robust in his denial of any knowledge of the affair. Becker, a thin
blond youth, made a complete confession. Yes, he had made the bomb
containers--several hundred of them, under Schmidt’s orders. He had
filled them with chlorate of potash and sulphuric acid at the Scheele
laboratory and had seen Captain Wolpert take them away. At that
moment Wolpert, a hulking red figure, who had been conversing fairly
freely, shut up tight, and refused to answer further questions. Becker
acknowledged that he had made the _Kirkoswald_ bomb, and added that the
later cases were larger than that.
“Captain Wolpert,” I said, “don’t you think you’re doing Germany more
harm than good by doing this sort of thing?”
“Damn it!” he exploded. “I gave it up June first. But you’ve got to do
what those bull-headed fellows tell you, haven’t you?”
“Did you know Robert Fay, Captain?” I asked.
“Yes--I met him one time in Schimmel’s office with Rintelen,” he
replied.
“You mean _von_ Rintelen?” I asked, using the aristocratic prefix which
Rintelen had assumed.
“No!” bellowed Wolpert. “Not _von_, damn him--_Rintelen_!”
[Illustration:
_Copyright, International Film Service_
Ernest Becker
_Copyright, International Film Service_
Captain Charles von Kleist (left) and Captain Otto Wolpert (right)]
The result of our first examination of the four was the arrest of Carl
Schmidt, chief engineer of the _Friedrich der Grosse_, and three of
his assistants, Georg Praedel, William Paradies and Friedrich Garbade.
We covered the laboratory, but Dr. Scheele had fled, to Florida. There
he received a telegram telling him it was safe for him to return to
New York. He had traveled as far as Baltimore when another telegram
informed him of the arrests, and he fled to Cuba, and it was March
of 1918 before he was arrested by the Havana police and extradited
to New York. The laboratory was in a secret room on the top floor of
the factory, accessible only through a trap door, and the trap itself
was pierced with eyeholes so that anyone at work inside could see
who was outside. We found a rich store of explosive and incendiary
chemicals--all the ingredients of the bombs, which Lieutenant Busby
brought back as evidence. Scheele was a finished chemist, and a German
spy of 23 years’ standing. It had never occurred to him that von
Kleist would squeal for want of money. “How good a German are you?” he
had asked von Kleist when he engaged him in March, 1915. (The first
project of the two was to saturate fertilizer with lubricating oil and
thus smuggle the oil into Germany.) “I’m as good a German as you ever
pretended to be,” von Kleist answered. “You are not,” said Scheele,
“or you wouldn’t have taken out naturalization papers here. I didn’t
do that.” “Well, I couldn’t have got my captain’s sailing license if I
hadn’t,” said von Kleist.
Loyalty to Germany alone had not satisfied the appetite of von Kleist,
for he had caught a glimpse that night of the check for $10,000, signed
“Hansen” which Scheele proudly waved as evidence of what Germany
thought of his ship-destroying ability. In the Austrian-subsidized
Transatlantic Trust Company, where von Rintelen had deposited a large
amount of money on his arrival from Germany, he had an account in the
name of Hansen. Here then was the explanation of Fay’s remark about his
friend who was a prisoner in England.
So far, so good. We knew that Becker, Schmidt and the other engineers
had made the bombs, and that Becker and Scheele had filled them. On
the evidence the four were convicted; Becker and von Kleist were sent
to Atlanta for two years, and the other four to the penitentiary for
six months. We were satisfied, but could not prove, that Wolpert and
Bode had disposed of the bombs where they would do the most damage.
They refused naturally to convict themselves, were admitted to bail of
$25,000, which was provided by friendly Germans, and were interned when
we went to war. The four assistants served their terms and then were
extended the privileges of internment camps as dangerous enemy aliens.
So far, so good, but the snake was not yet dead--we had only cut off a
section of his tail. To be sure, he could not get about with his former
vigor. The ship fires, which had continued through February, stopped,
and one can count on his fingers the fires that broke out on ships
after that date. Our theory had served its purpose--but who were the
men higher up?
When Paul Koenig had been taken into custody in late December, 1915, we
had found in his house in West 94th Street an address book containing
some hundreds of names of folk with whom he apparently did business.
