"I leave my post without any feeling of bitterness, because I know that when history is once written, it will establish our clean record despite all the misrepresentations and calumnies spread broadcast at present."
FOOTNOTE:
[2] Franz Schulenberg was a deserter from the German army who advertised in the Spokane newspapers in February, 1915, for land on which to colonize a number of Spanish families. These families turned out to be Hindus, whom he proposed to employ in obtaining information of Canadian shipping, to be relayed by secret wireless to German raiders in the Pacific. Schulenberg was captured on December 5, 1917, in an automobile on the road from Santa Cruz to San Francisco, two days after he had left a woman spy who was associated with von Papen's office, and who directed Schulenberg's movements in the United States. He admitted having bought, in 1915, a ton of dynamite, fifty Maxim silencers, fifty rifles, and a quantity of fuse for shipment to Hindus near the Canadian border, between Victoria and Vancouver.
CHAPTER IX MORE BOMB PLOTS
Kaltschmidt and the Windsor explosions—The Port Huron tunnel—Werner Horn—Explosions embarrass the Embassy—Black Tom—The second Welland affair—Harry Newton—The damage done in three years—Waiter spies.
In the check-book of the military attaché was a counterfoil betraying a payment of $1,000 made on March 27, 1915, to "W. von Igel (for A. Kaltschmidt, Detroit)." That stub was part of a bomb plot.
A young German named Charles Francis Respa was employed in 1908 by Albert Carl Kaltschmidt in a Detroit machine shop. Seven years later Kaltschmidt had occasion to hire Respa again. To a group which included Respa, his brother-in-law Carl Schmidt, Gus Stevens and Kaltschmidt's own brother-in-law, Fritz Neef, he outlined a plan for destroying factories in Canada. Neef was the Detroit agent for the Eisemann magneto, and had a machine shop of his own.
"We are not citizens of this country," Kaltschmidt reiterated to his accomplices. "It is our duty to stand by the Fatherland. The Americans would throw us out of work after war started." (The Americans, on the contrary, gave the ringleaders of the conspiracy plenty of hard labor after the war started.) To seal the bargain Kaltschmidt paid the men a retainer, and sent Stevens and Respa to Winnipeg to see whether it might not be feasible to blow up the railroad bridge there.