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By John Woodrow Cox

WASHINGTON – A team of power company workers were trudging through a seldom-visited thicket in Southwest Washington when they spotted something odd in a ditch.

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Protruding from the grass was a rectangular slab of granite.

They looked closer, and an inscription on the surface came into focus. What they saw astonished them.

It was a memorial. In honor of Nazi spies. On U.S. government property.

“In memory of agents of the German Abwehr,” the engraving began, “executed August 8, 1942.”

Below that were six names and below those was another cryptic line: “Donated by the N.S.W.P.P.”

News of the unsettling discovery soon reached Jim Rosenstock, who worked in resource management for the National Park Service and also happened to be a local history buff. He was curious, but also skeptical. How could someone have planted such an item there? And why? And – above all – who?

Rosenstock needed to see it for himself so he, too, made the hike into Blue Plains, a woody area known best for a wastewater treatment plant and an abundance of mosquitoes. And that’s when he saw the stone.