CHAPTER VII FALSE PASSPORTS
Hans von Wedell's bureau—The traffic in false passports—Carl Ruroede—Methods of forgery—Adams' coup—Von Wedell's letter to von Bernstorff—Stegler—Lody—Berlin counterfeits American passports—Von Breechow.
Throughout August, 1914, it was comparatively easy for Germans in America who wished to respond to the call of the Fatherland to leave American shores. A number of circumstances tended swiftly to make it more hazardous. The British were in no mind to permit an influx of reservists to Germany while they could blockade Germany. The cordon tightened, and soon every merchant ship was stopped at sea by a British patrol and searched for German suspects. German spies here took refuge in the protection afforded by an American passport. False passports were issued by the State Department in considerable quantities during the early weeks of war—issued unwittingly, of course, for the applicant in most cases underwent no more than the customary peace-time examination.
We have already seen that von der Goltz easily secured a passport. The details of his application were these: Karl A. Luederitz, the German consul at Baltimore, detailed one of his men to supply Goltz with a lawyer and an application blank (then known as Form 375). The lawyer was Frederick F. Schneider, of 2 East German Street, Baltimore. On that application Goltz swore that his name was Bridgeman H. Taylor, his birthplace San Francisco, his citizenship American, his residence New York City, and his occupation that of export broker. Charles Tucker served as witness to these fantastic sentiments. Two days later (August 31) the State Department issued passport number 40308 in the name of Taylor, and William Jennings Bryan signed the precious document.
It was not necessary at that time to state the countries which the applicant intended to visit. Within a few weeks, however, that information was required on the passport.
Each additional precaution taken by the Government placed a new obstacle in the way of unlimited supply of passports. The Goltz method was easy enough, but it soon became impossible to employ it. The necessity for sending news through to Berlin by courier was increasingly urgent and it devolved upon Captain von Papen to systematize the supply of passports. The military attaché in November selected Lieutenant Hans von Wedell, who had already made a trip as courier to Berlin for his friend, Count von Bernstorff. Von Wedell was married to a German baroness. He had been a newspaper reporter in New York, and later a lawyer. He opened an office in Bridge Street, New York, and began to send out emissaries to sailors on interned German liners, and to their friends in Hoboken, directing them to apply for passports. He sent others to the haunts of tramps on the lower East Side, to the Mills Hotel, and other gathering places of the down-and-outs, offering ten, fifteen or twenty dollars to men who would apply for and deliver passports. And he bought them! He spent much time at the Deutscher Verein, and at the Elks' Club in 43rd Street where he often met his agents to give instructions and receive passports. His bills were paid by Captain von Papen, as revealed by the attaché's checks and check stubs; on November 24, 1914, a payment in his favor of $500; on December 5, $500 more and then $300, the latter being for "journey money." Von Wedell's bills at the Deutscher Verein in November, 1914, came to $38.05, according to another counterfoil. The Captain in the meantime employed Frau von Wedell as courier, sending her with messages to Germany. On December 22, 1914, he paid the baroness, according to his check-book, $800.
Hans von Wedell and his wife. He was an important member
of the false-passport bureau and she a messenger
from von Papen to Germany
The passports secured by von Wedell, and by his successor, Carl Ruroede, Sr., a clerk in Oelrichs & Co., whom he engaged, were supplied by the dozens to officers whom the General Staff had ordered back to Berlin. Not only American passports, but Mexican, Swiss, Swedish, Norwegian and all South American varieties were seized eagerly by reservists bound for the front. Germans and Austrians, who had been captured in Russia, sent to Siberia as prisoners of war, escaped and making their way by caravan through China, had embarked on vessels bound for America. Arriving in New York they shipped for neutral European countries. Among them was an Austrian officer, an expert aeroplane observer whose feet were frozen and amputated in Siberia, but who escaped to this country. He was ordered home because of his extreme value in observation, and after his flight three-fourths of the way round the world, the British took him off a ship at Falmouth to spend the remainder of the war in a prison camp.
Captain von Papen used the bureau frequently for passports for spies whom he wished to send to England, France, Italy or Russia. Anton Kuepferle and von Breechow were two such agents. Both were captured in England with false passports in their possession. Both confessed, and the former killed himself in Brixton Jail.
Von Wedell and Ruroede grew reckless and boastful. Two hangers-on at the Mills Hotel called upon one of the writers of this volume one day and told him of von Wedell's practices, related how they had blackmailed him out of $50, gave his private telephone numbers and set forth his haunts. When this and other information reached the Department of Justice, Albert G. Adams, a clever agent, insinuated himself into Ruroede's confidence, and offered to secure passports for him for $50 each. Posing as a pro-German, he pried into the inner ring of the passport-buyers, and was informed by Ruroede just how the stock of passports needed replenishing.
