MORE BOMB PLOTS
Kaltschmidt and the Windsor explosions--The Port Huron
tunnel--Werner Horn--Explosions embarrass the Embassy--Black
Tom--The second Welland affair--Harry Newton--The damage done in
three years--Waiter spies.
In the check-book of the military attaché was a counterfoil betraying
a payment of $1,000 made on March 27, 1915, to "W. von Igel (for A.
Kaltschmidt, Detroit)." That stub was part of a bomb plot.
A young German named Charles Francis Respa was employed in 1908 by
Albert Carl Kaltschmidt in a Detroit machine shop. Seven years later
Kaltschmidt had occasion to hire Respa again. To a group which included
Respa, his brother-in-law Carl Schmidt, Gus Stevens and Kaltschmidt's
own brother-in-law, Fritz Neef, he outlined a plan for destroying
factories in Canada. Neef was the Detroit agent for the Eisemann
magneto, and had a machine shop of his own.
"We are not citizens of this country," Kaltschmidt reiterated to his
accomplices. "It is our duty to stand by the Fatherland. The Americans
would throw us out of work after war started." (The Americans, on the
contrary, gave the ringleaders of the conspiracy plenty of hard labor
after the war started.) To seal the bargain Kaltschmidt paid the men
a retainer, and sent Stevens and Respa to Winnipeg to see whether it
might not be feasible to blow up the railroad bridge there.
Respa reported back. His next assignment was to go to Port Huron and
determine whether enough dynamite might be attached to the rear of a
passenger train bound through the international tunnel under the St.
Clair River to destroy the tube. Respa came to the conclusion that
it was not practicable, for the authorities were taking precautions
against just such an operation. Respa and Stevens were then despatched
to Duluth, where they met Schmidt and a fourth member of the group,
each carrying a suitcase containing numerous sticks of dynamite, and
the quartette returned with its explosives to Detroit.
Kaltschmidt then hired him for $18 a week. Respa had left Germany
before his term of military service came due; Kaltschmidt used this
information as a club over his head, for he knew the young man could
not return to the Fatherland. On June 21 Kaltschmidt called Respa
to his office in the Kresge Building, and showed him two elaborate
time-clock devices which could be so set as to fire bombs at any
specified hour, and Respa, at Kaltschmidt's command, carried the clocks
across the Detroit River to Windsor, Ontario, late that afternoon. His
sister, Mrs. Schmidt, went with him, and together they wandered about
until the hour when they knew that William Lefler, the night watchman
of the Peabody Overall Company factory in Walkerville, would go on duty.
Under cover of darkness, the brother and sister met Lefler, who gave
Respa two suitcases full of dynamite which Kaltschmidt had smuggled
piecemeal into Canada under the front seat of his automobile. Respa
attached the clocks to the charges, set one of the infernal machines
near the factory, and planted the other in the rear of the Windsor
armory, in which Canadian troops were asleep, and near which was a
Catholic girls' school. Then he and Mrs. Schmidt scurried back to
the ferry and took the last boat to Detroit. At three o'clock in the
morning they heard a muffled roar from the Canadian side; the factory
bomb had gone off. The other charge failed to explode: Respa said he
deliberately set the percussion cap at the wrong angle, because he
knew that soldiers were sleeping in the armory, and he had no stomach
for murder.
One of the gang was presently arrested, and Respa was spirited away
to the retirement of a mechanic's job in a West Hoboken garage. But
he grew restless, and spent his money, and Kaltschmidt refused him
more. He pawned his watch and his ring, bought a ticket to Detroit,
and presented himself before Kaltschmidt with a demand for money,
in default of which Respa proposed to "squeal." He was immediately
returned to the payroll.
The Canadian provincial detectives had begun to search for the night
watchman, Lefler. They found him, and from him they extracted a full
confession. Respa's arrest was easy, and the United States willingly
returned him, although Kaltschmidt did attempt to establish a false
alibi for his underling. Respa was sentenced to life imprisonment,
Lefler to ten years, for the destruction of the factory.
