Reading Eagle (August 9, 1942)
Escape chair
Dasch… 30 years in jail
Burger… life imprisonment
Executions shake Nazis
Former Berlin reporter believes leniency idea dispelled in Reich
By Pierre J. Huss
New York (INS) – (Aug. 8)
Any Nazi complacency about American inclinations toward leniency even to spies and traitors has been effectively shattered by the execution today of six of the eight condemned Nazi saboteurs.
From my own knowledge of Nazi Germany, I feel certain that the manner in which the military trial was conducted and the swiftness with which justice was meted out once a verdict had been reached and handed to the President for his approval will cause serious setbacks on Hitler’s planned fifth column and sabotage activities in the United States.
We can expect the Axis prophets of distortion – led by the little Nazi propaganda fiend Joseph Goebbels – to drum up a pained outcry about “Yankee brutality.”
They will seek, no doubt, to camouflage and distort the bare facts in Berlin, Rome and Tokyo, but there is scarcely an Axis individual of even mediocre intelligence to whom the blow will not strike home regardless of the officially-inspired propaganda.
Clear-cut warning
I know that in Naziland, the average German will read the regimented morning newspapers and listen to the government radio without enthusiasm; inside, where the Gestapo cannot look, he will be aware that the electric switch thrown in Washington District of Columbia jail today is a clear-cut warning to all the world that a similar fate awaits every saboteur, spy or traitor caught in the United States.
Death to persons accused of such crimes in the Nazi Reich is a foregone conclusion. But the important difference is that in Naziland, there is no such thing as a fair trial. Hitler is not interested in due process of law. The accused is “railroaded” to death by a rubber-stamp tribunal known as “the People’s Court” and in many instances even this formality is dispensed with.
We in America have shown to the world that even in a time of dire crisis we can preserve those tenets of justice which form part of the principles for which we are fighting this war.
Each and every one of the saboteurs was given every opportunity to defend himself and expert military counsel was assigned them by the President with explicit orders to give them every defense justified by the facts.
Paid penalty
But once the decision was reached after careful and honorable weighing of testimony, nothing was allowed to interfere with making the saboteurs pay fully for the crimes of which they were found guilty.
This will ring a bell not only in Nazi Germany, but in a different and equally dramatic way in the oppressed Nazi-occupied lands which have had a taste of the Nazi brand of justice.
There will be no suppressing the fact from either Germany or the conquered lands. The radio broadcasts emanating from Britain and America will take care of that. These are listened to secretly by enough people throughout Europe to spread the word eventually to everybody by word of mouth.
The average German will have occasion to compare the American brand of justice with what he has witnesses almost daily in his own country. And the average patriot in the conquered countries will feel somewhat repaid for the bitter penalties inflicted on him and his fellow victims in Europe by the Nazi tyrants.
Hitler himself will study this report with incredulous eyes and frown at the new complications that come with it. His first step, in view of this unexpected turn in the land of “the Yankees,” will be to order Propaganda Minister Goebbels to prepare a version for public consumption doctored to fit the measure of Nazi propaganda.
No admissions
Naturally, there can be no admission in Berlin of the fact that these men were saboteurs trained in Berlin and shipped over to America by U-boat. The Nazi cry more than likely will endeavor to pin the mantle of martyrdom on “persecuted and innocent victims of German blood,” who died:
…on the field of battle like any soldier and consequently will be remembered and mourned as such by all Germans.
That has been the method resorted to by the Nazis in washing their hands of all responsibility in similar cases since the outbreak of war.
But it goes without saying that the Washington executions will seriously “blitz” the Nazi sabotage and spy schools and interfere with the recruiting of adaptable candidates for such hazardous jobs.
Hitherto, as far as could be learned in Berlin, these schools made much of the fact that non-Axis lands ordinarily deal leniently with individuals convicted of being on Hitler’s payroll. It was presumably pointed out that in the lands of the Western Hemisphere especially, there was little to risk except perhaps a prison sentence, usually commuted at the end of the war. That was something not to be underestimated in persuading prospective candidates to enroll in the secret schools.
Harsh examples
The Nazis themselves have always been their own harshest example to spies, saboteurs and traitors.
The Gestapo or German military counterespionage service picks up a man or woman suspected of espionage, sabotage. Or treason and says nothing about the case. There is no announcement until after the special Nazi tribunal known as “the People’s Court” has pronounced and carried out the death penalty.
The public becomes aware of the case when the blood-red notices appear on public bulletin boards giving in bold-face type the name of the person executed and the charges. In Berlin, I used to see as many as six to eight of these death notices each morning.
News of Haupt’s death is kept from parents
Haupt
Chicago, Illinois (INS) – (Aug. 8)
U.S. Marshal William McDonald tonight said that the parents of Herbert Haupt, one of the six Nazi saboteurs executed in Washington today, will not be told of his electrocution – at least for the time being.
Mr. and Mrs. Hans Max Haupt, the dead youth’s father and mother, are in the Cook County jail awaiting action on charges they aided their son when he returned to Chicago from Germany where he had taken special schooling in sabotage.
The marshal said, however, that the elder Haupts might possibly learn of the death of their son through the jail’s “grapevine.”