CHAPTER IX MORE BOMB PLOTS
Kaltschmidt and the Windsor explosions—The Port Huron tunnel—Werner Horn—Explosions embarrass the Embassy—Black Tom—The second Welland affair—Harry Newton—The damage done in three years—Waiter spies.
In the check-book of the military attaché was a counterfoil betraying a payment of $1,000 made on March 27, 1915, to "W. von Igel (for A. Kaltschmidt, Detroit)." That stub was part of a bomb plot.
A young German named Charles Francis Respa was employed in 1908 by Albert Carl Kaltschmidt in a Detroit machine shop. Seven years later Kaltschmidt had occasion to hire Respa again. To a group which included Respa, his brother-in-law Carl Schmidt, Gus Stevens and Kaltschmidt's own brother-in-law, Fritz Neef, he outlined a plan for destroying factories in Canada. Neef was the Detroit agent for the Eisemann magneto, and had a machine shop of his own.
"We are not citizens of this country," Kaltschmidt reiterated to his accomplices. "It is our duty to stand by the Fatherland. The Americans would throw us out of work after war started." (The Americans, on the contrary, gave the ringleaders of the conspiracy plenty of hard labor after the war started.) To seal the bargain Kaltschmidt paid the men a retainer, and sent Stevens and Respa to Winnipeg to see whether it might not be feasible to blow up the railroad bridge there.
Respa reported back. His next assignment was to go to Port Huron and determine whether enough dynamite might be attached to the rear of a passenger train bound through the international tunnel under the St. Clair River to destroy the tube. Respa came to the conclusion that it was not practicable, for the authorities were taking precautions against just such an operation. Respa and Stevens were then despatched to Duluth, where they met Schmidt and a fourth member of the group, each carrying a suitcase containing numerous sticks of dynamite, and the quartette returned with its explosives to Detroit.
Kaltschmidt then hired him for $18 a week. Respa had left Germany before his term of military service came due; Kaltschmidt used this information as a club over his head, for he knew the young man could not return to the Fatherland. On June 21 Kaltschmidt called Respa to his office in the Kresge Building, and showed him two elaborate time-clock devices which could be so set as to fire bombs at any specified hour, and Respa, at Kaltschmidt's command, carried the clocks across the Detroit River to Windsor, Ontario, late that afternoon. His sister, Mrs. Schmidt, went with him, and together they wandered about until the hour when they knew that William Lefler, the night watchman of the Peabody Overall Company factory in Walkerville, would go on duty.
Under cover of darkness, the brother and sister met Lefler, who gave Respa two suitcases full of dynamite which Kaltschmidt had smuggled piecemeal into Canada under the front seat of his automobile. Respa attached the clocks to the charges, set one of the infernal machines near the factory, and planted the other in the rear of the Windsor armory, in which Canadian troops were asleep, and near which was a Catholic girls' school. Then he and Mrs. Schmidt scurried back to the ferry and took the last boat to Detroit. At three o'clock in the morning they heard a muffled roar from the Canadian side; the factory bomb had gone off. The other charge failed to explode: Respa said he deliberately set the percussion cap at the wrong angle, because he knew that soldiers were sleeping in the armory, and he had no stomach for murder.
One of the gang was presently arrested, and Respa was spirited away to the retirement of a mechanic's job in a West Hoboken garage. But he grew restless, and spent his money, and Kaltschmidt refused him more. He pawned his watch and his ring, bought a ticket to Detroit, and presented himself before Kaltschmidt with a demand for money, in default of which Respa proposed to "squeal." He was immediately returned to the payroll.
The Canadian provincial detectives had begun to search for the night watchman, Lefler. They found him, and from him they extracted a full confession. Respa's arrest was easy, and the United States willingly returned him, although Kaltschmidt did attempt to establish a false alibi for his underling. Respa was sentenced to life imprisonment, Lefler to ten years, for the destruction of the factory.