Though in the early days of the war it had not been necessary for the applicant to give more than a general description of himself, the cry of "German spies!" in the Allied countries became so insistent that the Government added the requirement of a photograph of the bearer. The Germans, however, found it a simple matter to give a general description of a man's eyes, color of hair, and age to fit the person who was actually to use the document; then forwarded the picture of the applicant to be affixed. The applicant receiving the passport, would sell it at once. Even though the official seal was stamped on the photograph the Germans were not dismayed.
Adams rushed into Ruroede's office one day waving a sheaf of five passports issued to him by the Government. Adams was ostensibly proud of his work, Ruroede openly delighted.
"I knew I could get these passports easily," he boasted to Adams. "Why, if Lieutenant von Wedell had kept on here he never could have done this. He always was getting into a muddle."
"But how can you use these passports with these pictures on them?" asked the agent.
"Oh, that's easy," answered Ruroede. "Come in the back room. I'll show you." And Ruroede, before the observant eyes of the Department of Justice, patted one of the passports with a damp cloth, then with adhesive paste fastened a photograph of another man over the original bearing the imprint of the United States seal.
"We wet the photograph," said Ruroede, "and then we affix the picture of the man who is to use it. The new photograph also is dampened, but when it is fastened to the passport there still remains a sort of vacuum in spots between the new picture and the old because of ridges made by the seal. So we turn the passport upside down, place it on a soft ground—say a silk handkerchief—and then we take a paper-cutter with a dull point, and just trace the letters on the seal. The result is that the new photograph dries exactly as if it had been stamped by Uncle Sam. You can't tell the difference."
Adams never knew until long afterward that when he met Ruroede by appointment in Bowling Green, another German atop 11 Broadway was scrutinizing him through field-glasses, and examining every one who paused nearby, who might arouse suspicion of Adams' ingenuous part in the transaction.
Through Adams' efforts Ruroede and four Germans, one of them an officer in the German reserves, were arrested on January 2, on the Scandinavian-American liner Bergensfjord outward bound to Bergen, Norway. They had passports issued through Adams at Ruroede's request under the American names of Howard Paul Wright, Herbert S. Wilson, Peter Hanson and Stanley F. Martin. Their real names were Arthur Sachse, who worked in Pelham Heights, N.Y., and who was returning to become a lieutenant in the German Army; Walter Miller, August R. Meyer and Herman Wegener, who had come to New York from Chile, on their way to the Fatherland.
On the day when Ruroede, his assistant, and the four men for whom he obtained passports were arrested, Joseph A. Baker, assistant superintendent of the Federal agents in New York, took possession of the office at 11 Bridge Street. As he was sorting papers and making a general investigation, a German walked in bearing a card of introduction from von Papen, introducing himself as Wolfram von Knorr, a German officer who up to the outbreak of the war had been naval attaché in Tokio. The officer desired a passport. Baker, after a conversation in which von Knorr revealed von Papen's connection with the passport bureau, told him to return the next day. When the German read the next morning's newspapers he changed his lodging-place and his name.
Von Wedell himself was a passenger on the Bergensfjord, but when he was lined up with the other passengers, the Federal agents, who did not have a description of him, missed him and left the vessel. He was later (January 11) taken off the ship by the British, however, and transferred to another vessel for removal to a prison camp. She struck a German mine and sank, and Von Wedell is supposed to have drowned.
A few days before he sailed, he wrote a letter to von Bernstorff which fixes beyond question the responsibility for his false passport activities. The letter, dated from Nyack, where he was hiding, on December 26, 1914, follows:
"His Excellency The Imperial German Ambassador, Count von Bernstorff, Washington, D. C. Your Excellency: Allow me most obediently to put before you the following facts: It seems that an attempt has been made to produce the impression upon you that I prematurely abandoned my post, in New York. That is not true.
"I—My work was done. At my departure I left the service, well organized and worked out to its minutest details, in the hands of my successor, Mr. Carl Ruroede, picked out by myself, and, despite many warnings, still tarried for several days in New York in order to give him the necessary final directions and in order to hold in check the blackmailers thrown on my hands by the German officers until after the passage of my travelers through Gibraltar; in which I succeeded. Mr. Ruroede will testify to you that without my suitable preliminary labors, in which I left no conceivable means untried and in which I took not the slightest consideration of my personal weal or woe, it would be impossible for him, as well as for Mr. von Papen, to forward officers and 'aspirants' in any number whatever, to Europe. This merit I lay claim to and the occurrences of the last days have unfortunately compelled me, out of sheer self-respect, to emphasize this to your Excellency.