The dragnet closed in on Kaltschmidt. William M. Jarosch, a
German-born, who later enlisted in the United States Army, had been
introduced to Kaltschmidt in Chicago in 1915 by a former German
consul there, Gustav Jacobsen. Jacobsen recruited two other men,
and Kaltschmidt took the three to Detroit. Jarosch was directed to
secure employment at the plant of the Detroit Screw Works, but he
was rejected, so Kaltschmidt told him to watch the plant for a good
opportunity to set a bomb there. In the course of his sojourn in
Detroit he went to the Respa home in the placid little village of Romeo
and returned with a generous quantity of dynamite. This he delivered to
Neef, and in a conference at the magneto shop Kaltschmidt explained the
operation of the time-clock, and ordered Jarosch to set the device at
the Detroit Screw factory that night. He and his Chicago confederates
set out for the scene, but there were guards about, and Jarosch had no
desire for arrest, so he took the bomb to his hotel room, disengaged
the trigger, and calmly went to sleep. Next morning Kaltschmidt
reproached him, and Jarosch resigned, to return months later to show
Federal officers where he had buried some 80 pounds of dynamite,
nitroglycerine, and a bomb.
Kaltschmidt also conspired to destroy the Port Huron tunnel. For this
enterprise he contrived a car which he proposed to load with dynamite
set to explode with a time fuse. Fritz Neef, the Stuttgart graduate and
expert mechanical engineer, was his able assistant and adviser in this
project. The car was of standard railway gauge. It was to be set on
the Grand Trunk tracks at the mouth of the Port Huron end of the tunnel
and released, to roll down into the darkness under the river. At the
low point in the tunnel's curve the charge would explode, bursting the
walls of the tube, and completely interrupting the heavy international
freight traffic at that point.
The "devil car" never was released. Kaltschmidt was arrested, and
finally, in December, 1917, tried and convicted on three counts. He was
given the maximum sentence, of four years' imprisonment and $20,000
fine. His sister, Mrs. Neef, who had been an active intermediary, was
sentenced to three years' imprisonment and was fined $15,000; Carl
Schmidt and his wife were each condemned to two years in prison, and
assessed a fine of $10,000 each, and only old Franz Respa, the father
of the dynamiter, was acquitted.
The activities of this group received tangible approval from the
German Embassy. Even before von Papen drew the check on March 27 for
Kaltschmidt, the attaché's secretary, von Igel, had transferred $2,000
to the Detroit German from the banking firm of Knauth, Nachod and Kuhne
(January 23). On October 5, long after the Walkerville explosion,
but while the Port Huron venture was still a possibility, the Chase
National Bank of New York transferred to Knauth, Nachod and Kuhne
$25,000 from the joint account maintained there by Count von Bernstorff
and Dr. Albert, and next day the money was placed to Kaltschmidt's
credit.
The Port Huron tunnel was the object of German attentions from the
active San Francisco consulate. Crowley, who had been von Brincken's
messenger in the Van Koolbergen affair, and one Louis J. Smith, were
hired by Herr Bopp to go east on a destroying mission. They ran out of
money in New York, and called at the New York consulate for assistance.
They were told that the New York consulate had nothing to do with
Pacific coast activities, so they wired von Schack for funds. He
replied, chiding them for not having called on von Papen.
Late in June Smith left New York and joined Crowley at the Normandy
Hotel in Detroit. "Then we went to Port Huron," he said, "where we
planned to dynamite a railroad tunnel and a horse train. We didn't do
it, though.
"Then we went to Toronto, and Crowley told me to plant a bomb under a
horse train in the West Toronto yards. But I saw a policeman, and I got
out quick. Then we took some nitroglycerine, cotton, sawdust, and a tin
pan and some other things to Grosse Isle, Ontario, and went out back
of a cemetery and made some bombs.
"Well, we got back to San Francisco late in July, and Crowley and
I cooked up an expense account of $1,254.80, and took it up to the
consulate. Von Schack locked the door behind us, and then he said: 'I
don't want any statement. Tell me how much you want?' We told him, and
he said he would get it the following day. Then all of a sudden he
asked: 'How do I know you fellows did any jobs in Canada?'
"'Wire the mayor of Toronto and ask him!' Crowley answered."
On one occasion at least the Germans respected American property, for
the protection America might afford. Werner Horn, a former lieutenant
in the Landwehr, was in Guatemala when the war broke out. He made an
attempt to return to his command, but got no farther than New York,
where he placed himself at the disposal of Captain von Papen. On
January 18 the military attaché paid him $700. On February 2 Horn
exploded a charge of dynamite on the Canadian end of the international
bridge at Vanceboro, Maine, spanning the St. Croix River to New
Brunswick. The explosion caused a slight damage to the Canadian half
of the bridge. A few hours later Horn was arrested in Vanceboro, and
admitted the crime.
