WWII Target: Altoona

Horseshoe Curve, hailed as a “triumph of science” after it opened near Altoona in 1854, was part of a vital transportation corridor for the Pennsylvania Railroad. Grif Teller painted this view of PRR K4s-class locomotive No. 5419 rounding the curve for the railroad’s 1935 wall calendar.
Collection of Dan Cupper

The tale of the bold but fizzled 1942 Nazi plot to sabotage the Horseshoe Curve railroad landmark near Altoona, Pennsylvania, has been told in books and articles almost since the day the spy-thriller story began to unfold.

First came a juvenile-fiction account in 1944 titled The Long Trains Roll by Stephen W. Meader. It recounts the story of Operation Pastorius, a wry allusion to the theme of Germans arriving in the United States. In 1683 Franz Daniel Pastorius, a German-born lawyer, educator and official, had founded the community of Germantown near Philadelphia, the New World’s first permanent German-American settlement.

Emboldened by the American public’s isolationist attitude prior to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler personally approved the plot in 1941. He was eager to demonstrate to the world that, even from across the Atlantic, he could spread terror and destruction in the American heartland. The plot consisted of landing saboteurs off the Atlantic Coast. These men would be equipped with explosives earmarked for destroying vital U.S. defense and transportation facilities; one of these sites was Altoona’s Horseshoe Curve on the four-track main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

Under the plan, the spies, all of whom had previously lived in the United States, would travel from site to site, destroying named military and civilian targets. Once these schemes were carried out, Nazi command would send another wave of saboteurs, followed still later by a Nazi leader who would set up an office in Chicago to direct further mayhem on a continuing basis.

But the story really begins a century earlier, when the fledgling Pennsylvania Railroad consisted of a crude single-track line a building from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh, days when a stagecoach ride between the two cities might take a week or two, depending on weather.

Proud Slogan: “World Famous”

Altoona-area boosters began calling it the “world famous” Horseshoe Curve a decade or two after it was opened in 1854. And indeed, it was widely recognized for its creative solution to a civil-engineering dilemma. Its chief surveyor, J. Edgar Thomson, had laid out the survey lines 5 miles west from Altoona before running smack against a 2,200-foot-high geologic feature known variously as the Allegheny Escarpment, Allegheny Front or Allegheny Ridge. It appeared as if Thomson would have to build inclined planes to surmount the obstacle, but this was the same antiquated technology he was trying to avoid in the form of the existing state-owned, 36-mile-long Allegheny Portage Railroad. The APRR used a series of five inclined planes to haul trains up the mountain from nearby Hollidaysburg to the summit at Cresson, and then five more to lower them down the other side into Johnstown. This was the central link in the Main Line of Public Works, which used a railroad from Philadelphia to Columbia, a canal from there to Hollidaysburg, then the APRR over the ridge, and finally another canal ride to Pittsburgh. The whole trip took three to four days.

It was Thomson who figured out that by diverting the route, looping his alignment down one side of a ravine and back up the other, he could keep the gradient, or rate of climb, tolerable enough for a standard train to climb, rather than relying on the time-consuming, trouble-prone, and dangerous planes. When Horseshoe Curve opened on February 15, 1854, the all-rail trip from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh immediately shrank travel time to 15 hours. The engineering world of that day marveled over the ingeniousness of lengthening a route in order to lower the grade, so much so that one observer called it a “triumph of science.” Uniting eastern and western Pennsylvania as never before, this 113-mile link from Altoona to Pittsburgh proved that the railroad age had truly arrived across Pennsylvania. And as for Thomson, he became president of the railroad he had built. It was a system that under his hand grew into the largest and single most important railroad in America, serving 13 states with 11,000 route-miles and employing, at its peak, some 279,000 people.

