In order properly and fully to understand the nature of the German system of spying, it is essential that we go down to fundamentals. The principles on which it is based may be said to have their roots in the character of the Germans themselves and that character has been largely developed by a special type of ethical education, the lines of which were to a great extent conceived by Frederick the Great as especially applicable to the qualities of his people, and subsequently elaborated into a kind of national philosophy by writers like Nietzsche, Treitschke, Bernhardi and others, all of whom were the leaders of that extreme pragmatical school of which we have spoken. Frederick, it may be said, was like his descendant[1] of to-day, William the Second, a man who outwardly professed religious principles and held the view that Religion is absolutely necessary in a State government. In the famous MatinÉes du Roi de Prusse, published in 1784, the Prussian monarch is made, however, to say that the value of religion for the people consists mainly in the fact that it enables their rulers to hold them more completely in subjection. For a King to have any religion whatsoever is, he is also said to have declared, a very unwise policy, and for the reason, he adds, that "if a King fears God, or more exactly, if he fears a future punishment, he becomes a greater bigot than any monk. If a favourable opportunity presents itself of taking forcible possession of a neighbouring province, immediately an army of demons seems to him ready to defend it; he is weak-minded enough to think he is going to commit an injustice and he proportions the punishment of his crime to the extent of his evil designs. When he is about to conclude a treaty with some foreign power, all is lost if he stops to remember that he is a Christian, for by doing so, he will always suffer himself to be duped and imposed upon."
It is only right to state here that the MatinÉes have been disavowed as the work of Frederick himself, and in the British Museum catalogue are placed among the "doubtful and spurious" works relating to the King of Prussia. It may be pointed out, however, that the "Testament of Peter the Great" was also in its time disavowed, although the policies it lays down for the Russianisation of the Near East have always been followed to the letter by successive Tsars. It is certain, too, that the successors of Frederick the Great on the Prussian throne have followed in every sense the spirit of their ancestor's alleged teachings and counsels, as far as indicated by the work under consideration, and since the policies in regard to the conduct of war and government, which were counselled as far back as 1784, are to-day being followed and improved upon by German commanders, we make no apology for assuming that the MatinÉes fully represent the mind of the monarch to whom they are attributed. As regards war, for example, here is the alleged opinion of Frederick:
Frederick the Great
The founder of modern organised espionage
"War is a business in which the slightest scruple is detrimental to one's arms and policies. It may be said that no sovereign can seriously enter into the business of war, if he feels he has not the right to justify pillage, incendiarism and carnage," a declaration which allows us to assume that at least one Hohenzollern heart would never have bled for the fate of Louvain, or Arras, or Rheims, in 1914.
Continuing to voice his opinions on religion, the King is made to say: "Whatever we may think inwardly, impiety is never to be displayed at any time, although we must adapt our sentiments and opinions to our rank and standing in the world. It would be the height of folly, if a monarch's attention was diverted by trifles of religion which are fit only for the common people. Besides, the most complete indifference for religious matters is the best means which a King can hold to prevent his subjects from becoming fanatics. My ancestors acted in a most sensible manner in dealing with religion, undertaking a religious Reformation which, while it gave them a glorious apostolic halo, at the same time filled their treasuries with money. The Hohenzollerns began by being pagans, of course, but became Christians in the ninth century in order to please the Emperors; in the fifteenth century they became Lutherans in order to have an excuse to rob the Church, and Reformers again in the sixteenth, in order to placate the Dutch over the succession of Cleves."
