The Web

CHAPTER VIII
THE SPY HIMSELF

Comment has been made elsewhere in these pages on the curiously perverted nature of the German intellect. It would not be truthful to call all Germans unintellectual or unscientific, for the reverse of this is in part true. But continually in its most elaborate workings, the German mind displays reversions to grossness, coarseness, and bestiality. Perversions and atrocities seem natural to their soldiers. These restrictions apply often to men in high authority. The German officer was perhaps even more a brute than the German private.

Take the case of the man Thierichens, Captain of the Prinz Eitel Friedrich, which was interned at Norfolk in March, 1915, after a successful career of six months as a commerce raider. For a long time Captain Thierichens was hailed in this country as a sort of naval hero; he received the admiration not only of men but of women. It was only after a considerable career in adulation that the tide of public estimation turned in regard to this man. His private correspondence was investigated, and it was found that he was carrying on correspondence with women in this country which showed a depth of human depravity on his part which cannot be understood and may not be described.

This phase of German mentality was manifested also in the highest diplomatic representatives that that country sent abroad. These men had no sense of honor or morality, but curiously enough, they were not aware of their own lack. They performed the most pernicious acts of treason, and yet were never conscious they were committing any crime. Von Bernstorff, Dumba, von Papen, Boy-Ed, Bolo Pacha, Rintelen and Dr. Scheele—such a record of treachery never has been known in all the history of diplomacy; such a wholly devilish ingenuity, such an intellectual finesse in conspiracy, such a delicate exactness and such a crude brutality in destruction, never have been manifested on the part of any other nation in the world. The flower of centuries of civilization in Germany’s case had been merely a baneful, noisome bloom, and not the sweet product of an actual culture. The efflorescence of the German heart is the fungus of decay. Feed them? Why should we feed them? Trust them? Why should we trust them? Spare them? Why should we spare them? Receive them? Why should we receive them? Believe them? Why should we ever believe them?

A fine band of conspirators was uncovered by investigations of attempted atrocities against our eastern shipping. There was a man named Robert Fay who had invented a ship bomb, and who had all the German money he needed back of him. His machine was a sort of tank which he fastened to the rudder post just below the water line of a ship which was being loaded and which stood high in the water. As the vessel was loaded, it would submerge the tank and leave everything out of sight under water. Fay had worked out one of the most ingenious devices which any of the investigating Government engineers had ever seen.

His scheme, as Mr. Strothers describes it in his book, “Fighting Germany’s Spies,” was to go under the stern of an ocean steamer in a small boat and to affix to the rudder post this little tank. Of course every reader will know that in steering a ship the rudder turns first this way, then that. Fay had a rod so adjusted that every time the rudder moved it turned a beveled wheel within the bomb just one notch. A certain number of revolutions of that wheel—which of course would be very slow and gradual—would turn the next wheel of the clock one notch. This would gear into the wheel next beyond it. The last wheel would slowly unscrew a threaded cap at the head of a bolt which had, pressing upon its top, a strong spring. When the cap was loose the bolt would drop and it would act like a firing pin in a rifle, its point striking upon the cap of a rifle cartridge which was adjusted just above a small charge of chloride of potash. Below the potash there was a charge of dynamite, and below that again a charge of the tremendous explosive trinitrotoluol—the explosive known as “T. N. T.”

Suppose the device adjusted to the rudder of a steamship on some dark night in New York harbor. The cargo is loaded on the ship; inch by inch the ship sinks down, and this contrivance, spiked on the rudder post, is lost to sight. The ship steams out to sea. Every time she swings to change her course, every time the rudder is adjusted gently, a notch in the leisurely clock trained below her stern slips with a little, unheard click. Far out at sea—for what reason no one can tell—without any warning, the whole stern of the ship heaves up in the air. The water rushes in; the boilers explode. The ship, her cargo, her crew, her passengers, are gone.

Well, it cost but little. A few dollars would make such a bomb. Von Papen looked it over. He did not object to the cost; indeed, Germany did not scruple to spend any sum of money of the millions she sent to America, provided it would produce results. But von Papen was not sure of this; he did not think much of it. He declined it. As to the immorality of it, the frightfulness of it—that never came into his mind at all.