"II—The motives which induced me to leave New York and which, to my astonishment, were not communicated to you, are the following:
"1. I knew that the State Department had, for three weeks, withheld a passport application forged by me. Why?
"2. Ten days before my departure I learnt from a telegram sent me by Mr. von Papen, which stirred me up very much, and further through the omission of a cable, that Dr. Stark had fallen into the hands of the English. That gentleman's forged papers were liable to come back any day and could, owing chiefly to his lack of caution, easily be traced back to me.
"3. Officers and aspirants of the class which I had to forward over, namely the people, saddled me with a lot of criminals and blackmailers, whose eventual revelations were liable to bring about any day the explosion of the bomb.
"4. Mr. von Papen had repeatedly urgently ordered me to hide myself.
"5. Mr. Igel had told me I was taking the matter altogether too lightly and ought to—for God's sake—disappear.
"6. My counsel ... had advised me to hastily quit New York, inasmuch as a local detective agency was ordered to go after the passport forgeries.
"7. It had become clear to me that eventual arrest might yet injure the worthy undertaking and that my disappearance would probably put a stop to all investigation in this direction.
"How urgent it was for me to go away is shown by the fact that, two days after my departure, detectives, who had followed up my telephone calls, hunted up my wife's harmless and unsuspecting cousin in Brooklyn, and subjected her to an interrogatory.
"Mr. von Papen and Mr. Albert have told my wife that I forced myself forward to do this work. That is not true. When I, in Berlin, for the first time heard of this commission, I objected to going and represented to the gentleman that my entire livelihood which I had created for myself in America by six years of labor was at stake therein. I have no other means, and although Mr. Albert told my wife my practice was not worth talking about, it sufficed, nevertheless, to decently support myself and wife and to build my future on. I have finally, at the suasion of Count Wedell, undertaken it, ready to sacrifice my future and that of my wife. I have, in order to reach my goal, despite infinite difficulties, destroyed everything that I built up here for myself and my wife. I have perhaps sometimes been awkward, but always full of good will, and I now travel back to Germany with the consciousness of having done my duty as well as I understood it, and of having accomplished my task.
"With expressions of the most exquisite consideration, I am, your Excellency,
"Very respectfully,
"(Signed) Hans Adam von Wedell."
Ruroede was sentenced to three years in Atlanta prison. The four reservists, pleading guilty, protested they had taken the passports out of patriotism and were fined $200 each.
The arrest of Ruroede exposed the New York bureau, and made it necessary for the Germans to shift their base of operations, but it did not put an end to the fraudulent passport conspiracies. Captain Boy-Ed assumed the burden, and hired men to secure passports for him. One of these men was Richard Peter Stegler, a Prussian, 33 years old, who had served in the German Navy and afterward came to this country to start on his life work. Before the war he had applied for his first citizenship papers but his name had not been removed from the German naval reserve list.
"After the war started," Stegler said, "I received orders to return home. I was told that everything was in readiness for me. I was assigned to the naval station at Cuxhaven. My uniform, my cap, my boots and my locker would be all set aside for me, and I was told just where to go and what to do. But I could not get back at that time and I kept on with my work."
He became instead a member of the German secret service in New York. "There is not a ship that leaves the harbor, not a cargo that is loaded or unloaded, but that some member of this secret organization watches and reports every detail," he said. "All this information is transmitted in code to the German Government." In January, 1915, if not earlier, Stegler was sent by the German Consulate to Boy-Ed's office, where he received instructions to get a passport and make arrangements to go to England as a spy. Boy-Ed paid him $178, which the attaché admitted. Stegler immediately got in touch with Gustave Cook and Richard Madden, of Hoboken, and made use of Madden's birth certificate and citizenship in obtaining a passport from the American Government. Stegler paid $100 for the document. Stegler pleaded guilty to the charge and served 60 days in jail; Madden and Cook were convicted of conspiracy in connection with the project, and were sentenced to 10 months' imprisonment.
"I was told to make the voyage to England on the Lusitania," continued Stegler. "My instructions were as follows: 'Stop at Liverpool, examine the Mersey River, obtain the names, exact locations and all possible information concerning warships around Liverpool, ascertain the amount of munitions of war being unloaded on the Liverpool docks from the United States, ascertain their ultimate destination, and obtain a detailed list of all the ships in the harbor.'