In regard to Justice, Frederick declared that justice is due to the subjects of a State, although it is especially necessary that rulers should not be brought so far within the scope of justice that they become themselves subject to it. "I am too ambitious and autocratic by nature to suffer willingly the existence of another order within my States which should restrict my action. It was for this reason that I drew up a new code of laws. I am fully aware that I did away with the real spirit of justice, but the truth was, I had become rather afraid of the influence such notions exert among the common people. A King must not allow himself to be dazzled by the word Justice: it is only a relative term, and one which is susceptible of application and explanation in different ways. Everyone likes to be just in his own fashion, and as I early realised this, I decided to undermine the foundations of that great power Justice. And so it has only been by simplifying it as much as possible that I have been able to reduce it to the point where I wanted it to be—that is, to a minimum. I could never have accomplished anything had I been restrained by legal ideals. I might have passed for a just monarch, but I should never have won the title of a hero."
Of the value of a set policy in the world and as the only means of achieving any success, Frederick had very decided notions: "As it has been agreed among men that to cheat our fellow-creatures is a base and criminal act, it has been necessary to find a word which should modify the conception, and accordingly the term policy was adopted. By the word policy, I mean that we must always try to dupe other people. This is the only sure means of getting, not necessarily an advantage, but a fair chance of remaining on an equal footing. I am, therefore, not ashamed of making alliances from which only myself can derive entire advantage; but I am never so foolish as not to break faith when my interests require it, since I uphold the rectitude of the maxim that to despoil one's neighbours is to deprive them of the means of injuring one. Statesmanship can be reduced to three principles or maxims: the first is to maintain your power and, according to circumstances, to increase and extend it, just as I doubled my army on reaching the throne for the sole purposes of conquest. Make sure of your army; have plenty of money and bide a favourable time; you can then be certain, not only of preserving your States, but of adding to them. The term 'balance of power' is one which has subjugated the whole world; in reality, however, it is nothing but a mere phrase. Europe is a family in which there are too many bad brothers and relatives, and it is only by despising the whole system that vast projects can be formed. The second principle is to make your allies serve you, and to throw them off when they have ceased to be useful. The third principle is to make yourself feared—this is the height of great statesmanship. All your neighbours must be led to believe that you are a dangerous monarch who is moved by no principle except martial glory. If they are convinced that you would rather lose two kingdoms than not occupy a prominent place in history, you are certain to succeed. Above all, let no one within your kingdom write anything except to extol your actions and efforts."
Given a political philosophy of this kind as the inspiration of the Prussian idea—"Kultur," they call it—it is not hard to realise that the essentially evil qualities of the government of Prussia were certain ultimately to react upon the character of the people themselves. If anyone should doubt the correctness of our view that non-constitutional systems of government invariably require the support of vicious subsidiary systems in order to assure their stability, as in the militaristic regime of Napoleon, or the quasi-ecclesiastical rule of Richelieu, a study of Prussian autocracy will soon put him in the way of settled conviction. Since the day of Frederick, some one hundred and twenty-eight years ago, the people of Prussia have only known such liberty as is consistent with a bureaucracy the underlying conditions of which are conceived on entirely military ideas—that is to say, the type of individual freedom which we are accustomed to associate with a feudalistic regime or rule by martial law. People who travelled much on the Continent before the outbreak of the Great War may recollect how on crossing the frontier of Belgium into Germany—at Herbesthal, if we remember—one invariably seemed to experience much the same sensation as that of exchanging the atmosphere of some warm and comfortable sitting-room for the cold and formal conditions of a public office. Once across the border, the military spirit seemed to predominate everywhere, while among the friendly enough natives of the unofficial classes there was a subdued not to say cowed demeanour which was in saddening contrast with the free-and-easy cheeriness of the people just left behind. Everywhere was there evidence of set discipline and on all hands the spectre of officialism appeared to darken the daily lives of men with some sort of unexpressed threat. Even fair and open dealings seemed among the townsmen to be undertaken with the consciousness that at any moment some furtive official might come upon the scene and utter the irrevocable verboten—forbidden. Later in the noisy gaieties of the beer-garden or music-hall, one ever seemed to note that fear of the boisterous schoolboy who under the watchful eye of a forbidding master never ceases even in the fullness of his frolic to wonder just how far he is allowed to go. "Germany," says the admirable Price Collier, "has shown us that the short-cut to the government of a people by suppression and strangulation results in a dreary development of mediocrity." In our opinion the American might have added that a nation which is ruled as if it were a country of convicts, actual or potential, cannot fail inevitably to develop in a pronounced degree those symptoms of character and predisposition which land your convict in the correctional institutions where he is most commonly to be found. "Prussia and Germany," again says Collier, "are still ruled socially and politically by a small group of, roughly, fifty thousand men, eight thousand of them in the frock-coat of the civilian official and the rest in military uniforms."
