DR. SCHEELE, CHEMICAL SPY
One day the Department of Justice in Washington received a brief
code message, dated from Havana, saying that “Dr. Scheele” was
coming home. The War Department also had received a code message;
these started a little hum of activity. The messages gave a key
to the possession of certain papers. Hurriedly a special agent of
the Department of Justice was provided with a letter written in
the cipher designated. The agent spoke German, looked German, and
hastened to the home of an unsuspecting custodian of some of the
Fatherland’s most damaging records, and there arranged with the
guardian for a safer place for such papers. But the duly-accredited
messenger wasn’t German at all, and the papers handed over widened
out the trail of one big German plot.
Who was this Dr. Scheele? He was a quiet German chemist who
sometimes aided the police in detecting traces of crime. Didn’t
his neighbours know him? Of course; he was that genial and
entertaining German-American who owned a drug store in Brooklyn,
one of the desirable kind of citizens, the law-abiding kind of
foreigner whom we welcomed in our midst. Did the business world
know him? Yes; he was president of the New Jersey Agricultural
Chemical Company, a concern which kept its contracts and paid its
debts. America was satisfied with this president, the adopted son,
who had married an American wife and resided peacefully among us
for twenty-four years. Why not?
When the French liner _La Lorraine_ caught fire at sea with
hospital nurses and supplies of mercy on board, what could this
have to do with an inconspicuous druggist in Brooklyn?--or when
numerous ships sailed loaded with sugar or supplies for the needy
neutrals abroad, and never after were heard of?
Finally a British cruiser with an inquisitive captain overhauled
the steamship _Rize_ which was carrying a cargo of fertilizer badly
needed for the fields in Denmark. There was nothing particularly
suspicious about a cargo packed in sacks, just ordinary brown
powdered fertilizer of the most common variety and shipped by the
New Jersey Agricultural Chemical Co. But for some reason the papers
didn’t entirely satisfy. The cargo was confiscated, analyzed,
and an astonished chemist reported that the “fertilizer” was
composed of highest grade lubricating oil, mixed with a certain
chemical which had reduced the oil to a solid but when the mixture
was treated with a little acid the sacks yielded oil fit for the
Kaiser’s best _Unterseeboten_.
The Department of Justice paid an official call on the New Jersey
company--the “President” was away; he remained away during
two years of very painstaking search by the officials of the
Department’s secret service, which had an ever-increasing desire to
make the acquaintance of the inconspicuous chemist who seemed to
possess some of the mythical powers of the ancient alchemists.
There seemed also to be an unusual bank account connected with this
gentleman, engaged in such magnificent business enterprises, that
yielded such meagre profits, as were evidenced by the President’s
home life and general circumstances. Who is he, and where is he?
were questions that vexed the bureau in Washington. Two years
rolled by; numbers of Germans connected with “the Doctor” were sent
to jail, but only rumours were got of trails of the chemist.
Fate, however, transferred our story to the shadowy neighbourhood
of Morro Castle; there, an excited and still unidentified German
who was trying to board a vessel at Matanzas, Cuba, for a port
in Mexico, was brought into Havana in front of the bayonets of a
not-too-careful Rural Guard. Then a newly arrived representative
of the Department of Justice undertook some negotiations with the
Cuban Government for a safe passage back for a certain Dr. Walter
T. Scheele and his paymaster.
An ancient fort, which is the military prison in Havana and a
part of the old fortified wall which follows the water front of
the picturesque harbour, was shrouded in darkness when the hour
of departure arrived. Between the old fort and the grim outline
of “the Morro” lay a Cuban gunboat with black smoke pouring out
of her funnels; a tropical storm blowing in over the Gulf Stream
alternately darkened the sky a deeper tone and lit it up with
vivid lightning flashes. Presently a little group appeared on the
sea walls and a flash of lightning showed an American in plain
clothes, the regalia of the agents of Justice and a colonel of the
regular army who were signing a receipt for two quiet figures in
alpine hats. A courteous Cuban officer saluted and shook hands with
the departing guests, handcuffs were silently slipped on to thick
German wrists, and the little steam pinnace of the warship sped
off through the darkness alongside its gangway.
