One day the Department of Justice in Washington received a brief code message, dated from Havana, saying that “Dr. Scheele” was coming home. The War Department also had received a code message; these started a little hum of activity. The messages gave a key to the possession of certain papers. Hurriedly a special agent of the Department of Justice was provided with a letter written in the cipher designated. The agent spoke German, looked German, and hastened to the home of an unsuspecting custodian of some of the Fatherland’s most damaging records, and there arranged with the guardian for a safer place for such papers. But the duly-accredited messenger wasn’t German at all, and the papers handed over widened out the trail of one big German plot.

Who was this Dr. Scheele? He was a quiet German chemist who sometimes aided the police in detecting traces of crime. Didn’t his neighbours know him? Of course; he was that genial and entertaining German-American who owned a drug store in Brooklyn, one of the desirable kind of citizens, the law-abiding kind of foreigner whom we welcomed in our midst. Did the business world know him? Yes; he was president of the New Jersey Agricultural Chemical Company, a concern which kept its contracts and paid its debts. America was satisfied with this president, the adopted son, who had married an American wife and resided peacefully among us for twenty-four years. Why not?

When the French liner La Lorraine caught fire at sea with hospital nurses and supplies of mercy on board, what could this have to do with an inconspicuous druggist in Brooklyn?—or when numerous ships sailed loaded with sugar or supplies for the needy neutrals abroad, and never after were heard of?

Finally a British cruiser with an inquisitive captain overhauled the steamship Rize which was carrying a cargo of fertilizer badly needed for the fields in Denmark. There was nothing particularly suspicious about a cargo packed in sacks, just ordinary brown powdered fertilizer of the most common variety and shipped by the New Jersey Agricultural Chemical Co. But for some reason the papers didn’t entirely satisfy. The cargo was confiscated, analyzed, and an astonished chemist reported that the “fertilizer” was composed of highest grade lubricating oil, mixed with a certain chemical which had reduced the oil to a solid but when the mixture was treated with a little acid the sacks yielded oil fit for the Kaiser’s best Unterseeboten.

The Department of Justice paid an official call on the New Jersey company—the “President” was away; he remained away during two years of very painstaking search by the officials of the Department’s secret service, which had an ever-increasing desire to make the acquaintance of the inconspicuous chemist who seemed to possess some of the mythical powers of the ancient alchemists.

There seemed also to be an unusual bank account connected with this gentleman, engaged in such magnificent business enterprises, that yielded such meagre profits, as were evidenced by the President’s home life and general circumstances. Who is he, and where is he? were questions that vexed the bureau in Washington. Two years rolled by; numbers of Germans connected with “the Doctor” were sent to jail, but only rumours were got of trails of the chemist.

Fate, however, transferred our story to the shadowy neighbourhood of Morro Castle; there, an excited and still unidentified German who was trying to board a vessel at Matanzas, Cuba, for a port in Mexico, was brought into Havana in front of the bayonets of a not-too-careful Rural Guard. Then a newly arrived representative of the Department of Justice undertook some negotiations with the Cuban Government for a safe passage back for a certain Dr. Walter T. Scheele and his paymaster.

An ancient fort, which is the military prison in Havana and a part of the old fortified wall which follows the water front of the picturesque harbour, was shrouded in darkness when the hour of departure arrived. Between the old fort and the grim outline of “the Morro” lay a Cuban gunboat with black smoke pouring out of her funnels; a tropical storm blowing in over the Gulf Stream alternately darkened the sky a deeper tone and lit it up with vivid lightning flashes. Presently a little group appeared on the sea walls and a flash of lightning showed an American in plain clothes, the regalia of the agents of Justice and a colonel of the regular army who were signing a receipt for two quiet figures in alpine hats. A courteous Cuban officer saluted and shook hands with the departing guests, handcuffs were silently slipped on to thick German wrists, and the little steam pinnace of the warship sped off through the darkness alongside its gangway.

An interview none the less sombre and creepy occurred on the other side of the Gulf Stream within the walls of Fort Taylor. Two automobiles had driven up in the darkness to an emplacement beneath the shadow of a heavy gun. The party which had left Havana descended in a dimly lighted courtyard where a squad of non-commissioned officers was waiting. One figure in an alpine hat had to be lifted from the automobile while the other stood erect.

