Nazi saboteur Heinck after his arrest: 1942
Heinrich Harm Heinck, one of eight Nazi saboteurs who landed by submarine on U.S. shores In June 1942, is shown in a full head-to-toe mugshot after his arrest.
Heinrich Harm Heinck 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 (or federation), a pro-Nazi organization active in the United States.
Out of work, Heinck returned to Germany in 1939 where he was employed at the Volkswagen factory at Braunschweig. There he met Richard Quirin, who he became close friends with. Heinck’s wife Anna followed him and they lived with her parents and had one son.
Exempt from the draft because of their jobs, Heinck and Quirin were nevertheless both recruited for Operation Pastorius because of their knowledge of the USA, their mechanical abilities and their ability to speak English.
They were trained at the Brandenburg Sabotage School. In June 1942 the pair landed on Long Island with two others from a U-boat. Heinck was arrested, as was Quirin, after the other two reported the mission to the FBI.
In all, six agents were tried by a military tribunal and executed. After his death in the electric chair, Heinck was buried with the other five in the Washington D.C. potters field under a wooden marker which read 277. In 1982 a grave marker was placed at the Blue Plains burial plot.
Background to Operation Pastorius
After the U.S. declared war on Germany following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Nazi leader Adolph Hitler authorized a mission to sabotage the American war effort and attack civilian targets to demoralize the American civilian population inside the United States.
Recruited for Operation Pastorius, named for the leader of the first German settlement in America, were eight German residents who had lived in the United States.
Two of them, Ernst Burger and Herbert Haupt, were American citizens. The others, George John Dasch, Edward John Kerling, Richard Quirin, Heinrich Harm Heinck, Hermann Otto Neubauer, and Werner Thiel, had worked at various jobs in the United States.
All eight were recruited into the Abwehr military intelligence organization and were given three weeks of intensive sabotage training in the German High Command school on an estate at Quenz Lake, near Berlin, Germany. The agents were instructed in the manufacture and use of explosives, incendiaries, primers, and various forms of mechanical, chemical, and electrical delayed timing devices.
Their mission was to stage sabotage attacks on American economic targets: hydroelectric plants at Niagara Falls; the Aluminum Company of America's plants in Illinois, Tennessee, and New York; locks on the Ohio River near Louisville, Kentucky; the Horseshoe Curve, a crucial railroad pass near Altoona, Pennsylvania, as well as the Pennsylvania Railroad's repair shops at Altoona; a cryolite plant in Philadelphia; Hell Gate Bridge in New York; and Pennsylvania Station in Newark, New Jersey.
The agents were also instructed to spread a wave of terror by planting explosives on bridges, railroad stations, water facilities, and public places. They were given counterfeit birth certificates, Social Security Cards, draft deferment cards, nearly $175,000 in American money, and driver's licenses, and put aboard two U-boats to land on the east coast of the U.S.
Before the mission began, it was in danger of being compromised, as George Dasch, head of the team, left sensitive documents behind on a train, and one of the agents when drunk announced to patrons at a bar in Paris that he was a secret agent.
On the night of June 12, 1942, the first submarine to arrive in the U.S., U-202, landed at Amagansett, New York, which is about 100 miles east of New York City, on Long Island, at what today is Atlantic Avenue beach.
It was carrying Dasch and three other saboteurs (Burger, Quirin, and Heinck). The team came ashore wearing German Navy uniforms so that if they were captured, they would be classified as prisoners of war rather than spies. They also brought their explosives, primers and incendiaries, and buried them along with their uniforms, and put on civilian clothes to begin an expected two-year campaign in the sabotage of American defense-related production.
When Dasch was discovered amidst the dunes by unarmed Coast Guardsman John C. Cullen, Dasch offered Cullen a $260 bribe. Cullen feigned cooperation but reported the encounter. An armed patrol returned to the site but found only the buried equipment; the Germans had taken the Long Island Rail Road from the Amagansett station into Manhattan, where they checked into a hotel. A massive manhunt was begun.
The other four-member German team headed by Kerling landed without incident at Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, south of Jacksonville on June 16, 1942. They came on U-584, another submarine. This group came ashore wearing bathing suits but wore German Navy hats. After landing ashore, they threw away their hats, put on civilian clothes, and started their mission by boarding trains to Chicago, Illinois and Cincinnati, Ohio.
The two teams were to meet on July 4 in a hotel in Cincinnati to coordinate their sabotage operations.
Dasch called Burger into their upper-story hotel room and opened a window, saying they would talk, and if they disagreed, "only one of us will walk out that door—the other will fly out this window." Dasch told him he had no intention of going through with the mission, hated Nazism, and planned to report the plot to the FBI. Burger agreed to defect to the United States immediately.
On June 15, Dasch phoned the New York office of the FBI to explain who he was, but hung up when the agent answering doubted his story. Four days later, he took a train to Washington, DC and walked into FBI headquarters, where he gained the attention of Assistant Director D. M. Ladd by showing him the operation's budget of $84,000 cash.