An interview none the less sombre and creepy occurred on the
other side of the Gulf Stream within the walls of Fort Taylor.
Two automobiles had driven up in the darkness to an emplacement
beneath the shadow of a heavy gun. The party which had left
Havana descended in a dimly lighted courtyard where a squad of
non-commissioned officers was waiting. One figure in an alpine hat
had to be lifted from the automobile while the other stood erect.
Here is the story of Dr. Scheele, the more important of these two
agents of the Kaiser:
Twenty-five years ago a German youth (one of the favourite pupils
of the great chemist, Professor Keukle) graduated at Bonn. He came
of an illustrious family; his grandfather, the Swedish professor,
Scheele, discovered chlorine gas. His father, born in Germany, died
in the discovery of “prussic acid,” the most quickly fatal drug
known. The youth, with sixteen deep scars on his head and face from
duelling under the vicious German code, was a man of proved valour.
Who was better to send to the great developing home of liberty and
freedom and study its industry, and prepare for a day which was
already dazzling the newly enthroned Kaiser?
Dr. Hugo Schweitzer was chosen to go with him and collaborate. He,
as the head of the Bayer Chemical Company--a German concern that
practically monopolized the trade in synthetic drugs in the United
States--was to report on, to model, or undermine our development
of industrial chemistry. Dr. Scheele was to report on and develop
the plan and chemistry of warfare, explosives, incendiaries, poison
gas, and the products Germany should import and accumulate to make
her sure and independent on the day she should strike the world.
Did these young men faithfully accomplish their tasks?
Dye making was almost an unknown art in America when the war
broke out; chlorine gas was a laboratory curiosity; potash was a
German salt--we had been led to believe our millions of tons of
the mineral were insoluble. Where necessary, those of our chemists
who had learned the secrets were retained and paid. The list of
our chemical houses reads like the telephone directory of Unter
den Linden, and the Alien Property Custodian has since spent many
nights over their affairs.
While the German plenipotentiaries were busy at The Hague agreeing
to the elimination of poison gas and incendiaries from warfare,
their chemists in the United States, paid regularly but meagerly
through the Embassy at Washington, exchanged views in writing and
by cable with the chemists of the Fatherland over the most fatal
methods for the use of the gas which had just been developed for
the purpose.
Mustard gas was used against the Allies in 1917, a new and
atrocious device, “only discovered and recently used by the Germans
because of the brutality of their enemies.” A few formulæ for this
product were in Dr. Scheele’s laboratory in New York about five
years before the war, and tactics of the uses discussed in the
trips which he made home every two years “to keep up to date.”
Two methods of stifling American production have not yet been
mentioned. The first was this: When a man began to make a
reputation as a chemist in an American-owned concern, he was
hired away to work for a German-owned factory. Salary was no
consideration; they simply bid the price required to get him. The
second method was: when an American chemist invented a new product
or a new process, and patented it, it was bought from him before it
could be commercially developed. Again price was no consideration.
The only instructions were: “Pay as little as you can, but get it.”
The operation of this system was the duty of Dr. Scheele and
Dr. Schweitzer. Reporting to them was at least one loyal
German chemist in every chemical factory in the United States;
dozens of them in the larger ones. At their disposal were the
resources of the Imperial German Government. These, too, were
made accessible through Dr. Heinrich Albert in German-American
banking and brokerage concerns, chiefly G. Amsinck & Company, the
Trans-Atlantic Trust Company, and Knauth, Nochode & Kuhne, of New
York, every one of them in reality a local American agency of
one or another of the imperially controlled banks of Germany and
Austria--such as the Reichsbank, the Disconto Gesellschaft, or the
Deutsche Bank.
