Synopsis

In Chapter 1 (KTB #148) ERICH begins his career as a spy, and he lets us know of his love of beautiful women. In Chapter 2 (KTB #149), he was transferred home to Germany and his shipboard romance with Karen ended. In Chapter 3 (KTB #151) he began his training as a spy – and he learned that a spy who falls in love with an enemy spy – gets shot!

In Chapter 4 (KTB #152) we read where ERICH himself falls for a woman who turned out to be a German spy herself and her job was to lure German spies in training to betray themselves – and ERICH is nearly washed out of spy training. In Chapter 5 (KTB #153) we learned that ERICH was to be in charge of Operation PELIKAN, the plan to blow up the Panama Canal with two Ju 87 STUKA dive bombers brought over on two U-boats. At the last moment, it was thought by the German agency, that someone had tipped off the Americans to this plot, so the plan was scrapped. In Chapter 6 (KTB #154 and KTB #155) we read how ERICH and the Abwehr tried to find him a partner for his mission into the USA with the intended purpose of sabotaging the Manhattan Project – the atomic bomb project in the United States. In Chapter 7 (KTB #156) we read about the Atlantic crossing to the USA where ERICH and Billy were to be put ashore to assault the ‘Manhattan Project’. In Chapter 8 (KTB #157), the two agents landed on the coast of Maine, ready to begin their sabotage of the atomic bomb project. In Chapter 9 (KTB #158) ERICH gets the shock of learning that Billy has taken all the money and the diamonds, and deserted not only the mission, but ERICH as well.

In the first part of Chapter 10 (KTB #159) ERICH is trying desperately to find Billy – and get his $60,000 and diamonds back. In the balance of Chapter 10, we see how ERICH outwitted Billy and got his suitcases, filled with money and spy equipment back – at Billy’s expense but in the meantime to nobody’s surprise, ERICH has found another woman. In chapter 11, ERICH is doing well with this new woman, an old contact is going to tell him about the Manhattan Project - but his time is running out and Billy is about to betray him to the F.B.I.

In Chapter 12, ERICH was happily spending Christmas with Joan, but his tour of duty as a spy – and his life, were almost over. He was arrested by the F.B.I. and headed for the gallows. In Chapter 13, he's grilled by the F.B.I. In Chapter 14, he faces the probability of the hangman. In Chapter 15, he's sentenced to death. In 16, he's sized up by the handman. In 17, he's saved from the gallows.

Chapter 17 (II): Germany's Capitulation Saves My Life

“Anyone who won’t listen to instructions must take the consequences. Anyone who doesn’t shave will be sent to the ‘house’. Likewise anyone who leaves his jacket buttons undone. The ‘house’ is always ready for you. Remember that. We’ve plenty of single cells.”

Some of us laughed while he was delivering his lecture, but laughter was soon to desert us. At bedmaking, for instance, the edges of the pillows had to be dampened so that they did not slip. There were the most trifling regulations. An American prison has a devilish resemblance to a German barracks. We had to learn our rights and duties by heart.

“What are you allowed?” I was asked.

“Two razor blades a week.”

“A month, you fool!”

“And what else?”

“Earphones for the radio.”

“How long for?”

“Till nine at night, sir.”

The Pumpkin grinned. “When you get outside again, you can listen longer,” he remarked, “but for the present you’re staying here. And don’t forget the ‘house’. It’s lonely there. Not at all nice. You’ll see.”

Every day we were taken last into the dining hall. We had to sit down without speaking and take out soup in silence. Once we had to get under the tables because of disobedience. Our tin plates were overturned and the meat fell on the floor. It was not replaced. After that I made a practice of eating my meat first and have retained the habit to this day.

At first my fellow convicts were very reserved in their attitude towards me. I was an outsider. It was true that I had the distinction of a life sentence but the deeds of a spy were appraised with some discrimination in the penitentiary.

One day however, I succeeded in gaining the full acclaim of my fellow prisoners. For twenty-four hours on end I was the sole topic of conversation in Leavenworth and was thereafter received into the society of old lags.

We were sitting in the dining hall as on every other day. Everyone had his own place at table. The chef, himself a prisoner, came along and ladled out the food. He spoke German and bent over me. “There are two packets of Camels under the table.” He whispered. “Don’t forget to take them with you.”

