Posted on 08/07/2020 6:58:12 PM PDT by CheshireTheCat
Seventy-five years ago today, six German saboteurs were electrocuted in a Washington, D.C. jail … a failed World War II operation that bequeathed its target nation a controversial legal landmark.
On June 13 of 1942 — just eight weeks before they faced the electric chair — Herbert Hans Haupt, Heinrich Heinck, Edward Kerling, Herman Neubauer, Richard Quirin and Werner Thiel, all of them German nationals who had returned to the Fatherland after previous emigration to the U.S., were dropped by U-Boats along with two other men, Ernest Peter Burger and George John Dasch, in two quartets on the eastern fringe of Long Island and the Florida coast.
“Operation Pastorius” to sabotage war industries on the U.S. mainland would never even have time to get its land legs; spied in Long Island by a Coast Guard watchman whom they clumsily attempted to bribe, the agents scattered themselves to New York and Chicago. Burger and Dasch — who for this reason were not in the end electrocuted* — had their reservations about the Third Reich to begin with and guessed after the Coast Guard encounter where this fiasco was heading. They rang up the gobsmacked FBI to shop themselves and their comrades, enabling the feds to pick up the other six men in short order.
The eventual fate of the Nazi saboteurs is no surprise, but the means to obtain it was controversial then and remains so to this day....
(Excerpt) Read more at executedtoday.com ...
The FBI agent still didn't believe him and said simply, "If you are who you really say you are, then come to our office." It was at that point that the caller grabbed the other German whom he could trust and they both took the train from NYC to Philadelphia.
One of the reasons that the trial was kept secret was because the US Government wanted to maintain the facade that it was through our superior intelligence-gathering that the Germans were captured before they could do any of their work; had the truth ever gotten out, there may very well have been U-Boats making weekly drop-offs on beaches up and down the East Coast.
I think I had heard that before but have forgotten about it.
Thanks for reminding me.
They were not H1B visa holders?
A grand total of 7 DAYS between their trial Aug 1, 1942 and their execution, August 8, 1942.
That is pretty amazing.
Today, they’d die in prison.
NO, they would likely get a pardon from the next rat prez, and then get hired to lecture political history at Harvard and UC Berkeley.
Would that they would off serial killers that fast.
Today they would have been pardoned by either Clinton or Obama, given US Citizenship and some hard cash.
The result was that two of the eight had enough of a heart for the Americans that they turned themselves in. Had these men been cut from the same cloth as the men who blew up the munitions in New York Harbor some 26 years prior, they could have done some real damage.
“The signal Milligan precedent formed the basis of a furious objection by Army defense lawyer (and future Secretary of War) Kenneth Royall, who fought his clients’ hopeless corner so vigorously that the doomed men signed a letter praising his efforts. (“unbiased, better than we could expect and probably risking the indignation of public opinion.”)”
Today they’d be given free health care.
Yes, while there may have been/are legal issues, the fact of the matter is that the eight were enemy agents sent to prosecute war against the UnitedStates.
I would have preferred (and probably they as well) that they had been shot.
W. E. B. Griffin wrote about it.
They weren’t in uniform.
It is traditional that such are hanged.
OK, could also go with that.
p
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