Vic Socotra

02 September 2009

Meeting the Enemy

The Long Island Boys

(George John Dasch, 1942, no number)

It is positively chill this morning. It makes me long already for the summer that is still with us.

I’m sure the French have a word for it- missing something that is still around, but I have been feeling like this for quite a while, before the election, before the first dread realization that things were coming off the rails and the great locomotive was going to carve its own way through the underbrush.

I hate to beat this to death, but there are some things about the missing Nazis that is so timely that it compels me to tell the story. The complex and often dysfunctional interplay between the Cops and the Spooks that started back then survived through 9/11 and beyond. The Commission that caused the overhaul of the intelligence community and the FBI noted it with alarm.

We have a new DNI and an overhauled FBI, and common security badges. But some argue that communications and information sharing between the agencies is still screwed up.

I have a pal who, standing under a sign that read proudly “We have one Badge!” had one badge confiscated and replaced by another of exactly the color and composition.

The Nazi saboteurs are another case in point. We no longer have to worry about those sorts of terrorists, but there are new ones. Some of them speak our language, as they did, and they arrived on our shores unannounced. Half of them got in without detection, and their targets included the water supply of a major city.

There is nothing new under the sun, after all. The idea of sending saboteurs- terrorists in a wartime context- was the brainchild of Walter Kappe, an military intelligence officer and Nazi who had immigrated to America in 1925. He worked in the all-American town of Kankakee, Illinois; later spending time in New York and Chicago. He was involved in pro-German politics, and returned to Germany to work in the Ministry of Propaganda for that strange little Joseph Goebbels.

Kappe’s specialty was working the thousands of Germans who had repatriated to the Fatherland for economic and ideological reasons. As the war loomed with his one-time home, he transferred to military intelligence to utilize his expertise in a campaign of destruction and terror against the American homeland. He was put in charge of recruiting Germans who had spent time in America to return and attack her, using their language skills and cultural awareness to swim anonymously in the public sea.

He found twelve likely candidates, not a great deal different in magnitude than the number of jihadis that KSM was able to identify for bin Laden. Four dropped out during the intense training at The Farm, and it was two teams of four that were ultimately dispatched across the sea.

The specific targets in which he was interested are known now in the same sort of detail as that of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed- al Qaida’s target intellectual. We nick-named KSM. Aluminum production was necessary for the production of aircraft. The Abwehr staff studied how the system worked, and identified a cryolite plant in Philadelphia that was crucial to the production of the light metal in New York, Illinois and Tennessee.

The Ohio River locks that connect Cincinnati and St. Louis were designated for destruction, along with dams belonging to the TVA and those of the public utilities at Niagara Falls. Critical rail chokepoints at Hell Gate Bridge, which connects New England with New York City were going to be bombed, and the Horseshoe Curve at Altoona, the rail gateway to the west.

My Grandfather worked on the C &O system, and they wanted to blow him up, too, though there was nothing personal about it. What was personal was a plan to also hit Jewish-owned department stores. In some ways Kappe and KSM had so very much in common.

The delusion that eight men could carry this all off was profound, just as it was for the planners of 9/11, though I must admit the Saudis got a lot further than the Germans did.

The German version was also more expensive. The saboteurs were given $175,200 in American cash to finance the operation. That is not a great deal different than the amount of money they terrorists spent to capture four airplanes and turn three of them into gigantic cruise missile. Of course, if you deal with the money in constant dollars, and allowing for inflation, the Germans spent a lot more and got a lot less.

The bribe to Seaman 2/c Punchy Cullen, for example, amounted to $260 dollars and turned out to be the single largest expenditure of the mission, if you don’t count the marine diesel fuel and the time of two complete U-boat crews. Punchy did not get to keep the money. Clothing, meals, lodging and travel amounted to a grand total of $612.

I suppose it is about time to meet the Bad Guys. It is sort of interesting the way their numbers go: they are forever arranged by team. The Long Island Boys and the Ponte Vedre Bund.

Here they are, starting with the U-202 team:

George John Dasch doesn’t have a number. He was born on February 7th, 1903, and entered a convent to study for the priesthood at the age of 13. In 1917, at the age of 14, he was kicked out for moral reasons and enlisted in the Kaiser's Army, serving in Belgium for eleven months. In 1923, he spent a year in the United States illegally after stowing away on a freighter. He managed to get back to Germany twice to visit before the next big war, and served for a year in the US Army. He got an honorable discharge and married an American girl named Rose Marie Guille while working in the restaurant business. He got arrested twice, for operating a brothel and for bootlegging. He worked briefly in Chicago selling sanctuary supplies for the Mission of Our Lady of Mercy, and completed the requirements for citizenship in 1939, though he never showed up in court to be sworn in.

Ernst Peter Burger doesn’t have a number either. He was born September 1, 1906, at Augsburg <http://en.wikipedia.org%20%20/wiki/Augsburg> , Bavaria. He had an unremarkable childhood and saw what all Germans did in the hyper inflation of the early twenties. He joined the Nazi Party at the age of seventeen, and later immigrated to America to work as a machinist in Milwaukee and Detroit. He became a U.S. citizen in February of 1933, but when he couldn't find work during the Depression, he returned to Germany. There he rejoined the Nazi Party and became an aide-de-camp to Ernest Roehm, the enigmatic gay chief of the Nazi Brown Shirts. storm troopers. He went on to study at the University of Berlin, and he later wrote a paper critical of the Gestapo, a poor career choice that got him more than a year in a prison camp. That was a little better than the choice the Gestapo offered his former chief- Roehm was given a pistol with a single bullet and the opportunity to “do the right thing.” With manpower needed for the Army, Burger went from the camp to the Wehrmacht. As a private soldier he guarding Yugoslav and British POWs, until the Abwehr identified him as an English speaker, and a potential saboteur.

276. Richard Quirin has a number. He was born in Berlin, Germany in 1908. He was 34 when he clambered onto U-202 for his trip back across the ocean. They say he had a difficult childhood, being left with foster parents at age two. Returned to his mother at age 12, he lived with her in Hanover, and as an adult he became a mechanic by trade. In 1927, he traveled to Schenectady, New York, where he attended night school to learn English. He worked for General Electric for three years before being laid off in the Depression. Quirin then went to New York City and worked odd jobs. In 1936 he married, and became a member of the German-American Bund and a Nazi Party member. In 1939, he and his wife returned to Germany. He worked in the Volkswagen AG plant in Braunschweig, and there he met Heinrich Heinck, # 277.

Heinrich Harm Heinck has been assigned the next sequential number. He was born in Hamburg on June 27, 1907. As an adult, Heinck worked for the Hamburg-American Shipping Company and eventually served on the S.S.Westphalia as a machinist. In 1926 Heinck jumped ship in New York City and entered the United States illegally. He worked a variety of jobs, mostly as a machinist or tool and die maker. In 1933 he married Anna Goetz. Heinck was a member of the German-American Bund. Out of work, Heinck returned to Germany in 1939 where he met Quirin at the Volkswagen plant. Anna , his wife, followed him back to Europe and they lived with her parents and had one son. Exempt from the draft because of their jobs, Heinck and Quirin were nevertheless recruited by Major Kappe for special operations in America.

That is the team that boarded the U-202, which is as cramped and stuffy as the Hamburg-America liners were grand and open. It is as uncomfortablea way to travel to America as one can imagine.

I’ll have to tell you about The Ponte Vedre Bund tomorrow. They traveled on the U-584 in the same manner, and although they did not meet any Coast Guardsmen on the beach, they all got numbers, too.

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