El camino a Columbus: la concesiones de Villa hacia General Scott

En julio de 1915 Villa se encontró en apuros. Su ejercito había sido derrotado en Celaya y León, su control sobre México se había reducido a Chihuahua y partes de Sonora. Hasta entonces, Villa siempre se había guardado de tocar propiedad americana a favor de mantener buenas relaciones con los EEUU. Sin embargo, en vista de que su fortuna se desvanecía rápidamente y ya que México había sufrido media década de saqueos, confiscaciones, impuestos “especiales”, y destrucción, quedaba poca propiedad mexicana para confiscar. Villa declaró a principios de agosto que estaba dispuesto a imponer un “impuesto” especial a las empresas mineras americanas. 

Empresas como la ASARCO (American Smelting and Refining Company), la empresa de fundición más grande de México, inmediatamente sonaron la alarma en Washington. Muchas minas ya habían cesado las operaciones y sacaron sus empleados a causa del ambiente caótico en el norte de México mientras que los ejércitos de Carranza seguían forzando a Villa aún más hacia el norte. Villa necesitaba que estas empresas siguieran trabajando para generar ingresos de aduanas de exportación para Chihuahua. Amenazó con confiscar las empresas que se negaran a resumir operaciones. Se aprovechó de varias minas en el sur de Chihuahua y las manejó con sus propios hombres en julio de 1915 para rematar el punto. Aunque estas operaciones forzadas no constituían confiscación legalmente, los trabajadores mineros mandaron los lingotes al jefe pelado en vez de los legítimos propietarios de las minas. El New York Times informó sobre el asunto en el dos de agosto que Villa había confiscado numerosos negocios extranjeros y que había expulsado “un tren lleno de extranjeros.” Los comerciantes de Chihuahua se habían negado a aceptar la moneda Villista sin valor de clientes como forma de pago. Era una medida desesperada e inefectiva de intentar prevenir la inflación y la devaluación de su moneda.

Cuando el Jefe de Estado Mayor del Ejército General Hugh Lenox Scott se entrevistó con Villa a principios de agosto, le planteó que Villa iba a renunciar la posibilidad de que su facción se reconociera como poder legítimo en México de no ser que soltara estas empresas. El secretario Lansing le dio instrucciones a Scott de comunicarle a Villa que —los Estado Unidos jamás reconocería a Carranza. —  Mientras que Scott reclamó después que no le hubo hecho tal declaración a Villa, Sommerfeld, quien como confiado de ambos Villa y Scott estaba indudablemente informado, desde luego lo hizo.  Para la sorpresa de muchos observadores, pero no tan sorprendente dadas las seguranzas del Departamento de Estado de los Estado Unidos, Villa accedió a todas las demandas de Scott. —Entre todo, había más de seis millones de dólares [que Villa les devolvió a las empresas americanas] por las cuales no tenía equivalente para ofrecerle ni promesas que hacerle, y las devolvió porque se lo pedí; ni más ni menos.— Scott si ofreció permitirle a Villa la exportación de ganado (de dudosa propiedad) a los EEUU por dinero en efectivo. Sin embargo, cuando el secretario Lansing le mencionó la propuesta al presidente, éste lo paró. —¿Crees que sea prudente proporcionarle dinero a Villa justo en el momento que aparenta más débil y a punto del derroque?— preguntó el presidente, demostrando claramente que para entonces ya había cambiado de parecer. Francamente, el valor real de lo que Villa le había concedido a Scott era solamente el valor de los ingresos de producción de estas minas y la mercancía confiscada en Chihuahua. Sin embargo, con su dinero fíat devaluado y su terreno de control disminuyendo diariamente, las concesiones de Villa le constituían un mayor sacrificio por su parte. No es sorprendente que la cesión de las propiedades mineras coincidieran con no mandarles más fondos a Félix Sommerfeld y Lázaro De La Garza para pagar las municiones que tenía bajo contrato en los EEUU.

Sommerfeld se dirigió al Concilio Secreto de Guerra para pagar la cuenta… Lea el próximo fascículo del “Camino a Columbus,” explicando cómo fondos alemanes financian los suministros militares de Villa. Esta serie de blog trazará los acontecimientos que le condujeron a Villa al ataque de Columbus, Nuevo México en 9 de marzo de 1916 en etapas semanales. Daré un discurso el 12 de marzo en Columbus con el motivo de la Conmemoración Centenal del saqueo, y revelaré como le hicieron creer a Villa que atacar a los Estados Unidos sería buena idea. Si se impacienta y no desea esperar ocho meses para conocer los hechos tras Columbus, adquiera Félix A. Sommerfeld y el Frente Mexicano en la Gran Guerra hoy. 

The Road to Columbus: Who was James Manoil?

A Jewish-Rumanian immigrant and German agent, James Manoil, became the front man in the management of the munitions contract for twelve million cartridges with the Western Cartridge Company. Manoil suddenly appeared in May 1915 as the contact for Franklin Olin for Villa's munitions orders. Manoil deposited call-off payments of between 35,000 and 50,000 Dollars (between 700,000 and 1 Million Dollars in today's value) throughout the summer with Sommerfeld's accounts in St. Louis, who then forwarded them to the Western Cartridge Company. 

Who was this mysterious agent? Manoil was twenty-seven years old and worked with his brother Maurice (or Morris according to Census records) in a suite on 60 Wall Street, New York. James Manoil and Company produced a “manophone [phonograph] and other musical instruments.” Likely on a secret mission for Karl Boy-Ed, Manoil travelled to Argentina in January 1915. The trip coincided with the end of the remaining German fleet at the battle of Falkland, as a result of which hundreds of German sailors were stranded in Argentina. Not much more is known about Manoil, other than he did not possess significant wealth.

According to a statement by the Assistant Treasurer of the Guaranty Trust Company of New York, “concerning Mr. James Manoil …we have known him for some time and have extended him accommodation in small amounts on notes …We have never had a statement of his financial affairs, but we are inclined to think his means are moderate.” This man purchased several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of munitions from the Western Cartridge Company in the next weeks. Manoil’s address also happened to be that of the office of the German military attaché, Franz von Papen.

Captain Franz von Papen in New York in 1915

Von Papen’s offices housed the management of the Bridgeport Projectile Company which German secret agents had purchased in the spring through a frontman. The manager behind the scenes was the German naval intelligence agent Carl Heynen, the former HAPAG representative in Mexico, former German consul in Tampico, and right hand of Heinrich Albert. Heynen moved to the U.S. in the spring of 1915 after his assignment to supply the remnants of the German fleet in the Atlantic had ended. The munitions plant in Bridgeport, Connecticut, never produced anything. Heynen's main job was managing the purchase of smokeless powder, hydraulic presses, and other items that would create shortages in the American munitions industry. In addition, the German agent hired skilled workers away from the Remington plant next door. As a result, hourly wages rose dramatically and munitions' cost increased, further hurting the Allies. 

Although the person behind Manoil's endeavor has never been identified, Carl Heynen was von Papen and Albert's ideal go-to person to help with the orders at Western Cartridge Company. Heynen was not only a well-honed manager, he knew Mexico and Mexican culture better than anyone, was an experienced logistics man, and a personal friend of Felix Sommerfeld. It is safe to assume that Manoil’s main purpose in 1915 was to lend his name and business as a cover for the Secret War Council and Carl Heynen in particular.

Authorities missed their greatest chance to uncover the machinations of the German secret service in the United States in the summer of 1915. There is no other conclusion than to call the failure of U.S. authorities to investigate James Manoil one of the greatest intelligence blunders in the World War. The German-Rumanian frontman would have been easy to investigate. There was only one person with that name in the United States. A quick visit to his office on 60 Wall Street would have revealed that this person neither had the funds nor the wherewithal to buy millions of cartridges in the United States. Shadowing the man would have revealed his work for Franz von Papen and the Secret War Council. The link between Villa and von Papen that the MID and B.I. records fully documented would have uncovered Sommerfeld’s responsibilities and would have likely led to his arrest long before the attack on Columbus, New Mexico in March 1916 occurred.

The Military Intelligence Division investigated Manoil in 1918 after he had moved to Mexico. The American military attaché interviewed him, found him to be “very shrewd, intelligent [,] not well educated… of a rather aggressive character.” Investigators never connected Manoil with Sommerfeld, De La Garza, or the German government despite the documentation they had on the fifteen and the twelve million cartridge contracts. Researchers, as well, failed to understand Manoil’s role as a cover for German secret agents. James Manoil and his brother started the very successful Manoil Manufacturing Company in the 1920s which produced toy soldiers, a valued collector's item to this day.

Manoil toy soldiers made in the 1920s and 1930s.

This blog series will trace the events that led to Villa's attack on Columbus, New Mexico on March 9, 1916 in weekly segments. On March 12, I will speak at Columbus for the Centennial Commemoration of the raid and reveal how Villa was made to believe that attacking the United States was a good idea. If you get impatient and do not want to wait for eight months to learn the facts behind Columbus, buy Felix A. Sommerfeld and the Mexican Front in the Great War now.

The "Minister without Portfolio"

On July 24, 1915, a hot New York afternoon, Heinrich F. Albert and George Sylvester Viereck rode the elevated train on 6th Avenue from their lower Manhattan offices to uptown. Two U.S. secret service agents, Frank Burke and W. H. Houghton, shadowed the pair. At the 23rd street station Viereck left the train. Houghton followed the propagandist. Burke stayed on and watched Albert on the way home to his apartment at 105 East 51st.

Heinrich F. Albert, German Commercial Attache in New York in 1915. Briefly German Secretary of Treasury in the Weimar Republic

“…a young woman boarded the car and took the vacant seat beside Dr. Albert and began reading a book. To reach his home, Albert had to take another car at 59th str., but when the train reached that point he was reading and was not aware that the train had halted until it was about to proceed again. The stuffed brief case [sic] was between Dr. Albert and the side of the car. When it occurred to him that he must get off, he jumped up and told the guard to wait a minute. As he got to the platform, the young woman called that he had forgotten his brief case [sic]. Burke told the girl the case was his, grabbed it up and headed for the station platform by another exit from the car … Dr. Albert meanwhile was struggling to get back into the car, his passage impeded by a fat woman in the doorway. By this time Burke had reached the platform, looked back and saw that Dr. Albert was visibly agitated. Other passengers on the platform provided Burke with some concealment, but the stairway leading to the street was beyond the excited German. Sparring for time, Burke partially concealed the briefcase under his coat, and leaning against the platform wall, acted as if he were having trouble lighting a cigar. Dr. Albert glanced hastily about the platform, then dashed downstairs to the street below. Burke followed him. Dr. Albert was in an increasingly disturbed frame of mind. He walked out into the street, the better to scan the line of pedestrians. As an open trolley car clanged past, Burke ran out and leaped on its running board. But Dr. Albert had seen him and began pursuit. Burke told the trolley conductor the man pursuing them was deranged, so the car did not stop for him.”

What would become known as the briefcase incident uncovered the existence of an obscure secret organization with headquarters in New York City, called the War Council by one of its members. Agent Frank Burke and his colleague had in fact snatched the satchel of its chief, Heinrich F. Albert.

German officials in New York tried desperately to identify the culprits. Never quite establishing that the U.S. Secret Service was behind the theft, German agent and head of security of the German embassy, Paul Koenig, informed Albert that an “independent newspaper writer” named George Calvert had proffered a selection of the papers to the World editor, Timothy Walsh. Calvert, according to Koenig, had links to the Treasury Department. Indeed, Calvert likely was Frank Burke’s cover identity. The German secret service agent listed all the names of journalists involved in handling Albert’s papers and their addresses. Although Koenig did not specifically mention it, one can easily deduct that between August 2 and August 13 German agents scoured New York in attempts to lay their hands on these documents through any means possible. However, all the while they rested safely and protected in the U.S. Treasury Department.

Initially not sure who had taken the briefcase, Albert placed an ad in the New York Evening Telegram on July 27: “Lost on Saturday. On 3:30 Harlem Elevated Train, at 50th St. Station, Brown Leather Bag, Containing Documents. Deliver to G. H. Hoffman, 5 E. 47th St., Against $20 Reward.” Nobody, of course claimed the reward nor returned the briefcase to Albert’s secretary, Georg Hoffmann.

After examining the contents of the briefcase, the American government decided on August 2, 1915 to give them to the New York World. The newspaper notified Albert on August 13, the day of Rintelen’s arrest, that they had his papers in its possession. Desperately trying to thwart the publication, the German embassy sent the sixty-six year-old Second Counselor of the German Embassy in Washington, a member of the royal aristocracy of Prussia, and former member of the German parliament, Hermann Prince von Hatzfeld zu Trachenberg, to speak with Secretary of State Robert Lansing. The unsuspecting German diplomat did not realize that Lansing knew all about the issue since he had arranged for the World to get the documents. The entreaty came to naught. The World ran first page exposés on Albert and the activities of the Secret War Council between August 15 and 18.

Albert’s papers revealed the German ownership of the Bridgeport Projectile Company, the investments in American munitions, market-cornering efforts, investments in newspapers, bribes to American politicians, links of the Deutsche Bank representative, Hugo Schmidt, to the German operation, and payments of the German government to George Sylvester Viereck and the Fatherland. Every day new headlines seemed to top the ones of the day before. A. Bruce Bielaski, Secretary of State Lansing, and President Wilson convened emergency meetings to figure out how to react to the revelations. German Ambassador Count Bernstorff found himself cornered by anxious journalists wherever he went. The articles smothered whatever goodwill the general American public could still muster for Germany after the sinking of the Lusitania. English propaganda wallowed in the revelations that had found their way from Albert’s satchel to the headlines of American dailies.

Editorials both damned and pitied the German efforts. A New York Evening Globe editorial titled, “Insult to the American People,” compared the German support of the American peace movement to an insult “as much as if she [Germany] had deliberately fired at our flag.” The New York Evening Post wrote, “The pro-Germans have a right to carry on a propaganda [sic], to establish legitimate press bureaus and circulate news; the difficulty of it is that they have gone about it so badly… Here the boasted German efficiency has utterly failed. Germans are wonderful as organizers and soldiers, but in the higher realms of psychology and the spirit, Heaven [sic] knows, there are none to compare with them for wrecking their own cause.” Even the Secret War Council’s own, The New York Evening Mail, pondered, “If she [Germany] charged England with having incited the German propaganda in America by subtle intrigues, she would bring a charge against her enemy which, if true, would show what a dangerous and intelligent foe England is.” The Brooklyn Eagle demanded serious consequences: “The documents published by the New York World prefer such a serious indictment against agents of the German government that action should at once be taken in Washington.” 

Albert himself confided to his wife, “The Evening Sun speaks of ‘bovine stupidity’ [with respect to the letters and checkbooks English officials confiscated from von Papen in January 1916]… I for instance do not feel at all insulted at the ‘bovine stupidity’; I am obliged rather to admit frankly that this reproach is not so entirely unjustified, applying not to v. P. [von Papen] alone but myself too. For, no matter how valid excuses you may give for the disappearance of a brief-case [sic] or few carrying letters which get seized, it is the result after all which determines and marks such things as ‘bovine stupidity.’” Albert’s self-flagellation seemed appropriate. The revelation of his papers made virtually the entire portfolio of German secret service activities in the United States public.

Read the whole story of German intrigue in the United States in The Secret War on the United States in 1915, The Mexican Front in the Great War, and soon to become available The Secret War Council.

The Dark Invader - A Rogue Agent Arrested 100 Years Ago

Felix Sommerfeld worked closely with German Naval Attache Karl Boy-Ed through the fall of 1914 and in the spring of 1915. His regular intelligence reports to the naval attaché attest to Sommerfeld’s job description as a German naval intelligence agent. It is highly unlikely to assume that Sommerfeld acted without approval from Boy-Ed when he took apart the Huerta plot to re-enter Mexico with Pascual Orozco and Manuel Mondragon in June 1915. Franz Rintelen, the self-styled "Dark Invader" (the title of his bestselling book about his time in World War I), sent to the U.S. to cause labor unrest and sabotage allied munitions ships, supported the Huerta plot against the wishes of his superiors in the Secret War Council. 

Franz Rintelen's passport photo from July 1915. The mustache appeared only for the purpose of the photo.

When Rintelen inserted himself into Mexican affairs, a much larger and much more effective German clandestine project was under way. Sommerfeld, whom the American government considered an honest broker had personal access to the highest levels of the Departments of Justice, War, and State. His connections to the American business elite greatly exceeded those of Franz Rintelen. As a result he undertook the most ambitious German project of the period: Create a war between the United States and Mexico through the manipulation of U.S. government officials, American businesses, and the only real power in Mexico to cause this war, Pancho Villa. Sommerfeld proposed to create an intervention in Mexico to the German admiralty through Bernhard Dernburg on May 10, 1915. “He [Sommerfeld] is completely sure that an intervention of the United States in Mexico can be provoked… let Mr. Sommerfeld through me [Dernburg] have a clear ‘yes’ or ‘no.’” When Sommerfeld received a clear “yes,” Rintelen stood in the way.