When the Canadian authorities applied for his extradition, the warrant
which Judge Hale issued was not executed, the United States Marshal
for Maine having received word from Washington that a well-preserved
treaty between Great Britain and the United States would cover just
such a case, and Horn was indicted on a charge of having transported
explosives from New York City to Vanceboro. His attorneys naïvely
attempted to secure his liberty by casting a protective mantle of
international law about his shoulders: Werner Horn, they said, was a
First Lieutenant of the West-Prussian Pioneer Battalion Number 17, and
as such was sworn by His Royal Majesty of Prussia to
" ... discharge the obligations of his office in a becoming
manner, ... execute diligently and loyally whatever is made his
duty to do and carry out, and whatever is commanded him, by day
and by night, on land and on sea, and ... conduct himself bravely
and irreproachably in all wars and military events that may
occur...."
Yet he was tried, and that without much delay, and convicted, and
sentenced to imprisonment.
Although the destruction of railways was an attractive means of
stopping the progress of munitions to the seaboard, and although
it was a recognized practice during 1915, it made the Embassy at
Washington uneasy. Bernstorff protested to the Foreign Office in Berlin
that if a German agent should be caught in the act of dynamiting a
railroad it would be exceedingly embarrassing for him, and increase
the difficulties of his already ticklish rôle of apologist and
explainer-extraordinary. The Foreign Office accordingly sent a telegram
to von Papen:
"January 26--For Military Attaché.... Railway embankments and
bridges must not be touched. Embassy must in no circumstances be
compromised."
(Signed) "REPRESENTATIVE OF GENERAL STAFF."
And thereafter American railway bridges and embankments were safe,
though their owners may not have been aware of the fact at the time.
It is no mere metaphor to say that during 1915 and 1916 the smoke of
German explosions in factories in the United States was spreading
across the sun, casting the deepening shadow of war over America.
There was dynamite found in the coal tender of a munitions train
on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad at Callery Junction, Pa., on
December 10, 1915, the day on which enormous quantities of wheat were
destroyed by fire in grain elevators at Erie. A few hours earlier
a two-million-dollar explosion had occurred at the Hopewell plant
of the du Pont works. Shortly before Christmas a ton and a half of
nitroglycerine exploded at Fayville, Illinois.
During 1916 there were a dozen major explosions in the du Pont
properties alone and literally dozens of lives were lost. Two arms
plants at Bridgeport, Conn., were blown up. An explosion in May wiped
out a large chemical plant in Cadillac, Michigan. A munitions works
of the Bethlehem Steel Company at Newcastle, Pa., was destroyed. The
climax in violence came, however, in the sultry night of August 1-2.
Shortly after midnight the rocky island of Manhattan trembled, and
the roar of a prodigious blast burst over the harbor of New York. Two
million pounds of munitions were being transported in freight trains
and on barges near the island of Black Tom, a few hundred yards from
the Bartholdi Statue of Liberty. Some one, somehow, supplied the
spark. The loss of life was inconsiderable, for that neighborhood was
not inhabited, but the confusion was complete. Heavy windows in the
canyons of lower Manhattan were shivered, and for a few moments many of
the streets rained broken glass. Shell-laden barges near the original
explosion set up a scattering fire which continued for some time, most
of the projectiles losing their power through lack of a substantial
breech-block. But the immigration station on Ellis Island was in
panic, and its position became more unpleasant as one of the blazing
barges drifted down upon it. The shock was felt far out in Jersey, and
northward in Connecticut. An estimate of damage was placed at thirty
millions of dollars, probably as accurate as such an estimate need be;
the event was utterly spectacular, and from the point of view of the
unknown destroying agent, effective.
Exactly one year after von Papen gave up the first attempt upon the
Welland Canal, a second enterprise began with the same objective.
Captain von Papen felt that von der Goltz had bungled. This time
he intrusted the mission to the doughty and usually reliable Paul
Koenig. On September 27, 1915, Koenig, with Richard Emil Leyendecker,
a "hyphenated American" who dealt during the daytime in art woods
at 347 Fifth Avenue, New York, and Fred Metzler, of Jersey City,
Koenig's secretary, went to Buffalo and Niagara Falls, accompanied by
Mrs. Koenig. They had no trouble in crossing the border and making a
thorough investigation of the canal, its vulnerable points, its guards
and the patrol routes of those guards. Koenig selected men whom he
detailed to watch the guards, and he fixed on satisfactory storage
places for his explosives. The party then returned to Niagara Falls and
later to New York.