A 1934 panoramic photograph by A. P. McDowell of Altoona captures the magnitude of Horseshoe Curve.
Library of Congress

Over the years, the site has been an ever-present source of local pride to Altoonans. Eighteen U.S. presidents have traveled over Horseshoe Curve. Millions of passengers have ridden trains around it. Conductors and trainmen were required, by rulebook, to announce the upcoming scenic spectacle to passengers as trains approached the area. On long passenger trains, it was a ritual for riders to look out a window and see the locomotive hauling ahead slinking around the curve, turning to head in the opposite direction. For 150 years, trains have needed an extra push to get over the mountain, so additional “helper” locomotives were (and are) routinely added to freight trains for the westward climb.

In 1879 PRR opened a trackside park with flower beds and shrubbery. The adjacent Kittanning Point station was a convenient spot at which to arrive by train for an afternoon of leisurely picnicking and train-watching. The importance of PRR’s main line (New York, Philadelphia and Washington to Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Detroit, Indianapolis, Chicago and St. Louis) was underscored in the 1920s, when the company stated that it carried more freight over the Alleghenies in a single day than had its predecessor, the Allegheny Portage Railroad, in an entire year.

In 1930 the Altoona Mirror editorialized that although millions of rail passengers saw Horseshoe Curve, local residents seemed to take it for granted, doing little to publicize or promote the attraction and its surrounding natural beauty. Granted, the road leading to the curve was primitive at best, but before long that was remedied.

After a paved road was opened in 1932, tourists began to arrive by car. A stone masonry “rest house” that became a gift shop opened in 1940, a project that was among the last gasps of the Depression-era New Deal. Boosters’ claims aside, it’s fair to say that hundreds of thousands of visitors have seen the curve from the park.

But it truly achieved worldwide renown in June 1942, when eight Nazi saboteurs landed in America with plans to dynamite it to cripple the Allied war effort.

Operation Pastorius Is Born

The German Abwehr, or intelligence agency, trained men for Operation Pastorius at a secret school near Berlin. All recruits had lived in the United States, were fluent in English, and were blue-collar workers, the more easily to blend in with typical working-class Americans. Two of them were even naturalized citizens. The plan was to carry the eight men in two groups of four to America via submarine and put them ashore in rubber rafts. The mission got under way in late May 1942, with four men boarding each of two Nazi vessels, the U-202 and the U-584, at a port in France. The former headed for Long Island, while the latter headed for Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida. Stowed with them were dynamite, tools, civilian clothes, the names and addresses of Nazi sympathizers who could harbor or support them, and $170,000 in American currency.

Their list of targets comprised 12 transportation and manufacturing sites. Besides Horseshoe Curve, others included PRR’s station in Newark, New Jersey, and the New York City water supply system. Other railroad sites included a location on the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad and the Hell Gate Bridge in New York City, the only direct link between the Washington–New York corridor and New England, which was rich in naval facilities. The intention at some of the targets was to inflict real damage, such as at three aluminum plants that were valuable to airplane construction, river locks, and hydroelectric dams in New York and Tennessee. Others, such as the Newark station and New York City’s water supply system, were intended to sow panic and terror among citizens. Hitler’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, assured the German public that “transport of war munitions will never get started in America. Our network of sabotage is too strong.”

George Dasch, here in an FBI mugshot, revealed the plot to sabotage Horseshoe Curve and other locations critical to the war effort in the U.S. but was arrested along with the other conspirators.
FBI

The U-202 group was the first to arrive, on June 13, near Amagansett, New York. On the beach, they buried the explosives and changed into civilian clothes. As they were doing so, Seaman Second Class John Cullen, a Coast Guardsman, suddenly appeared on a patrol. Incredibly, he was armed with only a flashlight. George John Dasch, the leader of the U-202 group, tried to persuade him that they were fishermen who had lost their way. Then he disobeyed standing Abwehr orders to shoot and kill anyone they encountered during landing. Instead, he held a gun to the young man and told him, “Forget about this.” He then bribed him with $260. Cullen ran back to his base, but by the time he and his colleagues returned with arms, the Germans had vanished. The guardsmen found the buried explosives and reported the incident to the FBI.

