White Supremacist Memorial to Executed Nazi Spies in D.C. Removed

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“I kind of started doing a little bit of my own research,” Rosenstock recalled of that day in 2006 when he began to help unravel an only-in-Washington mystery, complete with World War II espionage, nationwide panic, a mass electrocution, J. Edgar Hoover chicanery, white supremacists, classic federal bureaucracy and a U.S. Supreme Court case that played a significant role in America’s modern war on terror.

Ignoring due process, President Franklin Roosevelt ordered that the men be tried in secret before a military commission — a tactic, then backed by the U.S. Supreme Court, that President George W. Bush would replicate 59 years later in his directive that Guantanamo Bay detainees be judged in a similar fashion.

In mid-summer 1942, seven U.S. Army generals found all eight men guilty but left their punishment to the president. He sentenced six to death and two, including Dasch, to lengthy prison terms (both were deported after the war).

The electrocutions began at 12:01 p.m. on Aug. 8. By 1:04, all six were dead.

Three days later, they were secretly buried amid a seldom-visited thicket of Southwest Washington known as Blue Plains.

Rosenstock quickly learned the backstory of the six Nazi spies listed on the stone, but another question remained: Who had placed it there?
The line at the bottom — referencing the “N.S.W.P.P.” — offered a clue.

Until the mid-1960s, the National Socialist White People’s Party had gone by a more familiar name: the American Nazi Party. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the group’s founder, George Lincoln Rockwell, had given it the new title shortly before his assassination in 1967.