Sordid Story

Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them aid and comfort. . . .

--The U.S. Constitution

In a small, imitation-marble pillared Federal courtroom in Chicago last week, six closely guarded naturalized U.S. citizens, German-born, went on trial for treason. By week's end the jury (nine housewives, three men) and a handful of spectators had heard the first grim chapters of a story that might well have come from the mind of a dime novelist.

Defendants: Hans and Erna Haupt, Walter and Lucille Froehling, Otto and Kate Wergin. The men were stolid, pale, the women red-eyed from weeping, as the indictment against them was read: that they had "adhered to" an enemy of the U.S. by aiding Herbert Hans Haupt, one of the eight submarine-borne Nazi saboteurs captured last summer by the FBI, tried by military court (six, including Haupt, later were executed).

To show that Herbert Haupt (son of Hans and Erna, nephew of Walter and Lucille) was an enemy, U.S. attorneys summoned to the witness stand Ernest Peter Burger, one of the two saboteurs who tattled on the others to save their own skins. To Americans who think of spies in terms of the movie-made breed of sinister villain, Ernest Burger was a distinct surprise. His grey suit was neat and quiet, his thin brown hair slicked down tightly, his deep-set blue eyes calm. As a witness he was courteous, cooperative, almost eager. Only once did he seem at all what everyone had expected: a young, heel-clicking stalwart of Hitler's "master race." That was when, needled because his attorney asked him if he had been promised immunity for testifying for the U.S., he stiffened, shot out his jaw and said haughtily: "I may remind you that you are speaking to a German soldier. The United States Government respected me by not even offering me any promises whatever. I expect the same from you, sir!"

Highlights of his thickly Teutonic two-day testimony, given without shame:

>He and his seven co-saboteurs, including Haupt, attended a "sabotage school" at Brandenburg, near Berlin, graduated, were then U-boated to America. "We were to harm, wherever possible, all aluminum production in the United States. . . . The intent was to do the worst possible damage in this country. Our exact assignment was to damage aluminum plants of the Alcoa Company in Tennessee, California and Oregon, and to damage rail lines between these plants and war-production centers."

> Haupt was instructed by his superiors in Germany: ". . . to get employment in an optical concern ... to get inside information about optical companies." (A Chicago optical company for which Haupt worked prior to his flight to Germany did subcontracting work on the secret Norden bombsight.) Haupt also was instructed "to register for the draft as soon as possible ... he was to explain his absence from America by saying he was in Mexico."

> They brought with them German uniforms, explosives, fuses, detonators, time clocks, powder-loaded fountain pens, U.S. draft and social-security cards and more than $100,000 in U.S. cash.

> "We didn't like Haupt, but ... he had been given the Iron Cross for carrying out an [earlier] assignment. After that Haupt was all right with us."

With several more weeks of testimony from more than 100 witnesses still to come, the sordid story of treachery had only been begun.

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