Dr. Hugo Schweitzer was chosen to go with him and collaborate. He, as the head of the Bayer Chemical Company—a German concern that practically monopolized the trade in synthetic drugs in the United States—was to report on, to model, or undermine our development of industrial chemistry. Dr. Scheele was to report on and develop the plan and chemistry of warfare, explosives, incendiaries, poison gas, and the products Germany should import and accumulate to make her sure and independent on the day she should strike the world. Did these young men faithfully accomplish their tasks?
Dye making was almost an unknown art in America when the war broke out; chlorine gas was a laboratory curiosity; potash was a German salt—we had been led to believe our millions of tons of the mineral were insoluble. Where necessary, those of our chemists who had learned the secrets were retained and paid. The list of our chemical houses reads like the telephone directory of Unter den Linden, and the Alien Property Custodian has since spent many nights over their affairs.
While the German plenipotentiaries were busy at The Hague agreeing to the elimination of poison gas and incendiaries from warfare, their chemists in the United States, paid regularly but meagerly through the Embassy at Washington, exchanged views in writing and by cable with the chemists of the Fatherland over the most fatal methods for the use of the gas which had just been developed for the purpose.
Mustard gas was used against the Allies in 1917, a new and atrocious device, “only discovered and recently used by the Germans because of the brutality of their enemies.” A few formulæ for this product were in Dr. Scheele’s laboratory in New York about five years before the war, and tactics of the uses discussed in the trips which he made home every two years “to keep up to date.”
Two methods of stifling American production have not yet been mentioned. The first was this: When a man began to make a reputation as a chemist in an American-owned concern, he was hired away to work for a German-owned factory. Salary was no consideration; they simply bid the price required to get him. The second method was: when an American chemist invented a new product or a new process, and patented it, it was bought from him before it could be commercially developed. Again price was no consideration. The only instructions were: “Pay as little as you can, but get it.”
The operation of this system was the duty of Dr. Scheele and Dr. Schweitzer. Reporting to them was at least one loyal German chemist in every chemical factory in the United States; dozens of them in the larger ones. At their disposal were the resources of the Imperial German Government. These, too, were made accessible through Dr. Heinrich Albert in German-American banking and brokerage concerns, chiefly G. Amsinck & Company, the Trans-Atlantic Trust Company, and Knauth, Nochode & Kuhne, of New York, every one of them in reality a local American agency of one or another of the imperially controlled banks of Germany and Austria—such as the Reichsbank, the Disconto Gesellschaft, or the Deutsche Bank.
The chief of these American branches was G. Amsinck & Company, operating as commission merchants and private bankers. The head of this concern was Adolf Pavenstedt, an accomplished man of the world, a shrewd banker, and under the iron discipline of the Kaiser’s military organization. Pavenstedt lived at the German Club in Central Park South, in New York, took his vacations in Cuba in the winter and the Berkshires in the summer, was received in the best society in New York, passed easily in Wall Street as a man of large personal fortune and of sound business judgment—altogether a characteristic German hypocrite and government agent acting under Dr. Albert and Bernstorff. He was a paymaster of Germany’s nation-wide organization to control our industrial life, to spy out our military plans, and to keep us powerless against the day when Prussia should be ready to sweep the world. He was also the financial go-between in the Bolo Pasha case. Fortunately, he has now long been a resident of an Army internment camp.
Two years ago the Government indicted Dr. Scheele for his part in the incendiary bomb plot. The details of this fiendish device will be given later in the story. Dr. Scheele was forewarned of probable detection on the 31st of March, 1916, by a special-delivery letter telling him to see Wolf von Igel immediately at 60 Wall Street in New York. Von Igel told him to start for Cuba by the next train. Dr. Scheele feared that such a precipitate flight would expose him to certain arrest. Hence, he violated his instruction and went south to Jacksonville by easy stages. There he called upon one Sperber, the editor of the Florida Deutsche Staatszeitung, who warned him not to sail from Key West, as that port was being watched both by our officers and by the British cruisers outside the three-mile limit. Sperber gave Dr. Scheele letters of introduction and credentials under the name of W. T. Rheinfelder, to act as a correspondent for his paper. He supplied him also with fake calling cards and other forged documents, establishing him in his rôle. Still fearing to leave for Cuba, he waited.