Hitler’s doomed sabotage Mission
When Nazi agents tried to infiltrate the US, it didn’t go entirely to plan
Operation Pastorius was sound in principle: the Nazis would contact and recruit eight German citizens living in the US. They would arm them, give them explosives, $175,000, fake identity cards and draft deferment documents to avoid being called up for military service.
This was December 1941, just after the US had declared war on Japan, and Germany wanted a campaign of terror to demoralise civilians and hamper the US war machine.
The saboteurs were trained at the German
High Command near Berlin where they were taught to handle explosives, they made efforts to improve their English and pop culture knowledge by reading American newspapers and magazines, and they developed robust fake histories that they learned by heart.
They had all the resources but it seemed none of the professionalism required for the job. George Dasch left documents that could have exposed the operation on a train. Another recruit drunkenly boasted to punters in a Parisian bar that he was a secret agent. The Nazis clearly didn’t choose their agents carefully enough.
After being dropped off 185 kilometres from New York City by a U-boat, the saboteurs had a close call with the US Coastguard, who found some of their equipment buried on the beach. Dasch and one of his fellow agents decided that they hated Nazis and went to the FBI to inform them of their mission. Two weeks later, the men were rounded up, having failed to execute any of their plans. Hitler never again tried to send saboteurs into the US.