It is the fashion to say that Doctor Stieber was the organiser of the modern spy system of Germany, for the conduct of which some million pounds sterling are annually appropriated. The truth is, however, that the organisation goes much farther back, a well-known statesman of the Napoleonic period, Baron Stein, having been responsible for the practical application of the theories which lie implicit in the philosophy of Frederick the Great. In his turn, Stieber assumed control of the lines and developed them to a point at which improvement became almost impossible. Stieber was a typical adventurer of the middle class, a man who, it is clear enough, had in him all those elements of character which we associate with the criminal who operates along the higher lines. It is said that he qualified as a barrister, not so much with the object of practising law, as to discover its limitations, or in other words, to know for a certainty how far scheming and the exploitation of simpler natures can be made a lawful trade. He was born in Prussia in 1818, and having been called to the Prussian Bar, sought to apply his knowledge of legal matters as a kind of counsellor in a Silesian factory, Silesia being in those days, 1847, the nursery of that vast school of Socialism which has since gained over twenty millions of adherents throughout Germany—indeed, one-third of the empire's entire population. By far the larger percentage of the workmen attached to the factory at which he was employed were Socialists, and Stieber realised that if he could only penetrate the secrets and methods of this important socialistic nucleus, he might prove undoubtedly serviceable to the central government in Berlin. Accordingly he joined the Socialist brotherhood, professing to be entirely in sympathy with their aims and aspirations, and in a short while became an acknowledged leader of the Silesian movement. As a man of superior education, Stieber gained admittance to the family of the firm which employed him, won the heart of his employer's daughter and married her.
It is certain that by 1848 he was already in touch with officials at the chief police bureau in Berlin, and traitor that he was, in order further to ingratiate himself with the Berlin authorities, Stieber persuaded his wife's uncle to enter into the Socialistic movement, the new recruit compromising himself so deeply by the violence of his radical opinions and utterances that, with Stieber's complicity, he was denounced, arrested and imprisoned on the ground that he was inciting the Silesians to revolt against the government. To have been a Socialist about 1850 was, it may be said, as bad as to have been an Anarchist in the last years of the nineteenth century, when that movement was at its height. The arrest of a relative through Stieber's instrumentality was accordingly a real earnest of his good disposition towards existing authority, and it was readily realised that in this recruit there was all the baseness and treachery which Berlin looked for in its officials. Stieber was summoned to Berlin, where he was given a commission in the secret police, with the duty of allying himself to the Socialist movement and reporting as to its progress, designs and machinations to headquarters in Berlin. Parenthetically, it may be observed, the German word stieber is equivalent to our own term sleuth-hound, so that the spy was happy in his patronymic as well as mentally adapted for his traitorous trade. A writer has described him in the following terms:—"Herr Stieber is a man whose head, nose and ears suggest a Hebrew strain, although it is known that his father was a Gentile. There is in the general aspect of the face, and especially in the drawn lines of the mouth, much of that self-justifying hardness which is associated with the ideas given us of the Inquisition Fathers; his eyes are almost white in their colourlessness. With subordinates he adopts the loud airs of a master towards his slaves, and when in the presence of high authorities he is self-abasing and quiet of voice, wearing a smile of perennial oiliness and acquiescence, with much rubbing of the hands, a Jewish characteristic."
