Coming at the explosives was a more complicated matter. How it was done
is best explained by the documents held by your secret service, which
were part of the evidence at the trial of Hans Tauscher in the Federal
Court here on a charge of plotting against the peace of the United
States. Tauscher testified that he had no knowledge of the Welland
Canal plot and that he sold the dynamite believing it was to be used
for mining in Mexico. The jury believed him or gave him the benefit of
a doubt, for they acquitted him.
These documents, and others in the possession of The World Magazine,
show:
First, that Sept. 5, 1914, Mr. Tauscher, American representative of
Krupp's, No. 320 Broadway, New York, asked the du Pont Powder Company
to deliver to Bridgeman Taylor 300 pounds of 60 per cent. dynamite and
send the bill to him.
Second, that on Sept. 11 the du Pont Company sent to Tauscher a bill
for 300 pounds of dynamite delivered to Bridgeman Taylor, New York
City, on Sept. 5; and on Sept. 16 sent him a second bill for 45 feet of
fuse delivered to Bridgeman Taylor on Sept. 12, the total of the two
bills amounting to $31.13.
Third, that on Dec. 29, 1914, Tauscher sent a bill to Capt. von Papen
for a total of $503.24, the third item of which, dated Sept. 11,
amounted to $31.13.
Fourth, that on Jan. 5, 1915, von Papen requested some one to draw a
check for $503.24 to the order of Tauscher.
I went and got the dynamite myself from the du Pont Company's dynamite
barges lying off the Jersey shore near the Statue of Liberty. I had
hired a motor boat near the foot of West One Hundred and Forty-Sixth
Street and I carried the stuff in suitcases. I took the whole 300
pounds in a taxicab to the German Club, and met von Papen there. He
told me to call later and he would supply me with automatic pistols,
batteries, detonators and wire for exploding the dynamite. He kept his
promise.
All these things I took, and part of them I stored in the rooms I had
taken in an obscure street and house in Harlem. For by this time the
boastful, talkative Major von der Goltz was slipping down in the world.
He could no longer afford the amenities of the Holland House. It must
have been quite obvious to all interested that the money he had brought
from Mexico was almost spent. There are certain advantages in looking
impecunious, if one knows how to use them. The furtive, secretive poor
man who does no work yet has what money he needs is open to suspicion.
But the broken spendthrift in his seedy clothes who cannot pay his
bills and yet does nothing but talk of his own importance--he is
manifestly a fool.
So toward the middle of September the fool von der Goltz and four
companions--Fritzen, Tucker, Busse and Covani--armed with automatic
pistols and carrying suitcases crammed with high explosives, were
permitted to leave New York, from the Grand Central Station, and to go
to Buffalo, where they took rooms at No. 198 Delaware Avenue and were
supplied with funds by wire from New York on Sept. 16, being identified
by a Buffalo lawyer, John T. Ryan.
After that we went on to Niagara Falls, where, within twelve miles, lay
the locks of the Welland Canal, our first and most important objective.
While waiting for further orders we fell victims to impatience.
For sitting and waiting was all we ever did. While my superiors were
hesitating to give the decisive word the first Canadian contingent had
left for England, and it had been decided to postpone the attempt till
another crucial moment for Canada.
So the affair ended tamely, and the authorities of the United States
never guessed how close they had come to being plunged into a
complication which might have made the Trent affair or the Alabama
affair of Civil War days seem small by comparison.
I have told you I was obviously in New York with a purpose, and hoped
to be unable to escape the attentions of detectives and Federal Secret
Service agents. They could have stopped us at any moment, and they did
not. Why? Because they thought me an impractical fool, a theatrical
plotter, harmless, and wanted to let me thoroughly compromise myself
before they stopped me. If the true circumstances had been like
the seeming ones, that would have been thoroughly sound policy, in
accordance with the best detective tradition. But----
The real circumstances were very different. My men and I were a blind.
We had our explosives and meant to use them if we could. But the
serious dynamiting was not assigned to us at all, but to men already in
Canada, men thoroughly organized, men whose names in no way suggested
German sympathies and who were not at all suspected, and never would be
as long as we made-to-order German plotters were at hand.
Imagine, then, what the effect would have been on public opinion
if those orders had not been countermanded. The Welland Canal and
others would have gone up, and we would have seemed to be the
perpetrators--we, whom the United States Government might so easily
have stopped if it had cared to. I have been concerned in various plots
in my time, but never in one of a more devilish ingenuity than this one
that failed, or failed in part.