Here is the story of Dr. Scheele, the more important of these two agents of the Kaiser:

Twenty-five years ago a German youth (one of the favourite pupils of the great chemist, Professor Keukle) graduated at Bonn. He came of an illustrious family; his grandfather, the Swedish professor, Scheele, discovered chlorine gas. His father, born in Germany, died in the discovery of “prussic acid,” the most quickly fatal drug known. The youth, with sixteen deep scars on his head and face from duelling under the vicious German code, was a man of proved valour. Who was better to send to the great developing home of liberty and freedom and study its industry, and prepare for a day which was already dazzling the newly enthroned Kaiser?

Dr. Hugo Schweitzer was chosen to go with him and collaborate. He, as the head of the Bayer Chemical Company—a German concern that practically monopolized the trade in synthetic drugs in the United States—was to report on, to model, or undermine our development of industrial chemistry. Dr. Scheele was to report on and develop the plan and chemistry of warfare, explosives, incendiaries, poison gas, and the products Germany should import and accumulate to make her sure and independent on the day she should strike the world. Did these young men faithfully accomplish their tasks?

Dye making was almost an unknown art in America when the war broke out; chlorine gas was a laboratory curiosity; potash was a German salt—we had been led to believe our millions of tons of the mineral were insoluble. Where necessary, those of our chemists who had learned the secrets were retained and paid. The list of our chemical houses reads like the telephone directory of Unter den Linden, and the Alien Property Custodian has since spent many nights over their affairs.

While the German plenipotentiaries were busy at The Hague agreeing to the elimination of poison gas and incendiaries from warfare, their chemists in the United States, paid regularly but meagerly through the Embassy at Washington, exchanged views in writing and by cable with the chemists of the Fatherland over the most fatal methods for the use of the gas which had just been developed for the purpose.

Mustard gas was used against the Allies in 1917, a new and atrocious device, “only discovered and recently used by the Germans because of the brutality of their enemies.” A few formulÆ for this product were in Dr. Scheele’s laboratory in New York about five years before the war, and tactics of the uses discussed in the trips which he made home every two years “to keep up to date.”

Two methods of stifling American production have not yet been mentioned. The first was this: When a man began to make a reputation as a chemist in an American-owned concern, he was hired away to work for a German-owned factory. Salary was no consideration; they simply bid the price required to get him. The second method was: when an American chemist invented a new product or a new process, and patented it, it was bought from him before it could be commercially developed. Again price was no consideration. The only instructions were: “Pay as little as you can, but get it.”

The operation of this system was the duty of Dr. Scheele and Dr. Schweitzer. Reporting to them was at least one loyal German chemist in every chemical factory in the United States; dozens of them in the larger ones. At their disposal were the resources of the Imperial German Government. These, too, were made accessible through Dr. Heinrich Albert in German-American banking and brokerage concerns, chiefly G. Amsinck & Company, the Trans-Atlantic Trust Company, and Knauth, Nochode & Kuhne, of New York, every one of them in reality a local American agency of one or another of the imperially controlled banks of Germany and Austria—such as the Reichsbank, the Disconto Gesellschaft, or the Deutsche Bank.

The chief of these American branches was G. Amsinck & Company, operating as commission merchants and private bankers. The head of this concern was Adolf Pavenstedt, an accomplished man of the world, a shrewd banker, and under the iron discipline of the Kaiser’s military organization. Pavenstedt lived at the German Club in Central Park South, in New York, took his vacations in Cuba in the winter and the Berkshires in the summer, was received in the best society in New York, passed easily in Wall Street as a man of large personal fortune and of sound business judgment—altogether a characteristic German hypocrite and government agent acting under Dr. Albert and Bernstorff. He was a paymaster of Germany’s nation-wide organization to control our industrial life, to spy out our military plans, and to keep us powerless against the day when Prussia should be ready to sweep the world. He was also the financial go-between in the Bolo Pasha case. Fortunately, he has now long been a resident of an Army internment camp.

Two years ago the Government indicted Dr. Scheele for his part in the incendiary bomb plot. The details of this fiendish device will be given later in the story. Dr. Scheele was forewarned of probable detection on the 31st of March, 1916, by a special-delivery letter telling him to see Wolf von Igel immediately at 60 Wall Street in New York. Von Igel told him to start for Cuba by the next train. Dr. Scheele feared that such a precipitate flight would expose him to certain arrest. Hence, he violated his instruction and went south to Jacksonville by easy stages. There he called upon one Sperber, the editor of the Florida Deutsche Staatszeitung, who warned him not to sail from Key West, as that port was being watched both by our officers and by the British cruisers outside the three-mile limit. Sperber gave Dr. Scheele letters of introduction and credentials under the name of W. T. Rheinfelder, to act as a correspondent for his paper. He supplied him also with fake calling cards and other forged documents, establishing him in his rÔle. Still fearing to leave for Cuba, he waited.

