Sektion P (politics)
He appears to have been based at Bamberger Strasse in Berlin.
Rudolf Nadolny’s memoirs, Mein Beitrag (Wiesbaden: Limes, 1955), contain little information on his activities as director of Sektion P.
Nicholai retired but he was re-called when war broke out and became head of the Berlin unit of IIIb. This was the place where the sabotage and influence activities against the USA (Morton tells about some of the agents which were involved) were planned and controlled. One can read it in the files of the German Foreign Office. The IIIb-man who was responsible for that was captain Rudolf Nadolny, head of the section Politics. Okay one must not know what he did and how he tried to handle with anthrax spores.
On 28 November 1914, the Admiralstab issued a circular to naval attachés and agents explaining that ‘It is necessary to hire through third parties who stand in no relationship to the official representatives of Germany, agents for arranging explosions on ships bound for enemy countries’.21 At about the same time, military intelligence established a sabotage department, Sektion P under Captain Rudolf Nadolny, and the General Staff considered blowing up Canadian railway tracks in order to prevent the anticipated movement of Allied troops from the Pacific to the Atlantic coast, and thence to the Western front.22 From 1916 onwards, German sabotage grew in scope and sophistication. With the British naval blockade tightening its grip on the Central Powers and German troops locked into a fierce and costly ten-month battle against the French at Verdun, the German military leadership became more eager to employ sabotage for strikes at the Allies and their neutral supply bases. Consequently, Sektion P extended its operations, and in spring 1916, the navy added a sabotage branch to its intelligence service, ‘NIV’, under Lieutenant Commander Alfred Lassen.23 The KNSt Antwerp also began to dabble in sabotage.24 Sabotage operations against Great Britain were usually prepared and launched from Scandinavia and, until February 1917, from the United States.25 The German secret services put considerable effort into obstructing the delivery of military hardware from the neutral United States to the Allies. A particularly notorious incident was the explosion at Black Tom pier in New Jersey in July 1916. The pier, located opposite the Statue of Liberty in the harbour of New York, was a depôt where war matériel manufactured in the northeastern states was stored for transport to the Allied powers. On the evening of the explosion, barges and freight cars at the depôt were reportedly filled with over 2 million lb of ammunition 122 Spies of the Kaiser Illustration 5 The alleged agent provocateur, Baron Louis von Horst, c. 1920. Note the crutches that von Horst depended upon after becoming partially paralysed during internment Source: Courtesy of Baron Dr Louis von Horst, Jr. destined for a Russian offensive. The munitions included shrapnel, black powder, TNT, and dynamite. Shock waves from the ensuing explosion at Black Tom and a succession of smaller explosions that Covert Action 123 lasted for several hours, could be felt as far as 90 miles away, caused $14 million in damage, and killed four people. After the war, a German– American mixed claims commission investigated the incident and implicated several former German secret service members as likely perpetrators.26 Illegal German activities in North America are well documented, but German officials always claimed that the ultimate target of their underhand warfare was the entente. To what extent, then, did the German secret services conduct such operations against Great Britain? In September 1914, the German military attaché to Washington, Captain Franz von Papen, recruited a certain Horst von der Goltz, apparently born in Koblenz as Franz Wachendorf. Not unlike Armgaard Graves, von der Goltz had indulged in an adventurous lifestyle that quickly brought him in conflict with the law. At the age of sixteen, he was arrested for forgery in Brussels and extradited to Germany. In 1912, he moved to the United States, thence to wartorn Mexico where he joined General Francisco ‘Pancho’ Villa’s revolutionary army and was promoted to major.27 In all likelihood, he assumed the name ‘Horst von der Goltz’ to impress the Mexicans. 28 Under that name he was captured by Villa’s enemies and imprisoned in Chihuahua where he remained until the revolutionaries conquered the town and liberated the German mercenary.29 Shortly after the outbreak of war in Europe, von der Goltz showed up at von Papen’s office in New York and offered his services. Both men quickly agreed that von der Goltz should blow up the Welland Canal on the US–Canadian border. 30 Von Papen supplied his new recruit with $500 and a letter of introduction, and von der Goltz proceeded to Baltimore where German consul Carl A. Lüderitz procured him a false passport under the name of Bridgeman A. Taylor. Von Papen’s straw man, one Federico Stalforth, put further financial means at von der Goltz’s disposal, and a certain Captain Hans Tauscher, a representative of the Krupp company, was to provide the necessary explosives to carry out the mission. Von der Goltz hired a motley group of men and was headed for the Canadian border when the military attaché called the whole operation off while the sabotage team was still in Buffalo.31 It is unclear why the mission was suddenly aborted, but given that von der Goltz was immediately recalled to Germany, one of the services in Berlin may have decided that his skills were better employed elsewhere. On 29 August 1914, von der Goltz applied for a US passport in the name of Bridgeman Taylor which was granted, and on 2 October, he had it visaed at the Italian consulate general in New York. Travelling via Genoa on the Duca d’Aosta, he reached Berlin about three weeks later.32 124 Spies of the Kaiser Illustration 6 Olaf Gulbransson, Der Weltbefreier, or ‘The World Liberator’, showing a German knight cutting off the tentacles of a British octopus, straddling the globe Source: Simplicissimus, 1917. No records survive of von der Goltz’s sojourn in Berlin. In 1916, he stated that the Germans had ordered him ‘to proceed to England for spy duty’.33 In his memoirs, however, he claims that German intelligence had instructed him to return via Britain to the United States ‘with a program which, in ruthlessness and efficiency, left nothing to be desired’. 34 The American press soon picked up on that version, and ever since most authors have concurred that von der Goltz was simply Covert Action 125 stopping over in England on his way back to the United States, or possibly to Mexico.35 But von der Goltz was in no hurry to reach the United States. He arrived in England on 4 November 1914 on the Batavia, a vessel plying between Rotterdam and Falmouth.36 If his final destination had really been the United States, he would have immediately re-embarked on a ship bound for America, but instead he registered at a London hotel under the name of Bridgeman Taylor of El Paso. 37 Because he failed to register as an alien, the police arrested him on 14 November 1914. 