“Von Papen operated from New York after the outbreak of war. “German
reservists who had been peaceful farmers, shopkeepers or waiters,
all over the United States, were mobilized for service, and paraded
through Battery Park in New York shouting ‘Deutschland, Deutschland
über alles!’ to the strains of the Austrian hymn, while they waited
for Papen’s orders from a building near by, and picked quarrels with a
counter procession of Frenchmen screaming the immortal ‘Marseillaise.’
Up in his office sat the attaché, summoning, assigning, despatching his
men on missions that were designed to terrorize America as the spiked
helmets were terrorizing Belgium at that moment.
“... Although von Papen marshaled his consuls, his reservists, his
thugs, his women, and his skilled agents, for a programme of violence
the like of which America had never experienced, the military phase
of the war was not destined for decision here, and there is again
something ironical in the fact that the arrogance of Captain von
Papen’s outrages hastened the coming of war to America and the decline
of Captain von Papen’s style of warfare in America.