One recalls reading the other day that Great Britain had shot only fourteen spies. We did not shoot one in America.

The Federal grand jury in New York on December 6, 1918, returned indictments charging treason against two men who already were in the Tombs awaiting trial on an earlier charge of conspiracy. This was the first actual treason trial since we entered the war. The men were Paul Fricke of Mt. Vernon and Hermann Wessells, an Imperial German Government spy, former officer of the German navy, then domiciled in America. Their co-defendants in the conspiracy trial were Jeremiah A. O’Leary, the Sinn Fein agitator; John T. Ryan, a Buffalo lawyer; Mme. Victorica, also an alleged German spy; Willard J. Robinson, an American, and the late Dr. Hugo Schweitzer, one of the best known German business men in New York.

It was alleged that the activities of Wessells had to do with “ways and means of secretly placing explosives, or securing other persons secretly to place explosives, on wharves located in the United States, on ships and vessels in ports of the United States, and plying between ports of the United States and other countries; to blow up, injure, and destroy the same, and cause fires thereon, and thereby hinder and hamper the prosecution of the war by the United States against Germany.”

The final overt act charged was that in July, 1917, Wessells requested “information as to ways and means of importing toy blocks from Switzerland,” his purpose being to find “ways and means of secretly and clandestinely introducing into the United States explosives and ingredients of explosives concealed in toy blocks.”

Had any of these toy blocks come into the hands of innocent children, what matter to a mind which would regard the Lusitania sinking as justifiable war? What difference would it make to a man hiding T. N. T. in a child’s toys whether he killed babies in Flanders or on the high seas or in American homes? Such men are unmoral. One would call treason one of their lesser crimes.

There was in New York City a certain German whom we will call von S——. He was an inventor of a machine called an aeromobile, which, however, he said he would not sell to any government but that of Germany. He was arrested by agents of the Department of Justice, charged with uttering disloyal, scurrilous and profane remarks against the Government and military forces of the United States. He is a German-born citizen of the United States. Enter now another citizen of the United States who spoke as good German as von S—— did and who posed as “an official representative of the German Imperial Government in the United States.” This latter gentleman said he wanted to buy the S—— invention for the Fatherland. S—— turned himself inside out, saying among other things: “Everything is fair in war—gas, poison, the bomb, the knife—we must stop at nothing. Germany must triumph over her enemies. I would not hesitate to destroy a whole city for the good of the German cause.” After S—— had been allowed to talk sufficiently, his new friend, who proved to be an A. P. L. operative in disguise, caused his arrest by an agent in the Military Intelligence Division. S—— was struck speechless when he found he had been trapped. He was held in ten thousand dollars bail at the examination and committed to the Tombs in default of surety. Would he have been admitted to any bail at all in Germany in similar circumstances?

Out in a great city on Puget Sound, the Minute Men Division of the American Protective League, after an exhaustive investigation covering several months, arrested a certain man whom we will call Johnson. He was charged with conspiracy to doctor steel and iron in the Seattle ship-yards with a powerful chemical, intending to commit wholesale murder by wrecking troop trains. He was a pattern-maker employed in a ship-building plant when the Federal officials arrested him as an alleged German spy. At the time of his arrest, he had in his pocket a bottle containing a violent explosive. His scheme was to apply a strong acid to steel and iron in the shipyards, which would destroy these metals by eating them away. He planned to place acid on iron about to be melted, so that the resulting steel products would be valueless and the ship-building program delayed. He was charged with undertaking to damage the more delicate bearings of the ships, so that they would be useless after putting out to sea. It was part of his scheme, as developed by the operatives, to place acids in the journal boxes of cars, with the intent of destroying them while they were under way. The A. P. L. operatives claimed to be conspirators with him. When one of them pointed out that such a wreck would cost a large amount of life, the accused is said to have replied: “Well, what’s the odds how we kill them, and what’s the difference whether we kill them over here or over there?” That man, like many now behind bars, had no moral sense at all.

Not all of these agents of Germany were men of the mental shrewdness of their great spy leaders. Johnson picked out a fellow worker and felt him out for a long period of time as to whether he would be safe as a confidant. This particular fellow happened to look like a German, and to talk like one. He also happened to be an A. P. L. operative. The accused, who is charged under the Espionage Act, does not yet know the identity of the man who informed against him.