38 His passport bore stamps from Germany, and the British authorities rightly suspected that von der Goltz was up to something. He was sentenced to six months imprisonment, after which he would be expelled from Britain. 39 In January 1915, von der Goltz asked for an audience with Reginald Hall, director of British naval intelligence, who agreed to a meeting. The German ex-mercenary offered Hall some ‘inside’ information in return for an early release, but instead the authorities wisely decided to intern von der Goltz until the end of the war. 40 Then came von Papen’s blunder. In December 1915, the US government declared the German military and naval attachés personae non gratae, and Berlin had to recall both of them. Military Attaché von Papen knew that all ships bound for Europe were being stopped and searched by the British, but he sincerely believed that his diplomatic immunity would spare him and his belongings from this procedure. Von Papen was carrying a number of highly sensitive documents with him when the British intercepted his ship and, as might have been expected, thoroughly searched his possessions. Among the many top secret documents, the British discovered a cheque made out to ‘Mr. Bridgeman Taylor’ with the additional explanation: ‘This person came over to England to offer himself for work under His Majesty’s Government. His real name is von der Goltz, and he is now in England.’ 41 The British authorities now had ultimate proof that von der Goltz was a German agent and that he had been on a mission to Britain, not the United States. Following von Papen’s interception, von der Goltz was escorted to Scotland Yard, where he confessed and offered his cooperation in order to save his skin. He was fortunate in that the British were then collecting evidence to prove and publicize German conspiracies in the United States. In a sworn statement, von der Goltz implicated von Papen and several others. The British Foreign Office proposed to publish the statement, but before doing so consulted the US State Department, which requested that von der Goltz be sent to America to give evidence 126 Spies of the Kaiser against the persons implicated. Von der Goltz eagerly agreed and left Britain on the Finland in late March 1916.42 Von Papen’s cheque proves that von der Goltz’s destination had not been the United States or Mexico, but Great Britain. Basil Thomson of the Special Branch suspected that von der Goltz had come to England on a sabotage mission and, given his earlier activities in the United States, this may well be an accurate assumption.43 Only the fact that he was of value for British propaganda in the United States saved von der Goltz from the firing squad. Washington and London had originally agreed to keep von der Goltz’s journey to the United States secret. He was to return to Britain after giving evidence. 44 But von der Goltz frustrated this plan on the way to New York. The chief reporter of the New York Sun, one Fougner, happened to be travelling on the same boat as von der Goltz. According to Basil Thomson, Fougner ‘pumped him [von der Goltz] on the way and had a garbled account of the business wired over to a Press Agency in New York’. As a result, von der Goltz’s secret journey was widely known in New York prior to his arrival, and the British Admiralty was forced to release his story to the press. 45 The Scotland Yard officer accompanying von der Goltz, Harold Brust, was at great pains to explain why he had failed to keep his prisoner separated from the other passengers. 46 As a state witness in the ensuing trial, von der Goltz did great damage to the individuals implicated, and he contributed significantly to the Germans’ image as ‘dynamiters’ in the United States. Due to von der Goltz’s confession, Hans Tauscher and Papen’s aide Wolf von Igel were arrested. 47 Moreover, von der Goltz accused members of the German diplomatic corps, including former service attachés Karl Boy-Ed and von Papen, as well as Consul Carl Lüderitz, of involvement in espionage, sabotage, and pass forgery.48 In England, von der Goltz would doubtless have been sentenced to death, and he was lucky to be shunted off to an internment camp on Ellis Island instead. Von der Goltz was not the only German saboteur sent on a mission to Great Britain. Early in the war, German naval intelligence decided to make an effort to hire Irishmen in the United States for placing explosives aboard British ships.49 In early 1915, naval agent Hans Boehm recruited Irishman Anthony J. Brogan for sabotage work. According to Boehm, Brogan was ‘ready for anything’ and ‘hates England’.50 In February 1916, Brogan, under the cover name ‘Kelly’, contacted Prieger of ‘NI’ and the General Staff from Portugal and explained that he had six men at his disposal to attack the main telephone and cable centre at Covert Action 127 London, which was situated 50 yards north of Westminster Cathedral and controlled the entire air defence of the City. He knew one of the Irish workers on the site and asked for money to pay his men.51 Isendahl instructed the German minister in Lisbon to forward £100 to ‘Kelly’, but the operation did not materialize. 52 In late March 1916, ‘Kelly’ informed Sektion P from Madrid that one of his agents, a certain Jennings, knew some men who were working at docks and military factories in Britain and were ready to carry out sabotage missions in their workplaces. He asked that Jennings be forwarded £2,000 for this purpose. 53 Nadolny, the director of Sektion P, agreed to this amount with the reservation that ‘Kelly’ should be reimbursed only after the successful conclusion of the mission.54 As Nadolny’s cable was not sent direct, but through the Auswärtiges Amt, the German military attaché in Madrid who was in charge of the operation never received it. Jennings’ gang was disbanded. 55 Nadolny was naturally annoyed and admonished Madrid that ‘bungling [Durcheinanderarbeiten] of different agencies is to be avoided’ in the future. 56 This aborted mission is a telling example of the German services’ inefficient, decentralized structure during the war. In December 1914, I.A. Mulder, an Afrikaner, proposed to NI’s director Naval Captain Prieger the placing of ‘infernal machines’ (Höllenmaschinen) on steamers carrying matériel bound for France or Britain and calling at ports on the United States’ Atlantic seaboard.57 ‘Infernal machines’ were bombs that looked from the outside like coal briquettes, oil tanks, jam jars, small margarine barrels, or other harmless items. The shell of the bomb broke down into two parts, one containing the explosive and the other the substance as which it was disguised. A thin glass tube containing sulphuric acid, covered by a metal sheath of a thickness according to the time required before the bomb exploded, was left in contact with the explosive, and as soon as the bomb was placed in the selected spot, this tube was broken. The acid then attacked the metal sheath and finally reached the explosive matter and caused it to explode. 