CHAPTER VIII
CORRESPONDENTS IN SHACKLES
Towards the end of 1915 the neutral newspaper correspondents in Berlin were summoned to the Kriegs-Presse-Bureau (War Press Bureau) of the Great General Staff. The official in charge, Major Nicolai, notified them that the German Government desired their signature to an agreement respecting their future activities in the war. It had been decided, Major Nicolai stated, to allow the American journalists to visit the German fronts at more or less regular intervals, but before this was done it would be necessary for them to enter into certain pledges. These were, mainly:—
1. To remain in Germany for the duration of the war, unless given special permission to leave by the German authorities.
2. To guarantee that dispatches would be published in the United States precisely as sent from Germany, that is to say, as edited and passed by the military censorship.
3. To supply their own headlines for their dispatches, and to guarantee that these, and none others, would be printed.
After labouring in vain to instruct Major Nicolai that with the best of intentions on the part of the correspondents it was beyond their power to say in exactly what form the Omaha Bee or the New Orleans Picayune would publish their "copy," they affixed their signatures to the weird document laid before them. It was signed, without exception, by all the important correspondents permanently stationed in Berlin. Two or three who did not desire to hand over the control of their personal movements to the German Government for an unlimited number of years did not "take the pledge," with the result that they were not invited to join the personally conducted junkets to the fronts which were subsequently organised.
Nothing that has happened in Germany during the war illustrates so well the vassalage to which neutral correspondents have been reduced as the humiliating pledges extorted from them by the German Government as the price of their remaining in Berlin for the practice of their profession.
It was undoubtedly this episode which inspired the American Ambassador, Mr. Gerard, to tell the American correspondents last summer that they would do well to obtain their freedom from the German censorship before invoking the Embassy's good offices to break down the alleged interference with their dispatches by the British censorship. When the Germans learned of the rebuff which Mr. Gerard had administered to his journalistic compatriots, the Berlin Press launched one of those violent attacks against the Ambassador to which he has constantly been subject in Germany during the war.
As I have shown in a previous chapter the German Government attaches so much importance to the control and manufacture of public opinion through the Press that it is drastic in the regulation of German newspapers. It is therefore comprehensible that it should strive to enlist to the fullest possible extent the Press of other countries. At least one paper in practically every neutral country is directly subsidised by the German Foreign Office, which does not, however, stop at this. The attempt to seduce the newspapers of other nations into interpreting the Fatherland as the Wilhelmstrasse wishes it to be interpreted leads the investigators to a subterranean labyrinth of schemes which would fill a volume.
Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated on June 28, 1914. Long before that Dr. Hammann, head of the Nachrichtendienst of the German Foreign Office, had organised a plan for the successful influencing of the Press of the world. In May, 1914, the work of a special bureau under his direction and presided over by a woman of international reputation was in full operation.
The following incident, which is one of the many I might cite, throws interesting light on one method of procedure. The head of the special bureau asked one of the best known woman newspaper reporters of Norway if she would like to do some easy work which would take up very little of her time and for which she would be well paid.
The Norwegian reporter was interested and asked for particulars.
"Germany wishes to educate other countries to a true appreciation of things German. Within a year, or at most within two years, we shall be doing this by sending to foreign newspapers articles which will instruct the world about Germany. Of course, it is not advisable to send them directly from our own bureau; it is much better to have them appear to come from the correspondents of the various foreign newspapers. Thus, we shall send you articles which you need only copy or translate and sign."
This has been the practice in German journalism for years, and its extension to other countries was merely a chain in the link of Germany's deliberate and thorough preparations for the war.
With a few exceptions, German reporters and correspondents are underpaid sycophants, mere putty in the hands of the Government. Therefore, the chagrin of the officials over the independence and ability of the majority of the American correspondents is easy to understand. The Wilhelmstrasse determined to control them, and through them to influence the American Press. Hence the rules given above.
When a man signs an agreement that he will not leave Germany until the end of the war, without special dispensation, he has bound himself to earn his livelihood in that country. He cannot do this without the consent of the Government, for if he does not write in a manner to please them they can slash his copy, delay it, and prevent him from going on trips to such an extent that he will be a failure with his newspaper at home. His whole success depends therefore upon his being "good" much after the manner in which a German editor must be "good." If he expresses a wish to leave Germany before the end of the war and the wish is granted, he feels that a great favour has been conferred upon him and he is supposed to feel himself morally bound to be "good" to Germany in the future.