FBI director J. Edgar Hoover imposed a news blackout on the incident and ordered a widespread manhunt. But lacking leads, the FBI found nothing. The saboteurs had slipped into Manhattan via a 6:57 a.m. departure on the Long Island Rail Road, a subsidiary of PRR. There, they blended in with the populace, shopping, dining and buying clothes. They rented hotel rooms and prepared to rendezvous with the U-584 group, which meanwhile landed in Florida on June 16.

It was the latter who held the plans to dynamite Horseshoe Curve. The plot called for the spies to wedge lumber between the rails, attach TNT to it, then install detonators on the rails so that the next engine to pass would set off an explosion. The goal was to derail that train, with the hope that the debris would spread across all four tracks, blocking them and perhaps wrecking oncoming trains. At the peak of wartime, the main line was handling a train about every five to 10 minutes. In plain numbers, a 1944 survey found that over a two-day period, 255 trains passed Altoona, comprising 18,089 cars.

Clearly, the Abwehr knew that this was a key artery for defense transport, the busiest in America; however, a hitch developed in the plan. Upon arrival in New York, two of the saboteurs who secretly had loathed the Nazi regime made plans to defect. No one will ever know whether Dasch, 39, and Ernest Peter Burger, 35, decided on the spur of the moment to defect or whether they’d harbored this subplot all along. Dasch was the least committed of the eight, and Burger had been imprisoned by the Nazis in Germany before being recruited, so he held no love for them.

The scene that followed resembled a Keystone Kops episode, with Dasch phoning the FBI and the Army in New York and Washington several times, intending to spill the beans on the plot and help agents capture the other saboteurs. He thought he would be welcomed as a hero, but instead he was dismissed again and again as a kook.

On June 18, Dasch went to Manhattan’s Penn Station and boarded what is believed to be PRR Train 175, the Colonial, for Washington, hoping to meet personally with Hoover. Once there, he finally found an FBI agent, Duane Traynor, who was willing to listen to his tale. Under questioning for six days and nights, he detailed the plan and the whereabouts of his accomplices for Traynor and others. The transcript filled 254 pages of single-spaced typing. Dasch later claimed that during questioning he and Burger were offered light prison sentences and presidential pardons in exchange for their role in thwarting the plan. But the FBI arrested him, talking him into entering a guilty plea in order to spare his parents, still in Germany, from Nazi reprisals.

The FBI began to round up the rest of the Germans. In New York, agents arrested Burger along with Richard Quirin, 34, and Heinrich Harm Heinck, 35. Two members of the Florida group — Edward John Kerling, 32, leader of the U-584 party, and Werner Thiel, 35 — had also traveled to New York, and they were arrested there. The other two — Herbert Haupt, 22, and Hermann Neubauer, 32 — had made their way to Chicago, where they were arrested. By Saturday, June 27, all were in custody, including Dasch. To Dasch’s dismay, he was charged, along with the others, with sabotage (even though no actual damage had been done), espionage, and conspiracy to commit both. Hoover boasted to Roosevelt, falsely, that the FBI alone had tracked down all eight spies.

That night, Hoover called a press conference, knowing that a sensational announcement involving spies in America would get banner-headline treatment in the nation’s fat and widely circulated Sunday newspapers. It had the desired effect, and Hoover, ever the manipulator of facts, claimed credit for the capture. This had the dual effect of polishing his agency’s reputation as a crack outfit and further cementing his power in Washington. Dasch’s surrender and invaluable aid to the Allied side was not mentioned — at all.

Altoona and PRR: A Relationship Like No Other

The railroad literally had founded Altoona when its rails first reached the area in 1850. Through the 19th century and into the 20th, it grew into the consummate railroad city. It was the location of the company’s 218-acre systemwide shop complex, where engines and cars were built, tested, rebuilt and, when the time came, scrapped and recycled into new products. At its peak about 1915, PRR employed 16,000 workers in the Altoona shops alone, not counting the thousands of train and engine employees, maintenance-of-way employees, dispatchers, switch-tower operators, stationmasters, freight-house laborers, and even gardeners. Nowhere else in America existed such a dense concentration of railroad employment. Railroad officials from around the globe came to Altoona to observe the company’s machines, techniques and workforce.

