Fighting Germany's Spies

by French Strother

During the night of March 9–10, 1915, this gallant cruiser of the Kaiserliche Marine, slipped into the harbour at Norfolk, having run the British blockade of cruisers outside the three-mile limit, ending a career of six months as a commerce raider, recalling the feats of the Alabama in the Civil War. The Eitel Friedrich was soon interned for the period of the war and her officers and crew put under formal arrest. Even the British, whose fleet had been outwitted, gave their tribute of praise to the men who had taken their fair chance and had got away. Captain Max Thierichens and his crew became objects of admiration to the world. They were showered with felicitations, most of all, as was natural enough, from Germans and German-Americans.

That is the bright side of the picture—and no one, even now, would care to dim its lustre.

But even at his best the German of the ruling class seems tainted with the ineradicable nature of the beast. The world has long accepted the Latin affinity of Mars and Venus—perhaps too complacently, though not without reason—so it would not have been surprised if the gallant Thierichens had not measured up to the standards of a Galahad. Nevertheless, it had a right to expect that he would not descend to the level of a Caliban; and Thierichens fell below even that low standard.

Among the great quantities of letters of congratulation which Captain Thierichens received were many from German-American women. They were stirred by the brilliancy of his exploit: it was a ray of light in the gloom that had fallen on the Teuton peoples after the Battle of the Marne, when the rosy vision of quick victory had turned to the gray fog of a long, defensive war. These letters breathed the passionate loyalty of the German spirit to the Fatherland. To these women, Thierichens was the embodiment of the martial spirit of their race—the spirit of the sons they saw themselves in imagination sending forth to war. Some phrases from their letters strike the key:

It is a pleasure for us to help our German brothers, but I also understand that you, my dear brother, are waiting to come out from your predicament. How grand it is that you are receiving letters from the Fatherland. We don’t hear anything. Can’t write anything, as the letters are not being delivered. So far good news. It is wonderful. My heart is jumping with joy. I look with confidence in the future. I have to please so many; have so many times to defend my Germany, but I have an unlimited confidence in God and in the truth.

Again: Hold your head high and do not forget: “starlight itself is in the night and God does not forsake his own.”

Their attitude was one of high patriotism and maternal solicitude. They sent him books and delicacies, scraps of news from Germany, and in every way sought to comfort and inspirit their hero.

Thierichens was indifferent to the lofty purpose of these letters. His mind was depraved by the social custom of military Germany by which men of the officer class are in youth taught to consider themselves above the moral law. He was quite aware of the kinship of all emotions, and he promptly undertook to change the direction of these currents of passion into a channel more pleasing to his tastes. It was not long until he had narrowed his correspondence chiefly to three women and of these more particularly to two. Of these latter one was a German servant girl of rather better than average understanding, and the other a kindergarten teacher in the Middle West, one twenty-five and the other forty-five years of age. Their correspondence in both cases started on an exalted plane. It ended in depravity unprintable. Only a reading of the complete series of Thierichens’s letters to these women could give a full understanding of the heartlessness, the baseness, and the ingenuity with which this man, always playing upon their patriotic fervour, transmuted their finer feelings into the most degrading travesty of romantic love. He and the kindergarten teacher never met. But by the time their correspondence came under Government censorship it had become a blend of exalted patriotism and of passion perverted to the obscenities pictured on the walls of ruined Pompeii.