Further amazing and incriminating letters are before me as I write, and I shall print more of this secret correspondence in order that readers in Great Britain may know the depths of Germany’s villainy and the exact methods by which Russia has been betrayed.
The official dossier concerning the crimes and conspiracies of the arch-scoundrel is astounding. It becomes increasingly amazing as one turns over its voluminous pages, its confidential reports, its copies of telegrams dispatched under fictitious names, since obtained from the telegraph bureaux of Russia, and its originals of secret instructions from Berlin.
In the latter one finds the subtle hand of the notorious Steinhauer, the head of the Kaiser’s spy-bureau, the fair-bearded, middle-aged Prussian who accompanied the German Emperor to Buckingham Palace on his last visit to London, and who was one of the select party of German motorists who came to tour England with Prince Henry of Prussia at their head.
It devolved upon myself to accompany and watch that tour very closely. Even then one department in Whitehall had not been chloroformed by the dope of the Sleep-quietly-in-your-beds Party—a department in the formation of which I had had some hand. Steinhauer I had met in Germany, though he did not know me, and when he came to England with His Imperial Highness, as Herr Eschenburg of Stuttgart, driving his big red “Mercedes,” I considered that it was high time to keep a strict eye upon him—which I did. What I discovered of his movements and of his associates has been of greatest advantage since the outbreak of war.
No more expert spy exists in all the world today than “Herr Eschenburg of Stuttgart”, whose real name is Steinhauer, known in the German Secret Service as “Number Seventy.”
The dossier here placed at my disposal shows that Herr Steinhauer visited Rasputin in Petrograd four times before August, 1914, while his underlings arrived at the house in the Gorokhovaya many times after the two Empires had come to grips.
Rasputin, in his unique position as autocrat aver the Autocrat, felt himself the personal agent of the Kaiser, and as such seems to have somewhat resented Steinhauer’s rather arrogant orders. Indeed, he complained bitterly to the German Emperor, who, in reply, propitiated the Siberian peasant by explaining that he was so occupied by the campaign against his enemies that he left all matters of detail to “our trusted and loyal friend Steinhauer, whose actions and orders are as my own.”
On August 28th, 1916, there arrived in Petrograd a pretty dark-haired young Dutch woman named Hélène Geismann. She presented a letter of introduction to Rasputin that evening at his house, and was promised audience of Her Majesty the Empress at noon next day.
The monk was at Tsarskoe-Selo when the young woman called. It was a meeting day of the higher, or Court Circle of the “sister-disciples,” such séances being held at five o’clock each Friday afternoon.
Three new “disciples” had been initiated into the mysteries of the mock-pious rascal’s new “religion.” Their names were the Baroness Zouieff, and Mesdemoiselles Olga Romanenkoff and Nadjezda Tavascherne, the two latter being of the noblest families of Moscow, and all moving in the Court entourage.