“There was one old German in my district,” says the report of a New York state chief, “who had spent thirty years in our region, surveying. He had been an officer in the Franco-German war, and was a recognized expert in real estate values, appraisals, etc. When we went into the war, he made public a little statement telling of his German origin and of his American citizenship. He came under the suspicion of some, and I looked into the matter. One of his men remembered hearing the German say, twenty years ago, when under the influence of liquor, that he had been a German spy in the war with France; he also remembered the German’s story of a horse he had used, which he had trained to run, trot or walk at certain definite paces. By keeping track of the different gaits, as he jogged along in his buggy over France, he would measure certain localities and compute distances—information which proved valuable later. It was need of such information that made Germany send out secret surveying forces when she was preparing to attack France. We put this man under surveillance but could get nothing on him except that he tried to learn when transports sailed. Apparently he had done all his work before the war began, just as he had in France before the other war.”

An ingenious and dastardly instance of spy work and sabotage was recently uncovered in Detroit. Anton G——, a skilled workman employed in a factory making airplane fuel tanks, deliberately planned an aviation accident. He took a tank which had been condemned because the bottom sump casting had been riveted into the wrong position, cut the rivets, properly adjusted the casting and soldered it in place, replacing the cut rivets so that the tank appeared O. K. for use. It passed the plant’s inspection, and was installed in a plane before its dangerous character was detected. G—— has given up the making of airplane tanks for the duration of the war—and longer.

Of all the individual spies located in America, one of the most noted and most able was that Dr. Scheele elsewhere mentioned as a Brooklyn druggist. Dr. Scheele was taken in Cuba by the United States Government after he had fled the country just ahead of the hounds. This accomplished student and practitioner of villainy was one of the finest chemists Germany ever produced—a descendant of a family of chemists. He was a major in the German army. That this man had intellect is beyond any question—he had more than that; he had genius. He was one of the finest examples of the great development in Germany of commercial chemistry. Men such as he have rendered services valuable beyond any price in almost all ranks of commerce, and Germany’s military orders were to get them at any price, all of them, for German-controlled concerns. Such men have helped give Germany her tremendous and powerful place in the commerce of the world. This unique genius in research, this ability to divine elemental secrets, allied with the hard working, abstemious, thrifty, free-breeding traits of the German people, made that nation very strong in her position among the world forces.

But here again comes in the proof of the assertion made in regard to the debased activities of the German nature, not only in its emotional manifestations but in its intellectual processes at well. Perhaps the one thought which will awaken the bitterest resentment and the most long-lived suspicion in the American mind against the German citizen is the revelation of the fact that German spies lived among us so long as accepted citizens, made their business successes here, profited by our free-handed generosity, while all the time they were agents of Germany and traitors to the United States.

In the preceding chapter, reference was made to some of these long-term spies, as they may be called—men who were sent out on their iniquitous missions even in time of peace. The best known of these men is Scheele, who, when apprehended, was trying to get to Europe. Now he is hugging the deputy U. S. marshal in whose custody he is, for fear some German will kill him for turning state’s evidence and revealing the whole secret German spy system in the United States. This man is the most interesting of all the known spies.

In brief, Scheele came over to this country quietly, a man quite unknown, just twenty-five years ago. For twenty-one years, up to the outbreak of the war, he received regularly $125 a month as his “honorarium” from the German Government. He was one of the fixed location spies—one of very many. He went into business, opening a drug store in a New York suburb, and he prospered there. He was not alone. There were many of his people about. He met more than one prominent German living in New York City—most of whom now live in Fort Oglethorpe. In these influential circles, in continuous close touch with Berlin, supplied all the time with money from Berlin, Scheele was appraised at his true worth as a possible agent of destruction.