Sommerfeld took him out without hesitation. He leaked Rintelen’s identity to James F. McElhone of the New York Herald on May 17, two weeks after Sommerfeld went to the border, and the week after he conferred with Lindley Garrison, the Secretary of War. McElhone’s boss was Editor-in-chief William Willis, one of Sommerfeld’s closest friends. Willis not only published his reporter’s scoop on the German agent, but also reported Sommerfeld’s information to the Chief of the U.S. Secret Service, William Flynn. The New York Sun carried an article on May 26, mentioning a mysterious German agent named “Hansen” (Rintelen’s alias). Not knowing how he had been identified, Rintelen closed his office and moved in with his business associate Andrew Meloy and Frederico Stallforth at 55 Liberty Street.

Sommerfeld reportedly was a frequent visitor there. According to witnesses, he not only watched Rintelen’s every move, but also “advised” him. Rintelen had presented Sommerfeld a letter of introduction from Peter Bruchhausen. Bruchhausen, a German commercial attaché attached to the legation in Argentina, was Sommerfeld’s intelligence handler in Mexico between 1911 and 1913.

As the American secret service began to close in on Rintelen, the German agent himself participated in his own downfall. Rintelen had contracted the publicity agent, John C. Hammond, for $10,000 to spread propaganda against the Allies as early as the end of April. The effort to show Bernhard Dernburg and the others in the German Press Office how propaganda was done backfired badly. Hammond reported Rintelen’s identity, as well as his activities, to President Wilson’s secretary, Joseph Tumulty. Rintelen also blundered in his social activities. He invited Anne L. Seward, a young and pretty schoolteacher who he knew from Berlin, on several dates in the first week of June. Rintelen spoke of “unlimited funds” at his disposal and made disparaging remarks about the “policy of the United States and the action of the President,” in order to impress her and other dinner guests. The niece of former Secretary of State William Seward found “the actions and general conduct of Captain Rintelen… so suspicious that… she determined to and did write the President upon the subject.” This letter, as well, went to President Wilson’s secretary, Joseph Tumulty. 

Rintelen had become a tremendous liability for the Secret War Council in New York by the time the Huerta affair came to light. British and American agents began to hone in on his location and activities. French police discovered the first German-made “cigar” bombs on the SS Kirk Oswald in Marseilles on May 10. The New York Bomb Squad was hot on the heels of Rintelen’s sabotage team. Likely upon the request of his direct superior, Karl Boy-Ed, the German Admiralty issued an order for Rintelen’s recall on July 2. A huge strike at Bridgeport, financed through Rintelen began on July 15 and aroused further suspicions about this mysterious agent in New York. Heinrich Albert “lost” his briefcase in the New York “El” on July 24, exposing most intelligence operations the Secret War Council was conducting.

The pavement was getting too hot for Rintelen. Without the ability to obtain a new passport, the agent booked a voyage back to Europe on the SS Noordam. He had decided to use the Swiss passport with which he had come to America. Meloy, his wife, and his secretary joined the German agent on his trip. Even then, on the voyage back to Europe, Rintelen could not keep his mouth shut and aroused suspicions from other passengers. British patrols took “The Dark Invader” off the ship during a routine check at Ramsgate on August 13.

Initially able to successfully hide his true identity under questioning, he caved after a few days. The British government interned him as a prisoner of war until 1917, when the American government won his extradition. Frederico Stallforth alluded to the real attitude in the Secret War Council concerning the Huerta-Orozco-Mondragón plot in a report to Heinrich Albert in the middle of August. Celebrating the fact that Meloy had accompanied Rintelen to Europe, Stallforth wrote, “All that which might have been especially suspicious has vanished and we have put out of the way all relating to the Mexican business… Perchance [sic] you will decide… to hold our friend M[eloy] over on some pretext or other so that he will not again make such a furor [referring to the discovery of the Huerta plot] here. You can imagine how well everything is going here since he [Meloy] has been eliminated from this stage [and gone to Europe].”

Half-hearted German efforts to affect a prisoner exchange for Rintelen in 1918 did not work, mainly because a few months after his arrest in England the German government, through Ambassador Count Bernstorff, disavowed him. When Rintelen came back to the U.S. in 1917, the war between Germany and the United States he had so carelessly provoked was in full swing. Since his offenses occurred in the neutrality period, New York courts convicted Rintelen of several felonies and passed sentences aggregating to four years of incarceration for procuring a false passport, conspiracy, firebombing ships, and causing labor unrest. The Huerta plot did not figure into his conviction. There simply was not enough evidence of a German-Mexican conspiracy.

Read the entire story of the German sabotage campaign in The Secret War on the United States in 1915.

The Road to Columbus: The Money Trail and Franklin Olin

Villa's inability to pay for the desperately needed munitions for the Division of the North created an opening for German agents to support both sides in Mexico's civil war and thus extend it. Sommerfeld, Pancho Villa's chief arms supplier in the U.S. and German naval intelligence agent, began shipping on a $420,000 contract on April 1, 1915 for 12 million 7mm cartridges. This contract was with the Western Cartridge Company in Alton, Illinois. Sommerfeld had made this deal on behalf of Villa in February 1915. The Mexican general had provided a down-payment of $50,000. For this order only the initial deposit appears in the accounts of Lázaro De La Garza, who had financial control of all New York funds of Villa’s supply chain. This leads to the unanswered question, who paid for the balance of this contract? The entire order was produced, paid for, and shipped to Villa between April and August 1915. The price per thousand cartridges was an astonishingly low $35, while Remington and Winchester charged $50 for the same product, and Peters Cartridge Company between $55 and $60.

The standard Mexican 7mm Mauser cartridge of 1915

Sommerfeld closed another arms contract on May 14, 1915, this time for 15 million cartridges at the same price as his earlier contract, $35 per thousand, valued at $525,000 ($11 Million in today’s value). There are several astonishing aspects to Sommerfeld’s deal. First, the price Sommerfeld got for the munitions was, again, at least thirty percent below market value. How did he get such an outstanding deal? Second, he managed to occupy the entire capacity of Franklin W. Olin’s Western Cartridge Company factory in East Alton for the year 1915 with this second order. Sommerfeld was now on the hook for $945,000 ($20 Million in today’s value), as Villa’s fortunes declined, and the Villista fiat money was rapidly losing value. The German agent expected to make 2% commissions, $18,900 if both contracts were fulfilled ($400,000 in today’s value). All the while he managed these huge contracts as a German in the middle of a huge spy scare that had gripped the United States as a result of the German sabotage campaign against U.S. targets. 

Sommerfeld’s account at the Mississippi Valley Trust Company shows a total $381,000 flowing through it from April to December 1915.

Only days after closing on the second contract for the fifteen million cartridges, on May 17, 1915, he signed the contract over to Lázaro De La Garza. De La Garza provided the down-payment of $65,000, which went to the Western Cartridge Company. The money came from Francisco Madero's uncles Alberto, Alfonso and Ernesto in New York, probably profits from sales of goods from the area Villa controlled in Northern Mexico, such as bullion, cattle, rubber, or cotton. De La Garza also logged a deposit “en B[an]co St. Louis” in May for $30,000. This amount does not show up on Sommerfeld’s account.

The head of the Secret War Council, Heinrich F. Albert, withdrew that exact amount in May from his account at the St. Louis Union Bank. Obviously, not just Albert, but also Sommerfeld maintained accounts St. Louis and specifically in the St. Louis Union Bank. This account was connected with Albert's. Assuming that Sommerfeld paid for both contracts, his St. Louis Union Bank account showed transactions of roughly $400,000, similar to another account he maintained at the Mississippi Valley Trust account. Only $145,000 of the total $945,000 appeared in the books of De La Garza. The French government ended up buying $265,000 worth later in 1915. The Carranza faction took $150,000 of the munitions in September. The Western Cartridge Company refunded $65,000. This leaves $385,000, almost the exact sum of Sommerfeld’s Mississippi Valley Trust transactions and what the U.S. government alleged to have come from Heinrich Albert ($381,000). The $385,000 also matches the funds believed to have remained on Albert’s various accounts in Milwaukee, Cleveland, St. Louis, and Chicago.

Another question looms large as well: Why would Franklin W. Olin sell munitions to Sommerfeld thirty percent or more below market value? Even if Olin would have sympathized with the German cause to the point that he refused to produce munitions for the Entente, he still could have commanded a higher price from the various Mexican factions, even Villa’s. Incidentally, De La Garza’s accounts show payments to Peters Cartridge Company for the same type of ammunition in May 1915 priced at $55 per thousand. The answer to this riddle may have revealed itself in the spring of 1916 when, out of the blue, and, without much fanfare, F. W. Olin opened a brass casing factory next to Western Cartridge Company in Alton, Illinois.

Olin was a businessman who believed in vertical integration. He started his business in 1892 when he founded the Equitable Powder Manufacturing Company. The company’s blasting caps served mostly the coal industry in the Midwest. He expanded the production to include small arms ammunition in 1898, changing the name to Western Cartridge Company. He also founded a company that manufactured targets in the same year to better serve his sporting and hunting rifle customers. The Western Cartridge Company had managed to carve out a nice slice of the U.S. munitions market dominated by the large arms manufacturers such as Winchester Rifle Company and Remington by the early teens. Since the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 the company thrived. The success resulted from the fact that Western was willing to produce 7mm Mauser cartridges widely used in Mexico. The Western Cartridge Company had sold millions of cases of ammunition through Sommerfeld to Madero, Carranza, and Villa over the years.

President Franklin Olin and his son, John, liked doing business with Sommerfeld. His clout over the past years had made the transportation of shipments across the international border smooth. When the U.S. government instituted various embargos, Sommerfeld called on his friends in very high places, such as Lindley Garrison, Secretary of War, or William Jennings Bryan, Secretary of State, or Hugh Lenox Scott, the General in charge of border troops and later President Wilson’s Chief of Staff of the Army and received permission to export. Sommerfeld also stood by his word. He was very well organized, understood proper specification, had the customer contacts, and, most importantly, he always paid on time.

The savvy businessman chomped at the bit when Sommerfeld asked Olin to quote on the two largest munitions orders in the company’s history. An order of that size would allow Olin to install his own brass mill to produce the cartridge cups. However, where to get the all-important presses for such a production? Enter Carl Heynen and the Bridgeport Projectile Company. Heynen was a German naval intelligence agent and ran the sham munitions plant for his German superiors. Using the Bridgeport Projectile Company as a front, Heinrich Albert had signed contracts in the spring of 1915, locking up the entire capacity for smokeless powder and for hydraulic presses in the United States. Where did Olin get this equipment that allowed him to open a brass mill in the spring of 1916? The difference between the sales price and market price on twenty seven million cartridges that Sommerfeld contracted amounted to approximately $405,000 ($8.5 million in today’s value). Heynen accounted for the cost of hydraulic presses he had ordered and which were actually produced: “$417,550 for presses which had actually been produced.” A striking coincidence! If true, the German government supported Olin’s plans for a brass mill with the understanding that he would not produce for the Entente; hence, the contracts with Sommerfeld at a price far below market value. The new factory would prove to be a boon for Olin. He came out of the war with tremendous financial strength. In 1931 he bought Winchester. Olin Industries is one of the largest corporations in the United States to this day, partly thanks to Franklin Olin and the connections of his good friend, Felix A. Sommerfeld.

This blog series will trace the events that led to Villa's attack on Columbus, New Mexico on March 9, 1916 in weekly segments. On March 12, I will speak at Columbus for the Centennial Commemoration of the raid and reveal how Villa was made to believe that attacking the United States was a good idea. If you get impatient and do not want to wait for eight months to learn the facts behind Columbus, buy Felix A. Sommerfeld and the Mexican Front in the Great War now.

The Road to Columbus: Villa's Concessions to General Scott

In July 1915, Villa found himself in dire straits. His army had been defeated at Celaya and Leon, his control over northern Mexico had shrunk to Chihuahua and parts of Sonora.   

Major General Hugh Lenox Scott and Pancho Villa in El Paso

Until then Villa had always refrained from touching American property in order to maintain good relations with the U.S. However, as his fortunes declined rapidly and since northern Mexico had endured half a decade of looting, confiscations, “special” taxations, and destruction, there was little Mexican property left to confiscate. Villa announced in the beginning of August that he intended to levy a special “tax” on American mining companies. Companies such as ASARCO (American Smelting and Refining Company), the largest smelting operation in Mexico, immediately raised alarm in Washington. Many mines had already ceased operations and pulled out their employees because of the chaotic environment in Northern Mexico as Carranza’s armies pushed Villa ever further north. Villa needed these businesses to operate in order to generate income from export duties for Chihuahua. He threatened companies that did not resume operations with confiscation. He seized several mines in southern Chihuahua and operated them with his own men in July 1915 to make his point. Although these forced operations did not legally constitute confiscation, Villa’s mine operators sent the bullion to their broke chieftain rather than the legitimate owners of the mines. The New York Times reported on August 2 that Villa had confiscated numerous foreign businesses and expelled “an entire trainload of foreigners.” The Chihuahua merchants had refused to take the worthless Villa currency for payment by customers. It was a desperate and ineffectual attempt to curb inflation and the devaluation of his currency.

When the Army Chief-of-Staff General Hugh Lenox Scott met with Villa in the beginning of August, he made the argument that Villa would forfeit his chances to have his faction recognized as the legitimate power in Mexico if he would not release these businesses. Secretary Lansing instructed Scott to tell Villa “the United States would never recognize Carranza.” While Scott later claimed that he did not relay this statement to Villa, Sommerfeld, who as a confidante of both Villa and Scott was undoubtedly informed, certainly did. Much to the surprise of observers, but not so surprising giving the assurances of the U.S. State Department, Villa acceded to all of Scott’s demands. “In all, there was more than six million dollars [Villa returned to American businesses] for which I had no equivalent to offer to Villa or promises to make, and he gave them up because I asked him; no more and no less.” Scott did offer to allow Villa the exportation of cattle (with questionable ownership) to the U.S. for cash. However, when Secretary Lansing mentioned the proposal to the President, he stopped it. “Do you think it wise to put Villa in the way of getting money just at the moment when he is apparently weakest and on the verge of collapse?” the President questioned, clearly showing that he had, by then, already changed his mind. To be fair, the real value of what Villa conceded to Scott was only the value of the production revenue of these mines and the confiscated merchandise in Chihuahua. However, with his fiat money devalued and his area of control shrinking by the day, Villa’s concessions did constitute a major sacrifice on his part. Not surprisingly, Villa’s cession of the mining properties coincided with him not sending any more funds to Felix Sommerfeld and Lazaro De La Garza to pay for the munitions he had under contract in the U.S.

Sommerfeld turned to the Secret War Council to foot the bill... Read the next installment of "the road to Columbus," explaining how German money finances Villa's military supplies. This blog series will trace the events that led to Villa's attack on Columbus, New Mexico on March 9, 1916 in weekly segments. On March 12, I will speak at Columbus for the Centennial Commemoration of the raid and reveal how Villa was made to believe that attacking the United States was a good idea. If you get impatient and do not want to wait for eight months to learn the facts behind Columbus, buy Felix A. Sommerfeld and the Mexican Front in the Great War now.

La versión española de In Plain Sight: Felix A. Sommerfeld, Maestro de Espias

Prólogo

El 6 de junio de 1911 un tren especial entraba lentamente en la estación principal de Ciudad de México. Francisco León De La Barra, el presidente provisional del país, su entero gabinete, el cuerpo diplomático e innumerables dignatarios esperaban en la plataforma para rendir homenaje al hombre que había depuesto al símbolo de una generación de represión y corrupción, el dictador Porfirio Díaz. Mientras la multitud congregada aclamaba, Francisco I. Madero, el Apóstol de la Democracia, y su comitiva de cien seguidores revolucionarios, amigos, políticos, dignatarios, miembros de su familia y comandantes militares descendían de los carros Pullman y serpenteaban su camino a través de la multitud saludando, estrechando manos y contestando palabras de bienvenida. “Las campanas de la catedral y de otras iglesias tañían festejando el jubiloso mensaje. Las sirenas de las fábricas aullaban y los silbatos de locomotoras en varias estaciones se sumaban chillonamente al estruendo. Parecía que los sentimientos contenidos de un pueblo entero habían sido liberados en una gigantesca explosión de emociones.” Junto al líder revolucionario, un hombre de mirada grave, impávida ante el desborde eufórico de la muchedumbre, se abría el camino a través de la masa en busca de su jefe. Félix A. Sommerfeld se preocupaba por la seguridad de Madero. Con una altura de 1,73 metros y 64 kilos de peso, Madero con su menuda contextura estaba expuesto a ser tragado por la muchedumbre que le apretujaba. A medida que el tropel de gente con el caudillo revolucionario en su medio fluía hacia las calles de la ciudad, Sommerfeld calmadamente escudriñaba la multitud en busca de un asomo de peligro. “Una cantidad estimada en cien mil personas vitoreaba delirantemente,” cada cual tratando de lograr lo mejor posible – ya sea al menos un rápido vistazo a su héroe o quizás incluso una posibilidad de tocarlo. Félix Sommerfeld, un veterano de la Guerra de los Bóxers, de treinta y dos años y nacido en Alemania, se esforzaba en su condición de jefe del destacamento encargado de la seguridad de Madero en mantener a su protegido fuera de peligro. Comprensiblemente, no obstante el grandioso recibimiento, Sommerfeld aspiraba a que Madero finalizara el desfile y pasara a la seguridad por los portones del palacio presidencial.