The American journalistic colony in Germany is an entirely different thing from what it used to be in pre-war days. Before 1914 it consisted, merely of the representatives of the Associated Press and United Press, half a dozen New York papers (including the notorious New-Yorker Staats-Zeitung), and the well-known and important Western journal, the Chicago Daily News. To-day many papers published in the United States are represented in Berlin by special correspondents. The influx of newcomers has been mostly from German-language papers, printed in such Teutonic centres as Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Milwaukee, etc. Journals like the Illinoiser Staats-zeitung, of Chicago, which for years past has barely been able to keep its head above water, have suddenly found themselves affluent enough to maintain correspondents in Europe who, for their part, scorn lodgings less pretentious than those of the de luxe Hotel Adlon in Unter den Linden.
The bright star in the American journalistic firmament in Berlin is Karl Heinrich von Wiegand, the special representative of the New York World. The New York World is not pro-German, but von Wiegand is of direct and noble German origin. Apart from his admitted talents as a newspaper man, his Prussian "von" is of no inconsiderable value to any newspaper which employs him. Von Wiegand, I believe, is a native of California. Persons unfriendly to him assert that he is really a native of Prussia, who went to the United States when a child. Wherever he was born, he is now typically American, and speaks German with an unmistakable Transatlantic accent. He is a bookseller by origin, and his little shop in San Francisco was wiped out by the earthquake. About forty-five years of age, he is a man of medium build, conspicuously near-sighted, wears inordinately thick "Teddy Roosevelt eye-glasses," and is in his whole bearing a "real" Westerner of unusually affable personality. Von Wiegand claims, when taunted with being a Press agent of the German Government, that he is nothing but an enterprising correspondent of the New York World. I did not find this opinion of himself fully shared in Germany. There are many people who will tell you that if von Wiegand is not an actual attache of the German Press Bureau, his "enterprise" almost always takes the form of very effective Press agent work for the Kaiser's cause. He certainly comes and goes at all official headquarters in Germany on terms of welcome and intimacy, and is a close friend of the notorious Count Reventlow.
My personal opinion, however, is that he is above all a journalist, and an exceedingly able one.
Von Wiegand's liaison with the powers that be in Berlin has long been a standing joke among his American colleagues. Shortly after the fall of Warsaw in August, 1915, when the stage in Poland was set for exhibition to the neutral world, he was roused from his slumbers in his suite at the Adlon by a midnight telephone message, apprising him that if he would be at Friedrichstrasse Station at 4.30 the next morning, with packed bags, he would be the only correspondent to be taken on a staff trip to Warsaw. Wiegand was there at the appointed hour, but was astonished to discover that he had been hoaxed. The perpetrators of the "rag" were some of his U. S. confreres.
Von Wiegand for nearly two years has been the recipient of such marked and exclusive favours in Berlin that Mr. Hearst's New York American (the chief rival of the New York World, and the head of the "International News Service" which has been suppressed in Great Britain, where it has been proved to have maliciously lied on divers occasions) decided to send to Germany a special correspondent who would also have a place in the sun. The gentleman appointed to crowd Mr. von Wiegand out of the limelight was a former clergyman named Dr. William Bayard Hale, a gifted writer and speaker, who obtained some international notoriety eight years ago by interviewing the Kaiser. That interview was so full of blazing political indiscretions that the German Government suppressed it at great cost by buying up the entire issue of the New York magazine in which the explosion was about to take place. Enough of the contents of the interview subsequently leaked out to indicate that its main feature was the German Emperor's insane animosity to Great Britain and Japan and his determination to go to war with them.
Dr. Hale also enjoyed the prestige of having once been an intimate of President Wilson. He had written the latter's biography, and later represented him in Mexico as a special emissary. Shortly before the war he married a New York German woman, who is, I believe, a sister or near relative of Herr Muschenheim, the owner of the Hotel Astor, which in 1914 and 1915 was inhabited by the German propaganda bureau, or one of the many bureaus maintained in New York City. From the date of his German matrimonial alliance Dr. Hale became an ardent protagonist of Kultur. One of his last activities before going to Germany was to edit a huge "yellow book" which summarised "Great Britain's violations of international law" and the acrimonious correspondence on contraband and shipping controversies between the British and American Governments. This publication was financed by the German publicity organisation and widely circulated in the United States and all neutral countries.