The memorandum book is mentioned elsewhere in this volume in detail,
but the present case may show just what specific use we made of the
catalogue of spies which the obliging Koenig had left in our hands.
Among other entries was this:
“Boniface during the day--3396 Worth--ask for
Boniface at night 1993 Chelsea--Never home until 10:30 P. M.”
We had gone systematically through the book, checking up our knowledge
of each person mentioned, in order to see whether the trail of Koenig,
von Papen, Boy-Ed and the Hamburg-American interests might not lead us
to other unexpected outrages, and so we were seeking this Boniface who
was “never home until 10:30 P. M.” For months he proved elusive, but
not long after the arrest of the Hoboken bomb-manufacturers we located
a certain Bonford Boniface.
He had only a single room for lodgings, and we called there one day
while he was known to be elsewhere and made a careful examination of
its contents. Our first signal that Boniface might be off-color was the
discovery of a file of clippings from newspapers describing the arrest
of von Kleist and his crew. Apparently he was interested in German
bombs. There was no evidence of the reason for his interest, however,
and the detectives were about to ‘leave the room as they had found it
when they ran across two letters signed “Karl Schimmel,” one postmarked
Buenos Aires and one from Holland. Both were colorless messages asking
how fortune was treating Boniface.
Now a cat may look at a king, and a man may receive friendly notes from
the Argentine and Holland without molestation, but I recalled something
of this name Karl Schimmel. He had come under suspicion before, first,
when the so-called “Do-Do Chemical Company” of 395 Broadway had applied
to the fire department for permission to store dynamite on the premises
of its executive, Karl Schimmel, at 127 Concord Avenue, the Bronx. The
application had been denied, and the fire department had asked the
Bomb Squad to look up the Do-Do Chemical Company and its officers. It
had no factory, no visible business, and as we presently found out no
Karl Schimmel, for he became alarmed at our investigations and fled to
Mexico, and South America, and then, with the aid of Count Luxburg he
made his way back to Germany. Again, Wolpert had spoken of having met
Fay in Schimmel’s office with Rintelen--but Wolpert would not talk.
There was a reasonable margin of doubt in our minds of Schimmel’s
behavior--enough to warrant Barth’s going to Boniface and asking him to
come to headquarters.
Schimmel, Boniface told us, had employed him for a time at $25 a week.
And what had he done in return? Nothing more than provide Schimmel
with a list of weekly sailings of all steamships leaving New York for
Europe, together with a description of their cargoes. Why had Schimmel,
a lawyer, been interested in sailings and cargoes? Boniface said he
did not know. How had Boniface compiled the list? At first, he said,
by scouting along the waterfront, picking up scraps of conversation
here and there and keeping an observant eye on the trucks bound for
the piers. Pier-guards began to notice him a trifle too attentively,
the waterfront was too many miles long, twenty-five dollars a week was
only twenty-five dollars a week, and Boniface, it must be remarked, was
racially thrifty. So he adopted the much simpler expedient of buying
each morning a copy of the _New York Herald_, a newspaper which pays
some attention to shipping, net cost in those days one cent, copying
sailing dates, hours and destinations from its columns, and conjuring
the cargoes out of his imagination.
Where had he delivered his reports? To Schimmel in his office at 51
Chambers Street. Whom had he seen there? Why, Rintelen, once, but he
didn’t know what his business there was. Another time a man named
Herman Ebling. (Ebling, it developed later, had been directed by
Wolpert, who had had his orders from á Captain Steinburg, to take a
tube of glanders germs and a dipping stick, seek out the wharves where
horses were being shipped abroad for artillery and transport, and
insert the germ-soaked stick into the nostrils of every third horse he
could reach, in order that a serious epidemic might presently break
out. Ebling claims he threw the tube overboard without fulfilling his
mission.) Where was Ebling? Boniface professed not to know. Whom else
had he seen? Well, there was another German lawyer, Martin Illsen,
counsel for the _New Yorker Herold_, a German daily.
We sent for Illsen and questioned him of his dealings with Schimmel.
He had written an article which he sent to the newspapers protesting
against the shipment of arms and ammunition to the Allies, for which
Schimmel had paid him $100. That he said was the extent of his service.