Felix A. Sommerfeld y Francisco I. Madero en 1911

La revolución había comenzado en forma lenta y desapercibida. En uno u otro lugar un asomo de descontento emergía en el horizonte político ya desde 1906, solo para volver a desaparecer en la calma aparente de la férrea dominación de Porfirio Díaz. Sin embargo, en la medida que el dictador envejecía y sus administradores selectos, los científicos, rechazaban el plan para una transición de poder ordenada, mientras una generación de mexicanos de clase media permanecía sin voz política y una verdadera tempestad de desastres naturales y financieros arrojaba al país a una caída precipitosa, la violencia se desencadenó en el otoño de 1910. Para muchos observadores la repentina desaparición del control de Díaz sobre el país fue una sorpresa. Madero emergía como un moderado vocero de una amplia coalición de emprendedores, terratenientes, industriales, los militares, los trabajadores y las masas rurales. Su objetivo era establecer un sistema democrático que extendiera representación política a todos los mexicanos y creara un sistema legal equitativo desde el cual evolucionaría una reforma agraria y la justicia social. En aquellos exaltantes días de mayo de 1911 solo algunos pocos avispados observadores se preguntaban si este tipo de reforma lenta podría satisfacer la aspiración por mejorar la vida de quince millones de mexicanos. Tal como lo demostraría el tiempo, demasiados grupos de intereses distintos habían sido despertados por la revolución de Madero y requeriría otros nueve años y más de un millón de muertos para establecer un nuevo contrato social, del cual los últimos artículos no serían escritos hasta la década de 1940. La revolución que Madero con su marcha victoriosa al centro de la Ciudad de México consideraba como concluida, en realidad recién comenzaba.

Nadie en la muchedumbre o siquiera en el círculo íntimo de confidentes que rodeaban a Madero tenía ni un pálpito del rol que Sommerfeld jugaría en su revolución en la década que se avecinaba. La victoria de Madero sobre el dictador había sido ganada principalmente en el campo de batalla pero también en una suite del Astor Hotel en Nueva York y varios otros lugares de negociación en México y en los Estados Unidos. Deponer al anciano dictador sería solamente una batalla en una larga y extendida guerra. Félix Sommerfeld, no por improvisación sino que por cuidadoso planeamiento, jugaría un papel fundamental en casi todas las batallas de esa guerra. Sin conocimiento de sus superiores, Sommerfeld había trabajado para la inteligencia naval alemana desde al menos 1908. Agentes alemanes habían maniobrado para colocarlo cerca del futuro presidente. Desde esa posición, Sommerfeld logró escalar para convertirse en el activo más importante del servicio de inteligencia alemana en el centro mismo del gobierno mexicano. Trabajando para el presidente Madero, y posiblemente con su tácita aprobación, el reservista alemán actuaba como enlace para el ministro de Alemania en México, contraalmirante Paul von Hintze, y proporcionaba a éste valiosa información de inteligencia sobre México, Europa y los Estados Unidos. Su buen desempeño desde esta posición facilitó definir la política exterior alemana respecto a Madero y su sucesor Huerta. Ningún otro extranjero ejerció mayor influencia y amasó más poder en la revolución mexicana. A partir de su cargo de jefe de seguridad, Sommerfeld asumió el desarrollo y dirección del servicio secreto mexicano. Bajo sus auspicios, la mayor organización de servicio secreto extranjero que alguna vez operara en territorio estadounidense se convirtió en un arma que aterrorizó y diezmó a los enemigos de Madero. Su organización demostró ser tan efectiva que posteriormente el gobierno estadounidense absorbió e integró partes importantes de la misma en el Bureau de Investigaciones.

Sommerfeld no pudo impedir la caída de Madero, el líder revolucionario que tanto idolatraba. El Jefe de Estado Mayor del Ejército de Madero, General Victoriano Huerta, usurpó la presidencia en febrero de 1913 con un sangriento golpe de estado y dispuso el asesinato de Madero. Habiendo escasamente eludido su arresto y un pelotón de fusilamiento, Sommerfeld reactivó la organización de su servicio secreto a lo largo de la frontera entre México y Estados Unidos para sumarse a la batalla contra el presidente usurpador.

La lucha resultante por remover a los sectores reaccionarios del sillón presidencial de México se desarrolló no solamente en los campos de batalla donde Venustiano Carranza, Emiliano Zapata, Álvaro Obregón y Pancho Villa lideraban a miles de mexicanos en la segunda revolución social del siglo. Éxito o derrota dependía de los suministros y financiamiento de estas fuerzas revolucionarias. Con la ayuda de sus relaciones en Alemania y en los Estados Unidos, Sommerfeld se convirtió en la pieza vital en la cadena de suministros revolucionarios. Su organización a lo largo de la frontera contrabandeaba armas y municiones para las tropas en cantidades que nunca antes hubieran sido consideradas posibles, mientras que sus contactos con las más altas autoridades de gobierno en Alemania y Estados Unidos cortaban créditos y suministros a Huerta. En su condición de agente alemán actuando a favor de los revolucionarios mexicanos, sus actividades coincidían con los intereses de los gobiernos de Estados Unidos y Alemania. Para sorpresa de la mayoría, pero no exento de lógica, el gobierno estadounidense cooperó con Sommerfeld y hacía la vista gorda ante las numerosas violaciones flagrantes de las leyes americanas. Sin que necesariamente sea merecedor de reconocimiento como el único causante de la derrota del hombre que había asesinado a Madero, la participación de Sommerfeld en la caída de Huerta fue crucial.

Este libro no está destinado a proporcionar un análisis completo de las causas y del curso de la revolución mexicana. Más bien, las siguientes páginas se limitan a relatar una historia fascinante y olvidada que es solamente un fragmento del total. Si fuera entendido como un tratado de amplia cobertura, el estrecho enfoque de este trabajo representaría una injusticia con el sacrificio y lucha de un pueblo entero contra el yugo de dictadura e injusticia social. Existen muchas grandes obras sobre la Revolución Mexicana, muchas de las cuales aparecen mencionadas como fuentes secundarias en este tratado. Sin embargo, hubo un elemento de intriga extranjera que impactó e influyó en las causas, el curso y el desenlace de la revolución mexicana. Inversiones extranjeras habían preparado en parte el suelo fértil para el descontento social y la privación de derechos políticos frente a lo cual las masas de México planteaban sus aspiraciones. Una vez que Madero hubo desencadenado la guerra civil, las organizaciones y corporaciones internacionales, con el apoyo de sus respectivos gobiernos, claramente se esforzaron por influenciar en los hechos, fortalecer sus posiciones y proteger a sus empleados dependientes y otros activos. A veces los gobiernos extranjeros intentaban atrasar los minuteros del reloj, otras de colocarlos a la hora que deseaban. Félix A. Sommerfeld, desde luego, no era el único agente secreto actuando en México. Sin embargo, bajo cualquier estándar, era el más influyente, el menos comprendido y el más eficiente, cuidadosamente entretejiendo los intereses de México, Alemania y Estados Unidos para sus propósitos. Esta sorprendente habilidad indujo a que estudiosos cuestionaran las verdaderas lealtades de Sommerfeld y acusarlo de ser un doble agente y, aún más, un triple agente. Nada podría ser más engañoso. Este agente alemán negociaba información y favores, no lealtades.

Sommerfeld creó y mantuvo un cuadro de personajes que se le unieron a la lucha a medida que la revolución avanzaba y que finalmente se convirtió en un campo de batalla de la Primera Guerra Mundial. Todos ellos parecían estar en desconocimiento de sus verdaderos amos alemanes. Tal como en los casos de todos los exitosos jefes de espías, Sommerfeld decidía quién jugaba cuál rol en su libreto y señalaba a sus compañeros solamente la parte del libreto que consideraba necesaria. Sherburne G. Hopkins, abogado, cabildero y corredor de bolsa, se convirtió en su principal contacto en Estados Unidos y en su jefe desde 1911 hasta 1914. Por intermedio de Hopkins, Sommerfeld logró acceso al círculo íntimo de la administración del presidente Wilson. El Jefe de Estado Mayor del Ejército de Wilson, General Hugh Lenox Scott, se convirtió en su amigo, el Secretario de Guerra Lindlay Garrison solía tomar el té con Sommerfeld cuando éste visitaba Washington, los senadores William Alden Smith y Albert Bacon Fall lo invitaban al Comité Selecto en Asuntos Mexicanos para atestiguar. Hopkins también le abrió a Sommerfeld las puertas de los círculos financieros de Nueva York. Como abogado y cabildero para el industrial Charles Ranlett Flint y el magnate petrolero Henry Clay Pierce, Hopkins le facilitó a Sommerfeld las llaves para relacionarse con empresarios americanos que aspiraban acercarse a las administraciones de Madero, Carranza y Villa. Ocasionalmente, Sommerfeld incluso actuaba en nombre del presidente Wilson, y el pintoresco grupo de diplomáticos aficionados de la Casa Blanca confiaba en él. Este papel le permitió manejar información crucial que fluía al gobierno de los Estados Unidos, manipulando así la política exterior americana en ventaja propia.

De todos sus compañeros de ruta, Federico Stallforth fue quien por más largo tiempo permaneció cercano a Sommerfeld. Nacido en México de padres alemanes, la vida de Stallforth antes y lo largo de la revolución ilustra en varias maneras la experiencia de hombres de negocios extranjeros y expatriados en México. Como dueño de minas y banquero en su ciudad natal de Hidalgo del Parral, Chihuahua, tanto él como su familia y sus negocios sufrieron considerablemente. Por el mayor tiempo de la revolución Chihuahua se convirtió como el principal campo de batalla en un escenario de frentes continuamente cambiantes. A pesar de los contactos de Stallforth con el gobierno mexicano (a través de su amigo Sommerfeld) y el gobierno de los Estados Unidos, con Wall Street, como también con la comunidad alemana de comerciantes y diplomáticos, la fortuna e inversiones de Stallforth se esfumaron en el calor abrasador de las batallas revolucionarias mexicanas. En gran medida, sin que esto haya sido su culpa, el ambiente social y económico que precipitó la revolución mexicana lo retuvieron junto con su familia, rehén de la situación. Para la mayoría de los extranjeros esta situación terminaría acabaría con la fortuna familiar. Sin embargo, la carrera de Stallforth recién comenzaba donde otras acababan. En quiebra y desilusionado, Stallforth se unió a Sommerfeld en Nueva York antes de la Gran Guerra y se convirtió en uno de los más importantes agentes alemanes en los Estados Unidos. Como en el caso de Sommerfeld, el papel de Stallforth en la historiografía es en sumo grado indefinido y nebuloso.

El nombre de Sommerfeld aparece en casi todas las obras sobre la revolución mexicana. Los historiadores Harris y Sadler comentaron: “… Sommerfeld solía moverse a través de la revolución mexicana como un fantasma.” Mientras que Harris y Sadler son los únicos investigadores que mencionan a Sommerfeld como jefe de espías, otros historiadores como Friedrich Katz y Michael Meyer le atribuyen un enigmático aunque indefinido papel. Otros investigadores como Jim Tuck lo describen como estafador, aventurero, personaje turbio y agente doble. A fin de esbozar un retrato tridimensional del hombre y de su tiempo, este libro correlaciona las declaraciones de Sommerfeld y Stallforth ante el Departamento de Justicia de los Estados Unidos con colecciones públicas y privadas. Los archivos desclasificados y disponibles a historiadores desde hace años son aquellos del Departamento de Justicia y el BI sobre México y Alemania de 1908 a 1922, de la Comisión Mixta de Reclamaciones, de la División de Inteligencia Militar de la Marina y del Ejército de los Estados Unidos y de extensas colecciones mantenidas en la biblioteca de Archivos Nacionales bajo el título de Documentos Alemanes Capturados. También se encuentran disponibles los escritos personales de Lázaro De La Garza, agente financiero de Pancho Villa, de Silvestre Terrazas, principal estratega de Villa y gobernador de Chihuahua, del General Hugh Lenox Scott, del Presidente Woodrow Wilson, de miembros de su gabinete y del mercenario Emil Holmdahl. No se encontraron hasta ahora escritos personales de Federico Stallforth. Este libro es el resultado de la minuciosa correlación entre fuentes de archivos mexicanos, estadounidenses y alemanes. No se encuentran disponibles los archivos del Servicio Secreto y de Inteligencia Militar alemanes que fueron destruidos por incendio durante ataques aéreos en 1945. Tampoco han sido descubiertos hasta ahora los escritos personales de Félix Sommerfeld.

A pesar del papel central que Sommerfeld desempeñó en el curso de la revolución mexicana y a pesar de las muchas referencias a sus actividades en los registros históricos, el agente alemán exitosamente cubrió sus pasos. Ni sus contemporáneos ni investigadores a lo largo de los últimos cien años han sido capaces de reunir las piezas de una carrera clandestina que hace palidecer las hazañas de James Bond, y las regandolas a un simple juego de niños. Un jefe de espías en la revolución mexicana y un maestro de espías en la Primera Guerra Mundial, tanto para sus contemporáneos como para los investigadores,  Sommerfeld ha permanecido oculto hasta ahora.

¡El libro estará disponible en México este verano! Gracias por su paciencia.

Im Schatten der Öffentlichkeit: Die Deutsche Version von In Plain Sight ist da!

Prolog des neuen Buches (Vorbestellungen sind ab 1. August möglich):

Am 6. Juni 1911 fuhr ein Sonderzug langsam in den Hauptbahnhof von Mexico City ein. Am Bahnsteig wartete bereits der Interimspräsident Francisco Leon de la Barra mit seinem gesamten Kabinett, dem diplomatischen Korps und unzähligen Würdenträgern darauf, dem Mann die Ehre zu erweisen, der das Symbol einer ganzen Generation der Unterdrückung und Korruption, Diktator Porfirio Diaz, gestürzt hatte. Unter wildem Beifall stiegen der „Apostel der Revolution“ Francisco I. Madero und sein Gefolge aus einhundert Mitrevolutionären, Freunden, Angehörigen, Politikern, Würdenträgern und Militärs aus dem Pullmanwagen und bahnten sich winkend und grüßend einen Weg durch die Menge. „Die Glocken der Kathedrale und neunzig weiterer Kirchen verkündeten die frohe Botschaft. Fabriksirenen heulten auf und das Pfeifen der Lokomotiven in den angrenzenden Bahnhöfen mischte sich schrill in das Getöse. Es war als würden die aufgestauten Gefühle eines ganzen Volkes in einer gewaltigen Explosion der Emotionen freigesetzt.“ An der Seite des obersten Revolutionärs kämpfte ein Mann mit strenger und gefasster Miene, unbeeindruckt vom ekstatischen Moment der Masse seinem Anführer den Weg frei. Felix A. Sommerfeld war besorgt um Maderos Sicherheit. Mit nur einem Meter sechzig Größe und knappen fünfundsechzig Kilo war Madero in Gefahr, von der sich auftürmenden Menge verschluckt zu werden. Als sich dann die Menschenflut um den Revolutionsführer in die Straßen der Hauptstadt ergoss, blieb Sommerfeld stets wachsam auf der Suche nach Anzeichen einer Bedrohung. „Etwa einhundert tausend Menschen jubelten im Freudentaumel“, wobei jeder versuchte, einen kurzen Blick auf den großen Helden zu erhaschen oder wenn möglich sogar die Chance zu bekommen, ihn zu berühren. Felix Sommerfeld, ein zweiunddreißigjähriger Boxerkriegsveteran deutscher Herkunft, hatte als Maderos frisch ernannter Sicherheitschef alle Hände voll zu tun, dessen Unversehrtheit zu gewährleisten. So ist es wenig erstaunlich, dass er sich, ungeachtet dieses prachtvollen Empfangs, nichts mehr wünschte, als dass Madero endlich das Ende der Prozession erreicht und die gut gesicherten Pforten des Präsidentenpalastes passiert.

