The threat to Pennsylvania’s Horseshoe Curve

The Horseshoe Curve is a U.S. National Historic Landmark completed in 1854 by the Pennsylvania Railroad. It was a major engineering feat designed to reduce the westbound grade to the summit of the Allegheny Mountains. Located 5 miles west of Altoona, Pa., the curve is 2,375 feet long and 1,300 feet in diameter. The Horseshoe Curve bends around a dam and lake, the highest of three Altoona Water Authority reservoirs that supply water from the valley to the city of Altoona.

Completed by the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR), the curve was so unique that Pennsylvania Railroad conductors were told to announce bend to daytime passengers — a tradition that continued by three Pennsylvania successors, including Penn Central, Conrail, and currently Norfolk Southern. The curve is considered one of the eight engineering marvels of the early 1850s.

During World War II, the PRR carried troops and material for the Allied war effort on the main line between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh. Train count peaked in the 1940s with more than 50 passenger trains per day, along with numerous freight and military trains.

On Dec. 11, 1941, four days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hitler declared war on the United States. He quickly authorized a secret mission to sabotage American factories and transportation infrastructure that might cripple the American war effort. The mission would include plans to attack civilian targets to create chaos and demoralize American citizens. It made sense that Horseshoe Curve might become an attractive target since it was on a major military route between major industrial cities such as Pittsburgh and the cities of the East Coast.

Hitler turned to Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, Chief of the German Abwehr (the military-intelligence service), to lead and coordinate a sabotage mission which was dubbed “Operation Pastorius”. Early in his military career during World War I, Canaris had successfully organized acts of sabotage on French targets in Morocco. He was also credited with orchestrating a devastating attack on the U.S. munitions depot located on Black Tom Island in New York Harbor. The tremendous blast destroyed the depot on July 30, 1916, with the roar of the blast heard as far away as Maryland and Connecticut. It should be noted that this was before America formally entered WWI. Canaris seemed confident that “Operation Pastorius” would be a similar success. Now holding the rank of admiral, Canaris recruited eight Germans who had lived in the United States to carry out Operation Pretorius.

All eight men were recruited into the Abwehr and chosen for this mission because of their command of the English language and their knowledge of the U.S. from living and traveling in the country. Two of them, Ernest Burger and Herbert Haupt, were U.S. citizens. The others, George John Dasch, Edward John Kerling, Richard Quirin, Heinrich Harm Heinck, Herman Otto Neubauer and Wermer Theil, had worked a various jobs in the United States. Dasch, age 39, had worked as a waiter in New York for many years and had married an American woman from Pennsylvania and even served in the U.S. Army for a short time.

Admiral Canaris wasted no time, moving the eight men to an estate in Quenzsee, near Berlin, Germany. There they were given three weeks of intensive sabotage training at the school operated by the German High Command. The eight agents were instructed in the manufacture and use of explosives, incendiaries, primers and rigging various types of delayed-timing devices. They were given an extensive list of targets, including the hydroelectric plants at Niagara Falls, along with bridges, water facilities and aluminum factories.

High on the priority list were large railroad installations in the Northeastern U.S., including Horseshoe Curve. At the time, the stretch of track was having roughly 8,700 freight cars passing through nearby Gallitzan each day with supply and troop trains rounded the Curve on the average of one every 15 minutes.

All eight spies continued to prepare for their departure at Quenzsee with additional physical training. They adopted aliases and were even tutored in American slang. At the point of departure, the men were split into two groups of four, with Dasch leading one group and Kerling leading the second group. Now equipped with false life histories, counterfeit birth certificates, driver’s licenses, Social Security cards and a total of $175,000 in American currency, the men were taken in two separate submarines to the Eastern Coast of the United States.

The two groups of four men departed on May 28, 1942 in German U-boats. They endured 17 longs days of cramped quarters and rough seas. Dasch’s group crossed in U-202, while Kerling’s group traveled in U-584. They traveled separately since Dasch’s group would land ashore near the Hampton’s on Long Island while Kerling’s target landing spot would was Ponte Vedra Beach, near Jacksonville, Fla.

U-202 actually landed at Amagansett, N.Y., at a beach on Long Island. About 100 miles east of New York City, Dasch, Burger, Quirin and Heinck came ashore on inflatable rafts. They were wearing German Navy uniforms so that if they were captured, they would be classified as prisoners of war rather than spies who would likely face execution. The four men brought their explosives, primer and incendiaries, which they planned to bury along with their uniforms, while changing into their civilian clothes.

