And there my own adventures end so far as this book is concerned. I shall not do more than touch upon my return to the United States on a far different errand from that I had once planned. My testimony in the Grand Jury proceedings against Captain Tauscher, von Igel, and others of my onetime fellow-conspirators, is a matter of too recent record to deserve more than passing mention. Tauscher, you t will remember, was acquitted because it was impossible to prove that he was aware of the objects for which he had supplied explosives. Von Igel, Captain von Papen's secretary, was protected by diplomatic immunity. And Fritzen and Covani, my former lieutenants, had not yet been captured.*
But though my intriguing was ended, Germany's was not. It may be interesting to consider these intrigues, in the light of what I had learned during those two years and what I have discovered since.
* Fritzen, who was captured in Hartwood, Gal., on March 9, 1917, was arraigned in New York City on March 16, and after pleading not guilty, later reversed his plea. He was sentenced to a term of eighteen months in a Federal prison.
CHAPTER X
GERMANY'S HATE CAMPAIGN IN AMERICA
The German intrigue against the United States Von Papen, Boy-Ed, and von Rintelen, and the work they did How the German-Americans were used, and how they were betrayed.
IN the long record of German intrigue in the United States one fact stands out predominantly. If you consider the tremendous ramifications of the system which Germany' has built, the extent of its organisation and the efficiency with which so gigantic a secret work was carried on, you will realise that this system was not the work of a short period, but of many years. As a matter of fact, Germany had laid the foundation of that structure of espionage and conspiracy many years before even before the time when the United States first became a Colonial Power and thus involved herself in the tangle of world politics.
I am making no rash assertions when I state that ten years ago the course which German agents should adopt towards the United States in the event of a great European war had been determined with a reasonable amount of exactness by the General Staff, and that it was this plan which was adapted to the conditions of the moment, and set into operation at the outbreak of the present conflict. No element of hostility lay behind this planning. Germany had no grievance against America; and whatever potential causes of conflict existed between the two nations lay in the far future.
That plan, so complete in detail, so menacing in its intent, was but part of a world-plan to assure to Germany when the time was ripe the submission of all her enemies and the peaceful assistance and acquiescence in her aims of those parts of the world which at that time should be at peace. Germany looked far ahead on that day when she first knew that war must come. She realised, if no other nation did, that however strong in themselves the combatants were, the neutrals who should command the world's supplies would really determine the victory.
Knowing this, Germany which does not play the game of diplomacy with gloves on laid her plans accordingly.
The United States offered a peculiarly fruitful field for her endeavours. By tradition and geography divorced from European rivalries, it was, nevertheless, from both an industrial and agricultural standpoint, obviously to become the most important of neutral nations. The United States alone could feed and equip a continent; and it needed no prophet to perceive that whichever country could appropriate to itself her resources would unquestionably win the war, if a speedy military victory were not forthcoming.
It was Germany's aim, therefore, to prepare the way by which she could secure those supplies, or, failing in that, to keep them from the enemy, England if England it should be. In a military way such a plan had little chance of success. England's command of the seas was too complete for Germany to consider that she could establish a successful blockade against her. It was then, I fancy, that Germany bethought herself of a greatly potential ally in the millions of citizens of German birth or parentage with whom the United States was filled.
One may extract a trifle of cynical amusement from what followed. Those millions of German-Americans had never been regarded with affection in Berlin. The vast majority of them were descendants of men who had left their homes for political reasons; and of those who had been born in Germany many had emigrated to escape military service, and others had gone to seek a better opportunity than their native land provided. They had been called renegades who had given up their true allegiance for citizenship in a foreign country, and Bernstorff himself, according to the evidence of U.S. Senator Phelan, had said that he regarded them as traitors and cowards.
But Germany voicing her own spleen in private, and Germany with an axe to grind, were two different entities. And no one who observed the honeyed beginnings of the Deutschtum movement in America would have believed that these men k who in public life were so assiduously and graciously flattered were in private characterised as utter traitors to the Fatherland and worse.
Certainly no one believed it when, in 1900, Prince Henry of Prussia paid his famous visit to America. No word of criticism of these "traitors'' was spoken by him; and when at banquets glasses were raised and Milwaukee smiled across the table at Berlin, the sentimental onlooker might have felt a gush of joy at this spectacle of amity and reconciliation. And the sentimental onlooker would never have suspected that Prince Henry had travelled three thousand miles for any other purpose than to attend the launching of the Kaiser's yacht Meteor, which was then building in an American yard.
But to the cynical observer, searching the records of the years immediately following Prince Henry's visit, a few strange facts would have become apparent. He would have discovered that German societies, which had been neither very numerous nor popular before, had in a comparatively short time acquired a membership and a prominence that were little short of marvellous. He would have noted the increasing number of German teachers and professors who appeared in the faculties of American schools and colleges. He would have remarked the growth in popularity of the German newspapers, many of them edited by Germans who had never become naturalised. And yet, observing these things, he might have agreed with the vast majority of Americans in regarding them as entirely harmless and of significance merely as a proof of how hard love of one's native land dies.