I thought he was joking. The tables had no drawers and their under surfaces were quite flat. Surreptitiously I felt about underneath and discovered that the chef had cleverly wedged a fork there and had impaled the cigarettes on the fork. I pushed them into my pocket, feeling not too happy about the situation – for fellow prisoners at the same table must have noticed something and the warders always noticed any disturbance, however slight.

“Right!” shouted the Rat, the most unpopular or our overseers, when the meal was over. “Stand up!”

We all jumped up from our chairs like automatons and the march out of the room proceeded in precise order. In due course it was the turn of our table to file out. We went silently, one after the other. “Halt!” called the Rat. “Hands up!”

Our pockets were searched as we left the dining hall. It all went very rapidly as prisoner after prisoner left the room. I flung my arms up. I had the two packets of cigarettes wedged between my fingers. The Rat stood in front of me, small, puny, suspicious. If he had pulled himself to his full height, his head would just have reached to my shoulder. He tapped my pockets, got impatient, then thrust both hands into them. Meanwhile the other prisoners were standing around. He found nothing. His face turned scarlet. He had made a fool of himself. The prisoners were all grinning now.

I went on standing there with my hands in the air, the cigarettes between my fingers. Everyone could see them except the Rat.

“Get on back to your work!” he shouted. Then he barked at me, “Be off with you! What are you hanging about for?”

I let my hands drop and shoved the cigarettes into my pocket as quickly as I could. Then I ran off as fast as my legs would carry me. My trick had won me my spurs.

I managed to get through the four weeks quarantine period without a visit to the ‘house’. I was promoted to the rank of a ‘proper’ convict, was moved to the main section of the prison and became eligible for the usual privileges.

I was amazed at how many Germans there were among my fellow convicts. Most of them had been sentenced as recalcitrant prisoners of war or as associates of the German M.I. I met Hermann Lang, said to have been responsible for the leakage of information to Germany about a bomb-detecting device. I also got to know an American of German descent who had been a prison guard and had allowed German prisoners of war to escape. I found myself in contact with some remarkable types and learned some extraordinary histories.

The cell I occupied was the one in which Cook, the self styled North Pole explorer, had done remission for his ludicrous imposture. Cook had declared that he had reached the North Pole and his successes had been acclaimed all over the world until it was revealed that he had never been there. America never forgave him for having made a fool of his country and he remained in prison until he died.

The hangman waits…..

My fate remained uncertain. Technically, I was still under sentence of death. My counsel had presented a second petition to Mr. Truman. Actually, this was unconstitutional as the decision to reject it had already been made by Truman’s predecessor.

The war in Europe had now been over for several months, and I had become an accomplished coal-heaver. I had to shift forty tons each day, with no Sundays off. I could not manage this formidable quota alone, and was assisted by two hefty Negroes. In other respects, and inside the prison, colored men and whites were strictly segregates, but in regard to the most despised form of labor, coal heaving, no race distinction was observed. I had to thank the Governor of Leavenworth for this edifying job. He detested me. Contrary to all regulations, he had neither been present to receive me nor was he to appear to take leave of me. However, my departure was to take place a few years later in strange circumstances…..

My fellow convicts, and particularly the Germans among them, were most friendly towards me. Immediately upon my arrival there, a former prisoner of war presented me with a packet containing sweets, soap and cigarettes to the value of ten dollars. To a prisoner, this represented a veritable fortune. They all worked together to help to make things bearable for me. At first, when I returned to my cell from my coal having activities, I fell literally flat with exhausting.

Gradually however, my biceps developed until I had muscles like a prizefighter. Once I got into an argument with an ex housebreaker and knocked him out. From that moment I became a member of the ruling class of Leavenworth.

One September evening, I was listening to my favorite band (Tommy Dorsey) on the radio. The program came to an end at eight o’clock and the news followed on. I felt like tugging the earphones off with annoyance, but for some reason, left them on.

There were political reports from all over the world and I listened desultorily to the account of some sort of disagreement with the Russians. Then came the news from Washington. Suddenly I sprang from my bed as if electrified. I had heard my own name quite plainly, without a shadow of a doubt. The news reader went on slowly and carefully. He could not know, of course, what his words meant to me.

“President Truman has today commuted the death sentence of the German spy Erich Gimpel, to one of life imprisonment. Gimpel made an illegal entry into the United States at the end of last year on board a German U-Boat to spy out atomic secrets. The FBI succeeded in catching him. An American court martial sentenced him to death by hanging. Execution was postponed indefinitely after the sudden death of Mr. Roosevelt.”

