FALSE PASSPORTS
Hans von Wedell's bureau--The traffic in false passports--Carl
Ruroede--Methods of forgery--Adams' coup--Von Wedell's letter
to von Bernstorff--Stegler--Lody--Berlin counterfeits American
passports--Von Breechow.
Throughout August, 1914, it was comparatively easy for Germans in
America who wished to respond to the call of the Fatherland to leave
American shores. A number of circumstances tended swiftly to make it
more hazardous. The British were in no mind to permit an influx of
reservists to Germany while they could blockade Germany. The cordon
tightened, and soon every merchant ship was stopped at sea by a British
patrol and searched for German suspects. German spies here took refuge
in the protection afforded by an American passport. False passports
were issued by the State Department in considerable quantities during
the early weeks of war--issued unwittingly, of course, for the
applicant in most cases underwent no more than the customary peace-time
examination.
We have already seen that von der Goltz easily secured a passport. The
details of his application were these: Karl A. Luederitz, the German
consul at Baltimore, detailed one of his men to supply Goltz with a
lawyer and an application blank (then known as Form 375). The lawyer
was Frederick F. Schneider, of 2 East German Street, Baltimore. On that
application Goltz swore that his name was Bridgeman H. Taylor, his
birthplace San Francisco, his citizenship American, his residence New
York City, and his occupation that of export broker. Charles Tucker
served as witness to these fantastic sentiments. Two days later (August
31) the State Department issued passport number 40308 in the name of
Taylor, and William Jennings Bryan signed the precious document.
It was not necessary at that time to state the countries which the
applicant intended to visit. Within a few weeks, however, that
information was required on the passport.
Each additional precaution taken by the Government placed a new
obstacle in the way of unlimited supply of passports. The Goltz
method was easy enough, but it soon became impossible to employ
it. The necessity for sending news through to Berlin by courier
was increasingly urgent and it devolved upon Captain von Papen to
systematize the supply of passports. The military attaché in November
selected Lieutenant Hans von Wedell, who had already made a trip as
courier to Berlin for his friend, Count von Bernstorff. Von Wedell
was married to a German baroness. He had been a newspaper reporter in
New York, and later a lawyer. He opened an office in Bridge Street,
New York, and began to send out emissaries to sailors on interned
German liners, and to their friends in Hoboken, directing them to
apply for passports. He sent others to the haunts of tramps on the
lower East Side, to the Mills Hotel, and other gathering places of
the down-and-outs, offering ten, fifteen or twenty dollars to men who
would apply for and deliver passports. And he bought them! He spent
much time at the Deutscher Verein, and at the Elks' Club in 43rd
Street where he often met his agents to give instructions and receive
passports. His bills were paid by Captain von Papen, as revealed by the
attaché's checks and check stubs; on November 24, 1914, a payment in
his favor of $500; on December 5, $500 more and then $300, the latter
being for "journey money." Von Wedell's bills at the Deutscher Verein
in November, 1914, came to $38.05, according to another counterfoil.
The Captain in the meantime employed Frau von Wedell as courier,
sending her with messages to Germany. On December 22, 1914, he paid the
baroness, according to his check-book, $800.
[Illustration: _Copyright, International Film Service_
Hans von Wedell and his wife. He was an important member of the
false-passport bureau and she a messenger from von Papen to Germany]
The passports secured by von Wedell, and by his successor, Carl
Ruroede, Sr., a clerk in Oelrichs & Co., whom he engaged, were supplied
by the dozens to officers whom the General Staff had ordered back to
Berlin. Not only American passports, but Mexican, Swiss, Swedish,
Norwegian and all South American varieties were seized eagerly by
reservists bound for the front. Germans and Austrians, who had been
captured in Russia, sent to Siberia as prisoners of war, escaped and
making their way by caravan through China, had embarked on vessels
bound for America. Arriving in New York they shipped for neutral
European countries. Among them was an Austrian officer, an expert
aeroplane observer whose feet were frozen and amputated in Siberia, but
who escaped to this country. He was ordered home because of his extreme
value in observation, and after his flight three-fourths of the way
round the world, the British took him off a ship at Falmouth to spend
the remainder of the war in a prison camp.
Captain von Papen used the bureau frequently for passports for spies
whom he wished to send to England, France, Italy or Russia. Anton
Kuepferle and von Breechow were two such agents. Both were captured in
England with false passports in their possession. Both confessed, and
the former killed himself in Brixton Jail.
Von Wedell and Ruroede grew reckless and boastful. Two hangers-on at
the Mills Hotel called upon one of the writers of this volume one
day and told him of von Wedell's practices, related how they had
blackmailed him out of $50, gave his private telephone numbers and
set forth his haunts. When this and other information reached the
Department of Justice, Albert G. Adams, a clever agent, insinuated
himself into Ruroede's confidence, and offered to secure passports for
him for $50 each. Posing as a pro-German, he pried into the inner ring
of the passport-buyers, and was informed by Ruroede just how the stock
of passports needed replenishing.
