Those who label Stieber as "von" in speaking of him are about on a level
with any who would choose to confer on Crippen, of unlamented memory,
the title of baronet, for the two pretensions are about equal, so far as
right to them is concerned. Karl Stieber was born at Mersebourg, a town
of Saxony in Prussia, in the year 1818. His parents were people of the
middle class, good and inconspicuous Prussians who destined their son
for the profession of the law, in which he qualified as a barrister, but
in which he achieved no distinction. It was not until 1847, when he was
nearly thirty years of age, that Stieber first came to notice. In that
year he obtained employment in the factory of Schoeffel Brothers in
Silesia, where the Socialistic movement that has gained so great a hold
on modern Germany was even then beginning.
Stieber, seeming to throw in his lot with the workmen, was in reality
waiting to see which way the cat would jump before he compromised
himself beyond withdrawal from either side. In the meantime, he won the
heart of a daughter of one of the directors of the firm, and displayed
his abilities in the matter of espionage by compromising the other
director--his future wife's uncle--in the Socialistic movement to such
an extent that the unfortunate man was accused of plotting against the
Government and inciting the workmen to revolt. By his denunciation of
Schoeffel, who was sentenced to a year's imprisonment for acts which
Stieber himself had committed, Stieber procured employ in the police
service, entering the ranks of the revolutionary workmen ostensibly as
one of the warmest adherents of the popular movement, but in reality its
worst and most insidious enemy.
In this guise he succeeded, in the course of popular and excited
demonstrations in Berlin, in attracting the attention of Frederick
William, the then King of Prussia. The year 1848 was a time of
revolutionary movements, and Stieber chose the right side. When, in
1850, the Prussian Government began the measures of repression which
have been continued in the case of the Socialist element down to the
present day, Frederick William appointed Stieber to the post of
_Polizierath_, a position in which he was superior to and beyond control
of the Commissioner of Police.
This was the inauguration of the system which Stieber perfected.
Hitherto, military espionage had been in the hands of the military
themselves, and, with their customary reverence for precedent, the
military were inclined to resent this appointment of an outsider to the
control of what had been especially their department. Further, the
regular police viewed Stieber with disfavour--it was not to their liking
that an informer such as he should be set over them, and able to work
independently of their control. It speaks much for Stieber's genius for
organisation that he combated both these influences successfully, and
established himself--with the aid of royal patronage and protection, of
course--at the head of a special organisation which was quite
independent of either military or police control.
Up to 1853 the system grew--in his Memoirs Stieber tells, with a conceit
quite in keeping with his other qualities, how he worked on the
confidence of his sovereign with minute reports concerning the doings of
court personages. He seems, in fact, to have taken pleasure in the
recital of his meannesses, which his perverted moral sense caused him to
see as exploits worthy of pride. It was as if, having nothing of moment
on which to exercise his cunning, he kept himself in practice on
anything or anybody that might be at hand. Thus until, in 1854, he was
charged with the work of extending into neighbouring countries the
system he had already perfected in Prussia. The cost of the business
was charged against "service of the interior," and, in addition to the
sum expended on internal espionage, a sum of 12,250 pounds was set aside
for the campaign which prepared the way for the wars in which Prussia
rose to the standing of a first-class European Power.
Through the severity of his measures in Prussia itself, Stieber caused
such a popular outcry that he was relieved of his post as chief of
police, but Bismarck, then coming to power, employed his hound in
equally useful work outside the bounds of the kingdom by sending him
through Bohemia, where, by establishing spies all along the route that
the army would have to traverse later, Stieber laid the foundations for
the campaign that was to end so disastrously for Austria at Sadowa. By
1866, when the Prussian campaign against Austria opened, Stieber had
Bohemia so thoroughly planted with spies that every step of the Austrian
forces was known to their opponents before it was taken, every village
had its informer ready for the Prussian troops when they entered, and,
though the system of mapping out posts of defence and military positions
had not then reached to the perfection it has since attained, it may be
said that the campaign against Austria was half won by Stieber before it
was entered on by the Prussian army. These things have so far passed
into history that they have become general knowledge; but how Stieber
enlisted and placed his spies--the actual routine and full secret of the
work--he is careful not to tell. It may be assumed that, among other
qualities, he possessed the power of reading his fellows; he was a
genius in psychology, and knew his spy when he saw one. Hence his
success, for which he was made chief of the "active service police," a
force never recognised in this way up to his time, and a post created
practically by his own ability in his special line of work.