58 The advantage of this mechanism was that it gave the agent placing the bomb on board ample time to leave the ship before the explosion. As these ‘infernal machines’ were often placed on Allied ships in neutral countries, the time-delay also served to let the explosive go off on the open sea, outside territorial waters, thus reducing the danger of diplomatic complications. The Germans produced the necessary devices in the United States and Berlin. In America, the German chemist Dr Walter Scheele used his New Jersey Agricultural and Chemical Company at 1123 Clinton Street in Hoboken for this purpose.59 The navy had a 128 Spies of the Kaiser production site at their Agatit-Werke, and Sektion P procured explosives and the like chiefly from its subsection Materialien-Verwaltung.60 In 1915, German agents attacked several Allied ships from New York: on 21 May 1915, the British merchant ship Bayropea caught fire on its way to Le Havre; on 10 June 1915, the British merchant ship Kirkswald put into Marseille, where nine bombs were discovered on board which had failed to go off; on 18 June 1915, a fire broke out on the Ingleside, which had arrived in Hull from New York, and upon search a bomb was found which had not exploded; similar incidents occurred on the Saltmarsh and other British ships coming from the United States.61 The British authorities issued several warnings about the danger of ‘infernal machines’.62 However, not all suspicious-looking fires can be ascribed to German sabotage. In 1916 and 1917, numerous vessels shipping copper from Australia and New Zealand sank or were severely damaged by fire, and the authorities were quick to suspect enemy aliens – and behind them German intelligence – as the source of these calamities. 63 But it is inconceivable that the German services could have carried out these assaults in Australia, and hence it is much more likely that the fires were due to accidents brought about by the ships’ cargoes. At times, the Germans ventured attacks on Allied ammunition factories. In his memoirs, Nadolny relates that the Chief of the General Staff, General Falkenhayn, awarded him the Iron Cross for the destruction of a Russian gunpowder factory at Ochta.64 Nadolny denies that any such operations took place in France or Britain, although Basil Thomson ascribes explosions at factories in Lancashire, Silvertown and Kensington in 1917 to German sabotage. 65 The most controversial case of alleged sabotage in a British ammunition factory occurred in 1915. On the night of 30–31 July, a series of fires and explosions at Nobel’s Explosives Company in Ardeer killed three workers and injured twenty-two. The whole of the TNT plant was destroyed along with a number of other buildings, including three cordite blending houses and three cordite stoves. The Home Office immediately suspected sabotage and set up a committee to inquire into the circumstances of this catastrophe. After a thorough investigation the committee concluded that enemy sabotage could not be ruled out, but shortly after the war MI5 conceded that the explosions ‘proved not to be the work of an enemy agent, but an accident’.66 Throughout the war, in not one instance could German authorship of an explosion in British factories be proven. Given that it was much easier for the Germans to conduct sabotage against Great Britain from neutral countries, sabotage within the United Kingdom was virtually nonexistent. Covert Action 129 Following America’s entry into the war in April 1917, the Scandinavian countries, in particular Norway, were among the few remaining options whence the Germans could launch sabotage operations against Great Britain. August Lassen, who had become director of the navy’s sabotage section ‘NIV’ in March 1917, even contemplated destroying the iron ore shipment facilities at Narvik, but this project was eventually abandoned. 67 As in the United States, ‘N’ sought to place ‘infernal machines’ on Allied ships in Norwegian seaports. The Admiralstab chose Baron Friedrich Walter von Rautenfels, born of German parents in Helsingfors in 1880, to execute this scheme. After the outbreak of war, the German diplomatic service hired Rautenfels as a translator for Russian and Finnish: later he worked as a courier for the Admiralstab. In 1917, Rautenfels hired a handful of subagents, mostly Finns, and smuggled several hundred kg of explosives, bombs, time mechanisms and the like required for the construction of infernal machines into Norway. The devices were stored in the homes of private individuals.68 Until June 1917, Rautenfels employed a specially trained saboteur to place explosives on ships bound for England. This man may be identical with Otto Cornehlsen, who operated in Gothenburg, Bergen, Hull and Hartlepool, and sent down several Allied and Norwegian vessels, according to his own account.69 However, British naval intelligence intercepted a German cable alluding to Rautenfels’ identity and his doings. The British immediately forwarded this information to the Norwegian government. By 1917, Norway maintained a hostile neutrality towards Germany, and the Norwegian government made no effort to hush the affair through diplomatic channels.70 Quite to the contrary, the police immediately arrested all suspects.71 In the course of this shakedown, the Norwegian authorities discovered a number of boxes containing explosives which, to make matters worse, were labelled with the address of the imperial German legation. Confronted with this evidence, Minister Hans Michahelles told the Norwegians that the suspects arrested so far, all of them Finns, were actually Bolshevik revolutionaries, not German agents. 72 One day later, Isendahl suggested that Michahelles should admit that the explosives were indeed German property, but that they had been intended exclusively for the destruction of the German auxiliary cruiser Berlin if it were seized by the enemy. At worst, the German legation should claim the devices were to be used against Russia, not Norway.73 However, the flood of evidence could not be stemmed. One of Rautenfels’ men confessed not only that the bombs were intended for England-bound ships in Norwegian ports, but also that this practice had already been applied in several cases.74 Meanwhile, the Norwegian 130 Spies of the Kaiser police discovered a major depôt in the house of Hjalmar Wirtanen, a Finn, containing fourteen large boxes with bombs, explosives and other devices. 75 The Wilhelmstraße successfully insisted to the Norwegian government that, as a member of the German diplomatic corps, Rautenfels be released. 