They did not know that they were being trailed. All three men had been
under surveillance for nearly a year, and after their migrations near
the canal, the guard was reenforced. It became impossible to carry
out the plan. A few weeks later the detectives who were shadowing
Koenig noticed that George Fuchs, a relative whom he employed at a
meagre salary, was seldom seen in his company. They sought Fuchs out
and plied him with refreshment. A few glasses of beer drew out his
story: Koenig owed him $15, and he therefore bore no affection for
Koenig. The detectives turned him over to Superintendent Offley of the
Department of Justice, who sympathized with Fuchs to such an extent
that the latter retailed enough evidence of the Welland plot to secure
Koenig's indictment on five counts. Thus did a debt of thirty pieces
of silver--in this case half-dollars--rob the Hamburg-American Line of
a six-foot, 200-pound detective, and the German spy system in America
of one of its roughest characters, for, thanks to Fuchs' revelations,
Koenig was indicted for a violation of Section 13 of the Penal Code.
Herald Square, New York, was the center of open-air oratory every
evening until after America entered the war. Those who had stood and
fought their verbal battles during the day about the bulletin board
of the _New York Herald_ remained at night to bellow to the idle
passersby along Broadway, and one night Felix Galley, a leather-lunged
contractor, gave an impassioned discourse justifying Germany's entrance
into the war. When the meeting broke up he was followed home by one who
rather passed his expectations as a convert.
The stranger was Harry Newton. He had been employed in a munitions
plant in St. Catharine's, Ontario. He suggested to Galley that he
would take any orders for arson which the Germans had in mind, and
recommended that as proof of his ability he would oblige with a
dynamiting of the Brooks Locomotive Works at Dunkirk, N. Y., for a
retainer of $5,000. Or, he said, he could arrange to destroy the
Federal building or Police Headquarters. This was more than the German
had bargained for, and assuring Newton that he would first have to
consult the "chief," he ran straightway to the police and in great
agitation told what had happened. Captain Tunney, of the Bomb Squad,
assigned Detective Sergeant George Barnitz to the case.
The detective, posing as a German agent, found Newton at Mills Hotel
No. 3, and opened negotiations with him. After several talks, they met
on the afternoon of April 19, 1916, at Grand Street and the Bowery.
Barnitz said: "Now, I'm in a hurry--haven't much time to discuss all
this. You say you're in the business strictly for the money. The chief
is willing to pay you $5,000 if you will smash the Welland Canal
or blow up the Brooks Locomotive Works or burn the McKinnon, Dash
Company's plant at St. Catharine's. But how do we know you won't demand
more from us after you are paid? Maybe you'll want more cash for your
assistants."
Newton was quick to reply that he worked alone and wouldn't trust any
assistant. He was anxious to start with the Brooks "job" at Dunkirk and
told Barnitz he had left in the baggage-room of the New York Central
Railroad at Buffalo a suitcase containing powerful bombs. (The suitcase
actually contained a loaded 4-inch shell, with percussion cap and
fuse.) It would be necessary only for him to go to Buffalo, get the
suitcase, hasten to Dunkirk and blow up the locomotive works.
"Fine," said Barnitz. "You are under arrest."
Newton stared a moment, then laughed. "You New York cops are a damned
sight smarter than I ever thought you were," he said, "and you made me
think you were a German!"
At Police Headquarters he described his plan for blowing up the Welland
Canal. Having worked in a town located on the canal, he was familiar
with the position of the locks. "It would be a simple matter," he said.
"You see these buttons I am wearing on my watch chain and in my coat
lapel. The plain gilt one reads 'On His Majesty's Service.' The blue
and white one reads 'McKinnon, Dash Company, Munitions. On Service.'
Those buttons are passes that would let me into any munitions plant in
Canada or this country. They would pass me through the guards of the
canal. It would be easy for me to pretend to be a workman, get a boat
and, carrying a dinner pail, filled with explosives, to pick out a weak
spot in the canal works and destroy the whole business.
"It would be a cinch to burn the McKinnon, Dash plant. I could go back
to work there as foreman. Any Saturday night I could be the last to
leave. Before going I could saturate flooring with benzine and put a
lighted candle where within a half hour or so the flame would reach the
benzine."
Newton also suggested his willingness to dynamite the banking house of
J. P. Morgan & Co., at 23 Wall Street, or to dynamite the banker's
automobile. He had a series of postcards in his own handwriting, which,
in case he was hired for a dynamiting, were to be mailed from distant
points every day while he was on the assignment, in order to establish
an alibi.
