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When a group of Nazi agents landed on the beach in Amagansett in 1942 they were labeled saboteurs. We’d now call them terrorists, and although their technology and competence were far different from the 9/11 conspirators, their goals were similar.
The saboteurs were all Germans who had lived in the United States for varying periods of time, working at menial jobs, and some were even citizens. They had all returned to Germany in the 1930s for economic, family and ideological reasons in support Hitler and the Third Reich. Their backgrounds made them perfect recruits for the mission: to plant explosives and blow up American factories, railroad lines, bridges, train stations, power plants and even department stores. They were told their mission was as important as any battle the Germans would fight and that it could decide the outcome of the war. As if to underscore this, two German submarines were diverted from crucial attacks on Allied shipping to carry eight saboteurs across the Atlantic to Amagansett and Ponte Vedra, Florida.
Considering that a nineteen-year old seaman on patrol east of the Atlantic Avenue Coast Guard Station encountered the Amagansett group as they landed that night of June 13, 1942, they should have been apprehended quickly. But America was not on guard: poor training, poor communications and rivalries among United States military and civilian departments, allowed the saboteurs to take the Long Island Railroad early morning train from Amagansett to Pennsylvania Station. At least the authorities were alerted.
We know now that the saboteurs were not nearly as smart or as well prepared as they should have been for the mission to succeed. Some of them were confused and neurotic, others were lazy or greedy or disloyal to their cause. One of them, with the support of a second, contacted the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover later took credit tracking them down and arresting them, never disclosing that the saboteur had voluntarily turned himself in and confessed. It is doubtful that the FBI could have captured them as quickly, prior to any attempted terrorism, without the turncoat.
All were rounded up and arrested within two weeks, and then tried and convicted. Six were executed by electrocution on August 8, 1942. The two who cooperated with the FBI received life sentences, and after the war were repatriated to Germany.
We’ve learned a great deal about the case in recent years as scholars and journalists have examined documents and uncovered facts. Surprisingly, no published account has gotten the Amagansett part of the story entirely right (something I know from my own research and observations).
We don’t think of the Hamptons as having military history, but it does, and it stretches back to colonial times. Before we were even a country, the settlers on the East End declared their support for independence and then lived under a harsh British occupation. Local patriots took part in a raid on the British garrison in Sag Harbor during the Revolutionary War, destroying twelve British warships and large amounts of supplies and ammunition. And a rebellious Southampton, whose sons were already fighting, raised a company of grandfathers to fight the crown.
Our local history could have been very different in the 1770s and again in 1942. Had the Nazi saboteurs succeeded, they would have set back the country’s war material production and destroyed many innocent lives. Let’s be very grateful on this Fourth of July weekend—when we honor the generations whose sacrifices give us our liberty and freedom—that they didn’t.