The German Secret Service in America 1914-1918Jones, John Price
History
The German Secret Service in America 1914-1918
Jones, John Price
World War, 1914-1918 -- Secret service -- Germany
The reader will recall the mention of a large quantity of weapons and
cartridges which Captain Hans Tauscher had stored in a building in
200 West Houston Street, New York, and which he said he had purchased
for "speculation." The speculation was apparently the project of
Indian mutiny, which in the eyes of the Indian Nationalist party was
to equal in grandeur the infamous mutiny of 1857. For those arms
were shipped to San Diego, California, secretly loaded aboard the
steamer _Annie Larsen_, and moved to sea. The plan provided for their
transshipment off the island of Socorro to the hold of the steamship
_Maverick_, which was to carry them to India. The two ships failed to
effect a rendezvous, and after some wandering the _Annie Larsen_ put
in at Hoquiam, Washington, where the cargo was at once seized by the
authorities. The _Maverick_ sailed to San Diego, Hilo, Johnson Island,
and finally to Batavia.
Count von Bernstorff had sufficient courage, on July 2, to inform
the Secretary of State "confidentially that the arms and ammunition
... had been purchased by my government months ago through the Krupp
agency in New York for shipment to German East Africa." On July 22,
he wrote again, asking that the arms be returned as the property of
the German Government, and offering to give the Department of Justice
"such further information on the subject as I may have" if they
cared to push an examination of the cargo. On October 5 he threw all
responsibility for the movements of the _Maverick_ upon Captain Fred
Jebsen, her skipper--by this time a fugitive from justice--and stating
"the German Government did not make the shipment, and knows nothing of
the details of how they were shipped"--which was a rather shabby way of
discrediting his subordinates.
It developed later that the arms were purchased--sixteen carloads of
them--by Henry Muck, Tauscher's manager, for $300,000, made payable
by von Papen through G. Amsinck & Co. to Tauscher. A part of the
shipment was sent to San Diego; the balance was to have gone to India
via Java and China, but never left on account of the protests of the
British Consul. Instead, a number of machine guns and 1,500,000 rounds
of ammunition were sold to a San Francisco broker who was acting as
agent for Adolphi Stahl, financial agent in the United States for the
Republic of Guatemala. When Zimmermann cabled to von Bernstorff on
April 30, 1916 (through Count von Luxburg in Buenos Aires), "Please
wire whether von Igel's report on March 27, Journal A, No. 257, has
been seized, and warn Chakravarty," he had grave concern over the
betrayal of German influences in the Hindu conspiracies. This was fully
justified when a correspondence notebook of von Igel's disclosed, among
other entries, the following transactions:
August 12, 1915--Captain Herman Othmer inclosed documents about
the _Annie Larsen_ and von Igel forwarded charter to Consul at San
Francisco.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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