His superiors again instructed him to go to Cuba. He landed in Cuba on April 16th. There he reported to the German Minister, Count Verdy du Vernois, who passed him on to an attachÉ of the Legation with this strange result: that Dr. Scheele next found himself installed as a “guest” in the house of one Juan Pozas, under the name of James G. Williams, and in the character of a visiting American.

His strange and unexpected host appeared at first to be simply a wealthy Cuban merchant. His manner of life strengthened this impression. Dr. Scheele found himself comfortably installed in a large room in a magnificent house, surrounded by grounds of a city block square, in the suburb Guana Bacca of Havana. In reality, Pozas was the king of the Cuban smugglers. His splendid establishment and his social prestige rested upon a picturesque foundation of the work of silent men in little boats working in the dark of the moon along the tropical Cuban shore.

To Dr. Scheele, Pozas soon appeared to be not only host but jailer. Though he was treated with every courtesy and as a member of the family, he was not allowed outside the house for six months after his arrival. The confinement so told upon his health that he was finally permitted the freedom of the garden, and, to while away the time, he worked among the flowers, making at length a beauty spot of the whole place. At the same time, he was devoting other spare hours to covering the walls of the Pozas mansion with beautiful mural paintings. Again it may be noted that Dr. Scheele is a remarkable man.

In this strange retreat the doctor spent two years. Then suddenly, without warning, he was hurried hither and yon about the island, travelling under guard by automobile by night, and lying hidden by day in the houses of trusted German agents. He finally arrived at Mantanzas. Here, the man in whose house he was to stay hidden became fearful that he would be discovered there and the man himself get into desperate trouble. He, therefore, directed Dr. Scheele to a neighbouring hotel, but the doctor was unable to obtain accommodation, so that he spent the night sitting in a railroad station.

Simultaneously another German of Havana was taken into custody. He was implicated in the Scheele affair by reason of his payments to the doctor, besides being involved in numerous violations of the neutrality of Cuba, for which the Cuban Government meant to hold him responsible.

The close investigation of this man revealed much valuable data. A collection of papers had been buried by Dr. Scheele in the tropical garden he had built about the Pozas mansion. There they were unearthed by the agent of the Department of Justice of the United States who had gone to Cuba to bring him back. Taking a pick and shovel and digging among the flowers cherished by the doctor, he found these damning documents from Potsdam, containing their secret instructions for the working out of the industrial conquest of Vereinigten Staaten—These United States.

Another set of documents was obtained by a very clever piece of work by agents of the Department of Justice. These were papers left behind by Wolf von Igel when he left the United States—papers that he dared not risk having seized and read by the British authorities on his way to Germany. They were packed in a suitcase and were committed to the care of a German in Englewood, New Jersey. On instructions from the head office of the Department of Justice in Washington, agents in the New York office of the Department wrote out in German, on a typewriter, the letter telling this German to deliver the suitcase to the bearer and including in its message the magic password. This letter was entrusted to an agent who spoke German perfectly.

He executed the commission without a hitch. He called upon the German and introduced himself in low tones as a loyal subject of the Kaiser and asked to be taken into the house. There he presented his letter. When the German read it, he broke into a hearty laugh and said the password no longer really applied, because it referred to the coal pile. He had found, on account of the coal shortage, that at times he could not keep enough coal in the cellar to keep the suitcase covered, and that consequently he had had to conceal it elsewhere in the house. The caller joined him in laughter at this piece of humour, and the German excused himself and soon returned with the suitcase. It was not till several days later that he had the slightest inkling that the man he had entertained was an operative of the American Government.

The plot for which Dr. Scheele was brought to earth was only a detail in the vast scheme of Germany’s treachery, but it was one of the most dastardly and most dramatic of those details, and its detection and unravelling revealed the men at the head of the German system in this country and their mutual relationships. In a previous chapter I have told something of the career of Franz von Rintelen. At this point he appears as an agent of Germany seeking to destroy the ships bearing American supplies to the Allies. One day Dr. Scheele received a caller, Eno Bode, a captain in the service of the North German Lloyd Steamship Company. Bode bore a card from Von Papen, ordering Scheele to execute any orders which Bode gave. Von Papen’s orders, in their turn, had come through Rintelen.

