The Story of Chicago's Nazi Spy

Chicago Tribune ^ | May 20, 2012 | Ron Grossman

[nickcarraway]

After a secret trip to Germany, a young North Sider returned in 1942 with other conspirators to steal U.S. military secrets and sabotage defense industries — but he was done in by a handkerchief

A spy story worthy of John le Carre began and ended 70 years ago this summer in Chicago.

It had classic elements of an espionage tale — enemy agents landed from submarines, explosives hidden in the sand of an East Coast beach, orders written in invisible ink — and Herbert Haupt, a young man from the North Side who participated in the first invasion of the U.S. mainland since the War of 1812.

Fellow alums of Waters Elementary School on Wilson Avenue once reminisced for a Tribune reporter about Haupt, who sported a brownshirt uniform in the 1930s, when Hitler had a small but vocal following among German-Americans. They recalled the German-born Haupt boasting: "Just wait and see. One day we will rule you!"

Still, Haupt's adolescence was in some ways not much different from that of his schoolmates. He was in the ROTC before dropping out of Lane Tech High School and getting a job at a Chicago factory in West Garfield Park that made parts for the famed Norden bombsight, which gave U.S. aircraft unprecedented accuracy. He met a young woman, Gerda Melind, and the two planned to get married. She recalled Haupt to a Trib reporter as a voracious reader, interested in philosophy and a great talker.

But he disappeared on her in 1941, shortly before the U.S. entered the war. "Her first knowledge that he had gone was a postcard he sent her from St. Louis, telling her he was en route to California," the Trib reported.

In fact, Haupt went to Mexico City, got money from the German consul, sailed to Japan

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

So, how did the story end 70 years later?

[Fiji Hill]

We ought to treat the Islamic terrorists that we capture the way we treated those conspirators and their accessories.

[rocksblues]

"He can talk you blue in the face and you think he's telling you something," said Melind, the fiancee, "but at the end he's told you nothing."

Must be a Chicago thing.