The chief of these American branches was G. Amsinck & Company,
operating as commission merchants and private bankers. The head
of this concern was Adolf Pavenstedt, an accomplished man of the
world, a shrewd banker, and under the iron discipline of the
Kaiser’s military organization. Pavenstedt lived at the German Club
in Central Park South, in New York, took his vacations in Cuba in
the winter and the Berkshires in the summer, was received in the
best society in New York, passed easily in Wall Street as a man of
large personal fortune and of sound business judgment--altogether
a characteristic German hypocrite and government agent acting
under Dr. Albert and Bernstorff. He was a paymaster of Germany’s
nation-wide organization to control our industrial life, to spy
out our military plans, and to keep us powerless against the day
when Prussia should be ready to sweep the world. He was also the
financial go-between in the Bolo Pasha case. Fortunately, he has
now long been a resident of an Army internment camp.
Two years ago the Government indicted Dr. Scheele for his part in
the incendiary bomb plot. The details of this fiendish device will
be given later in the story. Dr. Scheele was forewarned of probable
detection on the 31st of March, 1916, by a special-delivery letter
telling him to see Wolf von Igel immediately at 60 Wall Street in
New York. Von Igel told him to start for Cuba by the next train.
Dr. Scheele feared that such a precipitate flight would expose
him to certain arrest. Hence, he violated his instruction and
went south to Jacksonville by easy stages. There he called upon
one Sperber, the editor of the Florida _Deutsche Staatszeitung_,
who warned him not to sail from Key West, as that port was being
watched both by our officers and by the British cruisers outside
the three-mile limit. Sperber gave Dr. Scheele letters of
introduction and credentials under the name of W. T. Rheinfelder,
to act as a correspondent for his paper. He supplied him also with
fake calling cards and other forged documents, establishing him in
his rôle. Still fearing to leave for Cuba, he waited.
His superiors again instructed him to go to Cuba. He landed in Cuba
on April 16th. There he reported to the German Minister, Count
Verdy du Vernois, who passed him on to an attaché of the Legation
with this strange result: that Dr. Scheele next found himself
installed as a “guest” in the house of one Juan Pozas, under the
name of James G. Williams, and in the character of a visiting
American.
His strange and unexpected host appeared at first to be simply
a wealthy Cuban merchant. His manner of life strengthened this
impression. Dr. Scheele found himself comfortably installed in
a large room in a magnificent house, surrounded by grounds of
a city block square, in the suburb Guana Bacca of Havana. In
reality, Pozas was the king of the Cuban smugglers. His splendid
establishment and his social prestige rested upon a picturesque
foundation of the work of silent men in little boats working in the
dark of the moon along the tropical Cuban shore.
To Dr. Scheele, Pozas soon appeared to be not only host but jailer.
Though he was treated with every courtesy and as a member of the
family, he was not allowed outside the house for six months after
his arrival. The confinement so told upon his health that he was
finally permitted the freedom of the garden, and, to while away the
time, he worked among the flowers, making at length a beauty spot
of the whole place. At the same time, he was devoting other spare
hours to covering the walls of the Pozas mansion with beautiful
mural paintings. Again it may be noted that Dr. Scheele is a
remarkable man.
In this strange retreat the doctor spent two years. Then suddenly,
without warning, he was hurried hither and yon about the island,
travelling under guard by automobile by night, and lying hidden
by day in the houses of trusted German agents. He finally arrived
at Mantanzas. Here, the man in whose house he was to stay hidden
became fearful that he would be discovered there and the man
himself get into desperate trouble. He, therefore, directed Dr.
Scheele to a neighbouring hotel, but the doctor was unable to
obtain accommodation, so that he spent the night sitting in a
railroad station.
Simultaneously another German of Havana was taken into custody. He
was implicated in the Scheele affair by reason of his payments to
the doctor, besides being involved in numerous violations of the
neutrality of Cuba, for which the Cuban Government meant to hold
him responsible.