The Pennsylvania Railroad’s significant presence in Altoona can be seen in this aerial view of the city in the portion at the center surrounded by railroad tracks.
Collection of Dan Cupper

But the railroad was more than just a livelihood; it was an entire way of life. Stores and banks stayed open late to accommodate second- and third-shift shop workers. As early as 1883, railroad payday brought more than $200,000 into the local economy, cheering city merchants. Ups and downs in the national economy were reflected in Altoona by the number of employees PRR furloughed at any given time.

The newspapers assigned competing reporters just to cover developments and happenings. Their daily standing railroad columns were read as avidly as the sports page. New orders for building locomotives and cars, or the death or appointment of a PRR president, always made the front page, often bannered across the top.

The company helped build a hospital and sponsored an extensive array of sports teams, including baseball, basketball, wrestling, boxing, track and field, and the English game of cricket. Until the 1920s teams from around PRR’s 13-state system gathered to compete in these and other sports. The musically inclined — and there were many among the German and Italian families that had settled in Altoona — formed PRR-sponsored bands such as the Middle Division Band, the Altoona Works Band, and the Tyrone Shop Band.

Moreover, PRR officials dominated social and fraternal life. A man’s promotion, or not, often depended on whether he was a member of the local Shriners organization, Jaffa Mosque. PRR was quite willing to employ Italian and Irish track workers, but their Catholic faith kept them from rising into management.

Railroaders, both white-collar and blue-collar, ran for and were elected to mayoral and council seats. The ultimate accolades came whenever a local Altoona boy made good as an apprentice in the shops, eventually rising through middle management to become a high PRR official, including presidents and vice presidents. And speaking of that, it was often said that in Altoona, when one mentioned “the president” in street conversation, one had to make it clear whether he or she was referring to the sitting U.S. president or the president of PRR.

During World War II, the Pennsylvania Railroad firmly established in its printed materials—such as war bond ads and timetable covers—that it was supporting the war effort through transport of troops, munitions and rations.
Collection of Dan Cupper

Other industries in the area were less important, employing but a fraction of what the railroad did. Some critics charged that PRR deliberately kept out new business in order to conserve the steady supply of skilled labor for itself, a claim that the railroad hotly denied. Among other employers were shirt factories and other garment mills, which employed many wives of railroaders. When a husband was furloughed, it was often his wife’s earnings that kept the wolf from the door. It was not unusual for an employee to be laid off several times during a career, so that one might work 40 years but register only 35 years’ worth of seniority. Everyone accepted the cyclical nature of the work. PRR was the paternalistic giant in Altoona, giving and taking away, sometimes seemingly at will.

In the decade following World War II, PRR stopped building and servicing steam engines in favor of off-the-shelf diesel-electrics from General Motors and others. Furloughed were thousands upon thousands of now-surplus machinists, ironworkers, foundrymen and the like, never to be recalled. Altoona became an economically distressed city. Mayor William Prosser, speaking to area management leaders, put it this way: “In the past the Pennsylvania Railroad furnished housing for its employees, paid for the YMCA, constructed a library and even had a choir. The railroad was the mamma and daddy and we were the children, and the people became dependent.”

He was not the first to comment on this love-hate relationship. As far back as the 1920s, an Altoona Tribune editorial asked, “Have we not gone along in the way of [our] fathers, abusing the Pennsylvania Railroad company and yet depending almost exclusively upon it to furnish employment for the bulk of the people?” Unemployment, practically unheard of when the railroad was humming, reached 14 percent in the 1960s. For more than a century, in almost every way, the long shadow of PRR stretched over the community. Anything affecting PRR affected Altoona.

As a result, news of the spies’ arrests electrified Altoona. The morning Altoona Tribune and the afternoon Altoona Mirror quickly jumped on the fact that the city and Horseshoe Curve were important enough to warrant Hitler’s attention. At this point, accounts vary: No mention of closing Horseshoe Curve to visitation or guarding it ’round the clock had been made up until now. But as soon as Hoover announced the arrests, the press in Altoona assured readers that it had been closed and patrolled by armed guards for months. As a practical matter, the state road leading through the center of the curve could not be closed, but motorists found officers on duty, urging them to keep moving. Fifteen hundred No Parking signs were posted.