As they approached the beach, a local Coast Guardsman named John Cullen was starting his nightly patrol about a half-hour past midnight. Seaman Cullen was on one of the less glamorous tasks as a “sand pounder” — a term applied to Guardsman who patrolled beaches looking for signs of lurking German submarines or anything suspicious on the beach. On that foggy night Cullen, armed only with a flashlight and flare gun, spotted a figure in the mist and outlines of three men behind the figure. He called out “Who are you?” The closest German replied in English that they were fishermen who had run aground. Dasch offered a bribe of $300 to avoid getting into trouble, and Cullen feigned cooperation. Cullen was sure they were German spies, and fled back to his station to sound the alarm.

Having hastily buried their uniforms and explosives and now in civilian clothes, the spies made their way to the Amagansett Station, taking the Long Island Railroad into Manhattan. An armed Coast Guard Patrol showed up, but the Germans were gone. The four crates of explosives and German uniforms were soon found buried in the wet sand. Thus began the hunt for the saboteurs sent to the United States to blow up rail facilities and war industry plants.

Meanwhile, Kirling’s group of four on U-584 made a successful landing without incident at Ponte Vedra Beach on June 16, 1942. The group came ashore wearing bathing suits, but wore German Navy hats and like Dasch’s group buried their munitions, put on civilian clothes and started their mission by boarding trains to Chicago and probably to New York City, where they were to meet with Dasch’s group to plan their assaults. Dasch and his men holed up in a Manhattan hotel. Dasch was unnerved by his encounter with the Coast Guard and called Burger to his room to tell him he had no intention of going through with the mission and planned to report the plot to the FBI.

Under threat by Dasch, Burger agreed to defect to the United States immediately. Dasch even called the FBI from New York to request a meeting, thinking that he would be hailed a hero for exposing the mission. The FBI first treated his call as a hoax, forcing Dasch to travel to Washington, D.C. to meet directly with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. He even went to the FBI headquarters and was directed to an FBI agent named Duane L. Traynor, never meeting Hoover directly. Traynor sensed that Dasch was telling the truth and gained the attention of Assistant Director D.M. Ladd by showing him the operations budget of $84,000.

None of the other six German agents were aware of the betrayal, and over the next two weeks all six were arrested. Dasch hoped to be treated as a hero, but Hoover made no mention of him and gave credit to the FBI for capturing the saboteurs. After U.S. officials learned more about the foiled plot and possible targets, Horseshoe Curve was put on high alert because of its high military value. It was immediately fenced off and put under 24 hour military guard until 1946.

On July 2, 1942, President Roosevelt created a military tribunal to prosecute the Germans. The trial was held on July 8 in Assembly Hall on the fifth floor of the Department of Justice Building in Washington, D.C. before a seven-member military commission. The trial was complex, with objections by the defense over the validity of the military tribunal as well as the fact they had never actually completed any destructive acts. An appeal went to the U.S. Supreme Court after the trial ended on August 1, 1942. Two days later, all were found guilty and sentenced to death. President Roosevelt commuted Burger’s sentence to life in prison and Dasch’s to 30 years since they provided information about the others. Sparing the life of Dasch and Burger, it was reasoned, might encourage other potential saboteurs to undermine the efforts of colleagues in order to receive leniency.

The remaining six convicted saboteurs, one after another, took their seat in the electric chair on the third floor of the District of Columbia Jail. They were buried in a potter’s field in the Blue Plains neighborhood in the Anacostia area of Washington D.C.

The story of Operation Pastorius did not end with the trial. By 1948, President Harry S. Truman granted executive clemency to Dasch and Burger. The two men then were taken by Army transport to the America zone in Germany. Dasch published his account of Operation Pastorius in a 1959 book called Eight Spies Against America and died in Germany in 1992. Burger died in 1962.

Seaman John Cullen was awarded the coxswain insignia and received the Legion of Merit usually awarded to only officers. He was even featured on the front page of the New York Times. Cullen died in 2011 at the age of 90.

In a final ironic twist in Operation Pastorius, the creator of the plot, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, eventually began having strong doubts himself about Hitler. He witnessed examples of war crimes by the SS and received reports from his Abwehr agents of mass murders throughout Poland. He planned to protest to Hitler, but when he told the chief of the Wehrmacht, Wilhelm Keitel, he was warned to go no further.

At the insistence of Heinrich Himmler, Hitler dismissed Canaris and abolished the Abwehr in February 1944. At that point Canaris was being linked to the July 20 plot to kill Hitler, since several of conspirators were under suspicion and were known to be in Canaris’ circle. Investigations dragged on until April 1945. Canaris’ personal diary, which implicated him in the conspiracy, was eventually discovered and presented to Hitler. He was placed on trial by an SS summary court and sentenced to death.

Canaris was led to the gallows and executed on April 9, 1945 at the Flossenburg concentration camp, just weeks before the end of the war in Europe.

The creator of Operation Pastorius was executed for high treason, much like six of the eight men who in 1942 plotted to destroy the Horseshoe Curve. 

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