The Time Capsule: A James Bond caper, Three Stooges style
Was a highly-trained Nazi saboteur in this area during the early stages of World War II?
When I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI a couple years ago, it was for the purpose of obtaining their investigative file on the bombing of the Zephyr, a crime which happened with the westbound passenger train just minutes east of Villisca.
An interesting distraction in that 800-page report has to do with a lead that didn’t pan out, and a German secret agent who may have passed through town.
Hermann Neubauer, in June of 1942, was carrying a suitcase with a false bottom packed with $50 bills. He was staying at fine hotels and dining in style. Neubauer had spent lavishly since departing a German submarine off the coast of Florida a couple weeks earlier.
He was one of eight Nazi operatives trained in sabotage and sent on a mission. All had previously lived in the U.S., spoke fluent English and returned to Germany before the war to pledge their loyalty to Hitler. They were German versions of James Bond, but proved to be less sophisticated.
One submarine, late on a night in early June of 1942, surfaced off the coast of Long Island. Four men and four wooden boxes, the latter containing high explosives to implement the Nazi plan for a two-year campaign of what we would now call terrorism, went ashore. Another sub deposited four more agents, also amply equipped with explosives and cash, on a beach in Florida.
The men had undergone extensive training at a Nazi school of sabotage and espionage. They learned to identify targets, to infiltrate and blend in, to set explosive charges, to make acts of mass destruction appear to be accidental. Their mission was to derail trains and disrupt power plants, cripple this nation’s production of aircraft, tanks, ships and munitions.
Despite their training, they proved to be totally inept. The group, known as the “Long Island Four,” had problems within an hour of coming ashore. Two of them blundered into a Coast Guard encampment. Partly because they were walking around in the middle of the night arguing in German, partly because Pearl Harbor had caused our military to be alert for the “enemy within,” a guard confronted them. His suspicions were further aroused when one of the two, George Dasch, said he’d been taught to kill but in this case would be kind and give the guard $300 cash to forget he’d seen them. The arrest took place shortly thereafter. Before the day was over the pair, with appropriate persuasion, told all they knew.
The Florida four did a bit better. They split, headed for different locations. Those “different locations” included bingo halls, night clubs, red light districts and horse tracks. Authorities, assuming the saboteurs would be preparing to bomb munition factories and other critical targets, were looking in the wrong places.
Neubauer went to Chicago, where he found some old friends and partied for a couple of days. He cheerfully boasted about his training, his fun ride in a submarine and implied that he expected to eventually get around to retrieving explosives (which they’d buried on a Florida beach) and blowing something up.
He then headed west, probably for Denver, but somewhere in this area seems to have changed his mind and returned to Chicago. By then his friends had turned him in. He was the last of the eight to be apprehended.
Offenders of this type were treated differently then than now. Even though they did no damage, they were wartime enemies of our country. President Roosevelt showed them no sympathy. Six of the eight were tried, convicted, and executed within weeks of their capture. The two who cooperated were spared death but received lengthy prison sentences.
Roy Marshall is a local historian and columnist for the Red Oak Express. He can be contacted at news@redoakexpress.com.