76 At the end of 1917, however, Norwegian courts convicted numerous Germans, Norwegians, and Finns of espionage and sabotage at several trials in Bergen and Christiania. Michahelles was recalled to Germany, and his successor was refused an audience with the Norwegian king.77 The Norwegian government was even more willing to cooperate with the British authorities in fighting German intelligence after the discovery of extensive German sabotage operations on Norwegian soil in 1916 and 1917. In the course of investigating these plots, the Norwegian authorities became suspicious of a certain Erik Laven, later discovered to be the German agent Fritz Lavendal. Early in 1917, a check was placed on Laven’s mail. Consequently, Norwegian intelligence discovered that Miss Synnoeve Braaton regularly forwarded letters from Alfred Hagn to Laven. The Norwegian police quickly ascertained that Hagn was a German agent who had been operating in Britain since April 1917, and that Miss Braaton was his girlfriend, who was used by Laven as a cover address. Laven, together with another German agent, Leifhold, had approached Hagn in 1916 and persuaded him to sign up for an espionage mission to Britain. As the British service had helped the Norwegians to smash the German sabotage plots, the Norwegian police now returned the favour and informed London about Hagn. In May 1917, MI5 sent detective Melville to Bergen to befriend Hagn and collect incriminating evidence in his apartment. As soon as he set foot in England on 24 May, Hagn was arrested. At the same time, the Norwegian police arrested Laven together with the German agents Schwartz, Thoresen and Harthern. 78 Apparently Leifhold had escaped, and another suspect, the director of Germany’s marine interrogation service, Dr Filchner, had already left the country. The ensuing trial inflamed Norwegian public opinion. At the end of August, Laven was sentenced to five years, Schwartz to four years and the Norwegian Thoresen to two years’ penal servitude. Harthern was forced to leave the country.79 But this was not the end of it. Investigation and trial led to the unmasking of ever more German agents. By the end of October, another fourteen suspects were charged with espionage,80 and in November a Norwegian court sentenced two German sailors to seven months in prison for espionage.81 In December, Norwegian police discovered scores of letters bearing inscriptions in invisible ink or code-phrases in the clothing or personal effects Covert Action 131 of ships’ crews bound for or departing from Norwegian ports. Again, numerous arrests were made,82 and by early 1918, Norway had essentially been cleared of German agents. Biological warfare Microbiological knowledge was quite advanced at the outbreak of the First World War. Since the 1880s, German and French scientists, physicians, and veterinarians had played leading roles in achieving a better understanding of major bacteriological diseases and their modes of transmission. This may partially account for the fact that Germany and France were the first nations to investigate and conduct biological warfare. While further research is needed to determine the scope of French efforts in this regard, the ramifications of the German programme can be sketched broadly. 83 The German biological warfare programme began in early 1915 and was administered by Sektion P under Captain Nadolny. As such, it was subordinated to the General Staff and essentially independent of civilian oversight. The most common types of bacilli used were glanders and anthrax, which were cultured at the laboratory of the military veterinary academy in Berlin under the supervision of Professor Troester.84 A question that needed to be addressed early on was whether the programme was to target only livestock or human beings as well. Consistent with international law, which prohibited the use of poison or poisoned arms against enemy troops, the General Staff denied permission for anti-human biological warfare on at least two occasions in 1916. When Portugal entered the war on the side of the Allies, the German legation in Madrid cabled the following suggestions to Berlin, which the German government promptly ruled out: In order to close the Spanish–Portuguese frontier to make communications difficult between Portugal and the Allies, I [probably the military attaché, Commander Krohn] suggest contaminating at the frontier, with cholera bacilli, rivers flowing through Portugal. Professor Kleine of the Cameroons considers the plan to be perfectly feasible. It is necessary to have two glass phials of pure culture, which please send when safe opportunity occurs.85 In September 1916, Oberstabsarzt (captain and physician) Winter, sanitation officer of the 21st army corps, proposed spreading the plague to England. Winter’s apocalyptic scheme envisaged dropping liquid 132 Spies of the Kaiser cultures of plague bacilli from zeppelins onto ports, 100 litres at a time, with the aim of infecting rats and thereby setting off an epidemic. His memorandum was forwarded to General Erich Ludendorff of the General Staff, who passed it on to the Chief of the Surgeon General’s Office, with a note enquiring as to the proposal’s feasibility. On 24 September, the Surgeon General rejected the plan and admonished Winter: ‘My dear Stabsarzt, all respect to your courage and patriotism, but if we undertake this step we will no longer be worthy to exist as a nation.’86 When the Emperor heard of the brainstorming on this subject, he categorically forbade the use of zeppelins for bacteriological attacks on England, and a postwar memorandum of the army’s medical corps states that bacteriological warfare on humans had been ruled out on ethical as well as technical grounds.87 Winter’s memorandum had been circulated to several officials, and it is not difficult to imagine that his bizarre proposals generated a fair amount of gossip. Rumours to the effect that the Germans were considering a plague attack on Britain must have spread quickly. As related above, even the Emperor had heard of these ideas although he was not supposed to be informed. Only a few weeks after Winter had put his thoughts to paper, the rumour of the plague attack had spread to France and thence to Britain. A British Home Office memorandum recalled in April 1918: ‘In October, 1917, information was received from a French source that the enemy had inoculated a large number of rats with plague, and they intended to let them loose in the United Kingdom from submarines or aeroplanes.’ 88 While the Germans refrained from the use of biological weapons against humans, no such restrictions applied to animals. The German General Staff considered the contamination of horses, cattle and other livestock an attack on military supplies, which was permissible under contemporary legal notions of warfare. 