George John Dasch was Kappe's first recruit. He had gone to America in October of 1922, as a stowaway on the S.S. Schoharie, and had been a dishwasher and a waiter in Manhattan and on Long Island. In August of 1926 he was arrested twice, for operating a brothel and for violating Prohibition laws. While working in a hotel he met and married an American. Later he spent time in Chicago selling sanctuary supplies for the Mission of Our Lady of Mercy before returning to waiting tables. Although he completed the requirements for U.S. citizenship in 1939, he never showed up in court to be sworn in.

In 1941 Dasch returned to Berlin, where the Nazi bureaucracy required that he fill out forms explaining the reason for his return to Germany. Dasch wrote that he intended "to partake in political life." This led to his being questioned further by a Gestapo agent, to whom he said, "Even if I have to work as a street cleaner and do my job cleaning streets right, I want to participate politically." His motives may have been more complicated, however: he was not, one of his fellows later observed, "the absolute Nazi he pretended to be." After his capture by the FBI, Dasch claimed that he had joined the sabotage mission in order to learn secrets that he could later use in the United States to fight against the Nazis.

On June 3, 1941, Dasch met Kappe, who cross-examined him about his life in the United States. When Dasch said he wanted to join the German army, Kappe said he believed that Dasch might serve the Third Reich to far better advantage in another, unspecified capacity. Kappe subsequently hired Dasch to monitor U.S. radio broadcasts in a listening station where fifty-three languages were spoken and where the news that was gathered was teletyped to all the members of the German cabinet.

In November, Kappe called on Dasch again and asked him if he would like to return to America, to help realize "the plan on which my office has been working for a long time." Dasch demurred, saying, "But that's a peaceful country, isn't it?" Kappe admitted that the United States was indeed neutral, but he characterized it as an indirect enemy, because it was a supplier and a supporter of Germany's enemies. "Therefore," he said, "it is time to attack them. We wish to attack the American industries by industrial sabotage." By mid-January of 1942 Dasch had been assigned permanently to the planning of the U.S. mission.

On March 1 Dasch reported to a secret office of the Abwehr to review the personal histories of several other men whom Kappe had tentatively selected to make up two teams of saboteurs, one of which Dasch would lead. In a series of interviews Dasch identified and eliminated a number of what he called "nitwits," along with others who seemed interested simply in escaping Germany at any cost. In the end he selected the following men, who, if not "nitwits," were also not exactly the Nazi elite.

Ernest Peter Burger, born in 1906, joined the Nazi Party at the age of seventeen. He immigrated to America in 1927 to work as a machinist in Milwaukee and Detroit. He became a U.S. citizen in February of 1933, but when he couldn't find work during the Depression, he returned to Germany. There he rejoined the Nazi Party and became an aide-de-camp to Ernest Roehm, the chief of the Nazi storm troopers. He went on to study at the University of Berlin, and he later wrote a paper critical of the Gestapo—a move that earned him seventeen months in a concentration camp. Upon his release from the camp, in July of 1941, Burger served as a private in the German army, guarding Yugoslav and British prisoners of war. The following February he appeared on a list of Germans who had lived in America, and soon after he was interviewed and—somewhat oddly, given his history—selected to attend sabotage school.

Herbert Haupt, born in 1919, was the youngest of the recruits. He had also spent the most time in America, having moved to Chicago with his family when he was six years old. Haupt attended Chicago's Lane Technical High School and served in the German-American Bund's Junior League, but he fled to Mexico in June of 1941. The German consul in Mexico City gave him money and arranged for his passage to Japan; Haupt took a Japanese freighter to Yokohama, where he later boarded a German steamer that broke through the British naval blockade of Germany and landed him in Bordeaux 107 days later. He received the Iron Cross, second class, for sighting an enemy steamer while on lookout.

Heinrich Heinck, born in 1907, entered the United States illegally in 1926. After working in New York City as a busboy, a handyman, an elevator operator, and a machinist, he leaped at the German government's return offer in 1939. He had a limited command of English and spoke with a thick German accent. The other recruits considered Heinck phlegmatic and unsure of himself.

Edward Kerling, born in 1909, was among the first 80,000 men to join the Nazi Party. He joined at the age of nineteen and maintained his membership after moving to America, in 1928. After a stint smoking hams for a Brooklyn meat-packing company, Kerling found work as a chauffeur and handyman in Mount Kisco, New York, and Greenwich, Connecticut. In 1940 he returned to Germany, where he ran the propaganda shows in movie theaters. With his puffy cheeks, heavy jaw, and dimpled chin, Kerling was, Burger thought, a "decidedly Irish type." He was chosen to lead the second team.

Herman Neubauer, born in 1910, went to America in 1931; he worked as a cook in restaurants, on ships, and at the Chicago World's Fair, in 1933. In 1939 he moved to Miami, but in 1940, while visiting his family in Germany, he was drafted into the German army and sent to the Russian front, where he was wounded in the face and the leg by shrapnel. While recovering in an army medical center in Vienna, he received a note from Kappe inquiring whether he would "like to go on a special assignment to a country where you have been before."

Richard Quirin, born in 1908, moved to the United States in 1927. He worked in maintenance at a General Electric plant in Schenectady, New York, but was laid off during the Depression. He then moved to New York City, where he joined the Friends of the New Germany and found work as a housepainter. He, too, returned to Germany in the repatriation program.

Werner Thiel, born in 1907, traveled to America in 1927 to work as a machinist at a Ford plant in Detroit. He later moved to New York, where he took a job as a porter in a senior citizens' home. He subsequently moved to Hammond, Indiana, before taking various jobs in Illinois, California, and Florida. In 1939 Thiel returned to Germany in the repatriation program.

Life on the Farm

In April, Kappe and his recruits were dispatched to a farm in Brandenburg, forty miles west of Berlin. From the road all that was visible of the farm, formerly the home of a wealthy Jewish shoe manufacturer, was a large stone farmhouse and a few pigs and cows roaming the grounds. But back behind a stone wall armed guards and German shepherds were on patrol twenty-four hours a day. In the fields behind the farmhouse members of the Abwehr constructed sections of railroad track and bridges of various kinds and lengths. They also set up pistol and rifle ranges, a field for hand-grenade practice, and a gymnasium for boxing and judo training. Classrooms and laboratories were situated above the garage, and a nearby greenhouse supplied fresh fruit, vegetables, and—incongruously, given the circumstances—flowers.