Die Revolution hatte still und unbemerkt begonnen. Bis zurück ins Jahr 1906 hatten nur hier und da kurze Strohfeuer des Unmuts den politischen Horizont des Landes für Augenblicke erhellt, die jedoch gleich wieder in der trügerischen Stille unter Porfirio Diaz’ eiserner Hand erstickt wurden. Da der alternde Diktator und sein auserwählter Beraterstab der „Cientificos“ es bis zuletzt verweigerten, die Übergabe der Macht in einem geordneten Rahmen zu planen, brach die Gewalt im Herbst des Jahres 1910 los. Zu dieser Zeit fegte ein regelrechter Sturm aus finanziellen Krisen und Naturkatastrophen über das Land. Zudem gab es eine junge Generation mittelständischer Mexikaner, die keinerlei politisches Gehör fand. Für viele Zeitzeugen kam Diaz’ abrupter Machtverlust überraschend. Madero trat als gemäßigter Vertreter einer breiten Koalition aus Unternehmern, Grundbesitzern, Industriellen, dem Militär, der Arbeiterschaft und der Bauern auf. Sein Ziel war die Errichtung eines demokratischen Systems, in dem jeder Mexikaner politisch vertreten war, sowie eines unabhängigen Rechtssystems, das die Grundlage für Landreformen bilden und eine Entwicklung hin zu sozialer Gerechtigkeit auf den Weg bringen sollte. Dass diese allmählichen Reformen den Durst nach einem besseren Leben von siebzehn Millionen Mexikanern zu stillen vermochten, wurde in den hitzigen Tagen des Mai 1911 nur von wenigen scharfen Beobachtern bezweifelt. Tatsächlich sollte es angesichts der Vielzahl an verschiedensten Interessengruppen, die Madero mobilisiert hatte, noch weitere neun Jahre dauern und über eine Million Leben kosten, bis ein neuer Gesellschaftsvertrag zustande kommen sollte, dessen letzte Paragraphen erst in den 1940er Jahren fertiggestellt wurden. Die Revolution, die Madero während seines Triumphzugs durch Mexico City für abgeschlossen hielt, hatte in Wahrheit erst begonnen.

Niemand in der Menge oder gar im engen Vertrauenskreis um Madero hatte auch nur die leiseste Ahnung davon, welche Rolle Sommerfeld über die kommenden zehn Jahre in ihrer Revolution spielen sollte. Maderos Sieg über den Diktator wurde größtenteils auf dem Schlachtfeld, aber auch in einer Suite des New Yorker Astor Hotels und an weiteren Verhandlungsschauplätzen in Mexiko und den Vereinigten Staaten ausgefochten. Die Absetzung des alten Diktators sollte lediglich eine gewonnene Schlacht in einem lange währenden Krieg darstellen, in dem Felix Sommerfeld nicht zufällig, sondern durch die gezielte Beeinflussung der Geschehnisse eine Schlüsselrolle zukommen sollte. Ohne das Wissen seiner Mitstreiter hatte Sommerfeld spätestens seit 1908 für den deutschen Marinenachrichtendienst gearbeitet, und deutsche Agenten hatten ihn in den Kreis um den zukünftigen Präsidenten eingeschleust. Von dort aus gelang Sommerfeld der Aufstieg zum höchsten Posten, den ein deutscher Spion in der mexikanischen Regierung jemals bekleidete. Während seiner Arbeit für Präsident Madero fungierte der deutsche Heeresreservist, wohl mit dessen stillschweigender Zustimmung, als Verbindungsmann des deutschen Botschafters in Mexiko, Konteradmiral Paul von Hintze, und versorgte diesen mit wertvollen Informationen über Mexiko, Europa und die Vereinigten Staaten. Durch Sommerfelds Einsatz war es Deutschland möglich, seine außenpolitischen Bestrebungen auf Madero und dessen Nachfolger Huerta zu konzentrieren. Kein anderer Ausländer hatte in der Mexikanischen Revolution mehr Einfluss und Macht. Ausgehend von seinem Posten als Sicherheitschef nahm sich Sommerfeld bald der Gründung und Befehligung des Mexikanischen Geheimdienstes an. Unter seiner Schirmherrschaft entwickelte sich die größte ausländische Geheimdienstorganisation, die jemals auf US-amerikanischem Boden operierte, bald zu einer Waffe, die Maderos Feinde terrorisierte und dezimierte. Seine Organisation stellte sich als so effektiv heraus, dass die US-Regierung später große Teile davon in das „Bureau of Investigation“ übernahm.

Sommerfeld konnte den Untergang von Francisco Madero, dem Revolutionsführer, den er so schätzte, nicht verhindern. Der Oberbefehlshaber der Armee, General Victoriano Huerta, riss die Präsidentschaft 1913 an sich und ordnete die Ermordung Maderos in einem blutigen Staatsstreich an. Sommerfeld entkam nur knapp Gefängnis und Erschießungskommando und reaktivierte seine Geheimdienstorganisation entlang der US-amerikanischen Grenze für den Kampf gegen den Putschisten Huerta.

Der folgende Krieg um die Vertreibung des reaktionären Machthabers aus Mexikos Präsidentenpalast wütete nicht nur auf dem Schlachtfeld, wo hundert tausende Mexikaner unter der Führung von Venustiano Carranza, Emiliano Zapata, Alvaro Obregon und Pancho Villa für die zweite soziale Revolution des Jahrhunderts kämpften, die Entscheidung über Sieg oder Niederlage stand und fiel besonders auch mit der Versorgung und Finanzierung der revolutionären Truppen. Sommerfeld wurde dank seiner Beziehungen zu Deutschland und den USA zum Dreh- und Angelpunkt dieser Versorgungskette. In bisher undenkbarem Ausmaß schmuggelte seine Organisation Waffen und Munition und belieferte damit die Rebellen – gleichzeitig führten seine Beziehungen bis in die obersten Kreise der Regierungen Deutschlands und Amerikas dazu, dass Huerta von dieser Seite weder Kredite, noch Waffenlieferungen zuteilwurden. Die Interessen des deutschen Agenten, der an der Seite der mexikanischen Revolutionsbewegung agierte, überschnitten sich mit den Plänen der deutschen und amerikanischen Regierungen. So ist es zwar verwunderlich, aber keineswegs unlogisch, dass die Amerikaner uneingeschränkt mit Sommerfeld kooperierten und dessen zahlreiche offenkundige Übertretungen US-amerikanischen Rechts schweigend billigten. Natürlich kann man Sommerfeld den Sieg über den Mann, der Maderos Tod angeordnet hatte, nicht gänzlich allein zuschreiben, sein Anteil am Sturz Huertas war jedoch maßgeblich.

Dieses Buch setzt sich nicht zum Ziel, eine vollständige Analyse über Hintergründe und Verlauf der Mexikanischen Revolution anzustellen. Vielmehr erzählen die folgenden Seiten eine faszinierende und in Vergessenheit geratene Geschichte, die nur einen Bruchteil des großen Ganzen darstellt. Es existieren zahlreiche große Werke über die Mexikanische Revolution und viele davon wurden auch als Quellen für dieses Buch herangezogen. Erhöbe dieses Buch den Anspruch einer allumfassenden Abhandlung, so täte dessen enger Fokus einem ganzen Volk, das sich gegen die Unterjochung einer Diktatur aufgelehnt hat und für soziale Gerechtigkeit in den Kampf gezogen ist, sicher großes Unrecht. Jedoch zeichnete sich bereits im Vorfeld der Revolution ein gewisses Element außenpolitischer Machenschaften ab, welches einen erheblichen Einfluss auf ihren Verlauf und letztlich ihren Ausgang hatte. Es waren Investitionen aus dem Ausland, die zu sozialer Unzufriedenheit und der politischen Entmündigung des mexikanischen Volkes führten und so zum Teil den Boden bestellten, auf dem die Hoffnungen der breiten Masse zu keimen begannen. Als der Bürgerkrieg durch Madero entfesselt wurde, taten international agierende Banken und Unternehmen, unterstützt durch ihre Regierungen, ganz klar ihr Bestes, um den Lauf der Dinge zu ihrem eigenen Vorteil zu beeinflussen und ihre Mitarbeiter und ihr Kapital zu schützen. Fremde Regierungen versuchten immer wieder, das Rad der mexikanischen Geschichte je nach ihren Bedürfnissen entweder zu beschleunigen, oder aber zurückzudrehen. Felix A. Sommerfeld war sicher nicht der einzige Geheimagent, der in Mexiko tätig war. Welche Maßstäbe man auch anlegt, so war er jedoch mit Sicherheit der einflussreichste und, wenn auch der am wenigsten verstandene, doch der effektivste von ihnen, da er es vermochte, die Interessen Mexikos, Deutschlands und der USA so zu verbinden, dass deren Aktionen letztlich stets seinem eigenen Zweck dienten. Diese beeindruckende Fähigkeit weckte bei zahlreichen Forschern Zweifel an seinen tatsächlichen Beweggründen, und nicht selten wurde er als Doppel- oder sogar Dreifach-Agent bezeichnet. Doch weit gefehlt – dieser deutsche Agent verkaufte Informationen und Gefallen, nicht jedoch seine Integrität.

Sommerfeld scharte eine Gruppe von Mitstreitern um sich, die ihm während der Revolution und auch später zur Seite standen, als Mexiko Schauplatz des Ersten Weltkrieges wurde. Keiner seiner Mitstreiter schien sich jedoch darüber im Klaren zu sein, unter wessen Befehl der Deutsche tatsächlich stand. Wie alle großen Spionagekünstler entschied Sommerfeld darüber, wer in seinem Stück welche Rolle übernehmen sollte und er versorgte seine Akteure immer nur mit den Informationen, die er für notwendig hielt. Der Rechtsanwalt, Lobbyist und politische Strippenzieher Sherburne G. Hopkins wurde zu Sommerfelds Hauptkontakt in den USA und von 1911 bis 1914 sein Vorgesetzter. Durch ihn erlangte Sommerfeld Zugang zu den innersten Kreisen der Regierung um Präsident Wilson. So wurde Wilsons Generalstabschef, General Hugh Lenox Scott, zu Sommerfelds Freund, Kriegsminister Lindley Garrison empfing ihn zum Tee, wann immer er nach Washington kam und die Senatoren William Alden Smith und Albert Bacon Fall luden ihn ein, vor dem Sonderausschuss für Mexiko zu sprechen. Durch Hopkins‘ Einfluss öffnete sich für Sommerfeld auch in New Yorks Finanzkreisen so manche Tür. Als Anwalt und Lobbyist des Industriellen Charles Ranlet Flint und des Öl-Tycoons Henry Clay Pierce platzierte Hopkins Sommerfeld als primäre Anlaufstelle für alle amerikanischen Unternehmer, die mit den Regierungen Madero, Carranza und Villa Kontakt aufnehmen wollten. Von Zeit zu Zeit agierte Sommerfeld sogar im persönlichen Auftrag von Präsident Wilson und der bunten Schar von Amateurdiplomaten, denen man im Weißen Haus vertraute. Die Kontrolle über entscheidende Teile des Informationsflusses, die Sommerfeld dank seiner Stellung zur amerikanischen Regierung ausüben konnte, ermöglichte ihm die gezielte Manipulation der amerikanischen Außenpolitik für seine eigenen Zwecke.

Von allen Menschen, die Sommerfeld in seinem Leben begleiteten, blieb Frederico Stallforth am längsten an seiner Seite. Stallforths Eltern waren Deutsche, er selbst jedoch im Norden Mexikos geboren, und so ist sein Leben vor und während der Revolution für die Situation ausländischer Geschäftsleute und Auswanderer in Mexiko auf vielerlei Art und Weise beispielhaft. Als Minenbesitzer und Bankier in seiner Heimatstadt Hidalgo del Parral in Chihuahua, hatten er und seine Familie besonders schwer unter den Auswirkungen der Revolution zu leiden. Chihuahua war während des größten Teils der Revolution Hauptschauplatz der Auseinandersetzungen an einer sich ständig bewegenden Front, und obwohl Stallforth (durch seinen Freund Sommerfeld) Kontakte zur mexikanischen und amerikanischen Regierung, der Wall Street und zu wirtschaftlichen und diplomatischen Kreisen in Deutschland unterhielt, schmolzen sein Familienvermögen und sein in Mexiko investiertes Kapital unter der glühenden Hitze der Kämpfe dahin. Dies war größtenteils nicht sein eigener Fehler, vielmehr waren er und seine Familie bedingt durch die wirtschaftliche und soziale Situation in der Zeit vor der Revolution wie Geiseln in Mexiko gefangen. Während der Untergang des Familienunternehmens für die meisten Ausländer in Mexiko bereits das Ende bedeutete, fing Stallforths Karriere damit erst an. Mittellos und desillusioniert schloss er sich Sommerfeld in New York an und wurde zu einem der einflussreichsten deutschen Agenten in den Vereinigten Staaten. Wie auch im Fall von Felix A. Sommerfeld ist seine Rolle in der Geschichtsschreibung zu großen Teilen unklar.

Der Name Sommerfeld erscheint in fast jeder Arbeit zur Mexikanischen Revolution. Die Historiker Harris und Sadler bemerkten, dass sich „… Sommerfeld durch die Mexikanische Revolution bewegte wie ein Geist.“ Während Harris und Sadler die einzigen Historiker sind, die Sommerfeld den Titel des „Meisterspions“ zukommen lassen, schreiben ihm andere wie beispielsweise Friedrich Katz und Michael Meyer eine enigmatische und eher unklare Rolle zu. Wieder andere, wie beispielsweise Jim Tuck, bezeichnen ihn als „Hochstapler“, „Abenteurer“, „zwielichte Gestalt“ und „Doppelagent.“ Um letztlich zu einem dreidimensionalen Bild von Sommerfeld und den Zeiten, in denen er agierte, zu gelangen, stellt dieses Buch Sommerfelds und Stallforths Aussagen vor dem US-Justizministerium und Aufzeichnungen aus privaten und öffentlichen Sammlungen gegenüber. Die Akten des Justizministeriums und des FBI zu Mexiko und Deutschland von 1908 bis 1922 sind seit Jahren freigegeben und für Historiker einzusehen, ebenso die Akten der Schadenskommision, des US-Marinegeheimdienstes, der Nachrichtendienstabteilung der U.S. Army und umfangreiche Sammlungen des US-Staatsarchivs unter dem Titel „Captured German Documents“ (i.e. „Beschlagnahmte Deutsche Dokumente“). Zudem sind die persönlichen Aufzeichnungen von Pancho Villas Finanzvertreter Lazaro De La Garza und seines Hauptstrategen und Gouverneurs von Chihuahua, Silvestre Terrazas, von General Hugh Lenox Scott, Präsident Woodrow Wilson und seinem Kabinett, sowie die des Glücksritters Emil Holmdahl einzusehen. Bisher unbekannt sind die persönlichen Aufzeichnungen Frederico Stallforths. Dieses Buch ist das Ergebnis eines detaillierten Vergleichs amerikanischer, mexikanischer und deutscher Archivinformationen. Nicht zugänglich sind die Akten des deutschen Geheimdienstes und des deutschen Militärgeheimdienstes, da diese 1945 den Flammen des Zweiten Weltkriegs zum Opfer fielen. Auch Felix Sommerfelds persönliche Aufzeichnungen sind bisher noch nicht aufgefunden worden.

Trotz der zentralen Rolle, die Sommerfeld in der Mexikanischen Revolution gespielt hat, und obwohl man in den historischen Aufzeichnungen häufig auf Berichte über sein Handeln stößt, verstand es der deutsche Agent, seine Spuren zu verwischen. Weder seine Zeitgenossen, noch die Historiker der letzten hundert Jahre haben es geschafft, den geheimen Werdegang Sommerfelds aufzudecken, der die Heldentaten eines James Bond wie ein Kinderspiel aussehen lässt. Als Meisterspion in der Mexikanischen Revolution und während des ersten Weltkrieges bleibt Sommerfeld für seine Zeitgenossen und auch für Historiker bis heute verborgen im Schatten der Öffentlichkeit.

Robert Fay: A Terrorist Plot Foiled 100 Years Ago

The secret agent Lieutenant Robert Fay arrived in New York in April 1915 with a mission to sink freight ships on the East Coast of the U.S.  The twenty-four year-old infantry officer had caught the attention of his superiors in February 1915, while serving on the Western Front in France. Fay, who himself had suffered from the lethal rain of American-made artillery munitions, proposed a time bomb design that disabled rudders on munitions ships traveling from the United States to Europe. Fay showed his idea to the battalion commander. Impressed with the details, Fay’s superior alerted the army intelligence office in Berlin who invited and interviewed the young soldier. Not only did Fay have a design that seemed like a good idea, he had also worked at the Submarine Signal Company in Boston before the war and spoke English fluently. His brother-in-law, Walter E. Scholz, eight years older than Fay, still lived in New Jersey. The trained mechanic worked as a draftsman for railroad companies. Rudolf Nadolny of the Army Secret Service, Department IIIB, Political Section, gave Fay a fake Scottish passport under the name of H. A. Kearling and $4,000 ($84,000 in today’s value) for a sabotage mission in the U.S. He was to report directly to Military Attaché Franz von Papen in New York and proceed with his plans. 