89 It must be borne in mind that beasts were still a crucial means of transport in the First World War. In 1917–1918, the British armed forces possessed 591,000 horses, 213,000 mules, 47,000 camels, and 11,000 oxen, as opposed to merely 57,000 lorries and tractors, 23,000 cars and vans, and 7,000 motor ambulances. Horses, in particular, were as indispensable to the British war effort as machine guns, dreadnoughts, railways, and heavy artillery.90 The British government made considerable efforts to obtain animals from overseas, and the Remount Department of the British army spent £67.5 million between 1914 and 1920 on purchasing and training horses and mules and delivering them to the front.91 Therefore, the Germans directed their biological warfare programme primarily at neutral Covert Action 133 livestock supplier countries, including the United States, Rumania, Spain, Norway and South America. The Germans usually dispatched a secret agent supplied with glanders or anthrax germs to one of these countries where the operative would then apply them to livestock bound for Britain. As late as 14 February 1918, the Royal Navy intercepted the German submarine U-35 off the Argentinian coast, where it had just landed two naval agents at Cartagena on whom anthrax or glander germs were found.92 The largest supplier of livestock was North America, which provided the British armed forces with 429,000 horses and 275,000 mules before the armistice, and the Germans made a particular effort to interfere with this trade by the means of biological warfare. In April 1915, Sektion P sent Dr Anton Dilger, a Heidelberg-trained physician and US citizen of German parents, to the United States. Dilger had in his possession glanders and anthrax germs. He set up a laboratory, casually referred to as ‘Tony’s Lab’ by German secret agents, in the basement of his house in north western Washington, DC. There he successfully produced cultures of bacillus anthracis and pseudomonas mallei, the causative agents of anthrax and glanders. A few months after Dilger’s arrival in Washington, his biological programme became operational and the cultures were administered to horses and mules in holding pens at the docks in New York, Baltimore, Newport News, and Norfolk. The programme ended in fall 1916 after Dilger’s return to Germany.93 While Berlin’s biological warfare programme was directed primarily at neutral countries, German agents made a few attempts to spread anthrax and glanders in France and Britain as well. On 30 March 1917, Scotland Yard circulated the following confidential memorandum to police officers across the United Kingdom: (1) A piece of sugar was found in which a tiny glass tube had been inserted and covered up with melted sugar. The presence of the tube in the lump of sugar was eventually detected in a strong transmitted light, but was not obvious to casual observation. The tube was sealed at both ends and contained liquid which was found by the usual tests to contain the anthrax bacillus in large quantities. (2) A German agent was found on arrest (by the French) in possession of an apparatus, consisting of a small wooden box, about 3 inches in length and ½ inch in diameter, which enclosed a metal tube. This contained a glass phial which contained the germs of the anthrax bacillus. He had also a small wire brush with two loops for the fingers, which was to be used for painting the solution in the nostrils of 134 Spies of the Kaiser the horse it was desired to infect. He had wired the nasal passage of the horse with view to the easier infection of the wound. Scotland Yard warned the police to keep this information secret ‘for fear of putting ideas into the heads of ill conditioned people in this country’. 94 The success of the German biological warfare campaign is difficult to measure, but one historian suggests that many of the cultures had become nonviable or avirulent by the time German agents administered them to horses or mules.95 To date, only one instance of anthrax in the United Kingdom can be linked to the German biological warfare programme. In April 1917, the Isle of Man reported four unconnected outbreaks of anthrax which implied deliberate inoculation as no previous cases had been recorded on the island for at least eight years.96 The psychological impact of Germany’s biological warfare probably exceeded the actual physical damage. As a result of Scotland Yard’s memorandum of 30 March 1917, the Home Office ordered that precautions be taken against the dissemination of anthrax in the United Kingdom.97 The German campaign caused a good many rumours such as the above-mentioned German plague attack on London. And in August 1917, the British embassy in Copenhagen investigated but dismissed a rumour that the Germans were smuggling contaminated spam from Norway to Britain.98 Ultimately, the German bacteriological campaign boomeranged when some of the operations were uncovered as happened after Rumania’s declaration of war on the Central Powers in August 1916. German officials in Bucharest had been unable to destroy or smuggle out of the country the cultures in their possession, and the German military attaché was observed burying some boxes in the garden of the German legation. Someone informed the new occupant of the building, the US chargé d’affaires, who unearthed a number of glass phials.99 The Americans quickly established that the phials contained bacteria cultures, a discovery that caused outrage in the international press and provided British propaganda with excellent ammunition. William Le Queux published an inspired article on the Rumanian incident, entitled ‘The German Death Factory’. 100 Adolf Weiszflog alias Ludovico Hurwitz y Zender Carl Friedrich Müller Ernest Waldemar Melin Fernando Bushman Georg Breeckow alias Reginald Rowland Haicke Marinus Petrius Jannsen Paul Hensel alias Irving Guy Ries Robert Rosenthal Willem Johanes Roos Albert Meyer Augusto Alfredo Roggen George Vaux Bacon 7 The Decline of German Naval Intelligence, 1917–1919 At the request of President Woodrow Wilson, the American Congress declared on 6 April 1917 that a state of war existed between the United States and the German Empire. The debate over American participation in the war had been going on for a while. In the short term, Washington’s decision to join the Allies was triggered by Germany’s declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare on 1 February 1917, with its complete disregard for the rights of neutrals.1 But the origins of American intervention ran deeper. President Wilson entered the conflict ‘to make the world safe for democracy’, and the majority of the East Coast establishment had long preferred the ‘democratic’ Allies over the ‘autocratic’ Central Powers. Anglo-American ties, in particular, played an important role in shaping Americans’ perceptions of the conflict. On a more mundane level, trade between the United States and the Allies had reached huge proportions by early 1917, and the economic consequences for North America of an Allied defeat would have been considerable. Neither was a German victory in Washington’s strategic interest. 2 One historian has also implied that German covert operations on American soil contributed significantly to the United States drifting into the Allied camp. 3 The consequences of America’s entry into the war were of course enormous. There can be little doubt that April 1917 was the turning point of the First World War. The United States provided the exhausted Allies with virtually unlimited access to raw materials, ammunition, guns, foodstuffs and funds. Neither should American manpower be discounted. Overall, the contribution of the United States to the Allied victory can hardly be overestimated, and without President Woodrow Wilson’s decision to align his country with the entente in April 1917, the German surrender of November 1918 is inconceivable. 