LODY SENT TO DEATH
Stegler also said that he had been told that Boy-Ed previously had sent to England Karl Hans Lody, the German who in November, 1915, had been put to death as a spy in the Tower of London. Lody also 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 place to another.
Still another man who had a fraudulent German passport was a German naval reservist, who had shipped as a hand on the freighter Evelyn carrying horses to Bermuda. On one trip that he took, practically all of the horses were poisoned and were lost. He, however, was arrested by Federal authorities on the charge of using the name of a dead man in order to get an American passport.
In passport matters and the handling of spies, Captain Boy-Ed was more acute and more subtle than his colleague, von Papen. Nevertheless, the Government officials succeeded in getting a clear outline of his activities. It seems quite likely that after the arrest of Ruroede in December, 1914, when suspicion was directed to von Papen as the superintendent of the passport bureau, the management thereof was switched to Boy-Ed. The exposure of Boy-Ed’s connection with Stegler made it necessary for the German Government to change its system once more.
Boy-Ed, as has been shown, had supervision of naval affairs and matters pertaining to the sea. He issued information to the Press bearing on Germany’s conduct of her naval warfare. He made pleas for an embargo on the export of arms and ammunition. He received from Count von Bernstorff all information which the Ambassador obtained bearing on that question, and, on one occasion, the Count sent him a list of the countries which had forbidden the export of war supplies.
The conviction throughout the country has been steadily growing, since the exposure of von Papen’s methods, that Boy-Ed was not an innocent associate of the military attaché. The Federal authorities, in fact, have unearthed a large amount of evidence to show active participation by Boy-Ed in these enterprises, for to him they simply were part of the war of Germany on her enemies. Colonel Roosevelt, who has made a special study of Germany’s crimes on neutral territories, has expressed the sentiment of Americans in a speech at the Academy of Music, Brooklyn, on January 30, 1916, in these words:
“The German and Austrian Governments through their accredited representatives in the embassies here have carried on a campaign of bomb and torch against our industries. The action our government should have taken in view of this campaign was not action against Dumba, von Papen and Boy-Ed, but the holding of the German and Austrian Governments themselves responsible for every munition plant that was blown up or damaged.”
The roll of Boy-Ed’s associates, as indicating his knowledge of plots of violence, is illuminating. He employed Paul Koenig for a series of secret activities. He was said to have known Captain Eno Bode, dock superintendent of the Hamburg-American Steamship Line in Hoboken, and Captain Otto Wolpert, another dock superintendent, both of whom, it is charged, were involved in a bond conspiracy.
Boy-Ed and von Papen, in many secret conferences on board the Vaterland in Hoboken, where they were sure of no eavesdroppers, developed details of their war on America and the campaign of violence on land and on sea to stop the carrying of munitions of war to England, France and Russia. Von Papen superintended the campaigns on land and projected his work upon the seas. The moment, however, the schemes, as papers found in von Igel’s possession prove, had anything to do with the sea, he consulted Boy-Ed.