Came to him, therefore, one day, a captain in the service of the North German Lloyd Steamship Company. This man carried a card. From whom? No less than von Papen, a man accepted as bearing the credentials of a foreign government, entitling him to courtesy in our own country—von Papen, one of the master plotters located on this side of the sea. Scheele was asked to invent some sort of infernal machine by which ships could be set on fire after they had left port and were on the high seas. That was all. If innocent persons died, what matter? It must be a secret sort of thing, this machine, which could be distributed without creating a suspicion. It must be efficient. It must be small. It must work without much mechanism. And it must be deadly sure. This was the sort of warfare—allied to bestiality in France and Belgium, and red ruthlessness on the high seas—that was to make Germany loved and revered in the whole world, as now, amazingly enough, she asks us to be—we, her American brothers “with whom she has no quarrel.”

Very well, the order was accepted by Scheele. It was simple for this man, a mechanical and chemical genius. Of course, he needed some materials. Where should he get them except among fellow Germans? And were not the entire interned crew and corps of officers of the interned German steamships, which were lying in the Hudson, available for his purposes? Scheele got all the lead and tin and like material he needed there. The Scheele cigar bomb, as it came to be called, was only three or four inches long and an inch or two in diameter. Inside of it was a thin partition made of tin. In a cavity at one end was placed a certain chemical; in the other end, divided from it for the time being by a partition sheet of tin, was a strong corrosive acid. When the ends were sealed the work was done.

It was relatively simple to put two or three of these in a pocket and casually go aboard a ship, or through the influence of simple and kindly German neighbor people, have someone else go aboard the ship and drop such a bomb into a coal bunker; or better, among the cargo. The bomb needed absolutely no attention on the part of anyone. Scheele, a competent, thorough, painstaking German scientist of Germany’s highest and best type, left nothing to chance. He experimented from time to time, and verified his experiments. He knew how thick to make that partition of tin. He could make it of just such a thickness that the acid could eat through it in two or three or four days, so that if a certain steamship carried that bomb on the high seas for two or three or four days, in the course of time the acid would eat through the tin. Then, in the combination of the chemicals, heat would be generated and a fire was absolutely certain.

These things sound like the invention of a diseased mind—like the romance of some excited intellect concerning itself with unreal and impossible events belonging in another age—another world than ours. But they are true, actually true. Scheele, backed by these influential Germans in New York, backed by the diplomatic representatives of the German Government itself—we might as well say by all Germans also—actually did these things in this country.

Not one, but many ships broke into flames in mid-Atlantic. Sometimes the damage was not complete, but quite frequently the loss of a merchant ship was absolute. We cannot tell how many millions of dollars of the world’s property were lost in this way through the activities of this one perverted mind. Our censorship took care of some of that. Those losses of foodstuffs, of fuel, of clothing, had to be paid for by someone. They were subtracted from the world’s useful supplies. Who paid for them? You and I and all the taxpayers of America paid for the losses. One does not know how much Scheele himself got out of it—not very much; for, two months before this war was “forced” on Germany, Scheele was ordered to sell his drug store, and did so—though he complained he was doing very well in it. His salary is not known to have been raised.

One of the astonishing and disgusting developments of this war had been the knowledge gained of the unspeakable depravity and degeneracy of the German mind. There are in the Government records at Washington countless cases of German officers who, over their own signatures, have written things so foul and filthy, so low, lewd and bestial, that no pen on earth ever would rewrite them save one of their own sort. The Huns were not clean-minded fighting men, but in large percent animal-like, low, cruel, cunning, unscrupulous, unchivalrous even in their most arrogant ranks. This explains out of hand the atrocities in Belgium and France and shows what atrocities were waiting for America had this war been won by Germany.

Germany fell because she was rotten in heart and in soul. That was why she fought foul—because she was foul, foul to the core. It was an amazing and an abhorrent “kultur,” this which she offered to the world. It is no wonder that her ways of warfare were cruel, merciless, unchivalrous; no wonder that she crucified men and tortured women and children until there is no human way ever of squaring the account with her. She no longer belongs on the clear avenues of the world, and the one epitaph she has earned is the one word, “Unclean!” History has not usually recorded such statements. No. And history has not usually been in the way of discovering such truths.

It was this Dr. Scheele, an upper class German who lived here twenty-five years as a spy, who, under German Government order, started this friendly plan against America. You cannot call that military genius. You cannot call such a man a soldier. His is simply an instance of perverted intellect. It is not even to be dignified by the term malicious. It is unmoral, base, intellectually obscene, as Thierichens was emotionally obscene.