135 136 Spies of the Kaiser The last major German intelligence operation in Great Britain If it took the Allies another year and a half after being joined by United States to defeat Germany, American participation in the war had an immediate and decisive impact on the work of German naval intelligence. Neutral countries were of paramount importance to any intelligence service as bases for covert operations in enemy territory. Early in the war, the Admiralstab had focused on the Netherlands for recruitment, training and dispatch of naval agents to Britain. However, the British and German services kept a close watch over each other, and ‘N’ found it increasingly difficult to recruit Dutch agents. In the United States, on the other hand, German naval agents could still operate with relative ease, and given the country’s size, surveillance by the authorities was easier to evade than it was in the Netherlands, which was tightly packed with enemy spies. In addition, American citizens were less prone to suspicion than Dutchmen in the United Kingdom, and their fluency in English was an additional plus. Before the war, Frigate Captain Isendahl had proposed to recruit American journalists for intelligence work in Britain,4 and this suggestion was taken up with some success in 1916. The scheme was executed by reserve officer Karl Wünnenberg alias Charles Wunnenberg alias ‘Robert Davis’, and the journalist Albert A. Sander. Wünnenberg, a reserve naval lieutenant, had lived in New York since about 1900.5 Sander wrote for various Hearst newspapers.6 After the outbreak of war, ‘N’ instructed the pair to set up an office in New York City and carry out sabotage and intelligence operations in Britain as well as in the United States.7 To provide them with a suitable cover, Sander was promoted to manager of the Central Powers War Film Exchange and Wünnenberg became his associate. Unlike other agents in America, they maintained no links with German officials in the United States, but were instead subordinated to the KNSt Antwerp. In 1915, Wünnenberg was ordered to attend classes at the Antwerp spy school. There he received a codename (A13) and was instructed in the use of secret ink, recruitment methods, and the kind of intelligence he was to provide. Antwerp issued him two cover addresses and sent him back to New York with instructions to enlist American journalists for intelligence missions to the United Kingdom.8 Subsequently, Wünnenberg and Sander recruited several agents, among them the journalists George Vaux Bacon (A58), Rutledge Rutherford (A30 or A20), J.C. Roodhardt (A93), Charles E. Hastings, Peter J. Cribben, George Born and Roslyn Whytock. Each was paid up to $1,000 in advance and promised another Decline of German Naval Intelligence, 1917–1919 137 $125 per week, a considerable amount of money, reflecting the importance the Germans attached to the venture. The journalists were to report on the arrival and departure of merchant ships to and from the British Isles, locate anti-aircraft gun bases and ascertain the location of the shore anchorages of transatlantic cables. Likewise, they were to plant anti-British articles in American newspapers. Rutledge Rutherford landed in England on 3 April 1916 and left on 19 April for Holland, where he remained for about a year. He supplied a socialist American journalist, Charles Edward Russell, with news from Ireland, and the latter published a lengthy article on the British suppression of the Irish uprising. Rutherford produced several anti-British articles for American papers, among them the New York American. Antwerp was full of praise for Rutherford’s work.9 Meanwhile, George Vaux Bacon arrived in Liverpool in early September. He had found employment with the Central Press Association and, under this cover, gathered intelligence for the Germans in London. His contact on the Continent was Arthur Denis Meisner (A82), a retired German lieutenant turned tobacco broker in Amsterdam. Unfortunately for Bacon and Antwerp, Meisner had been on MI5’s blacklist since June 1916 and his mail was under check. When Bacon left Britain and arrived in Holland on 22 September, MI5 asked Tinsley to monitor the American journalist, and Tinsley’s men observed Bacon at a meeting with American journalists Peter Cribben and Rutledge Rutherford. Despite this clear evidence, Kell’s unit almost bungled the operation. Major Carter of MI5, who dealt with Bacon’s intercepted letter, did not forward it to the addressee, Meisner. Consequently, Bacon and his German spymasters realized that the letter had been intercepted. In addition, one of Tinsley’s agents approached Bacon ‘somewhat clumsily’, as the MI5 historical reports put it, thus strengthening Bacon’s suspicions that the British were on his track. However, rather than keeping Bacon out of Britain, Antwerp merely substituted Bacon’s compromised cover address of Meisner with Rutherford’s equally compromised address. Eluding Tinsley and his henchmen, Bacon returned to Britain in November, but he was soon rediscovered through mail interception. Following two weeks in Ireland, where he contacted a Sinn Feiner, he returned to London and found a letter from Basil Thomson requesting his appearance for an interview at New Scotland Yard. On 9 December, Thomson interrogated him, and Bacon admitted his connection with Meisner. While Bacon was detained, the British authorities ordered a search of his belongings, which produced a bottle of Argyrol, a new type of secret ink, and letters from Rutherford as well as the cover addresses of Meisner and 138 Spies of the Kaiser W. van der Kolk. Only two days later another of Sander’s and Wünnenberg’s recruits, Roslyn Whytock, turned up at Thomson’s office and confessed all he knew about his employers. Whytock delivered the names of Charles E. Hastings, Alfred Schultze, and Wilhelm Dunell (A77), and confirmed that the German consul in Rotterdam was playing an active role in German intelligence operations. However, except for Bacon and Whytock, all members of the ‘Antwerp ring’ were currently in the Netherlands and none of them was likely to cross the Channel after Bacon’s arrest. Although Bacon made a full confession on 9 February, he was tried by court martial and sentenced on 26 February 1917 to death by firing squad. Only his citizenship and inside knowledge of German covert operations in the United States saved his skin. With America’s entry into the war now a distinct possibility, Whitehall was especially keen to forward evidence on German clandestine activities operations on American territory to Washington. The British authorities relayed Bacon’s confession to their American counterparts, who immediately arrested Sander and Wünnenberg.10 However, US officials were aware that Bacon’s active cooperation, rather than merely his written confession, was needed to indict the pair. Consequently, Washington persuaded London to commute Bacon’s death sentence into one of penal servitude for life and send him to the United States to give evidence against his spymasters. 