Besides Burger, none of the other German agents knew they were betrayed. Over the next two weeks, Burger and the other six were arrested. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover made no mention that Dasch had turned himself in, and claimed credit for the FBI for cracking the spy ring.
Information that Dasch and Burger had exposed the operation was withheld from the public until after World War II was over in order to make it appear to the American public and to Nazi Germany that the FBI was effective in preventing sabotage.
Fearful that a civilian court would be too lenient, President Roosevelt issued Executive Proclamation 2561 on July 2, 1942 creating a military tribunal to prosecute the Germans. Placed before a seven-member military commission, the Germans were charged with the following offenses:
1) Violating the law of war;
2) Violating Article 81 of the Articles of War, defining the offense of corresponding with or giving intelligence to the enemy;
3) Violating Article 82 of the Articles of War, defining the offense of spying; and
4) Conspiracy to commit the offenses alleged in the first three charges.
The trial was held in Assembly Hall #1 on the fifth floor of the Department of Justice building in Washington D.C. on July 8, 1942.
Lawyers for the accused, who included Lauson Stone and Kenneth Royall, attempted to have the case tried in a civilian court but were rebuffed by the United States Supreme Court in Ex parte Quirin, 317 U.S. 1 (1942), a case that was later cited as a precedent for the trial by military commission of any unlawful combatant against the United States.
The trial for the eight defendants ended on August 1, 1942. Two days later, all were found guilty and sentenced to death. Roosevelt commuted Burger's sentence to life in prison and Dasch's to 30 years because they had turned themselves in and provided information about the others.
The others were executed on August 8, 1942 in the electric chair on the third floor of the District of Columbia jail and buried in a potter's field in the Blue Plains area in the Anacostia section of Washington, D.C.
In April 1948, U.S. President Harry Truman granted clemency to Dasch and Burger who were deported to the American zone in Germany and required to live in that area or face re-imprisonment.
Fourteen other people were charged with aiding the eight saboteurs. They were Walter and Lucille Froehling, Otto and Kate Wergin, Harry and Emma Jaques, Anthony Cramer, Helmut Leiner, Herman Heinrich, Maria Kerling, Hedwig Engemann, Hans Max Haupt and Erna Haupt, and Ernest Kerkhof.
Nearly all were held as enemy aliens and several were sentenced to death for treason, but had their convictions reversed on appeal. Some were re-tried on lesser charges. Some never went to trial.
--Information partially excerpted from Wikipedia
For more information and related images, see flic.kr/s/aHsmPiRmT4
The photographer is unknown. The image is believed to be a U.S. government photograph It is housed in the D.C. Library Washington Star Collection.
Nazi saboteur Heinck after his arrest: 1942
Heinrich Harm Heinck, one of eight Nazi saboteurs who landed by submarine on U.S. shores In June 1942, is shown in a full head-to-toe mugshot after his arrest.
Heinrich Harm Heinck 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 (or federation), a pro-Nazi organization active in the United States.
Out of work, Heinck returned to Germany in 1939 where he was employed at the Volkswagen factory at Braunschweig. There he met Richard Quirin, who he became close friends with. Heinck’s wife Anna followed him and they lived with her parents and had one son.
Exempt from the draft because of their jobs, Heinck and Quirin were nevertheless both recruited for Operation Pastorius because of their knowledge of the USA, their mechanical abilities and their ability to speak English.
They were trained at the Brandenburg Sabotage School. In June 1942 the pair landed on Long Island with two others from a U-boat. Heinck was arrested, as was Quirin, after the other two reported the mission to the FBI.
In all, six agents were tried by a military tribunal and executed. After his death in the electric chair, Heinck was buried with the other five in the Washington D.C. potters field under a wooden marker which read 277. In 1982 a grave marker was placed at the Blue Plains burial plot.
Background to Operation Pastorius
After the U.S. declared war on Germany following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Nazi leader Adolph Hitler authorized a mission to sabotage the American war effort and attack civilian targets to demoralize the American civilian population inside the United States.
Recruited for Operation Pastorius, named for the leader of the first German settlement in America, were eight German residents who had lived in the United States.
Two of them, Ernst Burger and Herbert Haupt, were American citizens. The others, George John Dasch, Edward John Kerling, Richard Quirin, Heinrich Harm Heinck, Hermann Otto Neubauer, and Werner Thiel, had worked at various jobs in the United States.
All eight were recruited into the Abwehr military intelligence organization and were given three weeks of intensive sabotage training in the German High Command school on an estate at Quenz Lake, near Berlin, Germany. The agents were instructed in the manufacture and use of explosives, incendiaries, primers, and various forms of mechanical, chemical, and electrical delayed timing devices.
Their mission was to stage sabotage attacks on American economic targets: hydroelectric plants at Niagara Falls; the Aluminum Company of America's plants in Illinois, Tennessee, and New York; locks on the Ohio River near Louisville, Kentucky; the Horseshoe Curve, a crucial railroad pass near Altoona, Pennsylvania, as well as the Pennsylvania Railroad's repair shops at Altoona; a cryolite plant in Philadelphia; Hell Gate Bridge in New York; and Pennsylvania Station in Newark, New Jersey.