[Illustration: Sergeant Thomas Jenkins, U. S. Army, who successfully
located a part of one of the bombs in a locker in the German Turn
Verein in Brooklyn]
“Did you ever see this man Ebling there?” I inquired, feeling that
in Ebling we might find the missing link between the bomb-makers and
the fires. “Yes,” Illsen replied. “Where is he now?” Illsen did not
know. “Do you remember meeting anyone else in the office?” “Yes, there
was a lithographer. His name is Uhde. He comes, I think, from Brooklyn
but I do not know where he is.”
It is our business to find out where people are, and as the reader may
already have observed, to follow a case through from one man to another
if we have to question a thousand individuals on the way to our goal.
We took up the search for Uhde, and investigated everyone of that name
in Greater New York. More months had passed before we finally found the
man we were after--Walter Uhde. We pounced on him without the formality
of an examination, and searched his room, to find some correspondence
with Schimmel and more newspaper accounts of the arrest and trial
of the Hoboken gang. It was this evidence and the pressure which it
brought to bear upon his conscience that made Uhde give up evidence
enough to picture the bomb plot in its entirety.
It began, as the outbreak of the ship fires already had indicated,
in the early months of 1915. One winter night there was a secret
meeting in the restaurant of the Brooklyn Labor Lyceum. In a private
dining-room sat Dr. Scheele, the chemist, Captain Wolpert, the
dock-superintendent, Karl Schimmel, the lawyer, Uhde, the lithographer,
Eugene Reistert, the proprietor of the restaurant, and a certain
Captain Steinburg. This man was particularly dangerous to the welfare
of the United States. His real name was Erich von Steinmetz, and he was
a captain in the German navy. At that time he had just come to America
by way of Vladivostock, dodging the immigration examiners by travelling
in woman’s dress, and evading the quarantine authorities by concealing
in the fold of the dress the same tubes of glanders germs with which
he sent Ebling to inoculate the horses for the Allies. Steinmetz was
Rintelen’s first and ablest assistant, and Schimmel was his second.
The two men outlined to the dinner party a plan to manufacture and
plant the bombs. The sailors would make the containers, Scheele would
see that they were filled and would act as paymaster for the group,
Schimmel and Wolpert would keep in touch with the sailings and cargoes,
and Wolpert, Uhde and Reistert would deliver them to the small fry who
could be hired to place them in sugar-bags and other freight.
How well the plan succeeded we already know. Wolpert distributed the
bombs to several local points of German operation in the greater city,
and even Scheele had on one occasion carried a box full of bombs packed
only in sawdust from the laboratory over to the Labor Lyceum. Reistert
and Uhde tested a few of the infernal machines in the rear of the
building, and Uhde fancied them so much that he kept one as a souvenir,
stowed away in the toe of an old boot in his locker at the Turn
Verein, where Detectives Barth and Jenkins found it. The conspiracy
had originated in March; the first day of May, Wolpert gave a bomb to
a Chenango who smuggled it aboard the _Kirkoswald_, with the result
which we have followed. On May 7, 1915, the glorious _Lusitania_ was
torpedoed, and on the following morning, Karl Schimmel, coming into his
office and finding Illsen and Boniface there, exclaimed:
“Ah--that U-boat commander has done well enough, but he has stolen all
the glory away from me. I had nine cigars on the _Lusitania_.” (For
“cigars” read “bombs.”) “If they had not torpedoed her the cigars would
have done the work!”
He may have told the truth. His secret is at the bottom of the Atlantic
now, along with what shreds of respect the civilized world might
otherwise have had for Germany. It is certain that Schimmel tried to
place his “cigars” aboard the vessel, for Reistert had given Uhde $100
and a little man named Klein a package of bombs with instructions to go
to a saloon in West Street near the White Star piers. There they were
to meet a third man, to whom they would deliver the package, and that
man would see them safely aboard the ship. The man did not appear at
the appointed hour, so they left the package with the bartender, and
went to the missing man’s house in Harlem, where they paid him his fee.