He would have been mistaken had he so regarded them. The German Government does not spend money for sentimental purposes; and in the last ten years that Government has expended literally millions of dollars for propaganda in the United States. It has consistently encouraged a sentiment for the Fatherland that should be so strong that it would hold first place in the heart of every German-American. It has circulated pamphlets advocating the exclusive use of the German language, not merely in the homes, but in shops and street cars and all other public places. It has lent financial support to German organisations in America, and in a thousand ways has aimed so to win the hearts of the German-Americans that when the time should come the United States, by sheer force of numbers, would be delivered, bound hand and foot, into the hands of the German Government.
It was this object of undermining the true allegiance of the German citizens of the United States which transformed an innocent and natural tendency into a menace that was the more insidious because the very people involved were, for the most part, entirely ignorant of its true nature. Germany seized upon an attachment that was purely one of sentiment and race and sought to make it an instrument of political power; and she went about her work with so efficient a secrecy that she very nearly accomplished her purpose.
By the time the Great War broke out the German propaganda in America had assumed notable proportions. German newspapers were plentiful and had acquired a tremendous influence over the minds of the German-speaking folk. Many of the German societies had been consolidated into one national organisation the German-American National Alliance, with a membership of two millions, and a president, C. J. Hexamer, of Chicago, whose devotion to the Fatherland has been so great that he has been decorated with the Order
of the Red Eagle. And the German people of the United States had, by a long campaign of flattery and cajolery, coupled with a systematic glorification of German genius and institutions, been won to attachment to the country of their origin that required only a touch to translate it into fanaticism.
Germany had set the stage and rehearsed the chorus. There were needed only the principals to make the drama complete. These she provided in the persons of four men: Franz von Pap en, Karl Boy-Ed, Heinrich Albert, and later Franz von Rintelen.
They were no ordinary men whom Germany had appointed to the leadership of this giant underground warfare against a peaceful country. Highly bred, possessing a wide and intensive knowledge of finance, of military strategy and of diplomatic finesse, they were admirably equipped to win the admiration and trust of the people of America at the very moment that they were attacking them. All of them were men skilled in the art of making friends; and so successfully did they employ this art that their popularity for a long time contrived to shield them from suspicion. Each of these men was assigned to the command of some particular branch of German secret service. And each brought to his task the resources of the scientist, the soldier and the statesman, coupled with the scruples of the bandit. It is impossible in this brief space to tell the full story of the activities of these gentlemen and of their many highly trained assistants. Violence, as you know, played no small part in their plans. Sedition, strikes in munitions plants, attacks upon ships carrying supplies to the Allies, the crippling of transportation facilities, bomb outrages these are a few of the main elements in the campaign to render the United States useless as a source of supply for Germany's enemies. But ultimately of more importance than this was a programme of publicity which should not only present to the German-Americans the viewpoint of their Fatherland (an entirely legitimate propaganda), but which was aimed to consolidate them into a political unit which should be used, by peaceful means if possible such as petitions and the like, but if that method failed, by absolute armed resistance to force the United States Government to declare an embargo upon shipments of munitions and foodstuffs to the Allies, and to compel it to assume a position if not of active alliance with Germany (a hope that was never seriously entertained) at least one which should distinctly favour the German Government and cause serious dissension between America and England.
There followed a twofold campaign: on the one hand, active terrorism against private industry in so far as it was of value to the Allies, reinforced by the most determined plots against Canada; on the other, an insincere and lying propaganda that presented the United States Government as a pretender of a neutrality which it did not attempt to practise as an institution controlled by men who were unworthy of the support of any but Anglophiles and hypocrites.
Left to itself, the sympathy of German-Americans would have been directed towards Germany; stimulated as it was by an unremitting campaign of publicity, this sympathy became a devotion almost rabid in its intensity. Race consciousness was aroused and placed upon the defensive by the attitude of the larger portion of the American Press, and the German-Americans grew defiant and aggressive in their apologies for the Fatherland. Even those whose German origin was so remote that they were ignorant of the very language of their fathers, subscribed to newspapers and periodicals whose sole reason for existence was that they presented the truth as Germany saw it. If in that presentation the German Press adopted a tone that was seditious why, there were those in Berlin who would applaud the more heartily. And in New York Captain von Papen and his colleagues would read and nod their heads approvingly.
At the end of the first two months of the war, and of my active service in America, the campaign of violence was well under way. Already plans had been made for several enterprises other than the Welland Canal plot, about which you read in Chapter VII. Attacks had been planned against vulnerable points on the Canadian Pacific Railway, such as the St. Clair Tunnel running under the Detroit River at Point Huron, Michigan; agents had been planted in the various munitions factories, and spies were everywhere seeking possible points of vantage at which a blow for Germany could be struck. A plan had even then been made to blow up the railway bridge at Vanceboro.
