FIGHTING
GERMANY’S SPIES
[CHAPTER I]
The Inside Story of the Passport Frauds
and
The First Glimpse of Werner Horn
When Carl Ruroede, the “genius” of the German passport frauds, came suddenly to earth in the hands of agents of the Department of Justice and unbosomed himself to the United States Assistant District Attorney in New York, he said sadly:
“I thought I was going to get an Iron Cross; but what they ought to do is to pin a little tin stove on me.”
The cold, strong hand of American justice wrung that very human cry from Ruroede, who was the central figure (though far from the most sinister or the most powerful) in this earliest drama of Germany’s bad faith with neutral America—a drama that dealt in forgery, blackmail, and lies that revealed in action the motives of greed and jealousy and ambition, and that ended with three diplomats disgraced, one plotter in the penitentiary, and another sent to a watery grave in the Atlantic by a torpedo from a U-boat of the very country he had tried to serve. This is the story:
Twenty-five days after the Kaiser touched the button which publicly notified the world that Germany at last had decided that “The Day” had come—to be exact, on August 25, 1914—Ambassador Bernstorff wrote a letter effusively addressed to “My very honoured Mr. Von Wedell.” (Ruroede had not yet appeared on the scene.) The letter itself was more restrained than the address, but in it Bernstorff condescended to accept tentatively an offer of Wedell’s to make a nameless voyage. The voyage was soon made, for on September 24th Wedell left Rotterdam, bearing a letter from the German Consul-General there, asking all German authorities to speed him on his way to Berlin, because he was bearing dispatches to the Foreign Office. Arrived in Berlin, Wedell executed his commission and then called upon his uncle, Count Botho von Wedell, a high functionary of the Foreign Office. He was aflame with a great idea, which he unfolded to his uncle. The idea was approved, and right after the elections in November he was back in New York to put it into execution, incidentally bearing with him some letters handed him by order of Mr. Ballin, head of the Hamburg-American Steamship Company, and another letter “for a young lady who goes to America in the interest of Germany.” If unhappy Wedell had let this be his last voyage—but that belongs later in the story.
Wedell’s scheme was this: He learned in Berlin that Germany had at home all the common soldiers she expected to need, but that more officers were wanted. He was told that Germany cared not at all whether the 100,000 reservists in America got home or not, but that she cared very much indeed to get the 800 or 1,000 officers in North and South America back to the Fatherland. Nothing but the ocean and the British fleet stood in their way. The ocean might be overcome. But the British fleet——? Wedell proposed the answer: He would buy passports from longshoremen in New York—careless Swedes or Swiss or Spaniards to whom $20 was of infinitely more concern than a mere lie—and send the officers to Europe, armed with these documents, as neutrals travelling on business. Once in Norway or Spain or Italy, to get on into Germany would be easy.
For a few weeks Wedell got along famously. He bought passports and papers showing nativity from Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and Swiss longshoremen and sailors. Meantime, he got in touch with German reserve officers and passed them on to Europe on these passports.