His work in Silesia was so ably performed and so many arrests and imprisonments followed as the result of his services, that the Berlin authorities decided to employ their sleuth in the capital, where already the Socialists were becoming an important enough body. Armed with letters of introduction from his committees in Silesia, Stieber arrived in Berlin and forthwith became a member of the principal revolutionary clubs in the metropolis. The spy himself describes his presentation to King Frederick William: "My duties required me as a Socialist leader to head a procession of revolutionaries through the capital. At a point in the progress of our bands, the King appeared on the scene, and naturally felt but little at his ease, seeing that the Socialists were the avowed enemies of all existing forms of government and their representatives. Noting his trepidation, I approached his majesty near enough to say: 'Sire, have no fear. I am of your majesty's side and have taken every precaution for your safety. In the meanwhile I must proceed with my rÔle of leading these poor deluded people.'" Notwithstanding that Stieber from this day became an object of suspicion to men of the Socialist clubs who had known him in Silesia, the influence of the King protected him and eventually took him into the monarch's service with the title of "police-counsellor," a position which allowed him virtually to act on his own initiative and independently of the minister of police. Stieber's real business in his new post was to keep a close watch upon the ministerial or official police, and that he did so with particular satisfaction to the Prussian monarch, the latter one day admitted to the official chief of police who was complaining of the officious activities and energies of the police-counsellor, and suggested his removal on the ground that since the man was a traitor to those with whom he professed to adhere, he must necessarily be suspect in any cause in which he engaged. The King replied:
"Stieber is more devoted to his King than to any cause and I reward him well. He used to come to me from time to time and tell me what the Socialists were doing, what their plans and intentions were and how on one occasion they had debated the question of seizing the royal family and establishing a Commune."
The minister of police was accordingly forced to realise that Stieber had for several years been engaged in the double game of working for the secret service as an agent and at the same time of spying upon them at the instance of the King. A few days later he was appointed by his royal patron chief of the Prussian secret service with a salary of £1200 per annum. In his new capacity, as the confidential man of the sovereign and the head of a system which operated almost as much against the official police as against revolutionary bodies, the spy had not only to organise the nucleus of that army corps of espionage which by 1912 was said to number 45,000 active agents, but had also to fight strong and influential enemies who saw with dismay the promotion of this unknown intruder. In order to effect the complete independence of his own body from all others which exercised kindred functions, Stieber suggested the entire modernisation and specialisation of his service with proper subsidies and adequate appropriations from parliament, the department to enjoy autonomy under its presiding chief. He undertook himself to organise an "internal" and an "external" service, and here it may be said that the Russian dual system of espionage has been based entirely on Stieber's ideas and, in so far, differs not at all from the secret service of Prussia, except possibly in that the almost entire absence of ideas of personal liberty renders illegal acts and outrages far more frequent in Russia than in Germany. It was Stieber also who inaugurated the well-established system of court-spying which is known to exist at all the German capitals; he was responsible for the corps of spies within government offices who spy upon departmental bureaux, while a highly efficient body of clerks who were employed in banking and commercial houses and all institutions which possessed large internal and foreign relations were also paid in proportion to tit-bits of information which they were able to place at the disposal of his cabinet. To the King—clearly a worthy descendant of Frederick II.—Stieber, by virtue of his office, had free access and presented a daily report in person in which all and everything of any import concerning the public and private life of men and women was made known to the sovereign. On one occasion the King jokingly reproved his spy, saying: "You give me all the information I require regarding the private lives of my courtiers; but what about my brothers? They are certainly not angels."
"Your Majesty had not authorised me to spy upon the Princes," replied Stieber, "but in the meantime I had prepared myself against the possibilities of your Majesty doing so. Here are three sealed documents containing all there is to be known about their Royal Highnesses since I have had the honour of serving."