My companions congratulated me excitedly. A warder came, stuck his head in the window, and said,

“Did you hear, Gimpel? So you can keep your head. Some people are lucky.”

The American President had held a press conference at the White House that afternoon and the time had been taken up with political questions. The session had already lasted nearly two and a half hours when Mr. Truman read out my pardon. About a hundred American journalists were present. I got the details from the newspaper the following day.

“Why have you pardoned Gimpel?” President Truman was asked.

“Gimpel was a spy,” replied Truman, “and a spy is a man who fights for his country. No country in the world fights a war without spies. We, of course, had our own spies in Germany. It is customary to hang spies during a war, but it is also customary to pardon them when the war is over.”

The President smiled woodenly into the flashlights of the press cameras. “For that reason, I have decided to commute his death sentence to one of life imprisonment.”

The Hangman is Cheated…..

I was to feel the influence of the invisible governor of Leavenworth for some time yet. I heaved coal for four years. The monotony of the work at first dulled all though, but later my anxieties became ever more insistent.

Was my father still alive? What was it like in Germany now? Would I ever leave prison? Would this eternal waiting, this unchanging hopelessness, this life in which a few cigarettes or a bit of chocolate could be of paramount importance, would this ever come to an end?

Would I ever speak again with men who neither boasted about crime or protested innocence? Would I ever again hold a woman in my arms? Would I ever again enter a restaurant as a free man and choose what I wanted to eat?

One day, I was taken off coal heaving and drafted to some excavation work. At first, I could not imagine why. Then suddenly I realized. I took a closer look at the man who was digging opposite me and I recognized him. It was Dasch.

Dasch, the traitor, the murderer of his comrades, the man who was responsible for the fact that six German agents who had regarded him as a colleague, had died on the electric chair.

EDITOR NOTE – Georg Dasch was one of the eight men involved in Operation PASTORUS. Four men including Dasch, were put ashore at Amagansett on Long Island, NY from U-202 and four more put ashore at Ponte Vedre Beach (Jacksonville) Florida a few days later from U-584. Reportedly, Dasch was a flaming Communist and at his first opportunity, called the FBI and turned in all his comrades. He and Ernst Berger got prison time while the other six were quickly sent to the electric chair.

He shoveled away slowly. No one talked to him. He was despised by all prisoners alike, whether German or American. He looked deliberately right past me. Very rarely did he make any attempt to talk, for he knew well enough that no one would answer him.

Out of the 2,400 men in Leavenworth who between them had broken all the ten commandments, the traitors alone were singled out for ostracism. Even among this company of pimps, robbers and murderers, a traitor was always an outsider.

We were facing each other, separated only by a ridiculously shallow ditch about six feet wide. The prison governor had seen to it that we were placed like this. Each of us had a spade handy, a good solid American spade. I would only have to give him a blow. No doubt this is what everyone in Leavenworth was waiting for. But they waited in vain. The man who was facing me was a prisoner of his own thoughts. He was on the martyr’s pile of his own conscience, pilloried by his own crime. He had been a Judas friend and he knew it.

I got used to Dasch. I looked past him as he looked past me. Later I mastered myself sufficiently to exchange a few trifling words with him. He was small and seedy looking. He was obviously frightened, and looked as if he never had enough sleep. Perhaps the last desperate cries of his victims still sounded in his ears. Perhaps he could see them before him, dying with a curse on their lips, one slowly, another quickly, according to how their bodies reacted to the electric charge. Perhaps he saw before him the simple cheap wooden coffins in which the bodies of his comrades were taken away for medical dissection.

I didn’t know and I couldn’t worry my head about him. Our respective backgrounds were known in Leavenworth and the men were surprised that my spade didn’t someday, somehow slip out of my hand…….

“Of course you know what’s the matter with Dasch, don’t you?” a fellow prisoner asked me one day.

“Of course,” I replied.

“You know, don’t you, that he’s got your pals on his conscience?”

“What are you getting at?”

“Fellows like him deserve to be rubbed out,” he went on. “They’ve no right to go on living.”

I nodded. He grinned. “If you’ll give me ten packs of cigarettes I’ll see to it Dasch quits the land of the living.”

“How do you propose to do it?”

“Quite simple,” he replied. “A slight accident, you know. I’m working up there on the scaffolding. Tomorrow when Dasch passes by, I’ll let a two hundredweight girder drop on his head, see?”