The dragnet closed in on Kaltschmidt. William M. Jarosch, a German-born, who later enlisted in the United States Army, had been introduced to Kaltschmidt in Chicago in 1915 by a former German consul there, Gustav Jacobsen. Jacobsen recruited two other men, and Kaltschmidt took the three to Detroit. Jarosch was directed to secure employment at the plant of the Detroit Screw Works, but he was rejected, so Kaltschmidt told him to watch the plant for a good opportunity to set a bomb there. In the course of his sojourn in Detroit he went to the Respa home in the placid little village of Romeo and returned with a generous quantity of dynamite. This he delivered to Neef, and in a conference at the magneto shop Kaltschmidt explained the operation of the time-clock, and ordered Jarosch to set the device at the Detroit Screw factory that night. He and his Chicago confederates set out for the scene, but there were guards about, and Jarosch had no desire for arrest, so he took the bomb to his hotel room, disengaged the trigger, and calmly went to sleep. Next morning Kaltschmidt reproached him, and Jarosch resigned, to return months later to show Federal officers where he had buried some 80 pounds of dynamite, nitroglycerine, and a bomb.
Kaltschmidt also conspired to destroy the Port Huron tunnel. For this enterprise he contrived a car which he proposed to load with dynamite set to explode with a time fuse. Fritz Neef, the Stuttgart graduate and expert mechanical engineer, was his able assistant and adviser in this project. The car was of standard railway gauge. It was to be set on the Grand Trunk tracks at the mouth of the Port Huron end of the tunnel and released, to roll down into the darkness under the river. At the low point in the tunnel's curve the charge would explode, bursting the walls of the tube, and completely interrupting the heavy international freight traffic at that point.
The "devil car" never was released. Kaltschmidt was arrested, and finally, in December, 1917, tried and convicted on three counts. He was given the maximum sentence, of four years' imprisonment and $20,000 fine. His sister, Mrs. Neef, who had been an active intermediary, was sentenced to three years' imprisonment and was fined $15,000; Carl Schmidt and his wife were each condemned to two years in prison, and assessed a fine of $10,000 each, and only old Franz Respa, the father of the dynamiter, was acquitted.
The activities of this group received tangible approval from the German Embassy. Even before von Papen drew the check on March 27 for Kaltschmidt, the attaché's secretary, von Igel, had transferred $2,000 to the Detroit German from the banking firm of Knauth, Nachod and Kuhne (January 23). On October 5, long after the Walkerville explosion, but while the Port Huron venture was still a possibility, the Chase National Bank of New York transferred to Knauth, Nachod and Kuhne $25,000 from the joint account maintained there by Count von Bernstorff and Dr. Albert, and next day the money was placed to Kaltschmidt's credit.
The Port Huron tunnel was the object of German attentions from the active San Francisco consulate. Crowley, who had been von Brincken's messenger in the Van Koolbergen affair, and one Louis J. Smith, were hired by Herr Bopp to go east on a destroying mission. They ran out of money in New York, and called at the New York consulate for assistance. They were told that the New York consulate had nothing to do with Pacific coast activities, so they wired von Schack for funds. He replied, chiding them for not having called on von Papen.
Late in June Smith left New York and joined Crowley at the Normandy Hotel in Detroit. "Then we went to Port Huron," he said, "where we planned to dynamite a railroad tunnel and a horse train. We didn't do it, though.
"Then we went to Toronto, and Crowley told me to plant a bomb under a horse train in the West Toronto yards. But I saw a policeman, and I got out quick. Then we took some nitroglycerine, cotton, sawdust, and a tin pan and some other things to Grosse Isle, Ontario, and went out back of a cemetery and made some bombs.
"Well, we got back to San Francisco late in July, and Crowley and I cooked up an expense account of $1,254.80, and took it up to the consulate. Von Schack locked the door behind us, and then he said: 'I don't want any statement. Tell me how much you want?' We told him, and he said he would get it the following day. Then all of a sudden he asked: 'How do I know you fellows did any jobs in Canada?'
"'Wire the mayor of Toronto and ask him!' Crowley answered."
On one occasion at least the Germans respected American property, for the protection America might afford. Werner Horn, a former lieutenant in the Landwehr, was in Guatemala when the war broke out. He made an attempt to return to his command, but got no farther than New York, where he placed himself at the disposal of Captain von Papen. On January 18 the military attaché paid him $700. On February 2 Horn exploded a charge of dynamite on the Canadian end of the international bridge at Vanceboro, Maine, spanning the St. Croix River to New Brunswick. The explosion caused a slight damage to the Canadian half of the bridge. A few hours later Horn was arrested in Vanceboro, and admitted the crime.
