ESPIONAGE: Death for the Saboteurs

A swank, black Packard whispered over the mud-covered asphalt street, drew up at the new south wing of the District of Columbia’s ancient red-brick jail. Out in the rain stepped greying Coroner Dr. A. Magruder McDonald. In the dim-lit vestibule a dozen reporters sat on death watch for the eight submarine-borne Nazi saboteurs. Some of them had waited more than 24 hours. The Coroner had nothing to say. But his mere presence told them their vigil would soon be over.

Lights in the jail dimmed, as they always do when an electrocution is about to begin. But no official announcement came (see p. 65).

In early afternoon the watch got the word—not from the jail, but from the White House. The electrocutions had begun at noon in the jail’s new death chamber atop the south wing. There, in a small room on an old, wooden chair behind a glass partition separating them from official witnesses, six of the spies, their heads in rubber masks with nose-and-mouth slits, had sat to die. Four executioners pulled the switches; in an hour and 20 minutes it was all over.

The military commission which tried the saboteurs had recommended that the other two, George John Dasch and Ernest Peter Burger, get life imprisonment instead of death. They had turned informers. President Roosevelt, reviewing the commission’s findings, reduced Dasch’s sentence to 30 years at hard labor. (Dasch and Burger might be useful at the trials of 14 men & women accused of giving the spies shelter in the U.S.)

As the White House made its announcement, two Army ambulances drove into the jail yard. A half-hour later the U.S. Marshal’s van appeared: Dasch and Burger went off to hard labor. In the courtyard, in the drizzle, six sheeted bodies on stretchers were loaded in the ambulances—four in one, two in the other. Steel-helmeted soldiers, with bayonets and machine guns, kept a little crowd of the curious away. The ambulances swung out slowly on the wet pavement, took the bodies to the Walter Reed Hospital for autopsy.

Thus, two months after the spies had landed on Long Island and Florida beaches, one month after their trial began, ended the biggest spy case in U.S. history. The U.S. still knew less about the case than about any one of its daily, tawdry crimes of passion. The record was sealed until after the war.

From Detroit came a stern warning to potential U.S. traitors. Up for sentence came Max Stephan, a naturalized German, owner of a small restaurant. Short, pudgy Max Stephan had been convicted of aiding Nazi Oberlentnant Hans Peter Krug, fugitive from a Canadian prison camp, in an attempt to escape to Mexico. In his cell he had boasted: “A victorious Germany will not leave Stephan in jail.” His sentence: death by hanging.