Shortly after 2:00 am, an earsplitting explosion rattled the Brooklyn Bridge, swayed skyscrapers, and shattered glass windows throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn. It was heard and felt as far away as Philadelphia, and in Baltimore, people spilled from their homes, fearing an earthquake was underway. Scientists would later assess the magnitude of the blast at 5.5 on today’s Richter scale.
The damage was estimated at $20 million – the equivalent of more than $500 million in 2021 dollars. Five deaths were officially recorded in the attack, including a ten-week-old baby thrown from its crib, but the true death toll was likely much higher, as many of the destroyed barges were commonly used as shelters by vagrants and immigrants.
For days, artillery shells and other munitions continued to explode, showering New York Harbor, to include Ellis Island, with embers and shell fragments. With debris raining down, authorities were forced to evacuate hundreds of terrified immigrants – having just escaped from war-torn Europe – from Ellis Island to the mainland. The nearby Statue of Liberty suffered severe shrapnel damage, closing visitor access to the Statue’s torch for good.
The Bureau of Investigation initially concluded the explosion was an accident, but doubts were widespread. The blast was believed by some to be the work of the same German operatives responsible for the numerous explosions and fires that had bedeviled ships and factories involved in the munitions trade for more than a year. They were right. Three years after the war ended, the United States and Germany formed the quasi-government Mixed Claims Commission (MCC) to investigate claims and negotiate financial compensation for wartime damages to commercial and private property. It took seventeen years for the MCC to find Germany responsible for the destruction of Black Tom Island, ordering the German government to pay the United States $50 million in damages. The Nazis paid little mind to this finding, and Germany would not settle the debt until 1979.
One of the American MCC investigators was Harvard Law School graduate John McCloy, a 12-year staff member for the Commission. In early 1941, McCloy was named Assistant Secretary of War, and after the attack on Pearl Harbor, helped craft the policy to intern more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans in remote facilities for much of the duration of World War II. The policy was clearly rooted in McCloy’s experience with German sabotage, views that were shared by President Roosevelt who had been the Assistant Secretary of the Navy during World War I, and who attempted to justify this indefensible action, by declaring “We don’t want another Black Tom.”
As for Black Tom Island, it would eventually sink into the bay. And what of the Black Tom saboteurs? Kristoff was arrested by the Jersey City police on suspicion of involvement in the blast, but they released him for lack of evidence. Drifting in and out of prison for various crimes, he died of tuberculosis in 1928. Jahnke and Witzke fled to Mexico shortly before the United States entered the war and were among the German agents who stirred anti-American sentiment and organized sabotage operations from across the border. Witzke was arrested in January 1918 by the U.S. Army after decrypted German cables alerted authorities to his movements; he was later found guilty of espionage. Sentenced to death, he was pardoned in 1923. Jahnke was never apprehended, and he returned to Germany in 1921. He served for years as an intelligence agent for the Nazi regime and was executed by the Soviets after his capture in 1945.