It was alleged that the activities of Wessells had to do with “ways and means of secretly placing explosives, or securing other persons secretly to place explosives, on wharves located in the United States, on ships and vessels in ports of the United States, and plying between ports of the United States and other countries; to blow up, injure, and destroy the same, and cause fires thereon, and thereby hinder and hamper the prosecution of the war by the United States against Germany.”
The final overt act charged was that in July, 1917, Wessells requested “information as to ways and means of importing toy blocks from Switzerland,” his purpose being to find “ways and means of secretly and clandestinely introducing into the United States explosives and ingredients of explosives concealed in toy blocks.”
Had any of these toy blocks come into the hands of innocent children, what matter to a mind which would regard the Lusitania sinking as justifiable war? What difference would it make to a man hiding T. N. T. in a child’s toys whether he killed babies in Flanders or on the high seas or in American homes? Such men are unmoral. One would call treason one of their lesser crimes.
There was in New York City a certain German whom we will call von S——. He was an inventor of a machine called an aeromobile, which, however, he said he would not sell to any government but that of Germany. He was arrested by agents of the Department of Justice, charged with uttering disloyal, scurrilous and profane remarks against the Government and military forces of the United States. He is a German-born citizen of the United States. Enter now another citizen of the United States who spoke as good German as von S—— did and who posed as “an official representative of the German Imperial Government in the United States.” This latter gentleman said he wanted to buy the S—— invention for the Fatherland. S—— turned himself inside out, saying among other things: “Everything is fair in war—gas, poison, the bomb, the knife—we must stop at nothing. Germany must triumph over her enemies. I would not hesitate to destroy a whole city for the good of the German cause.” After S—— had been allowed to talk sufficiently, his new friend, who proved to be an A. P. L. operative in disguise, caused his arrest by an agent in the Military Intelligence Division. S—— was struck speechless when he found he had been trapped. He was held in ten thousand dollars bail at the examination and committed to the Tombs in default of surety. Would he have been admitted to any bail at all in Germany in similar circumstances?
Out in a great city on Puget Sound, the Minute Men Division of the American Protective League, after an exhaustive investigation covering several months, arrested a certain man whom we will call Johnson. He was charged with conspiracy to doctor steel and iron in the Seattle ship-yards with a powerful chemical, intending to commit wholesale murder by wrecking troop trains. He was a pattern-maker employed in a ship-building plant when the Federal officials arrested him as an alleged German spy. At the time of his arrest, he had in his pocket a bottle containing a violent explosive. His scheme was to apply a strong acid to steel and iron in the shipyards, which would destroy these metals by eating them away. He planned to place acid on iron about to be melted, so that the resulting steel products would be valueless and the ship-building program delayed. He was charged with undertaking to damage the more delicate bearings of the ships, so that they would be useless after putting out to sea. It was part of his scheme, as developed by the operatives, to place acids in the journal boxes of cars, with the intent of destroying them while they were under way. The A. P. L. operatives claimed to be conspirators with him. When one of them pointed out that such a wreck would cost a large amount of life, the accused is said to have replied: “Well, what’s the odds how we kill them, and what’s the difference whether we kill them over here or over there?” That man, like many now behind bars, had no moral sense at all.
Not all of these agents of Germany were men of the mental shrewdness of their great spy leaders. Johnson picked out a fellow worker and felt him out for a long period of time as to whether he would be safe as a confidant. This particular fellow happened to look like a German, and to talk like one. He also happened to be an A. P. L. operative. The accused, who is charged under the Espionage Act, does not yet know the identity of the man who informed against him.
“There was one old German in my district,” says the report of a New York state chief, “who had spent thirty years in our region, surveying. He had been an officer in the Franco-German war, and was a recognized expert in real estate values, appraisals, etc. When we went into the war, he made public a little statement telling of his German origin and of his American citizenship. He came under the suspicion of some, and I looked into the matter. One of his men remembered hearing the German say, twenty years ago, when under the influence of liquor, that he had been a German spy in the war with France; he also remembered the German’s story of a horse he had used, which he had trained to run, trot or walk at certain definite paces. By keeping track of the different gaits, as he jogged along in his buggy over France, he would measure certain localities and compute distances—information which proved valuable later. It was need of such information that made Germany send out secret surveying forces when she was preparing to attack France. We put this man under surveillance but could get nothing on him except that he tried to learn when transports sailed. Apparently he had done all his work before the war began, just as he had in France before the other war.”
An ingenious and dastardly instance of spy work and sabotage was recently uncovered in Detroit. Anton G——, a skilled workman employed in a factory making airplane fuel tanks, deliberately planned an aviation accident. He took a tank which had been condemned because the bottom sump casting had been riveted into the wrong position, cut the rivets, properly adjusted the casting and soldered it in place, replacing the cut rivets so that the tank appeared O. K. for use. It passed the plant’s inspection, and was installed in a plane before its dangerous character was detected. G—— has given up the making of airplane tanks for the duration of the war—and longer.
Of all the individual spies located in America, one of the most noted and most able was that Dr. Scheele elsewhere mentioned as a Brooklyn druggist. Dr. Scheele was taken in Cuba by the United States Government after he had fled the country just ahead of the hounds. This accomplished student and practitioner of villainy was one of the finest chemists Germany ever produced—a descendant of a family of chemists. He was a major in the German army. That this man had intellect is beyond any question—he had more than that; he had genius. He was one of the finest examples of the great development in Germany of commercial chemistry. Men such as he have rendered services valuable beyond any price in almost all ranks of commerce, and Germany’s military orders were to get them at any price, all of them, for German-controlled concerns. Such men have helped give Germany her tremendous and powerful place in the commerce of the world. This unique genius in research, this ability to divine elemental secrets, allied with the hard working, abstemious, thrifty, free-breeding traits of the German people, made that nation very strong in her position among the world forces.
But here again comes in the proof of the assertion made in regard to the debased activities of the German nature, not only in its emotional manifestations but in its intellectual processes at well. Perhaps the one thought which will awaken the bitterest resentment and the most long-lived suspicion in the American mind against the German citizen is the revelation of the fact that German spies lived among us so long as accepted citizens, made their business successes here, profited by our free-handed generosity, while all the time they were agents of Germany and traitors to the United States.