In the preceding chapter, reference was made to some of these long-term spies, as they may be called—men who were sent out on their iniquitous missions even in time of peace. The best known of these men is Scheele, who, when apprehended, was trying to get to Europe. Now he is hugging the deputy U. S. marshal in whose custody he is, for fear some German will kill him for turning state’s evidence and revealing the whole secret German spy system in the United States. This man is the most interesting of all the known spies.
In brief, Scheele came over to this country quietly, a man quite unknown, just twenty-five years ago. For twenty-one years, up to the outbreak of the war, he received regularly $125 a month as his “honorarium” from the German Government. He was one of the fixed location spies—one of very many. He went into business, opening a drug store in a New York suburb, and he prospered there. He was not alone. There were many of his people about. He met more than one prominent German living in New York City—most of whom now live in Fort Oglethorpe. In these influential circles, in continuous close touch with Berlin, supplied all the time with money from Berlin, Scheele was appraised at his true worth as a possible agent of destruction.
Came to him, therefore, one day, a captain in the service of the North German Lloyd Steamship Company. This man carried a card. From whom? No less than von Papen, a man accepted as bearing the credentials of a foreign government, entitling him to courtesy in our own country—von Papen, one of the master plotters located on this side of the sea. Scheele was asked to invent some sort of infernal machine by which ships could be set on fire after they had left port and were on the high seas. That was all. If innocent persons died, what matter? It must be a secret sort of thing, this machine, which could be distributed without creating a suspicion. It must be efficient. It must be small. It must work without much mechanism. And it must be deadly sure. This was the sort of warfare—allied to bestiality in France and Belgium, and red ruthlessness on the high seas—that was to make Germany loved and revered in the whole world, as now, amazingly enough, she asks us to be—we, her American brothers “with whom she has no quarrel.”
Very well, the order was accepted by Scheele. It was simple for this man, a mechanical and chemical genius. Of course, he needed some materials. Where should he get them except among fellow Germans? And were not the entire interned crew and corps of officers of the interned German steamships, which were lying in the Hudson, available for his purposes? Scheele got all the lead and tin and like material he needed there. The Scheele cigar bomb, as it came to be called, was only three or four inches long and an inch or two in diameter. Inside of it was a thin partition made of tin. In a cavity at one end was placed a certain chemical; in the other end, divided from it for the time being by a partition sheet of tin, was a strong corrosive acid. When the ends were sealed the work was done.
It was relatively simple to put two or three of these in a pocket and casually go aboard a ship, or through the influence of simple and kindly German neighbor people, have someone else go aboard the ship and drop such a bomb into a coal bunker; or better, among the cargo. The bomb needed absolutely no attention on the part of anyone. Scheele, a competent, thorough, painstaking German scientist of Germany’s highest and best type, left nothing to chance. He experimented from time to time, and verified his experiments. He knew how thick to make that partition of tin. He could make it of just such a thickness that the acid could eat through it in two or three or four days, so that if a certain steamship carried that bomb on the high seas for two or three or four days, in the course of time the acid would eat through the tin. Then, in the combination of the chemicals, heat would be generated and a fire was absolutely certain.
These things sound like the invention of a diseased mind—like the romance of some excited intellect concerning itself with unreal and impossible events belonging in another age—another world than ours. But they are true, actually true. Scheele, backed by these influential Germans in New York, backed by the diplomatic representatives of the German Government itself—we might as well say by all Germans also—actually did these things in this country.
Not one, but many ships broke into flames in mid-Atlantic. Sometimes the damage was not complete, but quite frequently the loss of a merchant ship was absolute. We cannot tell how many millions of dollars of the world’s property were lost in this way through the activities of this one perverted mind. Our censorship took care of some of that. Those losses of foodstuffs, of fuel, of clothing, had to be paid for by someone. They were subtracted from the world’s useful supplies. Who paid for them? You and I and all the taxpayers of America paid for the losses. One does not know how much Scheele himself got out of it—not very much; for, two months before this war was “forced” on Germany, Scheele was ordered to sell his drug store, and did so—though he complained he was doing very well in it. His salary is not known to have been raised.
One of the astonishing and disgusting developments of this war had been the knowledge gained of the unspeakable depravity and degeneracy of the German mind. There are in the Government records at Washington countless cases of German officers who, over their own signatures, have written things so foul and filthy, so low, lewd and bestial, that no pen on earth ever would rewrite them save one of their own sort. The Huns were not clean-minded fighting men, but in large percent animal-like, low, cruel, cunning, unscrupulous, unchivalrous even in their most arrogant ranks. This explains out of hand the atrocities in Belgium and France and shows what atrocities were waiting for America had this war been won by Germany.
Germany fell because she was rotten in heart and in soul. That was why she fought foul—because she was foul, foul to the core. It was an amazing and an abhorrent “kultur,” this which she offered to the world. It is no wonder that her ways of warfare were cruel, merciless, unchivalrous; no wonder that she crucified men and tortured women and children until there is no human way ever of squaring the account with her. She no longer belongs on the clear avenues of the world, and the one epitaph she has earned is the one word, “Unclean!” History has not usually recorded such statements. No. And history has not usually been in the way of discovering such truths.
It was this Dr. Scheele, an upper class German who lived here twenty-five years as a spy, who, under German Government order, started this friendly plan against America. You cannot call that military genius. You cannot call such a man a soldier. His is simply an instance of perverted intellect. It is not even to be dignified by the term malicious. It is unmoral, base, intellectually obscene, as Thierichens was emotionally obscene.