Arrest Record of Robert Fay

Fay’s idea of a timed explosive sounded promising to von Papen, but it was a complicated design.

“A brief description of the contrivance reveals the mechanical ingenuity and practical efficiency of Fay’s bomb A rod attached to the rudder at every swing the rudder gave turned up by one notch the first of the beveled wheels within the bomb After a certain number of revolutions of that wheel it in turn gave one revolution to the next and so on through the series The last wheel was connected with the threaded cap around the upper end of the square bolt and made this cap slowly unscrew until at length the bolt dropped clear of it and yielded to the waiting pressure of the strong steel spring above This pressure drove it downward and brought the sharp points at its lower end down on the caps of the two rifle cartridges fixed below it like the blow of a rifle’s hammer The detonation from the explosion of these cartridges would set off a small charge of impregnated chlorate of potash which in turn would fire the small charge of the more sluggish but stronger dynamite and that in turn would explode the still more sluggish but tremendously more powerful trinitrotoluol.”

The resulting explosion, Fay argued, would be strong enough to blow the stern of a ship off and sink it. American investigators, who looked at Fay’s design after his arrest, agreed with the claim.

The German agent established his workshop in his brother-in-law’s garage in Weehawken, New Jersey. Initially, and with the help of Rintelen’s agent, Otto Wolpert, Fay bought one hundred pounds of potassium chlorate. However, he needed more. Through von Papen, Fay met the nephew of a wealthy financier by the name, Max Breitung. Fay asked Breitung for help. The young financier, anxious to prove his worth to the German government, had met the New York factory representative of a German cuckoo clock manufacturer on a transatlantic voyage. They had kept in contact through the German Club in New York. The acquaintance was Dr. Herbert O. Kienzle, a thirty year-old engineer from the town of Scheveningen in the Black Forest area of Germany. Kienzle had been a keen supporter of the Secret War Council’s propaganda efforts. He had written several articles on Dum Dum [hollow point] bullets for the German-owned paper, Fatherland, and New York’s German language daily, New Yorker Staats-Zeitung. His investigative journalism also appeared in large American dailies. The war had ground his clock business to a halt. He made several futile attempts to diversify the product line, getting into lamps, linens, and crafts, but the prospective American customers stayed away from his exclusive store on Park Place. Like Edward Rumely, the managing editor of the German-owned New York Evening Mail, and others that engaged with the Secret War Council’s projects, the engineering PhD had time on his hands and holes in his pocket.

Breitung and Kienzle secured 336 pounds of potassium chlorate for Fay, but it took until June to get it. The source, a German-American chemist, was compromised. The U.S. Secret Service had noticed the movement of these explosive chemicals and sent a mole to Breitung’s supplier. Through Breitung, Fay became acquainted with Kienzle and Daeche, who joined the team in the beginning of May 1915. The four, Fay, Scholz, Kienzle, and Daeche worked feverishly on the bomb design, all the while reporting back to Rintelen on the progress. Kienzle had a small motorboat, which he sold to Fay. Together, the saboteurs toured the New York harbor and checked out the large transatlantic steamers lined up to transport their deadly cargo to Europe. Security did not seem to be an issue, since guards were checking who was coming onto the ships, but not the little boats scurrying around in the harbor.

Back in the garage, the conspirators experimented with the two necessary explosives, potassium chlorate and TNT. Kienzle had a friend who worked in road construction. The clock maker’s friend worked on the grounds of a sanatorium in Butler, New Jersey, where Kienzle had spent some “quiet time” in the past. Builders in 1915 dynamited their way through the countryside in lieu of using heavy earth-moving equipment to prepare a roadbed. The contractor friend had lots of dynamite. When Fay went to Butler to “look that place over,” he met the contractor, a German-American named Englebert Bronckhurst, who supplied him with twenty sticks. Fay built a wooden replica of a ship’s rudder in the backyard of Scholz’ property. Fay and Scholz worked over the course of several weeks on the spring mechanism, the waterproof container for the explosives, the attachment to the rudder, and all other important details that would make the design viable. Kienzle likely did, but never admitted to having looked over the design from a technical standpoint. Since the winding spring mechanism came straight out of clock mechanics, it is hard to imagine that he did not have any input. Sometime in June, sabotage agent Franz Rintelen demanded to see a demonstration of the bomb. The team made four attempts, but the bomb did not work as designed. The container with the potassium chlorate kept getting wet, the firing mechanism still had quirks, and even the dynamite did not have the envisioned result. Rintelen left for Europe in August. The project came to a grinding halt. American investigators, meanwhile, had discovered German-made “cigar” bombs that had damaged dozens of freighters on the way to Europe, and were canvassing the waterfront for any hint as to who was behind it.

Fay’s next moves are not documented in detail. The four saboteurs kept working on the bombs. However, it seems that money was in short supply. According to Fay, von Papen sent him to Kentucky to bomb a manufacturing plant. Fay went to the Midwest in September 1915, and canvassed the factory in question. A female witness in Chicago reported to investigators that Fay “fleeced her out of eleven hundred and fifty dollars, representing himself to be employed by German Secret Service whose draft for salary and expenses had been delayed.” After Fay returned to New York, he asked Kienzle to get him one hundred pounds of TNT for the factory demolition. Kienzle went to his previous source in New York. However, the chemist was now under U.S. Secret Service surveillance and did not have access to TNT. The Secret Service shadow posed as a supplier in a classical sting operation, and offered to provide the dynamite. The agent found out about the other members of the German sabotage cell during the process, and after meeting Fay, had him, Paul Daeche, and Walter Scholz arrested. If you are interested in the entire story of the German sabotage campaign in 1915, check out The Secret War in the United States. Buy it right here or on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and many other fine booksellers. 

A New President for Mexico - Who Will The U.S. Government Approve?

100 years ago the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, contemplated a solution to the Mexican Revolution. On June 2, 1915 he issued an ultimatum to the warring factions of Venustiano Carranza, Francisco Villa, and Emiliano Zapata to come up with a candidate for the Mexican presidency that all could agree to and who would not be one of the rebel chiefs and who had to be a civilian. He, Wilson, would support this candidate in upcoming meetings of the Pan-American Conference. If the factions could not agree to a candidate, the Pan-American Conference were to choose a president for Mexico, which the United States would recognize diplomatically. 

Generals  Felipe Angeles and Antonio I. Villarreal in 1915

Serious wrangling and lobbying started almost immediately. Carranza refused to even contemplate a proposal since President Wilson's ultimatum infringed on the sovereignty of Mexico. He also wanted to become president and had the upper hand of Villa militarily. Felix Sommerfeld and Sherburne Hopkins floated a list of names for Pancho Villa's faction. Villa had immediately reaffirmed his long standing commitment of not wanting to become president of Mexico.

On top of the list was Felipe Ángeles, Villa's chief military adviser and a close ally of the murdered President Francisco Madero. Ángeles went to Washington officially with Pancho Villa’s approval but in reality because the two men had fallen out over military strategy and tactics in the wake of the battles of Celaya. The exiled general set out to meet with the Secretary of State Robert Lansing and other members of the Wilson administration in the end of June. President Wilson, General Hugh Lenox Scott, as well as Secretaries Franklin K. Lane and Lindley M. Garrison liked Ángeles and thought him to be a viable presidential candidate. Scott wrote in his memoirs, “Ángeles was the most cultivated and loyal gentleman I have known in the history of Mexico and he was Villa’s candidate for president, as he was mine so far as I had a right to have any.” However, fielding Ángeles as a candidate was a non-starter. New York Herald reporter Alexander Williams aptly defined the probability of an Ángeles administration in Mexico a few months later: “Felipe Ángeles is the enemy politically of every faction in Mexico other [than] that headed by Villa. Every other faction considers him a traitor. None of the important Mexicans would under any conditions affiliate with him.” 

Ángeles had started his career as a federal officer, and then joined the Madero revolution in 1911. After the president’s murder in 1913, the general sided with the Constitutionalists and became Carranza’s Secretary of War. When Villa and Carranza split, Ángeles sided with Villa. As a result, both the reactionary factions who could not forgive him for joining Francisco Madero, and the Constitutionalists, who Ángeles had dealt devastating military defeats, considered the formidable politician, tactician, and intellectual a traitor. Undoubtedly, President Wilson recognized the fact that Ángeles carried too much baggage to be a viable candidate for the Mexican presidency. His relationship with Villa also played into the decision not to support a Ángeles candidacy. Wilson kept these opinions to himself since the Mexican general remained an important source of information for his administration.

Manuel Bonilla had been Secretary of Communication, then Secretary of Development in the De La Barra and Madero administrations respectively, and thus seemed to have the potential to succeed the slain president as a legitimate successor. Bonilla had joined the Constitutionalists after the murder of President Madero in the spring of 1913. After Villa split with Carranza in 1914, he joined the Villista movement. However, precisely because he identified with Villa, there is no evidence that Bonilla had any real support from the Wilson administration.

Pancho Villa sent another heavy-weight in Mexican politics to Washington: Former Secretary of Education Miguel Díaz Lombardo. Díaz Lombardo spent most of the time the Constitutionalists fought to unseat the usurper president Huerta as their ambassador to France. Díaz Lombardo joined the Villista movement as the Minister of Foreign Affairs when he returned in 1914. A towering intellectual of the Mexican Revolution with an aristocratic background, he was a powerful voice in support of the Villista faction.

Roque Gonzalez Garza, one of the most important intellectuals of “Villismo” and one of Villa’s closest advisers, also joined the team. Gonzalez Garza, Díaz Lombardo, Bonilla, and Ángeles pushed for the candidacy of Vázquez Tagle, a non-descript government official they hoped to be able to control, since all four politicians had personal ambitions for the Mexican presidency. Another intellectual leader in the exile community was José Vasconselos. A philosopher, lawyer, and politician, he had served under the Gutiérrez administration as Secretary of Education until the government collapsed under the weight of Carranza’s military successes. In exile, he maintained close ties with Sherburne Hopkins and the American oil industry. These links came to light in June of 1914, when burglars ravaged Hopkins’ offices and gave sensitive files on the relationship between Mexican revolutionaries and American oil barons to the press. Wholly unacceptable to a host of Mexican factions, he, as well, was not a viable unity candidate for the presidency. Sherburne Hopkins, meanwhile, pushed another potential candidate: Emilio Vasquez Gomez, the Interior Secretary in Madero’s cabinet. He wrote to the exiled politician on June 7, “I think you ought to offer your impartial services… For my part I am ready to do anything whatever [sic] that is reasonable and proper.” However, Vasquez Gomez’ role in destabilizing the Madero presidency in an uprising in the spring of 1912 made him unacceptable to a host of Mexican exiles.

In the end, the warring factions of Mexico could not come up with a viable candidate. Despite his ultimatum Wilson abandoned the idea of imposing a president on Mexico. He realized that the civil war would be fueled rather than smothered. Sometime during July and August of 1915, the American president completely reversed his Mexico policy. He decided to support the most powerful faction of Mexico. The decision would have grave consequences for the United States and Mexico. To learn what happened read Felix A. Sommerfeld and the Mexican Front in the Great War. Get it right here or at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other book sellers. 

The Secret War on the United States in 1915 - Introduction

Read the introduction to my new book on the German sabotage campaign in the United States in 1915. If you are hooked, which is my expectation, get the e-book on Amazon for $9.99, the paperback from Amazon for $28, or order a hardcover from this shop and receive a 50% discount. This is the story of what really happened, not some journalistic half history haphazardly put together to get a movie deal. 

Despite President Wilson’s declaration of neutrality at the onset of the Great War, the United States became the main supplier of arms, munitions, military and civilian goods for the enemies of Germany and her allies in early 1915. The lure of profits from munitions sales on a grand scale trumped any efforts by the German Empire to resume non-contraband trade with the United States. Germany’s representatives in New York and Washington D.C. deserve blame for this development. From the onset of the war, they missed ample opportunities to counter British propaganda and use the anger of American business leaders, farmers, and merchants over the British sea blockade to exert political pressure. Their ineffective use of American surrogates to oppose the tightening English blockade, and the inability to coalesce American support into promoting trade in cotton, dyes, food, and fertilizer, all helped push American foreign policy away from true neutrality. The biggest fear of the German government, namely unleashing the unbridled power of the American economy in support of the enemy, thus became a painful reality in 1915. 

The frustration in Germany with this development, disregarding the fact that German officials had a lot to do with it, brought a group of hardliners from within the German military and civilian government to the fore. The belief was that a determined war effort against the United States and England would bring the war to a quicker conclusion. Based on intelligence that German military attaché in New York, Franz von Papen, his predecessor Hans-Wolfgang Herwarth von Bittenfeld, and other German intelligence assets had gathered in 1913 and 1914, the hardliners firmly believed that the American military would never play any significant role in the European conflict. Viewed from a military standpoint, they deemed an armed conflict with the U.S. inconsequential. Rather, an American declaration of war might be helpful in bringing moderate ‘politicians’ to support an uncompromising war effort. The flow of supplies and materiel from the U.S. to European battlefields in support of the Entente had a devastating effect on Germany’s war effort. An accommodating diplomatic approach, which the Foreign Office preferred, in their estimation, did not have the power to disturb these Entente supply lines. 

This group of hardliners consisted of influential members of the navy chain of command starting with Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz at the very top and reaching to submarine force commander Hermann Bauer and the German naval attaché in the United States, Karl Boy-Ed. The German General Staff including its secret service, Political Section IIIB under Rudolph Nadolny, also supported a hardline strategy. HAPAG Director Albert Ballin, who longed for a quick end to the conflict to get his massive merchant marine fleet back afloat, supported a tougher approach towards the United States, as well. Interior Secretary Clemens von Delbrück, who worked and agreed with Ballin, joined the group. Delbrück was the direct superior of Germany’s commercial agent in the U.S., Heinrich F. Albert. 

Albert had come to the United States as a German purchasing agent without diplomatic status in August 1914. He not only coordinated the German efforts of blockade running and trade, but also commanded the entire financial structure of the German empire in the United States. Albert was in charge of a secret organization in New York City. Publicly, this Secret War Council managed German propaganda, supported the German-American community, sold German war bonds, and engaged in legal trade. However, the darker mission of this council consisted of organizing clandestine activities in the U.S. during the neutrality period of 1914 to 1917.2 Albert approved and financed the German intelligence cells across the U.S. The leading members of the Secret War Council included the German officials in New York, Franz von Papen (military attaché), Karl Boy-Ed (naval attaché), Bernhard Dernburg (propaganda chief), Karl Alexander Fuehr (propaganda), and Heinrich Albert as chief (commercial agent and financial controller). 

Acting consul general in New York Erich Hossenfelder was not a member of this group of hardliners. Hossenfelder belonged to the more accommodating faction that did not condone the U.S. supply of Germany’s enemies, but feared dire consequences of a U.S. entry headed this faction, which included most officials in the Imperial Foreign Office, in particular the ambassador to the U.S., Johann Heinrich Count von Bernstorff. This moderate group supported a military strategy subordinate to diplomacy and political considerations, and sought to keep the United States out of the European war. German war strategy shifted significantly in the spring of 1915 and, consequently, reinforced hardliner attitudes. Britain had destroyed the German naval battle group of Admiral Spee in the Falklands in November 1914. Except for small excursions, the German High Seas Fleet remained moored in German ports. Germany’s naval raiders had either been destroyed or saved themselves by agreeing to internment in neutral harbors. The German navy, for all intent and purpose, had been neutralized in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The army also reeled from its failure to swiftly take France. The German forces dug in on the western front and consolidated the gains made in Belgium and eastern France. The momentum now shifted to the east and the Russian front. The German army made important gains in the spring of 1915, as it collapsed the Russian lines and steam-rolled into the strategically important south. The static war on the western front, where material and supply would determine the eventual outcome of the war, moved the United States into strategic focus. 

Albert, Dernburg, Boy-Ed, and von Papen’s efforts from August up to the end of 1914 had had virtually no impact on the German war effort. The German team organized attacks on transportation installations in Canada, supplied remnants of the German Navy from U.S. ports, bought arms and munitions, which they sent to neutral countries or in support of separatist and nationalist movements in India, Ireland, and China. Except for Naval Attaché Karl Boy-Ed, the German team in the U.S. lacked sufficient funds, and added to the amateurish impression of German operations and propaganda in the U.S.