Though in the early days of the war it had not been necessary for the
applicant to give more than a general description of himself, the cry
of "German spies!" in the Allied countries became so insistent that
the Government added the requirement of a photograph of the bearer.
The Germans, however, found it a simple matter to give a general
description of a man's eyes, color of hair, and age to fit the person
who was actually to use the document; then forwarded the picture of
the applicant to be affixed. The applicant receiving the passport,
would sell it at once. Even though the official seal was stamped on the
photograph the Germans were not dismayed.
Adams rushed into Ruroede's office one day waving a sheaf of five
passports issued to him by the Government. Adams was ostensibly proud
of his work, Ruroede openly delighted.
"I knew I could get these passports easily," he boasted to Adams. "Why,
if Lieutenant von Wedell had kept on here he never could have done
this. He always was getting into a muddle."
"But how can you use these passports with these pictures on them?"
asked the agent.
"Oh, that's easy," answered Ruroede. "Come in the back room. I'll
show you." And Ruroede, before the observant eyes of the Department
of Justice, patted one of the passports with a damp cloth, then with
adhesive paste fastened a photograph of another man over the original
bearing the imprint of the United States seal.
"We wet the photograph," said Ruroede, "and then we affix the picture
of the man who is to use it. The new photograph also is dampened, but
when it is fastened to the passport there still remains a sort of
vacuum in spots between the new picture and the old because of ridges
made by the seal. So we turn the passport upside down, place it on a
soft ground--say a silk handkerchief--and then we take a paper-cutter
with a dull point, and just trace the letters on the seal. The result
is that the new photograph dries exactly as if it had been stamped by
Uncle Sam. You can't tell the difference."
Adams never knew until long afterward that when he met Ruroede by
appointment in Bowling Green, another German atop 11 Broadway was
scrutinizing him through field-glasses, and examining every one who
paused nearby, who might arouse suspicion of Adams' ingenuous part in
the transaction.
Through Adams' efforts Ruroede and four Germans, one of them an
officer in the German reserves, were arrested on January 2, on the
Scandinavian-American liner _Bergensfjord_ outward bound to Bergen,
Norway. They had passports issued through Adams at Ruroede's request
under the American names of Howard Paul Wright, Herbert S. Wilson,
Peter Hanson and Stanley F. Martin. Their real names were Arthur
Sachse, who worked in Pelham Heights, N.Y., and who was returning to
become a lieutenant in the German Army; Walter Miller, August R. Meyer
and Herman Wegener, who had come to New York from Chile, on their way
to the Fatherland.
On the day when Ruroede, his assistant, and the four men for whom
he obtained passports were arrested, Joseph A. Baker, assistant
superintendent of the Federal agents in New York, took possession
of the office at 11 Bridge Street. As he was sorting papers and
making a general investigation, a German walked in bearing a card
of introduction from von Papen, introducing himself as Wolfram von
Knorr, a German officer who up to the outbreak of the war had been
naval attaché in Tokio. The officer desired a passport. Baker, after a
conversation in which von Knorr revealed von Papen's connection with
the passport bureau, told him to return the next day. When the German
read the next morning's newspapers he changed his lodging-place and his
name.
Von Wedell himself was a passenger on the _Bergensfjord_, but when he
was lined up with the other passengers, the Federal agents, who did
not have a description of him, missed him and left the vessel. He was
later (January 11) taken off the ship by the British, however, and
transferred to another vessel for removal to a prison camp. She struck
a German mine and sank, and Von Wedell is supposed to have drowned.
A few days before he sailed, he wrote a letter to von Bernstorff
which fixes beyond question the responsibility for his false passport
activities. The letter, dated from Nyack, where he was hiding, on
December 26, 1914, follows:
"His Excellency The Imperial German Ambassador, Count von
Bernstorff, Washington, D. C. Your Excellency: Allow me most
obediently to put before you the following facts: It seems that an
attempt has been made to produce the impression upon you that I
prematurely abandoned my post, in New York. That is not true.
"I--My work was done. At my departure I left the service, well
organized and worked out to its minutest details, in the hands of
my successor, Mr. Carl Ruroede, picked out by myself, and, despite
many warnings, still tarried for several days in New York in order
to give him the necessary final directions and in order to hold in
check the blackmailers thrown on my hands by the German officers
until after the passage of my travelers through Gibraltar; in
which I succeeded. Mr. Ruroede will testify to you that without
my suitable preliminary labors, in which I left no conceivable
means untried and in which I took not the slightest consideration
of my personal weal or woe, it would be impossible for him, as
well as for Mr. von Papen, to forward officers and 'aspirants' in
any number whatever, to Europe. This merit I lay claim to and the
occurrences of the last days have unfortunately compelled me, out
of sheer self-respect, to emphasize this to your Excellency.