From his years of exile he had learned the lesson of dealing as lightly
as possible with the people of his own country, and henceforth he
associated himself with the development of systems of espionage in other
countries, notably in France, where he made all preparations for the war
of 1870, and made them so thoroughly that it is common knowledge now how
the German invaders knew the country in which they were fighting better
than did Napoleon's own troops. He worked quite independently of the
diplomatic corps, established his own agencies in France, and set up his
"fixed posts," in a manner which has survived to some extent up to the
present day both as regards France and other countries. At this time
the work which he was in process of organising was a thing so new that
it received little attention from the French authorities of that day,
and the system may be said to have reached its zenith of perfection with
the war of 1870, when in every French town and village of the north-east
was a "fixed post," or, in plain English, a spy in the pay of the German
secret service. So complete was the information furnished that the
personal histories of individuals, their failings and eccentricities,
were catalogued, and scandal was tabulated in the archives of Berlin for
use in case it should be required, while fortifications and districts
were mapped out with a thoroughness such as the military surveyors of
France could not excel. When the war came the Prussian troops marched
through the country and knew its resources and difficulties even better
than the inhabitants themselves. How this was accomplished will be
shown later in detail.
Meanwhile Stieber, as privy councillor and confidant of Bismarck,
gradually overcame the antipathy of the military caste--an antipathy
which his useful work in Bohemia had gone far to allay. According to
the account given in his own Memoirs, he discovered that an attempt was
to be made on the life of the Czar Alexander when the latter attended a
grand review in company with Napoleon at Longchamps. It was Bismarck
who conceived the idea of not only letting the attempt take place, but
of frustrating it and having the would-be assassin arrested, since, as
Bismarck planned, French justice would not impose the capital sentence
for the merely attempted crime. The result justified the forecast, for
the assassin was not executed--and Alexander remembered, when 1870 came,
that France had let off lightly (from a Russian point of view) the man
who would have murdered him. In consequence, Prussia had nothing to
fear and Napoleon had nothing to hope from Russia when the war began.
Stieber could have stopped the attempt at assassination, had he chosen;
but, by allowing things to fall in the fashion that they did, Bismarck
made certain that there would be no Franco-Russian alliance. It was
characteristic of Prussian diplomacy and Prussian methods, and it was a
trick after Stieber's own heart, as his Memoirs show.
With this brief and necessarily incomplete sketch of his career up to
1870 the personal history of Stieber as a man may be said to end, as far
as the present German spy system is concerned, for from that point
onward the system became of more account than the man. So far, his work
was all personal in character; he conducted his own campaign in Bohemia,
and he organised the French espionage by personal work, but after 1870
he became so great a power that the system went on and expanded with him
as its head--it was no longer a matter of a man and his work, but a
department and its control. Its efficiency is largely due to him, even
now, and there is no doubt that he brought into working the most perfect
methods of espionage ever known.
His Memoirs must not be taken too literally; it is necessary to read
between the lines, for Stieber was a man of inordinate vanity--though
this never interfered with the efficiency of his work--and, if he is to
be believed, there was nobody in all Prussia of so much importance as
himself. He had no moral sense--it was a quality missed out from his
composition altogether, and the Memoirs show him as a criminal by
instinct, able to gratify criminal impulses by protected acts. For in
no other way can be explained his obvious pleasure in the commission of
what, under any other circumstances, would rank as crimes, fraudulent
and despicable to the last degree. The "syndicalism" of the present day
is a realisation of a dream that Stieber dreamed--not for the purpose of
benefiting the working classes, though, but with a view to rendering an
enemy powerless against Germany in case of war; the division of the
German secret service into two branches, known respectively as the
department of political action and the department of espionage proper,
was intended by Stieber to set up a section, under the former title,
which should take advantage of the working classes in France--and in
England as well--by causing them to act innocently against the best
interests of their country in the belief that they were following out
their own ideals and winning freedom for democracy. Espionage proper is
concerned with more purely military enterprise, and was the earlier
creation of this arch-spy.
Stieber died in 1892, full of honours, and much regretted by those whom
he had served. He had done more than any other man to sow dissension
between France and Russia; he had contributed largely to the humiliation
of France, and had made possible the subjugation of Austria in a seven
weeks' war; he had served his country well, having given it the most
effective system of espionage that the world has ever known. If the
principle that "the end justifies any means" be accepted, he had done
well for Prussia before 1870 and for Germany after--but his place is
among the criminals and perverts of the world, not among its great men.