Other than a lack of funding, the main reason for the ineffectiveness of the German team was that the Secret War Council lacked a strategic plan underlying the various efforts. All of that changed in the beginning of 1915. The recognition, albeit late in the game, that the American theatre of war indeed impacted the European fronts, triggered the formulation of a new strategy towards the United States. The German officials in New York had worked hard on achieving this kind of recognition as a prerequisite for realistic financing of their efforts. Since the beginning of the war, the Secret War Council in New York had peppered Berlin with a barrage of facts, demands, ideas, requests, and suggestions in the hope of funding for its mission. 

The German clandestine war against industrial and government targets in the United States in 1915 has spawned countless books in the years since. While the World War still raged in Europe, journalists, retired investigators, and other real or imagined eyewitnesses told the story of outrageous German acts of war against a neutral United States. Sensationalist tales of virtually unlimited funding, armies of German conspirators, and devastating damages to American factories, ships and logistics installations intermingled with a few fact based reports. Several examples were accounts of Captain Thomas J. Tunney, the chief of the New York Bomb Squad, as well as John Price Jones and Paul Merrick Hollister, two of the most notable investigative journalists in New York. After the war, several of the actors in this tragic tale of asymmetric warfare, all with their own agendas to build or correct a lasting legacy, put to paper their memories of a story that has yet to find definitive treatment. 

The historiography of the German sabotage campaign of 1915 in the United States is wrought with inaccuracies, half-truths, and remnants of misinformation the Allies has disseminated as part of their wartime propaganda campaign in the U.S. Standard works, such as Barbara Tuchman’s The Zimmermann Telegram, written in the 1960s, could not yet take advantage of the various archives available to researchers today and consequently missed crucial sources. Subsequent events in the German war on America, such as the explosions of the Black Tom Island in the New York harbor in July of 1916, and of the Canadian Car and Foundry factory in Kingsland, New Jersey, in January 1917, have led scholars to make assumptions about earlier, less documented German acts of war. Even recent studies and journalistic accounts contain serious errors because their authors allowed flawed assumptions, the uncritical use of misleading personal accounts, and superficially researched facts to co-mingle with British war propaganda and hearsay. This book has the purpose of setting the record straight using diplomatic, military, financial, and investigative files from German and American archival sources.

The German secret war against the United States in 1915, and its discovery and publication, combined with the disastrous sinking of the Lusitania in May of that year, prepared the American public to finally accept joining the Entente powers against Germany in 1917. German war planners, members of the Admiralty, the General Staff, and political hardliners in the German government underestimated or purposely ignored the risks and cost of a large-scale clandestine campaign in the United States. In hindsight, the decision to execute a secret war in the nominally neutral United States in 1915 was a colossal blunder. This is the story of a group of German agents in the United States who executed this mission.

Dr. Hugo Schweitzer and the Great Phenol Plot

Dr. Hugo Schweitzer

Dr. Hugo Schweitzer headed the U.S. subsidiary of Bayer Corporation. He had come to the United States in the 1890s as a chemist, climbed the corporate ladder and became one of the top CEOs in the American economy. He also remained on retainer by the German army. Schweitzer was an industrial spy - and a tremendous asset to the German Secret War Council in World War I. Schweitzer had impressed the head of the Secret War Council, Heinrich Albert, through his integrity, absolute loyalty to the German cause and intellectual capability. The German pharmaceutical executive theorized early in the war in an article titled, “Chemists’ War” that the chemical industry was the key to defeating Germany’s enemies. His ideas turned out to have prophetic value, considering the role of chemical and biological weapons used later in the war. After founding the German Publication Society, raising significant contributions from the German- American community, and working with Albert and Dernburg on propaganda projects, Schweitzer wanted to do more. He inundated  Albert’s office with a barrage of suggestions in the spring of 1915, as the German agents in New York embarked on finding strategic raw materials that could disrupt the American production of explosives, arms, and ammunition. The business executive and formidable chemist identified a chemical hardly known for its strategic value: phenol, also known as carbolic acid. This chemical compound, which is derived from crude oil, is used in many industrial products, mainly all kinds of polycarbonates and polymers, as well as detergents, and pharmaceuticals such as Aspirin. However, carbolic acid also was a key ingredient in the production of TNT. The price of carbolic acid increased as the American munitions industry boomed. Shortages of this crucial ingredient in Aspirin haunted Bayer’s Rensselaer, New York factory that produced this wonder drug.

Dr. Schweitzer immediately saw a tremendous opportunity to procure the necessary phenol for the Bayer Chemical Company while, at the same time, removing its availability for the explosives industry. He proposed to Albert and his team in April 1915 to build a factory that processed benzene into phenol and picric acid. This factory would have cost an estimated $100,000, and would have cornered the entire high explosives market. Not ready to invest in a second factory, the idea remained on the back burner while the team explored other options to limit the supply of strategic chemicals. After a barrage of suggestions and market data on the chemical industry, Schweitzer received orders to corner the high
explosives market through purchases of picric acid, a key ingredient of TNT, in June 1915.

Despite serious efforts using Stallforth and various straw men, and despite offering contracts above market price, Schweitzer could not get a contract with the American picric acid manufacturers. While his idea for a German-owned factory wound its way through the Secret War Council’s decision-making process, another formidable American inventor and entrepreneur chomped at the bit. Suffering from shortages of carbolic acid for his own ventures, Thomas Edison decided to build his own phenol refining plant in Silver Lake, New Jersey. Edison had no designs on participating in the booming war industry. Rather, the inventor of the phonograph urgently needed phenol for his booming vinyl record production company. Naturally, Edison’s plans quickly circulated in the chemical industry and reached the ears of Dr. Schweitzer. The Bayer executive immediately entered into  negotiations with Edison to secure excess production for his Aspirin production and prevent phenol from reaching explosives manufacturers. 

Albert agreed to finance the purchase of Edison’s entire annual excess output. Bayer Aspirin, a much-needed product in the domestic U.S. market, became the ideal cover for the project. After the Interior Department gave the green light for the investment, Schweitzer secured 1.2 million pounds of phenol at the end of June, virtually locking down the available U.S. capacities for the entire year. Without phenol, there would be no picric acid. Albert spent $1.3 million ($27.3 million in today’s value) on the contract. Schweitzer and Albert created a web of dummy companies to obscure the underlying mechanics of the operation. Edison’s phenol went to the Chemical Exchange Association, a post office box brokerage firm in New York. The actual deliveries went to the Heyden Chemical Works in Garfield, New Jersey, a subsidiary of the Chemische Fabrik von Heyden in Radebeul, Germany. As was the case with most German industrial producers, the Heyden concern in Germany had been requisitioned for the war and Albert Ballin. Phenol and derivative products went from Garfield directly to Bayer. Dr. Schweitzer sold off what Bayer did not need to other end-uses not considered detrimental to the German war effort. 

The action severely affected the U.S. markets. The price for toluene and picric acid, as well as for all related high explosives, skyrocketed as a result of the German actions. So successful and profitable was the project that Dr. Schweitzer “gave a lavish private dinner at New York’s swanky Hotel Astor in honor of Heinrich Albert. It was a happy evening because behind all the backslapping, champagne and cigars lay the knowledge that Schweitzer had pulled off a remarkable coup… Schweitzer now controlled one of the few available sources of phenol in America and was set to make a fortune.” 

The success of the German team in acting unrecognized behind the scenes of the American munitions industry was not long lived. It was Albert himself who accidentally broke the seal of silence in the end. He had his briefcase snatched on July 24, 1915. The phenol purchases suddenly graced the first pages of American dailies. Albert, teasingly called “minister without portfolio” in the press, offered to resign and return to Germany as a result, but was turned down flatly. Interestingly, nothing about the clandestine projects was illegal, which prompted the publication rather than legal action in the first place. Edison eventually cancelled the deliveries to Heyden and Bayer under pressure. While Albert used his lawyer, Norvin Lindheim, to enforce the signed and legal contracts, the war was rapidly entering a new, more violent stage on the American continent. Despite the setback, the Bridgeport project and the “Great Phenol Plot” remained the most successful German secret missions of the first war year. Heinrich Albert praised Dr. Schweitzer’s success in a letter later in the war:

“The breadth of highmindedness [sic] with which you at that time immediately entered into the plan has borne fruit as follows: One and a half million pounds of carbolic acid have been kept from the Allies. Out of this one and a half million pounds of carbolic acid four and one-half [sic] million pounds of picric acid can be produced. This tremendous quantity of explosives stuffs has been withheld from the Allies by your contract. In order to give one an idea of this enormous quantity the following figures are of interest: Four million five hundred thousand pounds equals [sic] 2,250 tons of explosives. A railroad freight car is loaded with 20 tons of explosives. The 2,250 tons would therefore fill 112 railway cars. A freight train with explosives consist [sic] chiefly of 40 freight cars, so that the 4,500,000 pounds of explosives would fill three railroad trains with 40 cars each. Now one should picture to himself what a military coup would be accomplished by an army leader if he should succeed in destroying three railroad trains of 40 cars, containing four and a half
million pounds of explosives.”

German Military Attache in the U.S., Franz Von Papen, proudly filed a report on May 18, 1915 to the Imperial War Ministry announcing, 

“All reports received here – from the English press as well as from the negotiations of the Allies with munitions-makers [sic] here – show that there is a great shortage of ammunition in
Russia, and that the needs of the English with their apparently enormous expenditure of ammunition during the last weeks, are nowhere near being met.”

The Arm of Obregon

In April 1915, Villa had suffered his hitherto most devastating defeats in the two battles at Celaya. In another engagement in the first week of June, at the battle of León, Obregón again won decisively against Villa’s Division of the North. Observers noted admiringly that Obregón had studied German techniques in the battles raging in France. The German influence in the Mexican general’s techniques came into the open through a Hearst reporter embedded with the Carranzistas. He handed a report from Captain Juan Rosales, a Carranzista living in El Paso, to the Bureau of Investigations: 

“General Obregón had his arm shot off early in the fifth, and then Krum [sic] Heller took charge. He had five German officers with him. None of them went into the field, but as every Mexican officer had been instructed by Obregón to obey Heller, he and his Germans sat in a little tent away from the firing line and made maps. On several occasions they rode out to hills and looked at everything through their field glasses. Then they would return to their tent. I was attached to Col. Heller’s staff. Late that night Col. Heller sent for every Carranzista officer. Some of them regarded them as foolish and threatened to disobey, but Heller again produced an order signed by General Obregón commanding every Carranzista officer to obey him (Heller) [.] That settled the matter and the fight soon began. It did not last long. Villa was whipped and then retreated. Heller gave more instructions and our army advanced. Villas [sic] was whipped again and retreated. Heller again followed him and whipped him again. This was the end if Villa’s army.”

Obregon after the Battle of Leon in 1915

Villa went on to fight another day. However, after a series of devastating defeats at the hand of Obregon and with the help of the American government, Villa disbanded the Division of the North in December 1915 and headed into the Sierra Madres. Villa died at the hands of assassins in 1923, likely under orders from then President Obregon.  Obregon himself was assassinated in 1928. However, his arm lived on as a relic of the Mexican Revolution until 1989. The New York Times reported on the cremation of the infamous arm:

“After nearly 75 years, one of the most grisly relics of the Mexican Revolution has finally been laid to rest. But the interment of what remained of the right arm of General Alvaro Obregon is not likely to erase the talismanic qualities Mexicans have long associated with both the limb and the man. Obregon, a hero of the Mexican Revolution who went on to become a president feared and admired for his ruthlessness, lost the arm at the elbow during a battle on June 3, 1915. For the last 54 years, the limb had been on display in a jar of formaldehyde at a large pink and black marble monument here, surrounded by inscriptions praising the general as a ‘military genius’ and a ‘paladin of the institutions’ that prevail in Mexico today.
The rest of Obregon’s body was buried in his home state of Sonora after he was assassinated on July 17, 1928, shortly after being elected to a second term of office that many historians believe he intended to use to establish a dictatorship. In recent years, alarm over the advancing decay of the limb has given rise to a debate on whether to make his body whole again by removing the arm from its pedestal just beneath a giant statue of the general.
’It’s really depressing to see it, and something needs to be done,’ Abel Cervantes, a former director of the Alvaro Obregon Civic Association, said this summer.
The novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez suggested that ‘they should just replace it with another arm,’ implying that the limb’s mystical aura and historical symbolism mattered more than its physical preservation.
The whole matter originally was to have been settled this summer, with a ceremonial cremation of the arm on the anniversary of Obregon’s assassination attended by troops and government luminaries. But those plans were canceled after some of the general’s descendants objected...In his memoirs, the general wrote that the pain he suffered when the grenade exploded near him as he directed his troops ‘was so prolonged and agonizing’ that ‘I pulled a pistol from my belt and fired into my left temple hoping to consummate the job that the shrapnel had not finished.’
As legend has it, an adjutant wrested the pistol from his intact left hand, and the general’s date with destiny was postponed for 13 years. The arm was preserved during that time by the doctor who amputated it.”

Germany Orders War between the U.S. and Mexico 100 Years Ago

Former Colonial Secretary Bernhard Dernburg, who headed the German propaganda team within the Secret War Council in the United States between 1914 and 1915

Sommerfeld’s efforts to enlist German support behind the Villa faction continued as the northern military chieftain ran out of funds and military successes. Intensive meetings with Bernhard Dernburg, the former German colonial minister and highest ranking German official in the U.S. at the time, led to an astonishing communication from his “friend, Mr. Felix A. Sommerfeld” with the German War Office which would have grave consequences: The Sommerfeld-Dernburg memorandum went to Admiral Henning von Holtzendorff on May 15, 1915 (to shortly become the head of the admiralty), and made the rounds in the German government, including Foreign Secretary Gottlieb von Jagow, Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg and members of the German Admiralty. Next to the sabotage order from January 1915, this document is perhaps the most remarkable piece of evidence regarding German strategy towards the U.S. in the neutrality period between 1914 and 1917. Historian Friedrich Katz first discovered its existence in the 1970s.

Because of my friend, Mr. Felix A. Sommerfeld, German citizen, did I gain knowledge of the different [munitions] contracts [of the Allies in the U.S.] in the beginning of the war… Felix A. Sommerfeld proposed to have the infantry cartridge 7mm… manufactured. The infantry cartridge Mauser 7mm could then be sold off to South American countries and Spain, which are all using this make, and that profitably… Felix A. Sommerfeld is intimately familiar with Mexican politics for the last four years, was adviser and confidential agent of President Madero in all diplomatic missions and currently holds the same position with General Villa and had since been commissioned to procure munitions and war supplies here in the United States [for him]. As a result, he knows all factories and their capacities. Ever since Sommerfeld, who is an excellent patriot, has been trying his best to find out what can be done to support Germany.

All contracts of the arms manufacturers contain a clause, which relegates the agreement null and void in the event of the United States entering into a war. The policies of the United States towards Mexico are widely known and one can be completely sure that the government of the United States will do whatever it can to prevent an intervention in Mexico. The military leadership of the United States, however, is very much in favor of an intervention, as well as the state governments of Texas and Arizona, that are bordering on Mexico. A few months ago an incident occurred at the Mexican border in Arizona [Naco] that almost resulted in an intervention. At this time the chief of the General Staff [Hugh Lenox Scott] at the insistence of Secretary of War Garrison was sent to the border to negotiate with General Villa. These negotiations took place through the mediation of Felix A. Sommerfeld, and at that time, as he told me multiple times, it would have been easy to provoke an intervention. Such an event at this time would mean the following for Germany:

An embargo on all munitions for the Allies, and since everyone knows that the Allies are completely dependent on American munitions and war supplies, [it would mean] a quick success for Germany, credits for the Allies would be restricted and, additionally, the policies of the United States would be distracted, another fact that would be to Germany’s advantage.

…Felix A. Sommerfeld had misgivings at the time to force an intervention through General Villa since he did not know the intentions of Germany towards the United States…

This issue seems to become relevant again in the near term and Felix A. Sommerfeld discussed it with me. He is completely convinced that an intervention in Mexico by the United States can be provoked…

After acknowledgement of this report I request that through any means at your disposal or through me Mr. Felix A. Sommerfeld be given a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ [for his proposal to provoke an intervention]…

The answer arrived a few days later, after the Foreign Secretary Gottlieb von Jagow saw the report:

In my opinion, the answer is absolutely ‘yes.’ Even if the shipments of munitions cannot be stopped, and I am not sure they can, it would be highly desirable for America to become involved in a war and be diverted from Europe… an intervention made necessary by the developments in Mexico would be the only [emphasis added] possible diversion for the American government. Moreover, since we can at this time do nothing in the Mexican situation, an American intervention would also be the best thing possible for our interests there.