"II--The motives which induced me to leave New York and which, to
my astonishment, were not communicated to you, are the following:
"1. I knew that the State Department had, for three weeks,
withheld a passport application forged by me. Why?
"2. Ten days before my departure I learnt from a telegram sent
me by Mr. von Papen, which stirred me up very much, and further
through the omission of a cable, that Dr. Stark had fallen into
the hands of the English. That gentleman's forged papers were
liable to come back any day and could, owing chiefly to his lack
of caution, easily be traced back to me.
"3. Officers and aspirants of the class which I had to forward
over, namely the people, saddled me with a lot of criminals and
blackmailers, whose eventual revelations were liable to bring
about any day the explosion of the bomb.
"4. Mr. von Papen had repeatedly urgently ordered me to hide
myself.
"5. Mr. Igel had told me I was taking the matter altogether too
lightly and ought to--for God's sake--disappear.
"6. My counsel ... had advised me to hastily quit New York,
inasmuch as a local detective agency was ordered to go after the
passport forgeries.
"7. It had become clear to me that eventual arrest might yet
injure the worthy undertaking and that my disappearance would
probably put a stop to all investigation in this direction.
"How urgent it was for me to go away is shown by the fact that,
two days after my departure, detectives, who had followed up my
telephone calls, hunted up my wife's harmless and unsuspecting
cousin in Brooklyn, and subjected her to an interrogatory.
"Mr. von Papen and Mr. Albert have told my wife that I forced
myself forward to do this work. That is not true. When I, in
Berlin, for the first time heard of this commission, I objected to
going and represented to the gentleman that my entire livelihood
which I had created for myself in America by six years of labor
was at stake therein. I have no other means, and although Mr.
Albert told my wife my practice was not worth talking about, it
sufficed, nevertheless, to decently support myself and wife and
to build my future on. I have finally, at the suasion of Count
Wedell, undertaken it, ready to sacrifice my future and that of
my wife. I have, in order to reach my goal, despite infinite
difficulties, destroyed everything that I built up here for myself
and my wife. I have perhaps sometimes been awkward, but always
full of good will, and I now travel back to Germany with the
consciousness of having done my duty as well as I understood it,
and of having accomplished my task.
"With expressions of the most exquisite consideration, I am, your
Excellency,
"Very respectfully,
"(Signed) HANS ADAM VON WEDELL."
Ruroede was sentenced to three years in Atlanta prison. The four
reservists, pleading guilty, protested they had taken the passports out
of patriotism and were fined $200 each.
The arrest of Ruroede exposed the New York bureau, and made it
necessary for the Germans to shift their base of operations, but it
did not put an end to the fraudulent passport conspiracies. Captain
Boy-Ed assumed the burden, and hired men to secure passports for him.
One of these men was Richard Peter Stegler, a Prussian, 33 years old,
who had served in the German Navy and afterward came to this country
to start on his life work. Before the war he had applied for his first
citizenship papers but his name had not been removed from the German
naval reserve list.
"After the war started," Stegler said, "I received orders to return
home. I was told that everything was in readiness for me. I was
assigned to the naval station at Cuxhaven. My uniform, my cap, my boots
and my locker would be all set aside for me, and I was told just where
to go and what to do. But I could not get back at that time and I kept
on with my work."
He became instead a member of the German secret service in New York.
"There is not a ship that leaves the harbor, not a cargo that is
loaded or unloaded, but that some member of this secret organization
watches and reports every detail," he said. "All this information is
transmitted in code to the German Government." In January, 1915, if not
earlier, Stegler was sent by the German Consulate to Boy-Ed's office,
where he received instructions to get a passport and make arrangements
to go to England as a spy. Boy-Ed paid him $178, which the attaché
admitted. Stegler immediately got in touch with Gustave Cook and
Richard Madden, of Hoboken, and made use of Madden's birth certificate
and citizenship in obtaining a passport from the American Government.
Stegler paid $100 for the document. Stegler pleaded guilty to the
charge and served 60 days in jail; Madden and Cook were convicted of
conspiracy in connection with the project, and were sentenced to 10
months' imprisonment.
"I was told to make the voyage to England on the _Lusitania_,"
continued Stegler. "My instructions were as follows: 'Stop at
Liverpool, examine the Mersey River, obtain the names, exact locations
and all possible information concerning warships around Liverpool,
ascertain the amount of munitions of war being unloaded on the
Liverpool docks from the United States, ascertain their ultimate
destination, and obtain a detailed list of all the ships in the harbor.'