Concurrently, the FBI ran a sweep of Altoona’s “enemy alien” German and Italian families who were suspected of aiding or communicating with Nazi Germany and perhaps even some of the eight spies. Anyone living in America during wartime who was not a citizen was deemed to be an “enemy alien” with travel restrictions and a long list of prohibited contraband, including radios, cameras, explosives and firearms. The FBI and state and local police rounded up 225 people, certainly a major operation.

Men and women — some of them PRR employees — were met at their doorsteps and hustled off to internment centers for questioning. Some were arrested; others were released. In keeping with Hoover’s policy of secrecy on everything, the FBI did not disclose the names of those involved. Of the 225, eight were arrested. This was by no means the first or only time or place where the FBI apprehended “enemy aliens.” It had done so in Altoona in February 1942, but only two people were detained that time. The newspapers mused over the possibility that Altoonans had aided the spies, editorializing, “We hope not, for this community has prided itself upon keeping free of traitorous rats of this sort.”

Other searches and seizures in the East included those in New York City, New Jersey, and Reading in Pennsylvania’s Berks County, with its high density of Pennsylvania Dutch residents. Those aliens who were detained long-term were shipped to internment camps, much as the nation had interned Japanese-Americans on the West Coast.

End of the Road for Six

The seven-man commission of generals, at the bench in the back of this photo, presides at the third day of proceedings during the Nazi saboteur trial in the fifth floor courtroom of the Department of Justice building in Washington, D.C., July 1942.
Library of Congress

Back in Washington, events were moving swiftly. President Franklin D. Roosevelt took a special interest in the case. He wanted the eight saboteurs to be executed, both as an indignity to Hitler and a warning to anyone who might try to replicate Operation Pastorius. On July 2, less than a week after the FBI announced the arrests, the president impaneled a military tribunal to try them: Seven generals would serve as judges, the prosecutor was Attorney General Francis Biddle, and defense attorneys were Army colonels. Denying the defendants due process, Roosevelt took this step to prevent the spies from winning the right to a trial in a civil court, where sentences might be more lenient. It was clear what Roosevelt wanted. He only half-jokingly asked an aide, “Should they be shot or hanged?”

Attorney General Francis Biddle, center left, served as prosecutor during the Nazi saboteur trial, with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover seated to his right. Defense attorney Col. Carl L. Ristine is in the foreground right.
Library of Congress

Through defense attorneys Col. Kenneth C. Royall and Col. Carl L. Ristine, the saboteurs appealed their treatment (and probable fate), seeking a writ of habeas corpus and thereby asking to be tried in civilian court. The case worked its way up to a rare special session of the Supreme Court, which sided with Roosevelt.

Saboteur Heinrich Heinck is led through a corridor in the Department of Justice by guards during the trial.
FBI

The military trial, closed to the public and press, had begun on July 8 and lasted till August 1, when the tribunal began deliberating over the evidence. Each of the accused spoke on his behalf; some remained defiantly faithful to the Fatherland, while others, seeking to escape execution, claimed that they had changed their minds either on the submarine or after landing in America, hoping to defect as Dasch and Burger had planned. As Dasch’s 254-page statement was read aloud, he held out hope that this alone would exonerate him. Two days later, the panel reached its conclusion on verdicts, again in secret, and sent both its recommendation and the entire 3,000-page transcript to the White House. Roosevelt would make the final determination on sentencing.

Public opinion was running 10-to-1 in favor of swiftly executing the spies, and the American press, editorially, felt the same way. On August 6, the verdicts were confirmed but kept secret. Roosevelt had decided that six of the spies should be executed by electrocution in the District of Columbia’s city jail. For having testified against the others, Dasch got a 30-year prison sentence and Burger got a life sentence. The executions were scheduled for two days later, Saturday, August 8, but Roosevelt would not and did not reveal the verdicts until after the spies had been executed. That morning, each of the six was told that he would die that day in the electric chair. In a few hours they were led to death row, and then, one by one, to the execution chamber. With stark, assembly-line efficiency, they were dispatched within the span of about an hour, from just after noon to 1:04 p.m. As planned, Steve Early, Roosevelt’s press secretary, then made the announcement, finally breaking much of the secrecy that surrounded the trial and case.