“Yes,” I replied.

He stretched out his hand. “That’s a bargain then. Ten packs of cigarettes. You needn’t give them all to me at once.”

“I haven’t got any,” I said, and left him standing. Dasch is alive today. He was pardoned long before me and sent back to Germany.

One thought, one project, one fixed idea now became rooted in my mind. Day and night I thought of only one thing – escape! I wanted to try it, no matter however hopeless it seemed and slowly, patiently, surreptitiously I went about my preparations.

I was now able to move much more freely within the prison walls and I knew my way about. It was clear to me that on three sides, escape was impossible. On the fourth side, the cellblock formed a natural wall which was supplemented a few feet away by a fence of steel mesh. There were watch towers all round, occupied by guards armed with machine guns. The guards however, often took a nap. The wire fence was illuminated at night, and no escape that way had been attempted for years. there were, after all, plenty of other opportunities, in the course of the day’s work outside for instance, which was where the privileged prisoners, among others, made their attempts to get away. Two or three times a month the Leavenworth sirens would wail, giving the alarm that a convict had escaped. The farmers in the neighborhood would then band together and take part in the hunt. For every escaped convict they intercepted, they got a $50 reward. Some of them had made it into quite a profitable sideline and were highly skilled in the technique of pursuit.

I wanted to try another method. Anyhow, I was not allowed to work outside. The governor saw to that too. Once the coal elevator in the engine room went wrong and the whole heating system threatened to break down. A crisis seemed imminent, for in Kansas the winters are extremely cold. The chief engineer of the prison tried desperately to put things right but was unsuccessful until he remembered me. The two of us managed it together. But the governor was not to know that I had helped…….

After that, the engineer suggested that I would be useful to him as an assistant and he made a great deal of my expert knowledge to the governor. But no luck! I went on digging, dreaming day and night of escape.

My first task was to discover how I could get out of the cellblock, which at night was locked up. to this end, I made a tool with which the iron bars could be pried apart so that I could slip through them. ‘Necessity can break iron bars’ is an old saying.

I told no one of my plans – then one day, all was ready. I waited until midnight, then I put my levering tool to work and was successful at the first attempt. I jumped out of the cellblock into the open – the narrow ‘no man’s land’ between the cellblock and the wire fence. I could still keep in the shadow of the main building. Now I had to make a quick leap across the brightly lit space between. If I was seen, I wouldn’t have a chance. It was just a matter of luck. Once I reached the wire fence, the first step would have been completed and the second and more difficult, would begin perhaps the machine guns of the guards would be trained upon just that spot at which I intended to work my way through the wire.

I flattened myself against the wall of the cellblock. Then I crouched, ready to spring. “NOW!” I told myself, “Keep calm.”

Then I bounded forward.

Spy for Germany

Chapter 7: To America by Submarine (KTB # 156)
Chapter 8: The Landing in America (KTB # 157)
Chapter 9: Tricked by Billy in NYC (KTB # 158)
Chapter 10 (I): I Work Out My Own Situation (KTB # 159)
Chapter 10 (II): I Work Out My Own Situation (KTB # 160)
Chapter 11 (I): Billy Betrays Me to the F.B.I. (KTB # 161)
Chapter 11 (II): Billy Betrays Me to the F.B.I. (KTB # 162)
Chapter 12 (I): Love -- and then Arrest! (KTB # 163)
Chapter 12 (II): Love -- and then Arrest! (KTB # 164)
Chapter 13 (I): Grilled by the FBI (KTB # 165)
Chapter 13 (II): Grilled by the FBI (KTB # 166)
Chapter 13 (III): Grilled by the FBI (KTB # 167)
Chapter 14 (I): In the Shadow of the Hangman (KTB # 168)
Chapter 14 (II): In the Shadow of the Hangman (KTB # 169)
Chapter 15 (I): Sentenced to Death (KTB # 170)
Chapter 15 (II): Sentenced to Death (KTB # 172)
Chapter 15 (III): Sentenced to Death (KTB # 173)
Chapter 16 (I): Sized Up by the Hangman (KTB # 174)
Chapter 16 (II): Sized Up by the Hangman (KTB # 175)
Chapter 16 (III): Sized Up by the Hangman (KTB # 176)
Chapter 17 (I): Germany's Capitulation Saves My Life (KTB # 177)
Chapter 17 (II): Germany's Capitulation Saves My Life (KTB # 178)