The Perverted German Mind—Stories of Brutal Indifference to Innocent Victims—Treason, Treachery, and Unmorality Hand in Hand—The Authentic Story of Dr. Scheele—Twenty-one Years a German Spy in America—The “Honor of a German Officer.”
Comment has been made elsewhere in these pages on the curiously perverted nature of the German intellect. It would not be truthful to call all Germans unintellectual or unscientific, for the reverse of this is in part true. But continually in its most elaborate workings, the German mind displays reversions to grossness, coarseness, and bestiality. Perversions and atrocities seem natural to their soldiers. These restrictions apply often to men in high authority. The German officer was perhaps even more a brute than the German private.
Take the case of the man Thierichens, Captain of the Prinz Eitel Friedrich, which was interned at Norfolk in March, 1915, after a successful career of six months as a commerce raider. For a long time Captain Thierichens was hailed in this country as a sort of naval hero; he received the admiration not only of men but of women. It was only after a considerable career in adulation that the tide of public estimation turned in regard to this man. His private correspondence was investigated, and it was found that he was carrying on correspondence with women in this country which showed a depth of human depravity on his part which cannot be understood and may not be described.
This phase of German mentality was manifested also in the highest diplomatic representatives that that country sent abroad. These men had no sense of honor or morality, but curiously enough, they were not aware of their own lack. They performed the most pernicious acts of treason, and yet were never conscious they were committing any crime. Von Bernstorff, Dumba, von Papen, Boy-Ed, Bolo Pacha, Rintelen and Dr. Scheele—such a record of treachery never has been known in all the history of diplomacy; such a wholly devilish ingenuity, such an intellectual finesse in conspiracy, such a delicate exactness and such a crude brutality in destruction, never have been manifested on the part of any other nation in the world. The flower of centuries of civilization in Germany’s case had been merely a baneful, noisome bloom, and not the sweet product of an actual culture. The efflorescence of the German heart is the fungus of decay. Feed them? Why should we feed them? Trust them? Why should we trust them? Spare them? Why should we spare them? Receive them? Why should we receive them? Believe them? Why should we ever believe them?
A fine band of conspirators was uncovered by investigations of attempted atrocities against our eastern shipping. There was a man named Robert Fay who had invented a ship bomb, and who had all the German money he needed back of him. His machine was a sort of tank which he fastened to the rudder post just below the water line of a ship which was being loaded and which stood high in the water. As the vessel was loaded, it would submerge the tank and leave everything out of sight under water. Fay had worked out one of the most ingenious devices which any of the investigating Government engineers had ever seen.
His scheme, as Mr. Strothers describes it in his book, “Fighting Germany’s Spies,” was to go under the stern of an ocean steamer in a small boat and to affix to the rudder post this little tank. Of course every reader will know that in steering a ship the rudder turns first this way, then that. Fay had a rod so adjusted that every time the rudder moved it turned a beveled wheel within the bomb just one notch. A certain number of revolutions of that wheel—which of course would be very slow and gradual—would turn the next wheel of the clock one notch. This would gear into the wheel next beyond it. The last wheel would slowly unscrew a threaded cap at the head of a bolt which had, pressing upon its top, a strong spring. When the cap was loose the bolt would drop and it would act like a firing pin in a rifle, its point striking upon the cap of a rifle cartridge which was adjusted just above a small charge of chloride of potash. Below the potash there was a charge of dynamite, and below that again a charge of the tremendous explosive trinitrotoluol—the explosive known as “T. N. T.”
Suppose the device adjusted to the rudder of a steamship on some dark night in New York harbor. The cargo is loaded on the ship; inch by inch the ship sinks down, and this contrivance, spiked on the rudder post, is lost to sight. The ship steams out to sea. Every time she swings to change her course, every time the rudder is adjusted gently, a notch in the leisurely clock trained below her stern slips with a little, unheard click. Far out at sea—for what reason no one can tell—without any warning, the whole stern of the ship heaves up in the air. The water rushes in; the boilers explode. The ship, her cargo, her crew, her passengers, are gone.
Well, it cost but little. A few dollars would make such a bomb. Von Papen looked it over. He did not object to the cost; indeed, Germany did not scruple to spend any sum of money of the millions she sent to America, provided it would produce results. But von Papen was not sure of this; he did not think much of it. He declined it. As to the immorality of it, the frightfulness of it—that never came into his mind at all.
One recalls reading the other day that Great Britain had shot only fourteen spies. We did not shoot one in America.
The Federal grand jury in New York on December 6, 1918, returned indictments charging treason against two men who already were in the Tombs awaiting trial on an earlier charge of conspiracy. This was the first actual treason trial since we entered the war. The men were Paul Fricke of Mt. Vernon and Hermann Wessells, an Imperial German Government spy, former officer of the German navy, then domiciled in America. Their co-defendants in the conspiracy trial were Jeremiah A. O’Leary, the Sinn Fein agitator; John T. Ryan, a Buffalo lawyer; Mme. Victorica, also an alleged German spy; Willard J. Robinson, an American, and the late Dr. Hugo Schweitzer, one of the best known German business men in New York.