"I was to make constant, though guarded inquiries, of the location of the dreadnought squadron which the Germans in New York understand was anchored somewhere near St. George's Channel. I was to appear as an American citizen soliciting trade. Captain Boy-Ed advised me to get letters of introduction to business firms. He made arrangements so that I received such letters and in one letter were enclosed some rare stamps which were to be a proof to certain persons in England that I was working for the Germans.
"After having studied at Liverpool I was to go to London and make an investigation of the Thames and its shipping. From there I was to proceed to Holland and work my way to the German border. While my passport did not include Germany, I was to give the captain of the nearest regiment a secret number which would indicate to him that I was a reservist on spy duty. By that means I was to hurry to Eisendal, head of the secret service in Berlin."
Stegler did not make the trip because his wife learned of the enterprise and begged him not to go. He too had run afoul of the vigilant Adams, and was placed under arrest in February, 1915, shortly after he decided to stay at home. In his possession were all the letters and telegrams exchanged between him and Boy-Ed, and one telegram from "Winkler," Captain Boy-Ed's servant.
Stegler also said that he had been told by Dr. Karl A. Fuehr, one of Dr. Albert's assistants, that Boy-Ed previously had sent to England Karl Hans Lody, the German who in November, 1915, was put to death as a spy in the Tower of London. Lody had been in the navy, had served on the Kaiser's yacht and then had come to this country and worked as an agent for the Hamburg-American Line, going from one city to another. Shortly after the war started Lody had gone on the mission of espionage which cost him his life.
Captain Boy-Ed authorized the commander of the German cruiser Geier, interned in Honolulu, to get his men back to Germany as best he could, by providing them with false passports. Still another of Boy-Ed's protégés was a naval reservist, August Meier, who shipped as a hand on the freighter Evelyn with a cargo of horses for Bermuda. On the voyage practically all of the horses were poisoned. Meier, however, was arrested by the Federal authorities on the charge of using the name of a dead man in order to get an American passport. In supplying passports and in handling spies, Captain Boy-Ed was more subtle than his colleague, von Papen. Nevertheless the Government officials succeeded in getting a clear outline of his activities. The exposure of Boy-Ed's connection with Stegler made it necessary for the German Government to change its system once more.
The Wilhelmstrasse had a bureau of its own. Reservists from America reported in Berlin for duty in Belgium and France, and their passports ceased to be useful, to them. The intelligence department commandeered the documents for agents whom they wished to send back to America. Tiny flakes of paper were torn from the body of the passport and from the seal, in order that counterfeiters might match them up. On January 14, 1915, an American named Reginald Rowland obtained a passport from the State Department for safe-conduct on a business trip to Germany. While it was being examined at the frontier every detail of the document was closely noted by the Germans. Some months later Captain Schnitzer, chief of the German secret service in Antwerp, had occasion to send a spy to England. He chose von Breechow, a German whom von Papen had forwarded from New York, and who had his first naturalization papers from the United States. To Breechow he gave a facsimile of Rowland's passport identical with the original in every superficial respect except that the spy's photograph had been substituted for the original, and the age of the bearer set down as 31—ten years older than Rowland.
Von Breechow passed the English officials at Rotterdam and at Tilbury. He soon fell under suspicion, however, and his passport was taken away. When the British learned that the real Rowland was at home in New Jersey, and in possession of his own passport, they sent for it, and compared the two. Breechow's revealed a false watermark, stamped on in clear grease, which made the paper translucent, but which was soluble in benzine. The stamp, ordinarily used to countersign both the photograph and the paper in a certain way, had been applied in a different position. With those exceptions, and the suspicious Teutonic twist to a "d" in the word "dark," the counterfeit was regular.
The Rosenthal case was the first to bring to light the false passport activities in Berlin. Rosenthal, posing as an agent for gas mantles, traveled in England successfully as a spy under an emergency passport issued by the American Embassy in Berlin. Captain Prieger, the chief of a section in the intelligence department of the General Staff, asked Rosenthal to make a second trip. The spy demurred, doubting whether his passport might be accepted a second time. The Captain turned to a safe, extracted a handful of false American passports, and said: "I can fit you out with a passport in any name you wish." Rosenthal decided to employ his own. He was arrested and imprisoned in England.
As the State Department increased its vigilance the evil began to expire. It was further stifled by concerted multiplication by the Allies of the examinations which the stranger had to undergo. But during its course it made personal communication between Berlin and lower Broadway almost casual.