A GERMAN ATTACHÉ REMINDS BERNSTORFF OF WEDELL
This telegram is from Haniel von Haimhausen, the counsellor of the German Embassy in Washington, and was sent in response to an inquiry from Bernstorff for the name of the man who had offered to act as a messenger to Germany for him. The message reads:
Count Bernstorff, care Ritz Carlton. Hans Adam von Wedell attorney fifteen William Street, New York he has been introduced by consul Hossenfelder, Haniel.
But he was not content with these foreign passports. In the case of a few exceptionally valuable German officers he wished to have credentials that would be above all suspicion. Consequently, he set about to gather a few American passports. Here his troubles began, and here he added the gravest burden to his already great load of culpabilities. For Von Wedell was an American citizen, and proud of it. But he was prouder still of his German origin and his high German connections, and in his eagerness to serve them he threw overboard his loyalty to the land of his adoption.
Von Wedell applied to a friend of his, a certain Tammany lawyer of pro-German sympathies, who had supplied him with a room belonging to a well-known fraternal organization as a safe base from which to handle his work in passports. What he wanted was an agent who was an American and who had political acquaintanceship that would enable him to work with less suspicion and with wider organization in gathering American passports. Through the lawyer he came in contact with an American, who for the purposes of this story may be called Mr. Carrots, because that is not his name but is remotely like it. Carrots seemed willing to go into the enterprise and at a meeting in Von Wedell’s room Von Wedell carefully unfolded the scheme, taking papers from a steel cabinet in the corner to show a further reason why the American passports he already had would soon be useless. This reason was that the Government was about to issue an order requiring that a photograph of the bearer should be affixed to the passport and that on this photograph should appear half of the embossing raised by the impression of the seal of the Department of State. He agreed to pay Carrots $20 apiece for all genuine passports he would supply to him. Carrots accepted his proposal and departed.
Instead of going out to buy passports, he went at once to the Surveyor of the Port of New York, Mr. Thomas E. Rush, and told him what Wedell was doing. Mr. Rush promptly got in touch with his chief in the Treasury Department at Washington, who referred the matter to the State Department, and they, in turn, to the Department of Justice. The result was that Carrots went back to Wedell about a week later and told him he would not be able to go on with the work but would supply someone to take his place. This was satisfactory to Wedell.
In the meantime, Wedell had introduced Carrots to a fellow-conspirator, Carl Ruroede, a clerk in the ship forwarding department of Oelrichs & Company—a man of little position, but fired by the war with the ambition to make a name in German circles that would put him in a position to succeed Oelrichs & Company as the general agent of the North German Lloyd in New York.
About this time Wedell lost his nerve. He was a lawyer and realized some of the possible consequences of certain of his acts. He had had occasion to forge names to two passports; and also he found out that he had reasons to suspect that he was under surveillance. These reasons were very good: he had arranged for the transportation to Italy of a German named Doctor Stark, using the passport of a friend of his in the newspaper business named Charles Raoul Chatillon. Wedell got wind of the fact that Stark had been taken off the steamer Duca de Aosta at Gibraltar, and was being detained while the British looked up his credentials.
Wedell by this time was in a most unhappy plight. Bernstorff and Von Papen had no use for him because he had been bragging about the great impression he was going to make upon the Foreign Office in Berlin by his work. If any impressions were to be made upon the Foreign Office in Berlin by anybody in America, Bernstorff and Von Papen wanted to make them. Wedell was so dangerously under suspicion that Von Papen, Von Igel, and his Tammany lawyer friend had all warned him he had better get out of the country. Wedell took their advice and fled to Cuba.