The close investigation of this man revealed much valuable data. A
collection of papers had been buried by Dr. Scheele in the tropical
garden he had built about the Pozas mansion. There they were
unearthed by the agent of the Department of Justice of the United
States who had gone to Cuba to bring him back. Taking a pick and
shovel and digging among the flowers cherished by the doctor, he
found these damning documents from Potsdam, containing their secret
instructions for the working out of the industrial conquest of
_Vereinigten Staaten_--These United States.
Another set of documents was obtained by a very clever piece of
work by agents of the Department of Justice. These were papers left
behind by Wolf von Igel when he left the United States--papers that
he dared not risk having seized and read by the British authorities
on his way to Germany. They were packed in a suitcase and were
committed to the care of a German in Englewood, New Jersey. On
instructions from the head office of the Department of Justice in
Washington, agents in the New York office of the Department wrote
out in German, on a typewriter, the letter telling this German to
deliver the suitcase to the bearer and including in its message the
magic password. This letter was entrusted to an agent who spoke
German perfectly.
He executed the commission without a hitch. He called upon the
German and introduced himself in low tones as a loyal subject of
the Kaiser and asked to be taken into the house. There he presented
his letter. When the German read it, he broke into a hearty laugh
and said the password no longer really applied, because it referred
to the coal pile. He had found, on account of the coal shortage,
that at times he could not keep enough coal in the cellar to keep
the suitcase covered, and that consequently he had had to conceal
it elsewhere in the house. The caller joined him in laughter at
this piece of humour, and the German excused himself and soon
returned with the suitcase. It was not till several days later that
he had the slightest inkling that the man he had entertained was an
operative of the American Government.
The plot for which Dr. Scheele was brought to earth was only a
detail in the vast scheme of Germany’s treachery, but it was one
of the most dastardly and most dramatic of those details, and its
detection and unravelling revealed the men at the head of the
German system in this country and their mutual relationships. In a
previous chapter I have told something of the career of Franz von
Rintelen. At this point he appears as an agent of Germany seeking
to destroy the ships bearing American supplies to the Allies. One
day Dr. Scheele received a caller, Eno Bode, a captain in the
service of the North German Lloyd Steamship Company. Bode bore a
card from Von Papen, ordering Scheele to execute any orders which
Bode gave. Von Papen’s orders, in their turn, had come through
Rintelen.
Bode now disclosed to Dr. Scheele a most infernal plan. He was
instructed to invent a bomb of simple mechanism, which could be
placed in a ship’s cargo or its coal and which would not explode,
but set fire to anything inflammable with which it came in contact.
It must be devised to operate at any predetermined time after it
was placed on board.
To Dr. Scheele, a great chemist himself and possessed of every
secret of the greatest nation of chemists in the world, this was
a simple order. In his instructions he was forbidden to apply
for his materials to any American concern through which the
purchase might ever be traced. Consequently, he asked for technical
assistance and was referred to Captain Carl Schmidt, the chief
engineer of the _Friedrich der Grosse_, one of the great German
liners interned at Hoboken. Schmidt placed at his disposal Charles
Becker, the electrician of the _Friedrich der Grosse_. From him he
obtained sections of lead pipe and thin sheets of lead and tin. The
chemicals were easily obtained from strictly German sources.
Dr. Scheele now made a few experiments and quickly evolved a bomb
that was as simple as it was efficient. It consisted merely of a
section of lead pipe, about two and a half inches in diameter and
three or four inches long. This cylinder was separated into two
water-tight compartments by a thin disk of the sheet tin. In one
of the two compartments was placed a chemical, and in the other
a corrosive acid. The ends were then sealed and the bomb was
complete. The acid slowly ate its way through the tin partition,
and when at length a tiny hole was made, the acid and the chemical
mingled and their action was to produce, without noise, a heat so
intense that it melted the lead in the cylinder and the whole bomb
flowed down into a molten mass so fervent that it would ignite any
ordinary substance, such as coal or wood. No timing mechanism was
necessary. The thickness of the tin partition determined the time
at which the bomb would act. By careful experiment, Dr. Scheele was
able to manufacture bombs that would become effective in two days,
four days, six days, eight days--at will. For example, if the tin
partition was made one sixtieth of an inch in thickness, the bomb
would operate in forty-eight hours. The thickness necessary for the
longer periods was established by actual test.