But already von Papen and his associates, including myself, knew that Germany could never succeed in crippling Allied commerce in the United States and in proceeding effectively against Canada until we could count upon the implicit co-operation of the German-Americans, even though that co-operation involved active disloyalty to the country of their adoption.
There lay the difficulty. That the bulk of the German-Americans were loyal to their Government I knew at the time. Now, happily, that is a matter which is beyond doubt. Among them there were, of course, many whose zeal outran their scruples and others whose scruples were for sale. But for the most part, although they could be cajoled into a partnership that was not always prudent, they could not be led beyond this point into positive defiance of the United States, however mistaken they might believe its policies.
The rest of the story I cannot tell at first hand, for I was not directly concerned in the events that followed. What I know I have pieced together from my recollection of conversations with von Papen, and from what many people in Berlin, who thought I was familiar with the affair, told me. Who fathered the idea I do not know. Someone conceived a scheme so treacherous and contemptible that every other act of this war seems white beside it. It was planned so to discredit the German-Americans that the hostility of their fellow-citizens would force them back into the arms of the German Government. These millions of American citizens of German descent were to be given the appearance of disloyalty in order that they might become objects of suspicion to their fellows, and through their resentment at this attitude the cleavage between Germans and non-Germans in America would be increased and perhaps culminate in armed conflict.
On the face of it this looks like the absurd and impossible dream of an insane person rather than a diplomatic programme. And yet, if it be examined more closely, the plan will be seen to have a psychological basis which, however farfetched, is essentially sound. Given a people already bewildered by the almost universal condemnation of a country which they have sincerely revered; add to that serious difference in sympathies an attitude of distrust of all German-Americans by the other inhabitants of the country; and you have sown the seed of a race-antagonism which if properly nurtured may easily grow into a violent hatred. In a word, Germany had decided that if the German-Americans could not be coaxed back into the fold they might be beaten back. She set about her part of the task with an industry which would have commanded admiration had it been better employed.
Glance back over the history of the past three years and consider how, almost overnight, the "hyphen "situation developed. America, shaken by a war which had been declared to be impossible, became suddenly conscious of the presence within her borders of a portion of her population a nation in numbers largely unassimilated, retaining its own language, and possessing characteristics which suddenly became conspicuously distasteful. Inevitably, as I say, the cleavage in sympathies produced distrust. But it was not until stories of plots in which German-Americans were implicated became current that this distrust developed into an acute suspicion. Germanophobia was rampant in those days, and to hysterical persons it was unthinkable that any German could be exempt from the suspicion of treason.
It was upon this foundation that the German agents erected their structure of lies and defamation. Not content with the efforts which the Jingo Press and Jingo individuals were unconsciously making on their behalf, they deliberately set on foot rumours which were intended to increase the distrust of German-Americans. I happen to know that during the first two years of the War many of the stories about German attempts upon Canada, about German-American complicity in various plots, emanated from the offices of Captain von Papen and his associates. I know also that many plots in which German-Americans were concerned had been deliberately encouraged by von Papen and afterwa
rds as deliberately betrayed! Time after time enterprises with no chance of success were set on foot with the sole purpose that they should fail for thus Germany could furnish to the world evidence that America was honeycombed with sedition and treachery evidence which Americans themselves would be the first to accept.
It was in reality a gigantic game of bluff. Germany wished to give to the world convincing proof that all peoples of German descent were solidly supporting her. It was for this reason that reports of impossible German activities were set afloat; that rumours of Germans massing in the Maine woods, of aeroplane flights over Canada, and of all sorts of enterprises which had no basis in fact, were disseminated. And since many anti-German papers had been indiscreet enough to attack the German-Americans as disloyal, the German agents used and fomented these attacks for their own purposes.
Who could gain by such a campaign of slander and the feeling it would produce? Certainly not the Administration, which had great need of a united country behind it. Certainly not the American Press, which was bound to lose circulation and advertising; nor American business, which would suffer from the loss of thousands of customers of German descent, who would turn to the German merchant for their needs. Only two classes could profit: the German Press, which was liberally subsidised by the German Government, and the German Government itself.
It was to the interests of the Administration at Washington to keep the country united by keeping the Germans disunited. The reverse condition would tend to indicate that Americanism was a failure, since the country was divided at a critical time; it would seriously hamper the Government in its dealings with all the warring nations; and it would be of benefit only to the German societies and German Press, and through them to the German Government. It was of benefit. The German newspapers increased their circulations and advertising revenues, in many cases by more than 100 per cent. German banks and insurance companies received money which had formerly gone to American institutions, and which now went to swell the Imperial German War Loans. And the German clubs increased their memberships and became more and more instruments of power in the work of Germany.
My Adventures as a German Secret Service Agent Page 14