11 In March, a New York court indicted Bacon, along with Sander and Wünnenberg. A search of Sander’s house had provided some incriminating evidence, but it was Bacon’s full confession that sealed their fate. Sander and Wünnenberg received sentences of two years’ penal servitude in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta and were fined $2,500 each. Bacon reaped the full reward for his cooperation. Rather than being shot in Britain, the New York court sentenced him to one year of penal servitude, with Judge Van Vleet lamenting that ‘he disliked very much to send such a bright young man to the penitentiary’. In addition, Bacon was to pay the symbolic fine of $1. Bacon’s sentence persuaded Hastings in the Netherlands to accompany a US emissary to Scotland Yard where Thomson interrogated him. Like Bacon, Hastings was then sentenced by a New York court to one year’s penal servitude and fined $1. 12 Rutledge Rutherford, who was more deeply compromised than Hastings, chose to stick with his German spymasters. They sent him to Stockholm and thence to Hamburg, where he found employment with the Continental Times, a propaganda sheet sponsored by the German Foreign Office. 13 Heinrich Grund (A1) forwarded Rutherford’s private correspondence to the United States. An attempt by the Germans to send Rutherford to Decline of German Naval Intelligence, 1917–1919 139 Switzerland failed as the Swiss legation would not grant him a passport. His trace then peters out. He probably stayed hidden in Germany until the war was over and then returned clandestinely to the United States. 14 Antwerp continued to make use of journalists in the Netherlands, but overall the scheme lost its significance after America’s declaration of war.15 The last German spies With America’s entry into war, German naval intelligence’s ambit became extremely restricted. From 1917, the Imperial Navy was chiefly concerned with the conduct and impact of unrestricted submarine warfare. The Admiralstab tried to use its agents to gather intelligence on the departure, route, and arrival of Allied convoys, albeit to little avail. The few remaining German spies in Britain could do little more than report the fact that the submarine campaign had failed to suppress British trade. As a German naval agent reported dejectedly from England in October 1917: Secret! Impact of unrestricted U-boat war. Inexperienced, but apparently reliable W 97a reports from London dating 1 October: . . . A stroll through London stores would not be pleasant for a German. Harrods, Whiteley’s, Fortnum’s, Billingsgate, Smithfields and Convent Garden, photographed with their stock of food, would make great publicity for the large amounts of food England has at her disposal.16 In September 1918, the Chief of the Admiralstab, Admiral Scheer, candidly acknowledged the failure of naval intelligence to provide the submarines with more accurate data on Allied shipping: ‘Our intelligence regarding convoy routes is rather inexact and incomplete.’ Scheer added that the morale of German naval agents was at a nadir, and he vainly encouraged the commanders of the submarine fleet to report any success achieved through naval intelligence to uplift his operatives’ mood. 17 By mid-1918, ‘N’ had largely discontinued its operations in England, and on 11 November, the day of the armistice, the Germans maintained but a single agent (W29) in Great Britain.18 Following the armistice, ‘N’ was quickly wound up. August Lassen, director of ‘NIV’, feared that the Allies might send fact-finding committees to Berlin and commandeer the department’s files. He also dreaded that revolutionaries (dunkle Elemente, literally, ‘dark elements’) might storm the Admiralstab building and capture and publish ‘N’s files. Apparently, 140 Spies of the Kaiser he was thinking of events the previous year in Russia where the Bolshevik revolutionaries had scoured the Tsarist archives and published numerous secret documents. Lassen begged his superior, Naval Captain Ebert, to order the destruction of all incriminating material. Ebert complied, and Lassen got to work with some of his men.19 The surviving files show that Lassen was primarily concerned with the destruction of the records of his own department, the sabotage division ‘NIV’. He might have felt that these were particularly worthy of destruction, or perhaps he wished to protect the department’s agents. He may have feared that the files implicated him and was trying to save his own skin. The Admiralstab and its naval intelligence department did not survive the armistice for long. On 14 November 1918, Admiral Scheer resigned, and the following day the Naval Office assumed control of the Admiralstab. On 15 July 1919, Friedrich Ebert, President of the new German republic, dissolved the Admiralstab and its intelligence department. 20 At the end of the war, several individuals convicted of espionage on behalf of Germany still languished in British prisons, and in 1920 and 1921 the new Director of Military Intelligence, William Thwaites, reviewed most of the cases with a view to possibly reducing prison terms. Just as the nationality of an individual accused of espionage for Germany had played a major role in determining the severity of a sentence during the war, citizenship now played a crucial role in Thwaites’ decision to recommend for or against remission. Throughout the war, an accused spy could expect little mercy if he held a German passport, but after the armistice German citizenship might come in handy, as the British authorities were more likely to sympathize with a spy who had acted out of patriotism, as the following cases illustrate. Louise Mathilde Smith, née Zastrow, was a German who had married an Englishman and thus acquired British citizenship. Yet on account of her German roots, her mail was being intercepted, and MI5 discovered that she was sending newspaper clippings to her family in Germany. She was interviewed at Scotland Yard, and on 4 March 1917 a civil court convicted her to ten years’ penal servitude.21 When reviewing her case in 1920, Thwaites described her as ‘A German born woman, who married a British subject in 1913, and who is to all intents and purposes a German subject (her husband died in March, 1917)’. He concluded that she had forwarded information to Germany out of patriotism, and he recommended her immediate release on the condition that she return to Germany. 22 Non-Germans could expect less leniency once the war was over. Franz Lausitz Theodore Greite had been sentenced to ten years in prison Decline of German Naval Intelligence, 1917–1919 141 for espionage on behalf of Germany in 1916. His guilt proven beyond doubt, Greite probably avoided a harsher punishment on account of his US passport. However, when Greite asked for a pardon in 1920, Thwaites informed him that no remission would be made as his sentence was already rather lenient, and that he was lucky not to have received capital punishment in the first place. 