By 1854 the chief agent had become a personage in Berlin, and although the nobility of the higher rank would not receive him, Stieber found many valuable acquaintances among the wealthy "climbers" of the capital who were eager to be associated with the powerful chief confidant of the King. When the special-service department was in full running, Stieber was given orders to apply its methods to foreign countries and accordingly by 1860 Austria, Bohemia, Saxony, Luxembourg and France were under the observation of his employees. In 1855 the Reichstag voted an appropriation of about £15,000 in order to "secure for the State the benefits of useful intelligence," the secret-service agent himself drawing some £1800 yearly from the fund. At this time, says a writer of the period, Stieber was the most prominent official in the kingdom. All were conscious of being closely watched by himself and his agents and everyone was aware that ruin and dismissal could be brought about at the nod of the chief, and accordingly Stieber effected the entrance of himself and his wife into some of the best houses in Berlin under veiled threats of disclosing secrets of moment unless his advances were respectfully received. About this time, too, Stieber began that collection of decorations which were to testify to the high honour and esteem in which his King and country held him. He had no proper military uniform and that which on official occasions he was wont to wear resembled not a little the quasi-regimental garb of the commissionaire. By 1860 it had become heavily covered with medals and decorations.
Stieber's activities had enabled him to learn so much as to the inner workings of the whole political and social fabric of Prussia and the Germanic nations that an attempt to abolish the private police system, undertaken by the Reichstag in 1855, had no practical result, although Stieber disappeared for a short while from official life in that year. It was certain, however, that the very extent of his private information had made him a man who was no less dangerous than important and who, in any case, was an individual who had to be calculated with. Bismarck, an already-established figure in national politics, was the first to realise this in 1864, when he was president of the council of ministers and when Stieber was reinstated in active public life. In the previous couple of years he had occupied his comparative leisure by organising the Russian secret police, by discovering the manoeuvres and designs of a certain French intrigante whose services were being used by diplomats, the Tsar conferring on him the order of Stanislaus and making him a large grant of money. Bismarck was well aware of the splendid services Stieber had rendered to Russia and it was with a view to making use of the chief's universal information that he attached him to the foreign office as a secret-mission agent, with instructions to proceed into Bohemia. It was already Bismarck's intention to strike down Austria, even as he had struck down Denmark in 1864 and as again he was to strike down France in 1870. Stieber's mission was to prepare the invasion of Bohemia by supplying Bismarck with all kinds of topographical information which must prove of the first importance to German military commanders. It was information which could only be acquired by a most minute inspection of the various military routes available into Austria, and Stieber felt that this could best be accomplished by disguising himself as a pedlar. His stock-in-trade consisted of religious statues and indecent pictures. During 1864, 1865 and 1866, the supposed pedlar, travelling with a small wagon, mapped out in the completest detail the country through which the Prussian armies marched in the last-named year to the victory of Sadowa by which Austria finally surrendered any possible claim she may still have entertained to hold the headship of the Germanic States in Europe. Even Moltke, the Prussian organiser of victory, was astonished at the vast amount of valuable military information by which the spy had facilitated the rapid advance of his armies. "A man with a genius for military combinations could not have done better for his own purposes," declared the old Field-Marshal to Bismarck. King William, too, while occupying Brunn as his headquarters after Sadowa, requested the ex-pedlar to administer the town, explaining to both Bismarck and the commander-in-chief his reasons in the following words:—
"One must not confine oneself to giving money to spies. One must also know how to show them honour when they deserve it."
Stieber was Governor of Brunn, the capital of Moravia, for several months, a position which Napoleon had also allowed his spy Schulmeister to hold at several towns in his time. It has to be remembered, however, that in both cases the spies were in districts about which they were far better acquainted than any members of the military or political personnels. Expediency also counted for something in each appointment. At the close of the war he was appointed a Prussian privy-councillor and minister of the national police. Asked afterwards how much he had expended on his network of strategic spies and traitors who practically sold Austria to Prussia in 1866, Stieber replied:
"One cannot set down in dollars the value of bloodshed which has been avoided, nor of victories which have been secured."