“Six Nazi Spies Die; Clemency for Two,” shouted the bold headline of the Sunday New York Times. Similar words blared from the front pages of newspapers across the nation. In Altoona, the two dailies set up their headlines in a thick black hot-metal font that printers refer to as “Second Coming” typeface, in other words, reserved for stories of earth-shattering importance, as in the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. In Washington, meanwhile, the bodies of the six were autopsied and buried in pauper’s graves in a barren field in a remote corner of the District of Columbia. Their wooden markers were simply numbered 276 through 281.

Postwar

The surviving spies fared poorly in jail, becoming the target of threats. Nazi prisoners of war who were held with them considered them to be traitors to Germany, and the Americans so held considered them to be enemies of the U.S. Dasch’s presence at a federal prison in Atlanta even sparked a riot among prisoners, who objected to being housed with him. The two were held in various federal prisons and then were deported to Germany in 1948. But in postwar Germany, Nazi sympathizers were everywhere. Dasch was viewed as having betrayed and caused the death of fellow Germans. Meanwhile, Burger seemed to vanish. Dasch tried to establish a small wool business and then a restaurant, but every time neighbors found him out, he was ostracized, forcing him to flee to another city.

In Washington, Hoover’s cover-up of the FBI’s nonrole in the case ended in November 1945, when Attorney General Tom Clark released details of the military tribunal, including Dasch’s and Burger’s betrayal of their fellow spies.

With the Allied defeat of Japan in August 1945, peace returned to the U.S. At Horseshoe Curve, the guards departed, and the signs came down. The park was reopened in the spring of 1946, just in time for the first postwar summer vacation travel season.

Within a few years, Horseshoe Curve got plenty more exposure — but this time it was welcome publicity. In 1952 PRR issued its annual wall calendar with a painting by artist Grif Teller depicting the curve as viewed from high atop Kittanning Point. Two years later, PRR celebrated the centennial of the curve’s opening with a display of fireworks and a panoramic nighttime color photo taken by Sylvania Electric. Three years later, the railroad installed a retired K4s-class steam locomotive in the park as a memorial to the Age of Steam. It also commemorated the thousands of shop workers in Altoona who had, among other accomplishments, built nearly 6,600 steam locomotives there.

Grif Teller painted another view of Horseshoe Curve, still intact after the war in 1952, for that year’s Pennsylvania Railroad wall calendar.
Collection of Dan Cupper

As World War II receded into the nation’s collective memory, the railroad commissioned a 39-foot-tall bronze figure by sculptor Walker Hancock. Titled Angel of the Resurrection, it depicts the archangel Michael lifting a fallen soldier upward. The statue is a memorial to the 1,307 PRR employees who died in the conflict — every one of them named on its granite base. At its unveiling ceremony in 1952, it was a young Army veteran, Robert Laws, PRR employee and wartime hero, who pulled the tapes. Fittingly, he was from Altoona. The statue still stands guard over the east end of the waiting room at Philadelphia’s palatial 30th Street Station.

As for George John Dasch, he spent the rest of his life in Germany trying bitterly in vain to clear his name, believing that the U.S. government had both betrayed and tricked him by dangling clemency before him. He tirelessly wrote letters to a succession of U.S. officials pleading for help, but they went unheeded. He also tried in vain to return to the United States. In 1959 he wrote a book, Eight Spies Against America, giving his version of the failed escapade. He died in 1992 at age 89, but his widow, Marie, kept up the campaign, also unsuccessfully.