It was the same Klein who had been carrying a bomb in his pocket one
afternoon when Schimmel had sent him to South Ferry to place it aboard
a ship. But the bomb caught fire, and before he could rid himself of it
it had burned through his clothing, so Schimmel magnanimously gave him
$20 for a new suit and his trouble. And it was the same Klein whom we
found dead of disease in a hospital, beyond the law’s reach, when we
finally were tracing him for arrest.
The stories of the culprits combined to lay at their door the origin
of most of the ship fires with which we had been afflicted for the
past two years. If nothing else had proved it, the cessation of the
fires would have been enough. We were anxious, after our twisting,
winding search, rather to have the guilty men convicted and placed in
safe-keeping than to fix definitely upon them the guilt for all of the
fires--that would have been practically impossible--but the very fact
that the fires ceased is sufficient evidence of their complete guilt.
It was not until October 17, 1917, six months after the United States
had gone to war, that our long hunt came to an end, and we arrested
Boniface, Reistert, Uhde and one Peter Zeffert. It was Zeffert who
confessed to having gone to Schimmel’s office one afternoon to help him
fill the bomb containers with chemicals. Reistert was there, and the
three took the bombs away in a taxi-cab to meet a destroying agent in
a waterfront saloon. The agent did not show up, and Messrs. Schimmel,
Reistert and Zeffert thereupon returned to the Chambers Street office
and unloaded the tubes.
I am sorry that our laws were not at that time drastic enough to punish
the men as they deserved. James W. Osborne, the assistant United States
Attorney who tried the case, wove an admirable prosecution, and Judge
Harland B. Howe turned a stern face upon the prisoners. Wolpert had
been haled from Atlanta to answer to the new charge, as had von Kleist
and Becker. The engineers were brought out of their internment camps.
And last, and foremost of all, Franz Rintelen was there--returned
to us by the British to answer to a series of charges which he had
tried hard and expensively to conceal. The best our laws of the moment
could do for these men who had defiled our hospitality and destroyed
millions of dollars’ worth of property on our soil was to sentence them
to one-and-one-half years in Atlanta. It is to the everlasting credit
of Judge Howe that Rintelen, Wolpert, von Kleist, Becker, Praedel,
Paradies and Garbade received the maximum prison term, and the maximum
fine of $2,000 each. Under the espionage act later adopted each of them
could be sentenced to twenty years and fined $10,000.
Popular consent would have made short work of these men’s lives.
Justice had to preside over their trials, however, and they were
punished to the full extent of an inadequate law. A more drastic
criminal code would probably have frightened the German spies in the
United States, and it is equally true that German agents who were
caught in the net of the law laughed up their sleeves as they made use
of one after another of the law’s technical provisions and privileges
to avert what would have been certain and swift death had they worn
the field-gray uniforms of their nation. They have not suffered in
proportion to their crimes. But their nation is paying the price.
[Illustration: Norman H. White, of Boston, a civilian attached to the
Military Intelligence, who unearthed numerous German intrigues]
There is something in the spectacle of Rintelen serving his sentence
at Atlanta--a long sentence, which he tried numerous tricks to
evade--that is peculiarly German, and that comes more nearly satisfying
our popular desire for retribution than the plight of any of his
wretched employees. He came to America arrogant, rich, defiant, cruel,
and sly--to wage war upon us. One of his first acts was to sign his
check for $10,000 to manufacture bombs to destroy our shipping. When
certain Americans crossed his reeking trail he ran away in terror.
By great good luck he was captured, discovered, and returned and by
considerable persistence and patience on the part of the Bomb Squad
one of his trails was laid bare. (He had many others.) He suffered
great indignity, as he thought, at being tried with the manual laborers
whom he had employed and left in trouble. He was convicted and sent
to prison. He pleaded ill-health, though he was a strong man, and
he tried to be transferred to a more lenient prison. He invoked the
aid of his crumbling government, who informed Washington that unless
he were surrendered to Germany that nation would take the lives of
American soldiers captured in battle. Every trick failed, and Franz
Rintelen, tried not as a prisoner of war for what morally were acts of
war against the United States, but by our peace courts, and under our
lenient peace laws, must now serve out his term in an American prison,
although his nation has given up the war and begged for clemency.