When the Canadian authorities applied for his extradition, the warrant which Judge Hale issued was not executed, the United States Marshal for Maine having received word from Washington that a well-preserved treaty between Great Britain and the United States would cover just such a case, and Horn was indicted on a charge of having transported explosives from New York City to Vanceboro. His attorneys naïvely attempted to secure his liberty by casting a protective mantle of international law about his shoulders: Werner Horn, they said, was a First Lieutenant of the West-Prussian Pioneer Battalion Number 17, and as such was sworn by His Royal Majesty of Prussia to
" ... discharge the obligations of his office in a becoming manner, ... execute diligently and loyally whatever is made his duty to do and carry out, and whatever is commanded him, by day and by night, on land and on sea, and ... conduct himself bravely and irreproachably in all wars and military events that may occur...."
Yet he was tried, and that without much delay, and convicted, and sentenced to imprisonment.
Although the destruction of railways was an attractive means of stopping the progress of munitions to the seaboard, and although it was a recognized practice during 1915, it made the Embassy at Washington uneasy. Bernstorff protested to the Foreign Office in Berlin that if a German agent should be caught in the act of dynamiting a railroad it would be exceedingly embarrassing for him, and increase the difficulties of his already ticklish rôle of apologist and explainer-extraordinary. The Foreign Office accordingly sent a telegram to von Papen:
"January 26—For Military Attaché.... Railway embankments and bridges must not be touched. Embassy must in no circumstances be compromised."
(Signed) "Representative of General Staff."
And thereafter American railway bridges and embankments were safe, though their owners may not have been aware of the fact at the time.
It is no mere metaphor to say that during 1915 and 1916 the smoke of German explosions in factories in the United States was spreading across the sun, casting the deepening shadow of war over America. There was dynamite found in the coal tender of a munitions train on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad at Callery Junction, Pa., on December 10, 1915, the day on which enormous quantities of wheat were destroyed by fire in grain elevators at Erie. A few hours earlier a two-million-dollar explosion had occurred at the Hopewell plant of the du Pont works. Shortly before Christmas a ton and a half of nitroglycerine exploded at Fayville, Illinois.
During 1916 there were a dozen major explosions in the du Pont properties alone and literally dozens of lives were lost. Two arms plants at Bridgeport, Conn., were blown up. An explosion in May wiped out a large chemical plant in Cadillac, Michigan. A munitions works of the Bethlehem Steel Company at Newcastle, Pa., was destroyed. The climax in violence came, however, in the sultry night of August 1-2. Shortly after midnight the rocky island of Manhattan trembled, and the roar of a prodigious blast burst over the harbor of New York. Two million pounds of munitions were being transported in freight trains and on barges near the island of Black Tom, a few hundred yards from the Bartholdi Statue of Liberty. Some one, somehow, supplied the spark. The loss of life was inconsiderable, for that neighborhood was not inhabited, but the confusion was complete. Heavy windows in the canyons of lower Manhattan were shivered, and for a few moments many of the streets rained broken glass. Shell-laden barges near the original explosion set up a scattering fire which continued for some time, most of the projectiles losing their power through lack of a substantial breech-block. But the immigration station on Ellis Island was in panic, and its position became more unpleasant as one of the blazing barges drifted down upon it. The shock was felt far out in Jersey, and northward in Connecticut. An estimate of damage was placed at thirty millions of dollars, probably as accurate as such an estimate need be; the event was utterly spectacular, and from the point of view of the unknown destroying agent, effective.
Exactly one year after von Papen gave up the first attempt upon the Welland Canal, a second enterprise began with the same objective. Captain von Papen felt that von der Goltz had bungled. This time he intrusted the mission to the doughty and usually reliable Paul Koenig. On September 27, 1915, Koenig, with Richard Emil Leyendecker, a "hyphenated American" who dealt during the daytime in art woods at 347 Fifth Avenue, New York, and Fred Metzler, of Jersey City, Koenig's secretary, went to Buffalo and Niagara Falls, accompanied by Mrs. Koenig. They had no trouble in crossing the border and making a thorough investigation of the canal, its vulnerable points, its guards and the patrol routes of those guards. Koenig selected men whom he detailed to watch the guards, and he fixed on satisfactory storage places for his explosives. The party then returned to Niagara Falls and later to New York.