He was an irresponsible person, and one who could not be said to be
under orders from the attachés in lower Broadway. Yet he is typical
of the restless and lawless floating population of which the Germans
made excellent tools. When he heard Galley he promptly offered his
services; his boldness would have made him a capital destroying agent,
and it was fired by the speech in Herald Square, a speech inspired
from Berlin. Here was his opportunity to make money. Thus, by a
word of encouragement, by the whisper of "big money" to discharged,
dissatisfied or disloyal employees of munitions plants, the seed of
German violence was sown everywhere. Men who were well dressed and
of good appearance would be remarked if they prowled about factory
districts; men must be employed who would fade into the drab landscape
by the very commonplaceness of their clothing and action. They could be
hired cheaply and swiftly disowned, these Newtons!
The _New York Times_ on November 3, 1917, recapitulated the damage
wrought by German incendiarism as follows:
"A graphic idea of what the fire losses in the United States owe to
the work of war incendiaries may be gained from consideration of the
fact that the total fire insurance paid in the United States in 1915,
according to the figures of the National Board of Fire Underwriters,
was $153,000,000. It is estimated that 60 per cent. of the loss by
fires in this country is represented in insurance. Therefore, the total
fire loss in the United States in 1915 was something over $200,000,000.
Of the $153,000,000 paid out by the insurance companies, $6,200,000 was
represented by incendiary fires. A total of $62,000,000 was charged to
fires from unknown causes.
"In 1916 the total jumped by 20 per cent., meaning an increase of about
$40,000,000. The biggest items in this loss were those sustained in
munition fires and explosions. Black Tom holds the record with a loss
of $11,000,000; there was the Kingsland explosion, the Penn's Grove
explosion, and others, all generally admitted to be the work of spies,
which caused losses running into millions.
"It was estimated yesterday by an insurance official that the
incendiary loss in 1916 was easily $25,000,000, or $15,000,000 above
normal. And these figures take into consideration only fires where the
origin was proved to be incendiary. On the books of the underwriters
the Black Tom munitions fire is not listed as incendiary, because it
was never legally proved that a German spy set it going.
"This increase in losses for 1916 when the big munition explosions
occurred, derives significance in the discussion of losses by spy fires
since this country entered the war, because the figures of fire losses
in the United States for 1917 may reach $300,000,000, or a larger
increase over 1916 than 1916 losses showed over 1915. An estimate
made yesterday by the head of a fire insurance company shows that if
the average of the losses in the first seven months of the year is
maintained until Jan. 1 the total would reach well above $250,000,000,
and with the increases of the past few months might easily total
$300,000,000 as the cost of the American ash heaps for 1917."
How did the Germans know where munitions were being manufactured?
Rumor fled swiftly through the labor districts, and the news was
reported through the regular channels of espionage, cleared through the
consulates and German business offices, and forwarded to the attachés
and the Embassy. But the collection of information did not stop there;
it was verified from another source--a serviceable factor in the
general system of espionage.
The American manufacturer shared his nation's predilection for talking
at meal-time. As the war contracts were distributed about the country,
every machine shop worthy of the name became a "munitions plant" and
the romance of having a part in the war strained the discretion of most
of America's war bridegrooms; they simply "had to tell some one"; not
infrequently this some one was a reliable intimate, sitting across a
restaurant table at lunch.
There was in America an organization bearing a title which suggested a
neutral origin, but whose officers' names, down even unto the official
physician, were undeniably German. It was ostensibly for the mutual
benefit of the foreign-born waiters, chefs and pantrymen who composed
its membership. But its real significance was indicated by the location
of its branches (its headquarters were in New York). Trenton, New
Jersey, for example, was not a "good hotel town," and foreign waiters
usually are to be found in a town which boasts a hotel managed by
metropolitan interests, and supplied with a foreign staff; but Trenton
was a munitions center, and there was a branch of this association
there. Schenectady, the home of the General Electric Company, had
no first-class hotel; there was a branch of the association in
Schenectady. Conversely, numerous cities whose hotels were manned by
foreign waiters and cooks had no branches. The organization was founded
in Dresden in 1877.
Many a confidence passed across a table was intercepted by the acute
ears of a German spy. Members of the Anglo-French Loan Commission who
were staying at the Biltmore in 1914 were served by a German agent
in a waiter's uniform. It would have gone well for America and the
preparations of supplies for her later Allies if there had been posted
in every hotel dining-room the French admonition,
"Taisez-vous! Ils s'ecoutent!"