The Web : $b The Authorized History of the American Protective LeagueHough, Emerson
History
The Web : $b The Authorized History of the American Protective League
Hough, Emerson
American Protective League; Propaganda, German; World War, 1914-1918 -- Secret service -- United States
In brief, Scheele came over to this country quietly, a man quite
unknown, just twenty-five years ago. For twenty-one years, up to
the outbreak of the war, he received regularly $125 a month as his
“honorarium” from the German Government. He was one of the fixed
location spies—one of very many. He went into business, opening a
drug store in a New York suburb, and he prospered there. He was not
alone. There were many of his people about. He met more than one
prominent German living in New York City—most of whom now live in Fort
Oglethorpe. In these influential circles, in continuous close touch
with Berlin, supplied all the time with money from Berlin, Scheele was
appraised at his true worth as a possible agent of destruction.
Came to him, therefore, one day, a captain in the service of the North
German Lloyd Steamship Company. This man carried a card. From whom? No
less than von Papen, a man accepted as bearing the credentials of a
foreign government, entitling him to courtesy in our own country—von
Papen, one of the master plotters located on this side of the sea.
Scheele was asked to invent some sort of infernal machine by which
ships could be set on fire after they had left port and were on the
high seas. That was all. If innocent persons died, what matter? It must
be a secret sort of thing, this machine, which could be distributed
without creating a suspicion. It must be efficient. It must be small.
It must work without much mechanism. And it must be deadly sure. This
was the sort of warfare—allied to bestiality in France and Belgium, and
red ruthlessness on the high seas—that was to make Germany loved and
revered in the whole world, as now, amazingly enough, she asks us to
be—we, her American brothers “with whom she has no quarrel.”
Very well, the order was accepted by Scheele. It was simple for this
man, a mechanical and chemical genius. Of course, he needed some
materials. Where should he get them except among fellow Germans? And
were not the entire interned crew and corps of officers of the interned
German steamships, which were lying in the Hudson, available for his
purposes? Scheele got all the lead and tin and like material he needed
there. The Scheele cigar bomb, as it came to be called, was only three
or four inches long and an inch or two in diameter. Inside of it was a
thin partition made of tin. In a cavity at one end was placed a certain
chemical; in the other end, divided from it for the time being by a
partition sheet of tin, was a strong corrosive acid. When the ends were
sealed the work was done.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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