Sommerfeld had presented a plan that the German Imperial Foreign Secretary and, most likely as a result of the importance of the proposal, the German Chancellor von Bethmann Hollweg personally had signed off on. The answer from Henning von Holtzendorff underlines the timing of Sommerfeld’s proposal. The Imperial German cabinet was mired in discussions on how – or if – to proceed with the commerce war using the submarine. Hardline proponents guaranteed a victory over England within six months, while the moderate wing of the cabinet, including Chancellor von Bethmann Hollweg, doubted that the submarine fleet even had enough boats to effectively blockade England. The logical consequence of an American declaration of war in case of unrestricted submarine warfare seemed too risky to the moderates, given the uncertainties of the strategy’s effectiveness.

The debate raged even louder in May as a result of the sinking of the Lusitania. The hardline group saw the Lusitania sinking as Abschreckung, a means to scare commerce traffic away from British harbors. The subsequent guarantees of the German government to President Wilson that submarines would, henceforth, observe cruiser rules and not sink passenger ships, led to a rift in the cabinet. Chief of the Admiralty Bachmann and Grand Admiral von Tirpitz openly opposed von Bethmann Hollweg and the Emperor and offered their resignations, which the Kaiser did not grant, initially. He was fired in August when Admiral Bachmann opposed the moderates again, while von Tirpitz was put on ice. The new Chief of the Admiralty was Admiral Henning von Holtzendorff.

Just as tempers flared in Berlin, Sommerfeld proposed a way out of the dilemma. Rather than having to decide now whether to risk a war with the United States or give up the unrestricted submarine war the navy demanded, he sought to create certain conditions in the United States that would end the threat of an effective American impact on the European war. Dernburg chose von Holtzendorff, who was then still retired, because his views regarding the submarine fleet were moderate and acceptable to Wilhelm II and von Bethmann Hollweg. Von Holtzendorff explained to the chancellor and the foreign secretary that if Sommerfeld’s proposal worked, American attention would be diverted and munitions kept from the Allies at the same time, while unrestricted submarine warfare could be re-launched. He wrote that an American intervention in Mexico would have an added benefit of also reestablishing order of whatever definition. The appointment of von Holtzendorff in August insured that Sommerfeld’s plan would be enacted. The Secret War Council was to create a strategic window in which unrestricted submarine warfare could be enacted and the war brought to a favorable conclusion.

Read the whole story in my new book Felix A.Sommerfeld and the Mexican Front in the Great War!

The Sinking of the Cunard Liner RMS Lusitania 100 Years ago

Germany fired the first shot in the new battle against America on February 4th 1915, when she announced a “blockade” against England to begin on February 18.

"The waters around Great Britain and Ireland, including the English Channel, are hereby proclaimed a war region. On and after February 18th every enemy merchant vessel found in this region will be destroyed, without its always being possible to warn the crews or passengers of the dangers threatening. Neutral ships will also incur danger in the war region, where, in view of the misuse of neutral flags ordered by the British Government, and incidents inevitable in sea warfare, attacks intended for hostile ships may affect neutral ships also. The sea passage to the north of the Shetland Islands, and the eastern region of the North Sea in a zone of at least 30 miles along the Netherlands coast, are not menaced by any danger.

(Signed) Berlin, February 4th,
VON POHL,
Chief of Marine Staff"

The first submarine to patrol the newly declared war zone left Ems on February 11, 1915. U-30 under Lieutenant Commander von Rosenberg-Gruszczynski crossed the Channel at Dover and reached the patrol area on the 17th. Another gas-powered sub, the U-16 under Captain Claus Hansen, had taken position in the Channel on February 1. On February 16 U-16 torpedoed the British Collier Dulwich off the coast of France, giving the crew time to launch lifeboats. Hansen blew up the small French steamer, Ville de Lille, a day later. The German commander meticulously followed search and seizure procedures as mandated by international law, even towing the lifeboats with the crew to the coast. Another French steamer, the Dinorah, suffered damages from a torpedo on February 18. This time, in accordance with the new orders, the U-16 attacked without warning.

The campaign proceeded full steam in April 1915. Thirty-seven ships – seventeen British, three French, three Russian, and eight neutrals (no American) – with absolute or conditional contraband sank after U-boat attacks. Two freighters, one French and one British, suffered damages but could be hauled into safety. One British and three neutral freighters were captured and hauled into German harbors for prize court proceedings, in which a panel of judges decided on the distribution of the captured ships and property. The submarine campaign thus destroyed 62,000 GRT and damaged 11,000 GRT in April, using fifteen submarines, of which thirteen were equipped with oceangoing diesel engines and tanks. The rapid increase of diesel-powered boats particularly alarmed the British war planners. Despite the raw number showing less than one percent of shipping vessels in and out of England being physically attacked, the psychological effects on sailors and neutral shippers began to show. A growing number of ocean carriers refused to take on freight destined for the war zone. Seamen, as well, rather switched to shipping lines not involved European trade.

German agents had carefully observed the comings and goings of British passenger liners from New York since the onset of the war. German secret agent Paul Koenig issued regular lists provided by informants in the New York customs department, among others, of contraband freight loaded on passenger ships. German spymaster in New York Heinrich Albert noted in his diary in February, “Shurz ./. Lusit. Armed – Malone.”  It is unknown whether the cryptic notation meant that Albert had received information as to armaments on the Lusitania from Dudley Field Malone, the Collector of the Port of New York whom Albert considered pro-German, or whether he intended to approach him with that information to take action against the ocean liner. The second possibility seems more likely since Malone later testified that there were no gun emplacements on the ship. However, as the RMS Lusitania readied herself for a return voyage to the United States, German agents might have suspected that she would be converted to an auxiliary cruiser while in port in Britain. The importance of this notation is the fact that the day before the official start of the German submarine campaign, Albert and his agents eyed the RMS Lusitania, the largest and one of five four-funneled British ocean liners in service at the time, with more than casual interest. Just a week prior, American newspapers had reported on a false flagging incident witnessed by Edward House. A British liner having carried contraband on many of her recent voyages, and listed in British naval registers as a potential auxiliary cruiser, she was a target for the German navy. Indeed, she represented a prize of highest significance, one that would show the world that the German submarine fleet had the means and resolve to stop traffic to the British Isles. The May 12, 1915 issue of the New York weekly Fatherland voiced the German desire to see the large passenger liner sunk. “Before long, a large passenger ship like the Lusitania, carrying implements of murder to Great Britain, will meet with a similar fate [as the Gulflight]…” When the paper went on sale in the newsstands, the dire forecast had already become reality.

On May 1, the same day U-30 torpedoed the American tanker Gulflight, the Cunard passenger liner, RMS Lusitania, readied herself in New York for the 202nd transatlantic crossing. She was the largest and fastest ship on the transatlantic circuit at the time, crossing the great divide between the United States and Europe in slightly less than five days. Ostensibly believing that the “American Government… still underestimated the dangers of the situation, and failed to take any measure of precaution,” German Ambassador Count Bernstorff is credited with issuing a stern warning to potential passengers traveling on British ocean liners, which appeared in the New York Times on May 1. 

Confronted with the warning, the Cunard Line press agent, Charles Sumner, tried his best to dispel the fear. “No passenger is permitted aboard them [Cunard Line ships] unless he can identify himself... Every passenger must identify his baggage before it is placed aboard. There are no German cruisers in the Atlantic, and the ‘danger zone’ does not begin until we reach the British Channel and the Irish Sea. Then one may say there is a general system of convoying British ships. The British Navy is responsible for all British ships, and especially for Cunarders.” The journalist then asked: “Your speed, too, is a safeguard, is it not?”…”Yes [Sumner answered]; as for submarines, I have no fear of them whatever.” The Lusitania would neither travel at her full speed of twenty-five knots nor would she receive a British naval escort in the danger zone. She cleared pier 54 in New York on May 1st around noon with 1,257 passengers and 702 crew members on board. Only a handful of passengers had opted out of the voyage as a result of the published warning and sailed with slower and less luxurious neutral passenger ships. The Lusitania carried over 4,200 cases of small arms munitions, 1,000 rounds each, and 1,250 cases of empty shrapnel casings in her hold, considered absolute contraband by all warring parties.

Captain Walter Schwieger

Whether to save money (Cunard’s explanation) or because the naval war caused a shortage of willing trimmers and firemen (Naval Attache Karl Boy-Ed’s explanation), the Lusitania only fired three of her four boilers. The German submarine U-20 under the command of the thirty year old Walter Schwieger cruised near the Old Head of Kinsale on May 6 heading to a station off Liverpool with orders to “sink troop transporters.” He sank the British steamers, Centurion and Candidate, two cargo ships, without warning. Two other submarines, the U-30 and the U-27 had orders to the same effect with stations hundreds of miles away off Dartmouth and the Bristol Channel, respectively. Despite specific warnings sent to the Lusitania after the U-20 attacks on May 6 to watch for submarines off the Old Head of Kinsale, her Captain, Bill Turner, steered the Cunarder straight into the channel at reduced speed. He did not follow his orders for evasive measures, such as zigzagging and using speed as the most effective means to lose a stalking submarine traveling at fifteen knots. Additionally, the thick fog on the morning of May 7 caused the Lusitania to sound her fog horns “once every minute,” broadcasting her approach for miles. A chain of unfortunate events unfolded that, in combination, brought the Lusitania into the fateful contact with Schwieger’s U-20. Around 1:40 pm on May 7, Schwieger launched a torpedo from 700 meters (2,100 feet) distance at the ocean liner. The impact under the bridge on starboard created an explosion, followed by another even more massive than the first. The forward movement of the ship caused an almost immediate list and submersion. Captain Schwieger described the scene in his war diary:

"Clear bow shot at 700 [meters]… Shot struck starboard side close behind the bridge. An extraordinarily heavy detonation followed, with a very large cloud of smoke (far above the front funnel). A second explosion must have followed that of the torpedo (boiler or coal or powder?)… The ship stopped immediately and quickly listed sharply to starboard, sinking deeper by the head at the same time. It appeared as if it would capsize in a short time. Great confusion arose on the ship; some of the boats were swung clear and lowered into the water… Many people must have lost their heads; several boats loaded with people rushed downward, struck the water bow or stern first and filled at once… The ship blew off steam; at the bow the name Lusitania in golden letters was visible. The funnels were painted black; stern flag not in place. It was running 20 nautical miles. Since it seemed as if the steamer could only remain above water for a short time, went to 24 m. [meters] and ran toward the Sea. Nor could I have fired a second torpedo into this swarm of people who were trying to save themselves."

The torpedoed RMS Lusitania

The mortally wounded super liner disappeared below the waves of the Atlantic Ocean after only eighteen minutes. Of the 1,959 passengers and crew on board, 1,198 perished in the ice-cold Irish Sea. One hundred twenty-eight of the victims were Americans. The international outrage over the senseless killing of civilians, many of them women and children, overshadowed any previous disagreements with the German conduct of the war. Spontaneous demonstrations against Germany broke out in New York and other large cities. The newspapers, filled with pictures of scores of caskets and eyewitness accounts, decried the barbarity of the German action. The large secondary explosion that hastened the demise of the ocean liner remains one of the hotly debated topics of the sinking. German propaganda immediately alleged that munitions and explosives aboard the ship caused the explosion. British propaganda alleged that multiple torpedoes were fired while passengers were trying to save themselves. Neither allegation was true. Scientists have inspected the wreckage in recent years and documented that a large boiler explosion or the combustion of coal dust in a forward compartment completed the destruction of the ship.

The circumstantial evidence supporting a concerted navy effort to sink the Lusitania on her 202nd voyage is overwhelming: The Lusitania represented a target that German officials publicly talked about. U-27 actively tried to sink the liner a month earlier. U-20 was sent into the shipping lane of the Lusitania in the week she was to cross with orders to sink “troop transporters,” which included large liners. The German propaganda office in New York, filled with supporters of the unrestricted submarine campaign, not the German embassy, initiated the publication of a warning to appear only on May 1, 1915, the departure day of the Lusitania, and only in New York papers. The American press also interpreted the warning as being directed specifically to Lusitania passengers. The Washington Times wrote prophetically on May 1: “Lusitania’s Passengers Warned of Ship’s Doom.” The counter argument, namely that the sinking occurred as the result of a host of circumstances that could not have been planned, is weak. Any such project requires luck. It is reasonable to assume, however, that the tremendous loss of life caused by the rapid sinking of the ship had not been intended. Sabotage agent Franz Rintelen told a B.I. agent in New York what many German officials likely believed, “…it was never intended that those on board the Lusitania should have been drowned as they believed under any conditions that the Lusitania would stay afloat for four or five hours at the least, and that all of these people would be rescued.”

Still, it would be presumptuous for a historian to conclude that the German naval leaders had thus presided over a disastrous and ineffective strategy. Clearly, the German admiralty knew that they had only a handful of U-boats in service, which they rather would have saved from likely destruction instead of trying to destroy the global merchant marine. In his memoirs, the commander of the submarine forces, Hermann Bauer, quoted his top-secret plan for a sea blockade of England dated December 27, 1914. The plan listed the strategic goals of Germany’s commerce war using four U-boats on patrol on average per day: “…Deterrence and as a result reduction [of the merchant traffic to and from England] and... increased cost through forcing uneconomical routes and high insurance premiums.”

The German supporters of unrestricted submarine warfare certainly took into account the possibility of losing the battle for public sympathy in the United States. They did not care. Frederico Stallforth explained the general feeling of Germany’s public opinion about the sinking of the Lusitania: “…the German Admiralty thought that the greatest demonstration of the efficiency of the U-boat as a weapon of war could be the sinking of the Lusitania, but the English claimed it could not be sunk by a submarine due to its speed, and that Captain Turner of the Lusitania had boasted before he left New York that his boat could not be destroyed in that way. There were warnings sent out from some source … it was likely that the boat was going to be sunk… the truth was that the U-boats were looking out for it [the Lusitania]. A service clerk who worked in the Hotel Astor at the time testified, “Summerfeld [sic] appeared very elated and expressed the hope that Germany would win…” Heinrich Albert wrote to his direct superior, Secretary of the Interior Clemens von Delbrück, on May 10, 1915: “…the Lusitania case is from a military- naval perspective one of the most significant victories we have achieved. Despite the hostile atmosphere I can currently conduct my work with a lightened heart.” A potential entry of the United States into the war as a result of the submarine campaign not only factored into the calculation but was considered desirable and purposefully provoked. Bauer wrote in his top-secret plan for a blockade under the heading “Amerika,” “An unbearable economic crisis which our U-boat blockade will cause with certainty could drive America into an intervention against us. This intervention…. would… be without deciding military influence on the war.” He was wrong.

If you want the whole story of Germany's secret war on the United States in 1915, check out the new book.

The Huerta-Orozco-Mondragón Plot in 1915

Almost exactly 100 years ago, a German naval intelligence agent named Franz Rintelen arrived in the United States. He had orders to prevent American shipment of arms and munitions to the enemies of the Empire by all means. Creating trouble for the U.S. military at the Mexican-American border was one of his devious projects. Little over one week after the arrival of Franz Rintelen, on April 12th 1915, ex- Mexican president Victoriano Huerta, former secretary of war Manuel Mondragón, Enrique Creel, the former governor of Chihuahua, and Huerta’s secretary General José Delgado stepped off the steamer Antonio Lopez in New York. Enrique Llorente, Villa’s representative in Washington who reported to Sommerfeld, filed a protest with the Wilson administration before the ship had even docked in the harbor. He alleged what most believed to be true at the time: that the former dictator of Mexico came to insert himself in Mexican affairs once again. Before letting Huerta enter the United States, immigration officials made the exiled dictator give an oath to the effect that he would stay out of Mexican affairs. 

Victoriano Huerta (middle) with Abraham Z. Ratner (right) and Jose Delgado (left) in New York in 1915

Despite the oath and public pronouncements, New York’s newspapers continued to speculate about the true purpose of Huerta’s trip. The general informed reporters smilingly that he was on a “pleasure trip” and had no intention of mingling in Mexican affairs. He settled in a suite on the fifth floor of the Hotel Ansonia, on Broadway and 73rd Street, in New York. Reporters watched closely as Huerta received hundreds of visitors, generals of the Porfirio Díaz era, former governors, and exiled politicians, all hoping to join the new movement. Most suspiciously, Huerta also secretly met with Pascual Orozco, a general who like Huerta first fought for President Madero then helped overthrow him. Huerta basked in the attention, freely granted interviews with journalists, and pleasantly ignored direct questions regarding his purpose in New York. Claiming that he had “fallen in love with this country,” Huerta rented a large villa on Long Island in the beginning of May. His wife and children and servants joined him in the new home, a household of thirty-five.