Bode now disclosed to Dr. Scheele a most infernal plan. He was instructed to invent a bomb of simple mechanism, which could be placed in a ship’s cargo or its coal and which would not explode, but set fire to anything inflammable with which it came in contact. It must be devised to operate at any predetermined time after it was placed on board.

To Dr. Scheele, a great chemist himself and possessed of every secret of the greatest nation of chemists in the world, this was a simple order. In his instructions he was forbidden to apply for his materials to any American concern through which the purchase might ever be traced. Consequently, he asked for technical assistance and was referred to Captain Carl Schmidt, the chief engineer of the Friedrich der Grosse, one of the great German liners interned at Hoboken. Schmidt placed at his disposal Charles Becker, the electrician of the Friedrich der Grosse. From him he obtained sections of lead pipe and thin sheets of lead and tin. The chemicals were easily obtained from strictly German sources.

Dr. Scheele now made a few experiments and quickly evolved a bomb that was as simple as it was efficient. It consisted merely of a section of lead pipe, about two and a half inches in diameter and three or four inches long. This cylinder was separated into two water-tight compartments by a thin disk of the sheet tin. In one of the two compartments was placed a chemical, and in the other a corrosive acid. The ends were then sealed and the bomb was complete. The acid slowly ate its way through the tin partition, and when at length a tiny hole was made, the acid and the chemical mingled and their action was to produce, without noise, a heat so intense that it melted the lead in the cylinder and the whole bomb flowed down into a molten mass so fervent that it would ignite any ordinary substance, such as coal or wood. No timing mechanism was necessary. The thickness of the tin partition determined the time at which the bomb would act. By careful experiment, Dr. Scheele was able to manufacture bombs that would become effective in two days, four days, six days, eight days—at will. For example, if the tin partition was made one sixtieth of an inch in thickness, the bomb would operate in forty-eight hours. The thickness necessary for the longer periods was established by actual test.

As soon as the bomb was perfected, its manufacture was undertaken on a big scale. Soon the workroom aboard the Friedrich der Grosse was turning out thirty-five of these “cigars,” as the Germans called them, every day. Altogether, before the game became too dangerous and Dr. Scheele was forced to flee, nearly five hundred bombs were manufactured.

Next came the necessity for an organization to place these bombs upon the ships. First, the ships themselves must be known—their sailing dates, their names, their berths and cargoes. Through German sources of information, the data about merchant ships were gathered and by Dr. Carl Schimmel, another German agent in New York City, were listed and classified. These records were placed at the disposal of the bomb-placing squad.

Captain Carl Wolpert was in charge of this work. He was the superintendent of the Atlas Line, a subsidiary of the Hamburg-American Steamship Company, and an officer of the German Naval Reserve. Armed by Scheele with the “cigars,” by Schimmel with the list of ships, and by Von Rintelen with unlimited money, Wolpert chose a group of trusted lieutenants from among the Germans in New York. These men frequented the water-front and the neighbouring saloons, where they sought out stevedores, who could be bribed to place the bombs where they were directed. Fortunately for the lives of seamen and for the property of the Allies, many of these men took the German money but threw the bombs into the bay. Enough, however, earned their blood money so that many ships were set afire on their voyage across the Atlantic, some of them burning to the water’s edge, most of them being greatly damaged, the total loss figuring well up in the millions of dollars. Many a captain in mid-ocean fought the flames on his vessel, from the second or third day of his voyage, all the way into port. A fire would break out in his bunker coal; it might be quenched, only to break out in the cargo two days later, and perhaps a day after that start up again in the coal.

This fiendish work was done in cold blood, do not forget, at the command of the Imperial German Government, at its expense, under the direction of one of its most highly placed aristocrats, by one of Germany’s greatest chemists, with the coÖperation of officers of the German Navy and with the cognizance of the German Ambassador to our friendly Government. Here was no passion of battle, no extemporized savagery of revenge. It was a calculated atrocity, perpetrated by the highest authorities of one of the most “civilized” of the “Christian” nations, using the most technical processes of one of the most complex arts of modern life. The magic by which the slimy refuse of burning coal is transmuted into dyes which give to paints and fabrics the splendour of the dawn and the beauty of the rose, was here debased to the infamous uses of treachery and murder.

THE END