Rintelen used to suggest that he was an illegitimate relative of the
late Kaiser. It may be true: the two have something in common. The
Kaiser has become plain Hohenzollern, and the chief German bomb-plotter
in the United States, is, as Wolpert angrily said that day at
headquarters, “not _von_ Rintelen, damn him--_Rintelen_!”
VIII
MR. HOLT’S FOUR DAYS
The facts were apparently unrelated to each other. Only a flight of
imagination would have connected them, and imagination, though it is
often valuable in speculating on what probably happened, is not court
evidence of what did happen. In the order of their occurrence, the
facts were these:
1. On April 16, 1906, Leone Krembs Muenter, wife of Erich Muenter, an
instructor in German in Harvard College, died, soon after the birth
of her second baby. The circumstances of her death were suspicious,
and the Coroner directed that the stomach of the body be taken to the
Harvard Medical School for examination. Dr. Muenter, on the following
day, requested that he be allowed to escort the remains from Cambridge
to Chicago for burial, and this permission was granted. With the
children he made the gloomy pilgrimage west. The body of the dead wife
was cremated. Dr. Muenter wrote at once from Chicago to the New York
Life Insurance Company directing that the policy on his wife’s life be
made payable to her sister, instead of to himself. The examination of
the lining of the stomach had indicated slow arsenical poisoning and a
warrant was issued at once for the husband. But it reached Chicago to
find him gone--no one knew where.
2. In a corridor of the main floor of the Senate wing of the United
States Capitol at Washington used to stand a telephone switchboard. On
the night of Friday, July 2, 1915, an explosion near it blew fragments
of the board through the walls of the telephone booths adjoining. No
one was about, which was lucky, for the wrecked switchboard was not the
only damage done: plaster rained from the walls and ceilings, every
door nearby was blown open (one was a door into the Vice-President’s
office which had not been in use for forty years), the east reception
room was wrecked, a gaping hole was torn in the stonework of the wall,
and fragments of windows, mirrors, crystal chandeliers and telephone
apparatus flew in every direction.
3. In his country home on East Island, where Long Island reaches out
into the Sound to form Glen Cove, John Pierpont Morgan was having
breakfast on the morning of Saturday, July 3, 1915. It was nearly
half past nine, and the members of his family, together with several
holiday guests, were in the breakfast room, which is on the eastern
side of the house. An automobile drove up to the front door, and the
butler was confronted by a man of dingy appearance who asked, in an
accent suggesting German, to see Mr. Morgan. He presented a card
bearing the legend “Society Summer Directory: represented by Thomas C.
Lester.” The butler wanted better credentials and asked for them. The
stranger pulled a revolver from his pocket, covered the butler with it
and stepping inside the door demanded, “Where is Morgan?”
With good presence of mind the butler answered, “In the library,”--the
library being in the west wing of the house, and away from the
breakfast room--and stepped toward the library door. Unfortunately it
was open, and the intruder, who was following with his gun aimed, saw
that the room was empty, and that the butler had lied. At the same
moment Physick, the butler, realized that his ruse had not worked. He
shouted, “Upstairs, Mr. Morgan! Upstairs!” hoping by the urgency of his
cry to convey to the banker a warning that something was distinctly
wrong and at the same time to get him out of range. Mr. Morgan at once
hurried up a rear stairway and began to search for the trouble. A
moment later Mrs. Morgan joined him. They proceeded from one room to
another, found nothing, and asked a nurse what was wrong. As the little
search party reached the head of the main staircase, with Mrs. Morgan
in the lead, she caught sight of a strange man with a revolver in each
hand. Lester had come up the front staircase. Mr. Morgan saw his wife
between himself and the guns, brushed her aside, and charged. The man
fired twice as the two went to the floor, grappling, and the hammer
of his revolver clicked twice more on caps that did not explode. Two
wounds, one in the front of the abdomen, and the other in the left
thigh, did not prevent Mr. Morgan, from overpowering his assailant: he
lay with the full weight of his 220 pounds on the man’s body, pinning
down the revolvers to the floor. One of the guns Mrs. Morgan and the
nurse wrenched from the man’s hand; the other Mr. Morgan captured.
Physick had meanwhile roused the servants, and he stunned the intruder
with a lump of coal as he lay on the floor. Lester’s unconscious form
was then trussed up and taken to the Glen Cove jail.