Those who have any doubt about this should read the remarkable
revelations of M. Georges Prade anent the Viktoria zu Berlin Insurance
Company, the premiums of which represented over eighty million pounds.
In the Paris offices of this company, in the Avenue de l'Opéra, M.
Prade discovered a peculiar organization called the Special Büro. The
_employés_ of this office were all Germans, between twenty-five and
thirty years of age, and officers in the German reserve. They spent
from five to six months in France, received forty pounds a month
each, with an allowance for travelling expenses, and spent their
time motoring all over France. Eastern France and the Alps was their
favourite region. Naturally they all disappeared a few days before the
German mobilization in July, 1914. Whilst these men were spying out
the land, their colleagues in Paris were performing equally useful
work for the German Government, "establishing an exact estimate of
the public fortune, a useful element in assessing war taxation and
indemnities," and otherwise obtaining valuable information. The
Viktoria, for example, offered special terms to French officers. It
insured them, without extra charge, against war risks, and, through
the medium of visiting agents, advanced money at very reasonable terms
on their policies. The Berlin offices of the Viktoria thus secured
the names of all the French officers who owed it money, an excellent
arrangement indeed on which to base an organization for spying.
One of the most astounding institutions in Paris before the war was
a free German school, open to children of all nationalities, where
instruction was given entirely in German, and French was treated as a
foreign tongue. Naturally history and geography were taught from the
German standpoint, and a love of Germany and the Kaiser was dinned
into the pupils. Stranger still, none of the professors held a French
certificate, a _sine qua non_ for a French teacher, or were even
naturalized. Yet in 1908 one of them was even decorated with the Legion
of Honour.
Side by side with this instance of "peaceful penetration" may be placed
that of a commercial agency, the Agence Schimmelpfeng, which existed
in Paris for years, and, under the guise of a society for giving
confidential information to commercial houses and their customers,
covered a most elaborate and minute spy system, with central offices in
Berlin. To give but one example of the work of this agency, it knew the
name of every baker in the East of France, how many men he employed,
and the exact number of sacks of flour he used per week. Thus the
German military authorities knew almost to a loaf how much bread could
be counted on for an invading army.
German spies were always particularly active in Eastern France. Another
precaution they took was to secure all the contracts for coal for the
frontier forts, in order to be able to withhold supplies at a critical
moment and thus render them useless. On a par with this was the
establishment of a German chemical works adjoining an airship factory,
which they were ready to supply with hydrogen just as long as it suited
them. The arrangement had this additional advantage: when any little
hitch occurred with a machine, German workmen were always ready with
their help. A French dirigible had thus no secrets for them.
Supplies and the methods by which as complete a control of them as
possible could be obtained must have been made the study of a special
section of the Secret Service department in Berlin. It is not curious
that in 1912 a German firm should have succeeded in obtaining the
contract for the exclusive furnishing of lubricating oil for the French
army motor-cars? But this is nothing in comparison with the plans laid
for getting possession of the iron-fields of Normandy and a certain
part of the French Channel coast.