Dr. Hale, a tall, dark, keen-looking, smooth-shaven, and smooth-spoken American, received in Berlin on his arrival a welcome customarily extended only to a new-coming foreign Ambassador. He came, of course, provided with the warmest credentials Count Bernstorff could supply. Long before Hale had a chance to present himself at the Foreign Office, the Foreign Office presented itself to him, an emissary from the Imperial Chancellor having, according to the story current in Berlin, left his compliments at Dr. Hale's hotel. He had not been in Berlin many days before an interview with Bethmann-Hollweg was handed to him on a silver plate. Forthwith the New York American began to be deluged with the journalistic sweetmeats—Ministerial interviews, Departmental statements, and exclusive news tit-bits—with which Karl Heinrich von Wiegand had so long and alone been distinguishing himself.
I have told in detail these facts about von Wiegand and Hale because between them the two men are able to flood the American public with a torrent of German-made news and views, whose volume and influence are tremendous. The New York World's European news is "syndicated" to scores of newspapers throughout the American, continent, and the service has "featured" von Wiegand's Berlin dispatches to the exclusion, or at least almost to the eclipse, of the World's other war news. Hale's dispatches to the Hearst Press have been published all the way across the Republic, not only in the dailies of vast circulation owned by Mr. Hearst in New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, but also in a great many other papers like the prominent Philadelphia North American, which subscribed to the "International News Service."
The German authorities understand all this perfectly well. That explains their unceasing attentions to von Wiegand and Hale, and to other valuable correspondents. One of these recently undertook to compile a book on Belgium in war-time for the purpose of white-washing Germans in American estimation. Accompanied by his wife, he was motored and wined and dined through the conquered country under the watchful chaperonage of German officers. He has returned to Berlin to write his book, although it is common knowledge there that during his entire stay in Belgium he was not permitted to talk to a single Belgian.
Although nominally catered to and fawned upon by the German authorities, the American correspondents cut on the whole a humiliating figure, although not all of them realise it. It is notorious they are spied upon day and night. They are even at times ruthlessly scorned by their benefactors in the Wilhelmstrasse. One of the Americans who essays to be independent, was some time ago a member of a journalistic party conducted to Lille. He left the party long enough to stroll into a jeweller's shop to purchase a new glass for his watch. While making the purchase he asked the Frenchman who waited on him how he liked the Germans. "They are very harsh, but just," was the reply. A couple of weeks later, when the correspondents were back in Berlin, Major Nicolai, of the War Press Bureau, sent for the correspondent, said to him that he knew of the occasion on which the American journalist had "left the party" in Lille, and demanded to know what had occurred in the watchmaker's shop. The correspondent repeated precisely what the Frenchman had said. "Well," snarled Major Nicolai, "why didn't you send that to your papers?" I may mention here that these parties of neutral correspondents are herded rather than conducted when on tour.
The American correspondents had a sample of the actual contempt in which the German authorities hold them on the day when the commercial submarine Deutschland returned to Bremen, August 23. For purposes of glorifying the Deutschland's achievement in the United States, the American correspondents in Berlin were dispatched to Bremen, where they were told that elaborate special arrangements for their reception and entertainment had been completed. Count Zeppelin, two airship commanders, who had just raided England, and a number of other national heroes would be present, together with the Grand Duke of Oldenburg at the head of a galaxy of civil, military, and naval dignitaries. The grand climax of the Deutschland joy carnival was to be a magnificent banquet with plenty of that rare luxury, bread and butter, at the famous Bremen Rathaus accompanied by both oratorical and pyrotechnical fireworks. The correspondents were given an opportunity to watch the triumphal progess of the Deutschland through the Weser into Bremen harbour, but at night, when they looked for their places at the Rathaus feast, they were informed that there was no room for them. An overflow banquet had been arranged in their special honour in a neighbouring tavern. This was too much even for some of the War Press Bureau's best American friends, and the overflow dinner party was served at a table which contained many vacant chairs. Their intended occupiers had taken the first train back to Berlin, thoroughly disgusted.
It is fair to say that several of the principal American correspondents in Berlin are making a serious effort to practise independent journalism, but it is a difficult and hopeless struggle. They are shackled and controlled from one end of the week to the other. They could not if they wished send the unadorned truth to the United States. All they are permitted to report is that portion of the truth which reflects Germany in the light in which it is useful for Germany to appear from time to time.
Germany has organised news for neutrals in the most intricate fashion. A certain kind of news is doled out for the United States, a totally different kind for Spain, and still a different brand, when emergency demands, for Switzerland, Brazil, or China. There is a Chinese correspondent among the other "neutrals" in Germany. The "news" prepared for him by Major Nicolai's department would be very amusing reading in the columns of Mr. von Wiegand's or Dr. Hale's papers.
There is a celebrated and pro-Ally newspaper in New York whose motto is "All the news that's fit to print." The motto of the German War Press Bureau is "All the news that's safe to print."