23 German spies who had been protected from the firing squad by Allied citizenship during the war, incurred Britain’s full wrath for their ‘betrayal’ after the armistice, as is evident in the case of the Belgian Leon Francis van der Goten, who was sentenced to life imprisonment for espionage in 1917.24 Although van der Goten had never been a genuine German spy, he was shown no mercy after the war. Thwaites had only scorn for van der Goten and ignored pleas from his family and the Belgian ambassador: ‘There is no doubt that this man ought to have been shot and but for the intervention of the Belgian Government at the time he would have been shot.’25 To Thwaites, van der Goten remained ‘A traitor to the Allied cause, who deserves no consideration Illustration 7 Louise Emily Wertheim, c. 1918 Source: Leonard Sellers: Shot in the Tower: The Story of the Spies Executed in the Tower of London during the First World War (London: Leo Cooper, 1997). 142 Spies of the Kaiser whatsoever’. 26 The British Foreign Office informed the Belgian ambassador ‘that the conduct of Van der Goten, an ally, constituted a very heinous form of espionage’ and that no remission would be made.27 Finally, there was Louise Emily Wertheim, a German woman and a spy (see Ill. 7). She had avoided the death penalty in 1915 on account of her gender, while her accomplice, Reginald Rowland alias Georg Traugott Breeckow was executed. Wertheim’s sentence had been reduced to ten years with expected further remission after the war. After all, she had not been a traitor, but a patriot, at least according to the prevailing logic of the time. Yet despite the remarkable leniency the British authorities displayed towards her, she paid the ultimate price for being a German spy. In January 1918, she was certified insane and transferred to Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. There, she retreated into her own world, claiming to be an important person in contact with consuls and legislations, and that nobody could leave England without her signature. Her physical health deteriorated rapidly. She developed severe eczema and pulmonary tuberculosis, of which she died on 29 July 1920, aged thirty-six years.28 Conclusion The history of German espionage in Great Britain during the First World War era reveals a curious double failure: the incapacity of ‘N’ to make a significant contribution to the German war effort and the inability of British counter-espionage to produce a realistic assessment of German espionage. It would be tempting to attribute the failure of German espionage to British countermeasures. However, the incapability of both the German and the British intelligence communities to fulfil their respective tasks was due far more to inherent deficiencies than to the activities of an enemy service. Unlike the fairly independent British intelligence community, ‘N’ was firmly integrated into the structure of the Imperial Navy, and the overall failure of German naval intelligence to contribute in any measure to the German war effort derives in large part from this fact. ‘N’ had to gather intelligence according to the Admiralstab’s operations plans, but the latter were continuously in flux. While originally the Admiralstab demanded intelligence on the disposition of foreign warships around the globe, after 1911 German naval planners focused increasingly on the Northern Sea and the British Isles. At the outbreak of war, the Admiralstab considered a decisive surface battle between Imperial and Royal Navy likely, and instructed ‘N’ accordingly. But from 1915 the submarine replaced the surface fleet as Germany’s most promising naval weapon, and ‘N’ had to redefine its mission once again. Unlike the army’s intelligence service, ‘N’ had to keep adjusting to the navy’s ever-changing operations plans, which made long-term intelligence-gathering difficult. Moreover, ‘N’ generally competed with rather than complemented the activities of the army’s intelligence service, Sektion IIIb. The two services shared little information; while ‘N’ focused on naval intelligence in Britain, IIIb limited its activities to collecting military intelligence in France and 143 144 Spies of the Kaiser Russia. Consequently, neither of the two services felt fully responsible for the monitoring of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), which crossed the Channel virtually without being noticed in August 1914, presenting the advancing German armies in Belgium and France with an unpleasant surprise. ‘N’ also committed a series of tactical errors. Especially prior to the war, agents were recruited clumsily and unprofessionally, occasionally straight out of prison. Moreover, the German naval attaché could never be induced to participate wholeheartedly in intelligence work. And Gustav Steinhauer, the man in charge of much of Germany’s pre-war espionage in Great Britain, was a capable operative but made a poor spymaster. Finally, German agents never entirely resolved the problem of conveying intelligence securely and quickly to headquarters in Berlin. Given that Britain was an island with a limited number of exit and entry points, and that German agents had to rely on telegram and mail for communications with their spymasters, this was perhaps an insoluble problem at the time.1 ‘N’ would have failed regardless of the existence or nonexistence of MI5. The majority of German wartime agents were never caught, but their successful intelligence missions in no way helped the Admiralstab meet the challenge of overwhelming British naval superiority. Occasionally, German secret service members lamented Britain’s ‘draconian’ counterespionage measures,2 but such observations were more often than not defensive lies to disguise their own impotence. German int
Most pre-war efforts of Abteilung IIIb were directed towards France, while intelligence about Russia remained primarily in the hands of Germany’s military attaché in Moscow. Intelligence on Great Britain was the responsibility of German naval intelligence, thus it seems that Latin America and other areas overseas would have fallen under naval purview as well.81 However, Berlin’s July 1914 instructions to its ambassador to the United States, Johann von Bernstorff, placed the Western Hemisphere under Abteilung IIIb responsibility.82
When the war broke out, Major Nicolai oversaw “about 90 officers and military civil servants” in the “rear branch of IIIb” in Berlin that had both intelligence and counterintelligence duties.83 They obviously had some early successes because Nicolai was decorated with the Iron Cross Second Class in November 1914. He became a confidante of the new chief of staff, General Erich von Falkenhayn and backed von Falkenhayn’s desire to concentrate all possible forces on the Western Front after failure of the Schlieffen Plan in autumn 1914.
While many other countries’ new secret services wallowed in confusion, neglected