The agents were also instructed to spread a wave of terror by planting explosives on bridges, railroad stations, water facilities, and public places. They were given counterfeit birth certificates, Social Security Cards, draft deferment cards, nearly $175,000 in American money, and driver's licenses, and put aboard two U-boats to land on the east coast of the U.S.
Before the mission began, it was in danger of being compromised, as George Dasch, head of the team, left sensitive documents behind on a train, and one of the agents when drunk announced to patrons at a bar in Paris that he was a secret agent.
On the night of June 12, 1942, the first submarine to arrive in the U.S., U-202, landed at Amagansett, New York, which is about 100 miles east of New York City, on Long Island, at what today is Atlantic Avenue beach.
It was carrying Dasch and three other saboteurs (Burger, Quirin, and Heinck). The team came ashore wearing German Navy uniforms so that if they were captured, they would be classified as prisoners of war rather than spies. They also brought their explosives, primers and incendiaries, and buried them along with their uniforms, and put on civilian clothes to begin an expected two-year campaign in the sabotage of American defense-related production.
When Dasch was discovered amidst the dunes by unarmed Coast Guardsman John C. Cullen, Dasch offered Cullen a $260 bribe. Cullen feigned cooperation but reported the encounter. An armed patrol returned to the site but found only the buried equipment; the Germans had taken the Long Island Rail Road from the Amagansett station into Manhattan, where they checked into a hotel. A massive manhunt was begun.
The other four-member German team headed by Kerling landed without incident at Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, south of Jacksonville on June 16, 1942. They came on U-584, another submarine. This group came ashore wearing bathing suits but wore German Navy hats. After landing ashore, they threw away their hats, put on civilian clothes, and started their mission by boarding trains to Chicago, Illinois and Cincinnati, Ohio.
The two teams were to meet on July 4 in a hotel in Cincinnati to coordinate their sabotage operations.
Dasch called Burger into their upper-story hotel room and opened a window, saying they would talk, and if they disagreed, "only one of us will walk out that door—the other will fly out this window." Dasch told him he had no intention of going through with the mission, hated Nazism, and planned to report the plot to the FBI. Burger agreed to defect to the United States immediately.
On June 15, Dasch phoned the New York office of the FBI to explain who he was, but hung up when the agent answering doubted his story. Four days later, he took a train to Washington, DC and walked into FBI headquarters, where he gained the attention of Assistant Director D. M. Ladd by showing him the operation's budget of $84,000 cash.
Besides Burger, none of the other German agents knew they were betrayed. Over the next two weeks, Burger and the other six were arrested. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover made no mention that Dasch had turned himself in, and claimed credit for the FBI for cracking the spy ring.
Information that Dasch and Burger had exposed the operation was withheld from the public until after World War II was over in order to make it appear to the American public and to Nazi Germany that the FBI was effective in preventing sabotage.
Fearful that a civilian court would be too lenient, President Roosevelt issued Executive Proclamation 2561 on July 2, 1942 creating a military tribunal to prosecute the Germans. Placed before a seven-member military commission, the Germans were charged with the following offenses:
1) Violating the law of war;
2) Violating Article 81 of the Articles of War, defining the offense of corresponding with or giving intelligence to the enemy;
3) Violating Article 82 of the Articles of War, defining the offense of spying; and
4) Conspiracy to commit the offenses alleged in the first three charges.
The trial was held in Assembly Hall #1 on the fifth floor of the Department of Justice building in Washington D.C. on July 8, 1942.
Lawyers for the accused, who included Lauson Stone and Kenneth Royall, attempted to have the case tried in a civilian court but were rebuffed by the United States Supreme Court in Ex parte Quirin, 317 U.S. 1 (1942), a case that was later cited as a precedent for the trial by military commission of any unlawful combatant against the United States.
The trial for the eight defendants ended on August 1, 1942. Two days later, all were found guilty and sentenced to death. Roosevelt commuted Burger's sentence to life in prison and Dasch's to 30 years because they had turned themselves in and provided information about the others.
The others were executed on August 8, 1942 in the electric chair on the third floor of the District of Columbia jail and buried in a potter's field in the Blue Plains area in the Anacostia section of Washington, D.C.
In April 1948, U.S. President Harry Truman granted clemency to Dasch and Burger who were deported to the American zone in Germany and required to live in that area or face re-imprisonment.
Fourteen other people were charged with aiding the eight saboteurs. They were Walter and Lucille Froehling, Otto and Kate Wergin, Harry and Emma Jaques, Anthony Cramer, Helmut Leiner, Herman Heinrich, Maria Kerling, Hedwig Engemann, Hans Max Haupt and Erna Haupt, and Ernest Kerkhof.
Nearly all were held as enemy aliens and several were sentenced to death for treason, but had their convictions reversed on appeal. Some were re-tried on lesser charges. Some never went to trial.
--Information partially excerpted from Wikipedia
For more information and related images, see flic.kr/s/aHsmPiRmT4
The photographer is unknown. The image is believed to be a U.S. government photograph It is housed in the D.C. Library Washington Star Collection.