They did not know that they were being trailed. All three men had been under surveillance for nearly a year, and after their migrations near the canal, the guard was reenforced. It became impossible to carry out the plan. A few weeks later the detectives who were shadowing Koenig noticed that George Fuchs, a relative whom he employed at a meagre salary, was seldom seen in his company. They sought Fuchs out and plied him with refreshment. A few glasses of beer drew out his story: Koenig owed him $15, and he therefore bore no affection for Koenig. The detectives turned him over to Superintendent Offley of the Department of Justice, who sympathized with Fuchs to such an extent that the latter retailed enough evidence of the Welland plot to secure Koenig's indictment on five counts. Thus did a debt of thirty pieces of silver—in this case half-dollars—rob the Hamburg-American Line of a six-foot, 200-pound detective, and the German spy system in America of one of its roughest characters, for, thanks to Fuchs' revelations, Koenig was indicted for a violation of Section 13 of the Penal Code.
Herald Square, New York, was the center of open-air oratory every evening until after America entered the war. Those who had stood and fought their verbal battles during the day about the bulletin board of the New York Herald remained at night to bellow to the idle passersby along Broadway, and one night Felix Galley, a leather-lunged contractor, gave an impassioned discourse justifying Germany's entrance into the war. When the meeting broke up he was followed home by one who rather passed his expectations as a convert.
The stranger was Harry Newton. He had been employed in a munitions plant in St. Catharine's, Ontario. He suggested to Galley that he would take any orders for arson which the Germans had in mind, and recommended that as proof of his ability he would oblige with a dynamiting of the Brooks Locomotive Works at Dunkirk, N. Y., for a retainer of $5,000. Or, he said, he could arrange to destroy the Federal building or Police Headquarters. This was more than the German had bargained for, and assuring Newton that he would first have to consult the "chief," he ran straightway to the police and in great agitation told what had happened. Captain Tunney, of the Bomb Squad, assigned Detective Sergeant George Barnitz to the case.
The detective, posing as a German agent, found Newton at Mills Hotel No. 3, and opened negotiations with him. After several talks, they met on the afternoon of April 19, 1916, at Grand Street and the Bowery. Barnitz said: "Now, I'm in a hurry—haven't much time to discuss all this. You say you're in the business strictly for the money. The chief is willing to pay you $5,000 if you will smash the Welland Canal or blow up the Brooks Locomotive Works or burn the McKinnon, Dash Company's plant at St. Catharine's. But how do we know you won't demand more from us after you are paid? Maybe you'll want more cash for your assistants."
Newton was quick to reply that he worked alone and wouldn't trust any assistant. He was anxious to start with the Brooks "job" at Dunkirk and told Barnitz he had left in the baggage-room of the New York Central Railroad at Buffalo a suitcase containing powerful bombs. (The suitcase actually contained a loaded 4-inch shell, with percussion cap and fuse.) It would be necessary only for him to go to Buffalo, get the suitcase, hasten to Dunkirk and blow up the locomotive works.
"Fine," said Barnitz. "You are under arrest."
Newton stared a moment, then laughed. "You New York cops are a damned sight smarter than I ever thought you were," he said, "and you made me think you were a German!"
At Police Headquarters he described his plan for blowing up the Welland Canal. Having worked in a town located on the canal, he was familiar with the position of the locks. "It would be a simple matter," he said. "You see these buttons I am wearing on my watch chain and in my coat lapel. The plain gilt one reads 'On His Majesty's Service.' The blue and white one reads 'McKinnon, Dash Company, Munitions. On Service.' Those buttons are passes that would let me into any munitions plant in Canada or this country. They would pass me through the guards of the canal. It would be easy for me to pretend to be a workman, get a boat and, carrying a dinner pail, filled with explosives, to pick out a weak spot in the canal works and destroy the whole business.
"It would be a cinch to burn the McKinnon, Dash plant. I could go back to work there as foreman. Any Saturday night I could be the last to leave. Before going I could saturate flooring with benzine and put a lighted candle where within a half hour or so the flame would reach the benzine."
Newton also suggested his willingness to dynamite the banking house of J. P. Morgan & Co., at 23 Wall Street, or to dynamite the banker's automobile. He had a series of postcards in his own handwriting, which, in case he was hired for a dynamiting, were to be mailed from distant points every day while he was on the assignment, in order to establish an alibi.