The postwar years were not kind to American railroading, especially in the Northeast. The coming of the 43,000-mile federally subsidized Interstate Highway system siphoned off freight business. As for passengers, the prosperity of those years put an auto in the garage of every American, it seemed, and that spelled the end for long-haul passenger trains. In the ’40s and early ’50s, some 50 passenger trains a day passed Horseshoe Curve, but by the late ’60s, that would drop to a baker’s dozen. The development of jetliners like the Boeing 707 put Chicago within three hours of New York. Why ride the train for 16 hours? The Pennsy, which once boasted that it paid dividends for more than 100 consecutive years, was nearly out of money, merging in 1968 with the New York Central in a feeble effort to cut costs and remain solvent. As a result, the curve fell first into the hands of the ill-fated and soon-bankrupt Penn Central, then the government-backed Conrail in 1976, and finally to Norfolk Southern in 1999. Deregulation of the industry in 1980 helped restore the financial health of American railroads.

The Altoona Railroaders Memorial Museum opened its new and larger facilities in downtown Altoona in 1992. On the second floor of the former PRR Master Mechanics Building, the exhibit-design planners included a section dedicated to the 1942 sabotage incident. Today, visitors are startled to see a Nazi flag hanging there to signify that Horseshoe Curve was indeed a sensitive national-defense target during wartime.

Although Horseshoe Curve now handles more freight tonnage than at any time in its 155-year history, passenger travel has dwindled to a single daily Amtrak train, the Pennsylvanian, in each direction between Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, Philadelphia and New York. As part of the Railroaders Memorial Museum complex, a new visitor center was opened at the curve in 1992. A celebration of the 150th anniversary of the curve’s opening was held in 2004, with Norfolk Southern putting on a modern laser-light show to reprise the 1954 flash photo.

Some stories linger on and on. The question of the legality of military judicial panels in wartime resurfaced in the 2000s, when Islamic jihad terrorists were being held at the U.S. base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. President George W. Bush ordered them to be tried with a military tribunal rather than in open civilian court. This procedure had been used only once before the 1942 saboteur case, for the trial of those who plotted the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.

And in 2017 utility-company workers stumbled across a 200-pound granite marker in a field in southwestern District of Columbia. It was a memorial to the six executed Nazis — Haupt, Heinck, Kerling, Neubauer, Quirin and Thiel — whose names were inscribed on the marker. This was a startling discovery, made all the more so because it sat on U.S. federal land. Nobody knows how it got there undetected, nor when it was placed. A subscript beneath the spies’ names reads, “Donated by the N.S.W.P.P.” — the National Socialist White People’s Party. The group, which espoused an agenda of racial hatred, was founded in 1958 as the American Nazi Party. The marker has since been removed and stored by the National Park Service at an undisclosed location.

Further Reading

There are several books about Operation Pastorius available. Of note is Michael Dobbs’ Saboteurs: The Nazi Raid on America (Knopf, 2004), which offers a compelling treatment of the sabotage plot. Betrayal: The True Story of J. Edgar Hoover and the Nazi Saboteurs Captured During WWII by David Alan Johnston (Hippocrene, 2007) deals with the FBI’s handling of the case. The Horseshoe Curve: Sabotage and Subversion in the Railroad City by Dennis P. McIlnay (Seven Oaks Press, 2007) focuses on the Altoona angle and also delves into long-hidden federal records that the author dislodged through Freedom of Information Act requests. George John Dasch’s account of his involvement in the plot was published as Eight Spies Against America (R.M. McBridge, 1959).

Popular general works on Horseshoe Curve include Horseshoe Heritage: The Story of a Great Railroad Landmark by Dan Cupper (Withers, 1992), World Famous Horseshoe Curve (Rail Press, 2006), and Horseshoe Curve by David W. Seidel (Arcadia, 2008).

Dan Cupper is a transportation historian from Harrisburg who is descended from a family of railroaders and is a retired locomotive engineer from Norfolk Southern Railroad. He has written several books on railroad history, including Horseshoe Heritage: The Story of a Great Railroad Landmark, Crossroads of Commerce: The Pennsylvania Railroad Calendar Art of Grif Teller, and Rockville Bridge: Rails Across the Susquehanna.