The nation looked to its coastline warily. Coast Guardsmen, now reinforced and armed with rifles, patrolled the sandy beaches (see cut). Everywhere the full alert was ordered. There must be no second invasion of spies and saboteurs. The first eight that had been caught, spewed up on U.S. shores like Jonahs from the bellies of U-boats (TIME, July 6), last week were assured of a swift trial.
The President appointed a military commission to try the saboteurs-and try them quickly. Headed by hard-bitten Major General Frank R. McCoy, a member of the Pearl Harbor Investigating Committee, the commission includes six other boot-tough generals. Prosecutors will be Attorney General Francis Biddle and the Army's Judge Advocate General Major General Myron C. Cramer. Two colonels will act as defense counsel. The commission will try the eight in secret, report immediately to the President.
Meanwhile, in a week of feverish anti-espionage activity, the country learned something every day about this shadowy side of the war.
Treason. Into a crowded Detroit courtroom strutted 22-year-old Oberleutnant Hans Peter Krug, cocky in the slate-blue uniform of the Luftwaffe. He clicked his heels, saluted a startled bailiff. German-English dictionary in hand, he mounted the witness stand.
Dark, sharp-faced Peter Krug, who had been shot down over Britain, had escaped in April from a Canadian prison camp. He made his way to Detroit, there met a naturalized German named Max Stephan, who ran a small tavern and still loved his Vaterland. Short, pudgy Max Stephan gave the fugitive money, food & drink. He helped the Nazi flyer on toward Mexico. But Peter Krug was caught in San Antonio. Last week he turned on Kamerad Stephan.
Blandly the cool young Nazi indicated that he had no further use for the tavern-keeper who had the stupidity to be caught. Peter Krug informed the court: "It is not my intention to testify against Max Stephan. I have only to clear out the facts and tell the truth." Coldly, in a heavy guttural, he told the facts in detail. The jury took but 83 minutes to convict Max Stephan of treason, the first such conviction under Federal statute since the Whiskey Rebellion trials in 1795. Since the Government did not demand his death, Max Stephan will probably escape the hangman.
Conspiracy. Three days later the U.S. got a sudden reminder of its careless prewar past, when the Bund was only a joke. In the tiny fishing village of Boca del Rio, six miles south of Mexico's steamy Vera Cruz, Mexican police nabbed swarthy Gerhard Wilhelm Kunze, onetime leader of the German-American Bund, where he succeeded Fritz Kuhn. Wilhelm Kunze had lived quietly in a small hotel, had bought a launch for an escape by sea. Hustled back to the U.S., he awaits trial on a charge of having conspired to send military information to Germany and Japan. Bundsman Kunze, a native-born citizen, always listed himself as German-American, because "the blood in my veins is different." The offense charged was before Pearl Harbor-so he, too, if convicted, will escape a spy's death.