicted, though even Hoover could not demand the execution of the two men who gave him the terrorists on a silver platter.

Six of the Germans were electrocuted at the DC Jail, laid out at Walter Reed and were buried on August 10th, 1942 in secret and anonymous graves in the Potters Field at the asylum for the Aged and Infirm at Blue Fields, Washington, DC. Then they were forgotten.

Mostly. It was a matter of national security.

The Asylum was ripped down in the 1950s, and replaced by a family shelter called DC Village. In the process, one of the original mile markers of the District (SE 8), placed there in 1772, was upended, lost, replaced and buried again.

Potters Field was also lost, or misplaced, since it’s boundary was marked off by the distance from the Stone along the fence that marked the edge of the Asylum grounds.

In 1982, when the great men were dead and the secrets of WW II were all revealed, make-believe Nazis from Arlington, Virginia, placed a memorial stone to the saboteurs on Park Service land somewhere around where they imagined the German graves might be.

The Rangers collected the tablet, and once they realized who had placed it, stored it away with shared embarrassment with the FBI.

It is around someplace in a warehouse, tucked away with the Arc of the Covenant, probably.

Why would anyone care now?

After all, this all happened a long time ago, in the saddest, most bedraggled part of town. It is a place inhabited by the disenfranchised, burdened by crime, represented by the corrupt, and filled with the wreckage of things the rest of the Federal City does not want to confront.

Lunatic asylums, military bases, homes for the indigent, lost cemeteries and the biggest and smelliest waste treatment plant ever.

Well, it is about history, of course, but mostly it is about money, silly.

And this week we all hit at least one of the jackpots. I show you how that works tomorrow, and we will start the week fresh on other matters. But this story is not quite over. In fact, it may just be getting going again.

I am betting the powers that be would have no problem at all in plowing over the resting place of those hundreds of poor people and the six Germans, too.

There is a lot of money flying around, and that is a new thing for Anacostia.

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