He was an irresponsible person, and one who could not be said to be under orders from the attachés in lower Broadway. Yet he is typical of the restless and lawless floating population of which the Germans made excellent tools. When he heard Galley he promptly offered his services; his boldness would have made him a capital destroying agent, and it was fired by the speech in Herald Square, a speech inspired from Berlin. Here was his opportunity to make money. Thus, by a word of encouragement, by the whisper of "big money" to discharged, dissatisfied or disloyal employees of munitions plants, the seed of German violence was sown everywhere. Men who were well dressed and of good appearance would be remarked if they prowled about factory districts; men must be employed who would fade into the drab landscape by the very commonplaceness of their clothing and action. They could be hired cheaply and swiftly disowned, these Newtons!
The New York Times on November 3, 1917, recapitulated the damage wrought by German incendiarism as follows:
"A graphic idea of what the fire losses in the United States owe to the work of war incendiaries may be gained from consideration of the fact that the total fire insurance paid in the United States in 1915, according to the figures of the National Board of Fire Underwriters, was $153,000,000. It is estimated that 60 per cent. of the loss by fires in this country is represented in insurance. Therefore, the total fire loss in the United States in 1915 was something over $200,000,000. Of the $153,000,000 paid out by the insurance companies, $6,200,000 was represented by incendiary fires. A total of $62,000,000 was charged to fires from unknown causes.
"In 1916 the total jumped by 20 per cent., meaning an increase of about $40,000,000. The biggest items in this loss were those sustained in munition fires and explosions. Black Tom holds the record with a loss of $11,000,000; there was the Kingsland explosion, the Penn's Grove explosion, and others, all generally admitted to be the work of spies, which caused losses running into millions.
"It was estimated yesterday by an insurance official that the incendiary loss in 1916 was easily $25,000,000, or $15,000,000 above normal. And these figures take into consideration only fires where the origin was proved to be incendiary. On the books of the underwriters the Black Tom munitions fire is not listed as incendiary, because it was never legally proved that a German spy set it going.
"This increase in losses for 1916 when the big munition explosions occurred, derives significance in the discussion of losses by spy fires since this country entered the war, because the figures of fire losses in the United States for 1917 may reach $300,000,000, or a larger increase over 1916 than 1916 losses showed over 1915. An estimate made yesterday by the head of a fire insurance company shows that if the average of the losses in the first seven months of the year is maintained until Jan. 1 the total would reach well above $250,000,000, and with the increases of the past few months might easily total $300,000,000 as the cost of the American ash heaps for 1917."
How did the Germans know where munitions were being manufactured? Rumor fled swiftly through the labor districts, and the news was reported through the regular channels of espionage, cleared through the consulates and German business offices, and forwarded to the attachés and the Embassy. But the collection of information did not stop there; it was verified from another source—a serviceable factor in the general system of espionage.
The American manufacturer shared his nation's predilection for talking at meal-time. As the war contracts were distributed about the country, every machine shop worthy of the name became a "munitions plant" and the romance of having a part in the war strained the discretion of most of America's war bridegrooms; they simply "had to tell some one"; not infrequently this some one was a reliable intimate, sitting across a restaurant table at lunch.
There was in America an organization bearing a title which suggested a neutral origin, but whose officers' names, down even unto the official physician, were undeniably German. It was ostensibly for the mutual benefit of the foreign-born waiters, chefs and pantrymen who composed its membership. But its real significance was indicated by the location of its branches (its headquarters were in New York). Trenton, New Jersey, for example, was not a "good hotel town," and foreign waiters usually are to be found in a town which boasts a hotel managed by metropolitan interests, and supplied with a foreign staff; but Trenton was a munitions center, and there was a branch of this association there. Schenectady, the home of the General Electric Company, had no first-class hotel; there was a branch of the association in Schenectady. Conversely, numerous cities whose hotels were manned by foreign waiters and cooks had no branches. The organization was founded in Dresden in 1877.
Many a confidence passed across a table was intercepted by the acute ears of a German spy. Members of the Anglo-French Loan Commission who were staying at the Biltmore in 1914 were served by a German agent in a waiter's uniform. It would have gone well for America and the preparations of supplies for her later Allies if there had been posted in every hotel dining-room the French admonition,
"Taisez-vous! Ils s'ecoutent!"