How well the plan succeeded we already know. Wolpert distributed the bombs to several local points of German operation in the greater city, and even Scheele had on one occasion carried a box full of bombs packed only in sawdust from the laboratory over to the Labor Lyceum. Reistert and Uhde tested a few of the infernal machines in the rear of the building, and Uhde fancied them so much that he kept one as a souvenir, stowed away in the toe of an old boot in his locker at the Turn Verein, where Detectives Barth and Jenkins found it. The conspiracy had originated in March; the first day of May, Wolpert gave a bomb to a Chenango who smuggled it aboard the Kirkoswald, with the result which we have followed. On May 7, 1915, the glorious Lusitania was torpedoed, and on the following morning, Karl Schimmel, coming into his office and finding Illsen and Boniface there, exclaimed:
“Ah—that U-boat commander has done well enough, but he has stolen all the glory away from me. I had nine cigars on the Lusitania.” (For “cigars” read “bombs.”) “If they had not torpedoed her the cigars would have done the work!”
He may have told the truth. His secret is at the bottom of the Atlantic now, along with what shreds of respect the civilized world might otherwise have had for Germany. It is certain that Schimmel tried to place his “cigars” aboard the vessel, for Reistert had given Uhde $100 and a little man named Klein a package of bombs with instructions to go to a saloon in West Street near the White Star piers. There they were to meet a third man, to whom they would deliver the package, and that man would see them safely aboard the ship. The man did not appear at the appointed hour, so they left the package with the bartender, and went to the missing man’s house in Harlem, where they paid him his fee. It was the same Klein who had been carrying a bomb in his pocket one afternoon when Schimmel had sent him to South Ferry to place it aboard a ship. But the bomb caught fire, and before he could rid himself of it it had burned through his clothing, so Schimmel magnanimously gave him $20 for a new suit and his trouble. And it was the same Klein whom we found dead of disease in a hospital, beyond the law’s reach, when we finally were tracing him for arrest.
The stories of the culprits combined to lay at their door the origin of most of the ship fires with which we had been afflicted for the past two years. If nothing else had proved it, the cessation of the fires would have been enough. We were anxious, after our twisting, winding search, rather to have the guilty men convicted and placed in safe-keeping than to fix definitely upon them the guilt for all of the fires—that would have been practically impossible—but the very fact that the fires ceased is sufficient evidence of their complete guilt. It was not until October 17, 1917, six months after the United States had gone to war, that our long hunt came to an end, and we arrested Boniface, Reistert, Uhde and one Peter Zeffert. It was Zeffert who confessed to having gone to Schimmel’s office one afternoon to help him fill the bomb containers with chemicals. Reistert was there, and the three took the bombs away in a taxi-cab to meet a destroying agent in a waterfront saloon. The agent did not show up, and Messrs. Schimmel, Reistert and Zeffert thereupon returned to the Chambers Street office and unloaded the tubes.
I am sorry that our laws were not at that time drastic enough to punish the men as they deserved. James W. Osborne, the assistant United States Attorney who tried the case, wove an admirable prosecution, and Judge Harland B. Howe turned a stern face upon the prisoners. Wolpert had been haled from Atlanta to answer to the new charge, as had von Kleist and Becker. The engineers were brought out of their internment camps. And last, and foremost of all, Franz Rintelen was there—returned to us by the British to answer to a series of charges which he had tried hard and expensively to conceal. The best our laws of the moment could do for these men who had defiled our hospitality and destroyed millions of dollars’ worth of property on our soil was to sentence them to one-and-one-half years in Atlanta. It is to the everlasting credit of Judge Howe that Rintelen, Wolpert, von Kleist, Becker, Praedel, Paradies and Garbade received the maximum prison term, and the maximum fine of $2,000 each. Under the espionage act later adopted each of them could be sentenced to twenty years and fined $10,000.
Popular consent would have made short work of these men’s lives. Justice had to preside over their trials, however, and they were punished to the full extent of an inadequate law. A more drastic criminal code would probably have frightened the German spies in the United States, and it is equally true that German agents who were caught in the net of the law laughed up their sleeves as they made use of one after another of the law’s technical provisions and privileges to avert what would have been certain and swift death had they worn the field-gray uniforms of their nation. They have not suffered in proportion to their crimes. But their nation is paying the price.
Norman H. White, of Boston, a civilian attached to the Military Intelligence, who unearthed numerous German intrigues
There is something in the spectacle of Rintelen serving his sentence at Atlanta—a long sentence, which he tried numerous tricks to evade—that is peculiarly German, and that comes more nearly satisfying our popular desire for retribution than the plight of any of his wretched employees. He came to America arrogant, rich, defiant, cruel, and sly—to wage war upon us. One of his first acts was to sign his check for $10,000 to manufacture bombs to destroy our shipping. When certain Americans crossed his reeking trail he ran away in terror. By great good luck he was captured, discovered, and returned and by considerable persistence and patience on the part of the Bomb Squad one of his trails was laid bare. (He had many others.) He suffered great indignity, as he thought, at being tried with the manual laborers whom he had employed and left in trouble. He was convicted and sent to prison. He pleaded ill-health, though he was a strong man, and he tried to be transferred to a more lenient prison. He invoked the aid of his crumbling government, who informed Washington that unless he were surrendered to Germany that nation would take the lives of American soldiers captured in battle. Every trick failed, and Franz Rintelen, tried not as a prisoner of war for what morally were acts of war against the United States, but by our peace courts, and under our lenient peace laws, must now serve out his term in an American prison, although his nation has given up the war and begged for clemency.
Rintelen used to suggest that he was an illegitimate relative of the late Kaiser. It may be true: the two have something in common. The Kaiser has become plain Hohenzollern, and the chief German bomb-plotter in the United States, is, as Wolpert angrily said that day at headquarters, “not von Rintelen, damn him—Rintelen!”