As soon as the bomb was perfected, its manufacture was undertaken
on a big scale. Soon the workroom aboard the _Friedrich der Grosse_
was turning out thirty-five of these “cigars,” as the Germans
called them, every day. Altogether, before the game became too
dangerous and Dr. Scheele was forced to flee, nearly five hundred
bombs were manufactured.
Next came the necessity for an organization to place these bombs
upon the ships. First, the ships themselves must be known--their
sailing dates, their names, their berths and cargoes. Through
German sources of information, the data about merchant ships were
gathered and by Dr. Carl Schimmel, another German agent in New York
City, were listed and classified. These records were placed at the
disposal of the bomb-placing squad.
Captain Carl Wolpert was in charge of this work. He was
the superintendent of the Atlas Line, a subsidiary of the
Hamburg-American Steamship Company, and an officer of the German
Naval Reserve. Armed by Scheele with the “cigars,” by Schimmel
with the list of ships, and by Von Rintelen with unlimited money,
Wolpert chose a group of trusted lieutenants from among the
Germans in New York. These men frequented the water-front and the
neighbouring saloons, where they sought out stevedores, who could
be bribed to place the bombs where they were directed. Fortunately
for the lives of seamen and for the property of the Allies, many of
these men took the German money but threw the bombs into the bay.
Enough, however, earned their blood money so that many ships were
set afire on their voyage across the Atlantic, some of them burning
to the water’s edge, most of them being greatly damaged, the total
loss figuring well up in the millions of dollars. Many a captain in
mid-ocean fought the flames on his vessel, from the second or third
day of his voyage, all the way into port. A fire would break out
in his bunker coal; it might be quenched, only to break out in the
cargo two days later, and perhaps a day after that start up again
in the coal.
This fiendish work was done in cold blood, do not forget, at
the command of the Imperial German Government, at its expense,
under the direction of one of its most highly placed aristocrats,
by one of Germany’s greatest chemists, with the coöperation of
officers of the German Navy and with the cognizance of the German
Ambassador to our friendly Government. Here was no passion of
battle, no extemporized savagery of revenge. It was a calculated
atrocity, perpetrated by the highest authorities of one of the most
“civilized” of the “Christian” nations, using the most technical
processes of one of the most complex arts of modern life. The magic
by which the slimy refuse of burning coal is transmuted into dyes
which give to paints and fabrics the splendour of the dawn and
the beauty of the rose, was here debased to the infamous uses of
treachery and murder.
THE END
[Illustration]
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS
GARDEN CITY, N. Y.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been
corrected after careful comparison with other occurrences within
the text and consultation of external sources.
Except for those changes noted below, all misspellings in the text,
and inconsistent or archaic usage, have been retained. For example,
courtroom, court-room; boarding-house, boarding house; disproven;
gasolene; whilom; plottings; cantine; extinguishment.
Pg 107: ‘judical decision’ replaced by ‘judicial decision’.
Pg 160: ‘wearied of “strafeing”’ replaced by ‘wearied of “strafing”’.
Pg 172: ‘descredited Martin’ replaced by ‘discredited Martin’.
Pg 184: ‘Fuer Deutschland’ replaced by ‘Für Deutschland’.
Pg 202: ‘their uufriendly’ replaced by ‘their unfriendly’.
Pg 242: ‘what out business’ replaced by ‘what our business’.
Pg 245: ‘Anjer-Java, calling’ replaced by ‘Anjer, Java, calling’.
Pg 264: ‘meagrely through’ replaced by ‘meagerly through’.
End of Project Gutenberg's Fighting Germany's Spies, by French Strother