My Four Years in Germany

by James W. Gerard

On September fourth the Chancellor gave me a statement to give to the reporters in which he attacked England, claiming that England did not desire the friendship of Germany but was moved by commercial jealousy and a desire to crush her; that the efforts made for peace had failed because Russia, under all circumstances, was resolved upon war; and that Germany had entered Belgium in order to forestall the planned French advance. He also claimed that England, regardless of consequences to the white race, had excited Japan to a pillaging expedition, and claimed that Belgian girls and women had gouged out the eyes of the wounded; that officers had been invited to dinner and shot across the table; and Belgian women had cut the throats of soldiers quartered in their houses while they were asleep. The Chancellor concluded by saying, in this statement, that everyone knows that the German people is not capable of unnecessary cruelty or of any brutality.

We were fully occupied with taking care of the English prisoners and interests, the Americans, and negotiations relating to commercial questions, and to getting goods required in the United States out of Germany, when, on October seventh, a most unpleasant incident, and one which for some time caused the members of our Embassy to feel rather bitterly toward the German Foreign Office, took place.

A great number of British civilians, men and women, were stranded in Berlin. To many of these were paid sums of money in the form of small allowances on behalf of the British Government. In order to facilitate this work, we placed the clerks employed in this distribution in the building formerly occupied by the British Consul in Berlin. Of course, the great crowds of Americans resorting to our Embassy, when combined with the crowds of British, made it almost impossible even to enter the Embassy, and establishment of this outlying relief station materially helped this situation. I occupied it, and employed English men and English women in this relief work by the express permission of the Imperial Foreign Office, which I thought it wise to obtain in view of the fact that the Germans seemed daily to become more irritable and suspicious, especially after the Battle of the Marne.

On the night of October second, our Second Secretary, Harvey, went to this relief headquarters at about twelve o'clock at night, and was witness to a raid made by the Berlin police on this establishment of ours. The men and women working were arrested, and all books and papers which the police could get at were seized by them. The next morning I went around to the place and on talking with the criminal detectives in charge, was told by them that they had made the raid by the orders of the Foreign Office. When I spoke to the Foreign Office about this, they denied that they had given directions for the raid and made a sort of half apology. The raid was all the more unjustified because only the day before I had had a conversation with the Adjutant of the Berlin Kommandantur and told him that, although I had permission from the Foreign Office, I thought it would be better to dismiss the English employed and employ only Americans or Germans; and I sent round to my friend, Herr von Gwinner, head of the Deutsche Bank, and asked him to recommend some German accountants to me.

The Kommandantur is the direct office of military control. When the Adjutant heard of the raid he was almost as indignant as I was, and on the tenth of October informed me that he had learned that the raid had been made on the joint orders of the Foreign Office and von Tirpitz's department.

The books and papers of an Embassy, including those relating to the affairs of foreign nations temporarily in the Embassy's care, are universally recognised in international law as not, subject to seizure, nor did the fact that I was carrying on this work outside the actual Embassy building have any bearing on this point so long as the building was directly under my control and, especially, as the only work carried on was work properly in my hands in my official capacity. The Foreign Office saw that they had made a mistake, but at Zimmermann's earnest request I agreed, as it were, to forget the incident. Later on, this precedent might have been used by our government had they desired to press the matter of the seizure of von Igel's papers. Von Igel, it will be remembered, was carrying on business of a private nature in a private office hired by him. Nevertheless, as he had been employed in some capacity in the German Embassy at Washington, Count von Bernstorff claimed immunity from seizure for the papers found in that office.

On August sixteenth the Kaiser left Berlin for the front. I wrote to his master of the household, saying that I should like an opportunity to be at the railway station to say good-bye to the Emperor, but was put off on various excuses. Thereafter the Emperor practically abandoned Berlin and lived either in Silesia, at Pless, or at some place near the Western front.

At first, following the precedent of the war of 1870, the more important members of the government followed the Kaiser to the front, even the Chancellor and the Minister of Foreign Affairs abandoning their offices in Berlin. Not long afterwards, when it was apparent that the war must be carried on on several fronts and that it was not going to be the matter of a few weeks which the Germans had first supposed, these officials returned to their offices in Berlin. In the meantime, however, much confusion had been caused by this rather ridiculous effort to follow the customs of the war of 1870.

When von Jagow, Minister of Foreign Affairs, was absent at the Great General Headquarters, the diplomats remaining behind conducted their negotiations with Zimmermann, who in turn had to transmit everything to the great general headquarters.

In August, there were apparently rumours afloat in countries outside of Germany that prominent Socialists at the outbreak of the war had been shot. The State Department cabled me to find out whether there was any truth in these rumours, with particular reference to Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.