The plan quickly failed after two of the agents, George John Dasch and Ernest Peter Burger, defected to the Federal Bureau of Investigation shortly after being deployed, betraying the other six.
In 1948, Dasch and Burger were granted executive clemency, conditional on their permanent deportation to the American occupation zone in Germany by President Harry S. Truman.
During World War I he had organized the sabotage of French installations in Morocco, and other German agents entered the United States to attack New York arms factories, including the destruction of munitions supplies at Black Tom Island, in 1916.
[5] All eight were recruited into the Abwehr and were given three weeks of intensive sabotage training in the German High Command school on an estate at Quenzsee, near Berlin, Germany.
The agents were also instructed to spread a wave of terror by planting explosives on bridges, railroad stations, water facilities, public places, and Jewish-owned shops.
[9] 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.[6] Even before the mission began, it was in danger of being compromised, as George Dasch, commander of the team, left confidential documents on a train, and one of the agents, while drunk, announced to patrons in a Paris tavern that he was a secret agent.
The team was launched in inflatable rafts (in which Dasch nearly drowned) and came ashore wearing German Navy uniforms so that, if they were captured, they would be classified as prisoners of war rather than spies.
[12][13][14] 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.
[15] Immediately upon reaching the beach, at around 30 minutes past midnight the saboteurs were discovered amidst the dunes by unarmed Coast Guardsman John C. Cullen, who was accosted by Dasch and offered a bribe of $300.
[12] Later that month, U-202 would sink two civilian ships: the Argentine steamer Rio Tercero and the American passenger liner City of Birmingham, before returning to Europe.
[18] The other four-member German team commanded by Kerling landed without incident at Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, south of Jacksonville on 16 June 1942.
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.
[14] Additional breaches of secrecy occurred; Kerling had boasted to a colleague about their mission, and in Chicago, Herbert Haupt had asked his father to buy him a sports car claiming he needed it while traveling on business for the German government.
[16][21][18] On 15 June, Dasch phoned the New York office of the FBI, gave his name as "Franz Pastorius" (the namesake of the operation), and explained the plot, but ended the call when the agent answering doubted his story and thought he was a crackpot.
Attorney General Francis Biddle estimated that at best, the German saboteurs could be convicted of conspiracy and face up to three years in prison, while Burger and Haupt could be tried for treason.
[24][25] Placed before a seven-member military commission, the Germans were charged with the following offenses: The trial was held in Assembly Hall #1 on the fifth floor of the Department of Justice building in Washington, D.C., on 8 July 1942.
The others were executed on 8 August 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 neighborhood in the Anacostia area of Washington.
[31] For his part in the affair, John Cullen was awarded the coxswain insignia, featured on the front page of the New York Times, and received the Legion of Merit medal.