But Scheele himself, now grown old—for he was a major when he came to America twenty-five years ago—is to-day a pleasant man of genial manner. He used to visit the home of one of his guards—to whom he stuck very close in his walks on the street, the guard having told him he would kill him on his first step toward escape—and there he always was kind to the children. “He was such a nice man,” said the guard’s wife—“so courtly.” He is a very egotistical man, and it requires a certain playing up to his vanity to get him to talk freely. Yet he has talked freely, and has given much valuable information to the United States. The men who accompany him in his city walks would dearly love to drop him out a high window or see him try to escape. They do not love him.

But Scheele loves himself. Asked one time as to some statement he had made, he took offense at suspicion of his veracity. He, twenty-five years a spy in America, a state’s-evidence man at last against his original country which he thus betrayed in turn, at this imputation slapped himself on the chest and said: “On my honor as a German officer!” Great God!

In his statements he was not often found tripping. For instance, when he said that 200,000 rifles for German revolutionists were stored in a German club in New York, its searchers did find evidence that rifles had earlier been stored there, but later removed. Scheele was taken from Washington to New York to point out these rifles. He would not go with less than four men as a guard. He is always afraid some German will kill him. Oh, yes, he is still alive. The secret men of the United States know where he is. He can be seen. He will talk. He is an elderly, kindly-looking man now—a man who speaks of his “honor as a German officer!”

The story of Scheele’s ferreting out is of itself a strange and absorbing tale, which shows how our own men were on their guard. To begin with, his cigar bombs did not work infallibly—perhaps the motion of the ship would slop the acid away from the tin partition so it would not cut through quite on schedule. One or two bombs were found on shipboard. One or two were found unexploded in the coal when ships were unloading at Bordeaux. The bombs were traced back to New York. Dock laborers had been bribed to put them aboard ships sometimes—and sometimes were ashamed to do so and dropped them into the water instead. Men who can decipher code can run a trail like this. Scheele soon was located.

But Scheele had fled long before. Why? Whither? The Imperial German Government knew Scheele was going to be caught. The large spies of the German embassy promised to pick Scheele up at Cuba—where he had taken temporary residence under the practically German custody of a Spaniard who kept him in a castle which also was a prison. And so it came to pass that when the embassadorial train of the Imperial German Government was kicked out of America and all these big spies were named openly, and all the news of that big spy system began to break, von Bernstorff, von Papen and company sailed for Germany—but they did not take any chances. They did not stop at Cuba.

Scheele was abandoned by his people—he was an actual prisoner in Cuba. He was bitter. He might talk under a third degree. An A. P. L. man of New York Division, Richmond Levering, now Major Levering, U. S. A., went to Cuba, got access to Scheele, took him to Key West, took him back again to Cuba—but took him back to an actual prison. Then, finding he had no place in the world, and no friend whose protection he could not buy, he sold his “honor of a German officer” to the United States, and in return, he is still alive, having paid as the price of life the full story, so far as he knows it, of the German Imperial spy system from Wilhelmstrasse to Brooklyn Bridge.

And there you have a spy, a real one, a man who planned murder and arson on the high seas, death to unknown hundreds of men, women and children; the man who invented the mustard gas that tortured and killed our boys and those of our allies on the line in France, and whose perverted intellect did none may know what else of subtle crime “on the honor of a German officer.”

Scheele made many revelations which never heretofore have been made public, because they were humiliating and shocking to us, and showed how completely we had been befooled for years. He said: “We knew all you had, everything, and we used all you had. You invented the submarine—and we used it, not you. You invented the airplane—and we used it, not you.” (Which is true, as our boys in the Argonne battle would testify.) “If you had had new gases, we’d have got them. We had four men for years in your Patent Office, and you never knew it. We knew every invention useful to us. We had a man in your army secrets, one in your navy.”

“But how could you do such things—how could you have men inside of our Government in that way?” interrupted the man to whom he was unburdening himself.

“Good God!” said Scheele, “we’ve got them in your Congress, haven’t we?”

It is enough. And now comes Dernburg and believes that Americans will hail the “new understanding” between Germany and America! He believes that we shall be very good friends, now that the war is over.