Operation Pastorius

Operation Pastorius
Part of the American Theater of World War II
The trial of the captured Germans, July 1942.
Objective	Sabotage American economic infrastructure
Date	June 1942
Executed by	Nazi Germany
Outcome	Failed

Operation Pastorius was a failed German intelligence plan for sabotage inside the United States during World War II. The operation was staged in June 1942 and was to be directed against strategic American economic targets. The operation was named by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the German Abwehr, for Francis Daniel Pastorius, the organizer of the first organized settlement of Germans in America. The plan involved eight German saboteurs who had previously spent time in the United States.

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. A military tribunal – whose constitutionality was challenged to the Supreme Court in Ex parte Quirin – sentenced all eight to death later that year. President Franklin D. Roosevelt commuted the sentences of Dasch and Burger, while the other six were executed. 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.

Sixteen other people were charged with aiding those in charge of the operation.^[1]