"I was to make constant, though guarded inquiries, of the location of
the dreadnought squadron which the Germans in New York understand was
anchored somewhere near St. George's Channel. I was to appear as an
American citizen soliciting trade. Captain Boy-Ed advised me to get
letters of introduction to business firms. He made arrangements so
that I received such letters and in one letter were enclosed some rare
stamps which were to be a proof to certain persons in England that I
was working for the Germans.
"After having studied at Liverpool I was to go to London and make an
investigation of the Thames and its shipping. From there I was to
proceed to Holland and work my way to the German border. While my
passport did not include Germany, I was to give the captain of the
nearest regiment a secret number which would indicate to him that I was
a reservist on spy duty. By that means I was to hurry to Eisendal, head
of the secret service in Berlin."
Stegler did not make the trip because his wife learned of the
enterprise and begged him not to go. He too had run afoul of the
vigilant Adams, and was placed under arrest in February, 1915,
shortly after he decided to stay at home. In his possession were all
the letters and telegrams exchanged between him and Boy-Ed, and one
telegram from "Winkler," Captain Boy-Ed's servant.
Stegler also said that he had been told by Dr. Karl A. Fuehr, one of
Dr. Albert's assistants, that Boy-Ed previously had sent to England
Karl Hans Lody, the German who in November, 1915, was put to death as
a spy in the Tower of London. Lody had been in the navy, had served on
the Kaiser's yacht and then had come to this country and worked as an
agent for the Hamburg-American Line, going from one city to another.
Shortly after the war started Lody had gone on the mission of espionage
which cost him his life.
Captain Boy-Ed authorized the commander of the German cruiser _Geier_,
interned in Honolulu, to get his men back to Germany as best he could,
by providing them with false passports. Still another of Boy-Ed's
protégés was a naval reservist, August Meier, who shipped as a hand
on the freighter _Evelyn_ with a cargo of horses for Bermuda. On the
voyage practically all of the horses were poisoned. Meier, however, was
arrested by the Federal authorities on the charge of using the name of
a dead man in order to get an American passport. In supplying passports
and in handling spies, Captain Boy-Ed was more subtle than his
colleague, von Papen. Nevertheless the Government officials succeeded
in getting a clear outline of his activities. The exposure of Boy-Ed's
connection with Stegler made it necessary for the German Government to
change its system once more.
The Wilhelmstrasse had a bureau of its own. Reservists from America
reported in Berlin for duty in Belgium and France, and their passports
ceased to be useful, to them. The intelligence department commandeered
the documents for agents whom they wished to send back to America. Tiny
flakes of paper were torn from the body of the passport and from the
seal, in order that counterfeiters might match them up. On January 14,
1915, an American named Reginald Rowland obtained a passport from the
State Department for safe-conduct on a business trip to Germany. While
it was being examined at the frontier every detail of the document was
closely noted by the Germans. Some months later Captain Schnitzer,
chief of the German secret service in Antwerp, had occasion to send
a spy to England. He chose von Breechow, a German whom von Papen had
forwarded from New York, and who had his first naturalization papers
from the United States. To Breechow he gave a facsimile of Rowland's
passport identical with the original in every superficial respect
except that the spy's photograph had been substituted for the original,
and the age of the bearer set down as 31--ten years older than Rowland.
Von Breechow passed the English officials at Rotterdam and at Tilbury.
He soon fell under suspicion, however, and his passport was taken
away. When the British learned that the real Rowland was at home in
New Jersey, and in possession of his own passport, they sent for it,
and compared the two. Breechow's revealed a false watermark, stamped
on in clear grease, which made the paper translucent, but which was
soluble in benzine. The stamp, ordinarily used to countersign both
the photograph and the paper in a certain way, had been applied in a
different position. With those exceptions, and the suspicious Teutonic
twist to a "d" in the word "dark," the counterfeit was regular.
The Rosenthal case was the first to bring to light the false passport
activities in Berlin. Rosenthal, posing as an agent for gas mantles,
traveled in England successfully as a spy under an emergency passport
issued by the American Embassy in Berlin. Captain Prieger, the chief of
a section in the intelligence department of the General Staff, asked
Rosenthal to make a second trip. The spy demurred, doubting whether his
passport might be accepted a second time. The Captain turned to a safe,
extracted a handful of false American passports, and said: "I can fit
you out with a passport in any name you wish." Rosenthal decided to
employ his own. He was arrested and imprisoned in England.
As the State Department increased its vigilance the evil began to
expire. It was further stifled by concerted multiplication by the
Allies of the examinations which the stranger had to undergo. But
during its course it made personal communication between Berlin and
lower Broadway almost casual.