Evidence that Felix Sommerfeld (and by extension, Pancho Villa) did not support the Huerta-Orozco-Mondragón plot surfaced in El Paso in the first week of May 1915. Sommerfeld had traveled to the border in secrecy where he still operated Villa’s secret service on the American side. It is unknown whether Sommerfeld had come to confer with Villa, but he certainly came to focus his secret service organization on sabotaging the “Científico” plot. Sommerfeld's men ratted out arms depots and munitions dumps, as well as meetings and other preparations to cross recruits into Mexico. American agents of the Bureau of Investigations reported on May 3 “… Felix Sommerfeld and [illegible], both very active heretofore in revolutionary matters, had been seen a few days ago, just about daylight, coming from the direction of the foothills north of El Paso.”

According to British intelligence, intensive meetings occurred in and around Huerta that involved German naval intelligence agent Franz Rintelen, Military Attache Franz von Papen, and Naval Attache Karl Boy-Ed. Boy-Ed, who claimed steadfastly never to have met Huerta other than in Mexico in 1914, might not have been involved but still professed his sympathies with the exiled dictator in his memoirs. “His forced removal by the Americans I always thought it [the ousting of Huerta] to be a calamity for Mexico,” he wrote in 1920. The German agents certainly had an interest in helping create the trouble about to commence all along the border. And Huerta certainly would have been happy for any material or financial support. Other than talk, not much happened.

While Mondragón got cold feet and left for France,  Huerta and Orozco kept pushing their plot. Significant amounts of supplies poured into the border region throughout May and June, consigned to small dealers in and around Texas. The sudden influx, evidenced by Sommerfeld’s activities and enlistment of his friend, the U.S. Secretary of War Lindley M. Garrison, combined with the rampant rumors that a conspiracy was afoot, caused great alarm with both the American officials and the Villista secret service. It was very difficult to separate these shipments from deliveries to Villa and Obregón, who imported millions of cartridges for over 60,000 soldiers in active duty. Historians have alleged that Huerta received German financial aid for his munitions. As it turns out, it was Villa who received the funds, while Huerta used his own from the loot he took with him into exile in 1914.

U.S. authorities and Sommerfeld’s organization tried their best to stop the conspiracy. Despite their efforts and the lack of support from the other Mexican factions, Victoriano Huerta and his immediate followers decided on June 24 to go ahead with their plan. The exiled general and a group of his closest advisers took a train to San Francisco on that day, ostensibly to visit the World Fair exhibition. However, in Chicago they switched to a train to Kansas City, where they changed destinations again and headed for El Paso. The train stopped in the early morning hours of June 27, right across the Texas border near Newman, New Mexico, a small hamlet between New Mexico and Texas and only twenty miles from El Paso. Pascual Orozco and a small group of Huertistas had waited at the station with two cars to take their leader across the Mexican border. Customs Collector Zach Lamar Cobb and a detail of soldiers from Fort Bliss arrested Orozco and his men. As the train stopped on the Texas side of the border Huerta greeted Orozco before U.S. authorities arrested him, as well. Huerta seemed completely surprised. Not so surprised was the American public. Even before agents arrested Huerta, New York papers had reported that the general was on a train bound for El Paso to start a new revolution.

He and Orozco posted bail within hours and remained in El Paso, freely continuing to plot their insurgency. Orozco escaped from house arrest on July 3, 1915. Reports indicated that he entered Mexico where three hundred of his followers awaited him. It turned out he went into hiding on the American side of the border, without men or equipment or money. An American posse hunted him and four companions down, shot and killed them on August 30. Huerta, who had been re-arrested after Orozco’s escape, remained incarcerated at Fort Bliss. A lifelong alcoholic, the death of Orozco caused him once more to seek solace in Cognac and other spirits. After falling ill, being released, rearrested, and falling ill again, he died on January 13, 1916. The official cause of death read cirrhosis of the liver, an entirely reasonable explanation. However, reports of two botched medical operations leading to his final decline fueled conspiracy theories ever since that someone, maybe even the American government, had murdered him. The border remained unsettled for months to come. Felix Díaz tried his own insurrection from New Orleans in the coming months. The Bureau of Investigations uncovered several small filibustering operations in August. About $10,000 worth of arms and ammunition fell into the hands of American officials. However, the plot of the “Científicos” under the leadership of Huerta and Orozco had been ended effectively with the arrests near Newman, New Mexico. 

Interested how Sommerfeld eliminated his fellow agent Rintelen? Check out the new book The Secret War on the United States in 1915. For the real back story of Pancho Villa's attack on Columbus, NM in 1916, read Felix A Sommerfeld and the Mexican Front in the Great War. 

Leon Thrasher, the first American submarine casualty

The German High Seas Fleet sortied into the middle of the North Sea on January 23rd to challenge the British fleet in an area called Dogger Bank. The engagement resulted in the loss of a German dreadnought and the near loss of a second. The British warships had proven to be better armed, better coordinated, and faster than the German squadron. The loss of the SMS Bluecher caused Wilhelm II to dismiss Admiral Ingenohl and appoint Admiral von Pohl to take command of the High Seas Fleet. While von Pohl ordered periodic sorties from Kiel, the German admiralty refused to risk a direct confrontation with the numerically superior British Grand Fleet. Thus, the blockade of England, which the admiralty estimated would take 220 submarines to enforce, was taken up by twenty-five U-boats, only five or six of which patrolled the ocean at any given time. The German blockade was illegal by the standard of the Declaration of London, as was the English counterpart.

Two days before the German Empire announced its war on commerce, Colonel Edward House, President Wilson’s friend and confidante, left New York on the Lusitania for Britain on January 30th 1915. The president had sent him on a diplomatic mission to the warring nations of Europe hoping to get both sides to accept a mediation offer from the United States. As the ship neared the Irish Coast, the captain of the large passenger liner gave orders to hoist the American flag. Colonel House, who witnessed the ruse, was furious. He filed a report to the State Department and denounced the abuse of neutral flags on British ships. The affair caused a raucous in the House of Representatives and in the American press, yet without any tangible consequences for Britain. The German claim that Britain had ordered her merchant marine to use neutral flags in the war zone had become fact, certified by one of the highest officials of the U.S. government. The first submarine to patrol the newly declared war zone left Ems on February 11th 1915. U-30 under Lieutenant Commander von Rosenberg-Gruszczynski crossed the Channel at Dover and reached the patrol area on the 17th. Another gas-powered sub, the U-16 under Captain Claus Hansen, had taken position in the Channel on February 1st. On the February 16th U-16 torpedoed the British Collier Dulwich off the coast of France, giving the crew time to launch lifeboats. Hansen blew up the small French steamer, Ville de Lille, a day later. The German commander meticulously followed search and seizure procedures as mandated by international law, even towing the lifeboats with the crew to the coast. Another French steamer, the Dinorah, suffered damages from a torpedo on the 18th. This time, in accordance with the new orders, the U-16 attacked without warning.

The first potentially serious mistake occurred on the following day, when Captain Hansen failed to properly identify his target and torpedoed the 9,000-ton Norwegian steamer Belridge. The Standard Oil Corporation tanker transported oil from the United States to the Netherlands. Luckily for Germany, no one was injured in the attack and the steamer beached itself before it could sink. However, the impracticality of the German admiralty’s orders not to harm neutral ships now showed the first result. Germany quickly admitted to the mistake and committed to paying for the damages to the ship in order to quell public attention. A mistake it was! According to the files of Heinrich Albert, the Belridge served as a blockade-runner for his office since the fall of 1914 and carried benzene (gas) for the German government.

U-30 also scored hits on February 20th, sinking two English freighters without warning. U-8, under Lieutenant Commander Stoss, which left on February 16th, destroyed five steamers in the shipping lanes between Dover and Calais. It sank on that voyage after hitting a mine. U-6, another gas-powered boat returned home after it suffered damage from a ramming by a freighter it had attacked. Despite the bad winter weather, which forced U-30, in particular, to abandon targets and submerge for the rough sea to pass, the four submarines scored one sinking per day since the campaign began.

The German submarine fleet, consisting of fourteen boats, entered the theater of war full force in the month of March. U-12 sank after the British cruiser HMS Ariel rammed it. U-17 suffered mechanical damage from a wave and had to return to port. U-37 disappeared without a trace after damaging one steamer and sinking two others. U-29 sank on March 26th without survivors after the British armored cruiser HMS Dreadnought rammed it. The British media noted with enthusiasm that justice had been done, since the commander of the U -29 was Otto Weddingen, who had sunk three British cruisers in the beginning of the war with 1,200 sailors dying in the incident. U-33 barely escaped a ramming attempt after it stopped a British freighter under observance of ‘cruiser rules.’

U-28, the submarine that sank the SS Falaba

U-28 sank the British cargo-passenger steamer SS Falaba on March 28th, causing the first American submarine casualty of the war, the thirty-one year-old mining engineer of Massachusetts, Leon Thrasher. One hundred-four of the 242 passengers, including Thrasher, drowned. According to the German government, the U-28 had signaled the Falaba to stop. The steamer, however, attempted to flee and signaled nearby British warships for help. The U-28 then torpedoed the ship. The cargo contained munitions, an absolute contraband. Whether or not the German version of events was true, the sinking took place well within the confines of international law. The presence of enemy warships likely caused the U-boat captain to abandon plans for time-consuming rescue operations. One of the surviving passengers shot a host of photographs documenting the tragic end of the ship. The pictures wound their way onto the front pages of American dailies, bringing home the brutality of Germany’s naval war, an ever-growing public relations fiasco. The U-boat fleet sank thirty-six ships in that month alone, amounting to 79,000 GRT with six ships damaged, amounting to 22,000 GRT. The use of neutral flags by British and French shipping, the losses, especially of the valuable diesel-powered U-29 and U-37, and the ramming attempt from a stopped freighter all contributed to snuffing out the last remaining efforts to respect cruiser rules.

The campaign proceeded full steam in April 1915. Thirty-seven ships – seventeen British, three French, three Russian, and eight neutrals (no American) – with absolute or conditional contraband sank after U-boat attacks. Two freighters, one French and one British, suffered damages but could be hauled into safety. One British and three neutral freighters were captured and hauled into German harbors for prize court proceedings, in which a panel of judges decided on the distribution of the captured ships and property. The submarine campaign thus destroyed 62,000 GRT and damaged 11,000 GRT in April, using fifteen submarines, of which thirteen were equipped with oceangoing diesel engines and tanks. The rapid increase of diesel-powered boats particularly alarmed the British war planners. Despite the raw number showing less than one percent of shipping vessels in and out of England being physically attacked, the psychological effects on seamen and neutral shippers began to show. A growing number of ocean carriers refused to take on freight destined for the war zone. Seamen, as well, rather switched to shipping lines not involved European trade.

The First Sealord of the Admiralty, Winston S. Churchill, proposed to arm the merchant marine to defend against submarine attacks in response to the German aggression. This proposal further sealed the decision of the German admiralty that traditional search and seizure procedures could not be followed in the case of a submarine. Once surfaced, these vessels had little chance of defending their vulnerable hulls against ramming, machine gun, or cannon fire. The German ‘hardliners’ in the submarine debate, especially the commander of the submarine fleet, Hermann Bauer, demanded that restrictions on targeting, such as excluding neutral vessels, would be dropped. He cited the British policies of ramming, false flagging, and now arming of merchant vessels as the justification.

Read more in The Secret War on the United States in 1915.

Why we should care what happened 100 years ago...

For years I have blogged on the Mexican Revolution and the First World War. Between 60,000 and 140,000 of you are reading these little articles every week. I thank you for the interest and for buying my books. Yet, I ask myself, why are so many of you interested in this? Here is my interpretation - and you are welcome to add to or dispute it:

Francisco I. Madero

The Mexican Revolution is incredibly timely compared to what is happening all around us. The parallels are uncanny, and we are all looking for answers about where the world is going, what the role of my country in this world is, how the world affects me, my job, my family, my future, the future of my kids? Since we cannot look into the future, and the present is riddled with propaganda and subjectivity, studying the past might provide the best answers. I am with you!

In 1910, seemingly out of the blue, the Mexican Revolution sprung up in a movement for democracy and economic justice. It was not meant to last for ten years or cost one million lives. But it did. Ripping the existing power structure apart creates a vacuum. There is no security in an outcome because whoever fills this vacuum is not pre-described in a revolution. 

A few years ago, the world watched in amazement as the Arab Spring tore down dictators in several countries. Immediately new governments took the place of the old (compare to De La Barra/Madero). In the west, we heralded these governments, as imperfect as they may have been, as standard bearers of liberal democracy, economic justice, and a predictable and fair justice system. Syria, Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Jordan remained dictatorships. Assad in Syria became a criminal in the western press. He fought the "democratic" opposition and killed civilians. And, by the way, Syria traditionally had sided with the Soviet sphere. That is bad. Iran also remained a villain, since they had a successful revolution (in the sense that the revolutionaries captured power, solidified it, and are still there after 35 years), which we do not like the outcome of. In fact, in our western view of how things should develop, we wish a Persian Spring on them and tried to help create it. The other four dictatorships support "western democracy," just not in their own countries (in the sense of shipping oil and providing limited support for Israel). These are the "good" dictators.

Now comes ISIL, the Kurdish Peshmerga, the Assyrian defense force, and a few more. For months we heard suppressed calls from Syrian President Bashar Al'Assad, that he was in fact fighting large terrorist (whatever that means) rebels within Syria. He compared them to Al Quaeda to see if someone would call off the western "regime change" forces. He was ridiculed. We know now, he was right. Suddenly, out of the blue (except for some analysts somewhere deep in the cellars of western clandestine services) the carefully trained and armed Iraqi army dropped its weapons, including heavy armaments and munitions depots, and ran. ISIL suddenly dominated half of Iraq and half of Syria. The only viable force to stand up against them initially were the Kurdish Peshmerga.

The course of the Mexican Revolution has incredible parallels to what is happening right now. When Madero overthrew Diaz, Mexico was the largest oil producing country in the world. Ships, trains, automobiles sprung up everywhere and formed the basis of the modern economies. England, Germany, and France (the "superpowers" of the time) clung to the old regime, supported the Cientificos, and made no effort to financially support Madero's movement. The United States as well, not a "superpower," but close enough to Mexico to have huge economic and financial interests, supported the anti-Madero forces. In part because of the lack of support, in part because of his inability to consolidate power and maintain broad based popular support, the first democratically elected president of Mexico died in a coup. Here is the vacuum.

For a little over one year the putschists under Huerta filled it but, but in reality new forces with broad popular support (within their regions) filled the power vacuum. With every defeat of the "federals," revolutionaries gained supplies, ability, and ground. Pancho Villa might represent the Kurdish Peshmerga. Who would have thought in the spring of 1913, when he crossed into Mexico with a handful of fighters, that one year later he commanded the largest army in Mexico and controlled half of the country. He had some support from the U.S., he had regional popular support, he was able to finance his movement. Carranza had no fighting force, but led the publicity campaign to get support. In the Arab revolution, Carranza seems to be missing. However, Obregon, with regional support from Sonora, might be found in the Sunni leadership in Iraq. The United States occupied Veracruz (air strikes to support the Kurds) to influence the outcome, created munitions import embargoes but did not enforce them against the factions of Villa, Zapata, and Carranza. We do not understand, how all these heavy weapons get into the region, but Turkey's borders and places with U.S. presence (Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Afghanistan) are all candidates. In the 1910s one could only use rail, horse and ship to transport. Today, the air transport is the main means of transportation.

Execution of Villistas in Cd. Juarez in 1916

Thousands of federal officers, captured opposition fighters, and civilians died at the hands of these revolutionary factions. Just like today, when we gasp with horror as ISIL fighters execute "enemies," Villa, Obregon, Zapata all lined up hundreds of captured enemies after every battle and executed them, often in front of American reporters. The purpose might have been slightly different, but one aspect certainly was to create horror among the civilian population, recruit, and draw larger powers into the conflict. This is also not to say, that the federals did not execute their captured. Assad (the "federals") certainly is not a nice guy, neither was Huerta.

So, can we can accept that the Arab region represents Mexico in the early 1900s? Mexico was then the largest oil producer. Regional revolutionary chieftains  in Mexico now stand for the radical Islamists, as well as powerful regional tribes and factions. Western powers had a hand in creating the huge unemployment, political disenfranchisement, and economic suffering of large Arab populations. In Mexico the rallying cry was land reform. What is it in Arabia? A share in the oil wealth? Jobs? Liberty? Indeginismo and Islamist fundamentalism are both ideologies that search for a new social contract in a glorious, "better" past. Make no mistake, the Arab Spring is a social revolution just like the French, Mexican, and Russian revolutions.  

Arms and supplies for the old regimes (then the Cientificos, today the "friendly" Arab dictators that control oil) exacerbated the initial, limited reform movement, and created revolutions all over the Arab world. Support from powerful defense lobbies in the western world for this or that faction then and now kept both sides well equipped, making money for the arms producers and dealers, while extending the conflict. The success of ISIL, the Kurdish Peshmerga, the Assyrian defense, and tribal opposition rests on popular support that the other factions fighting them, such as the Iraqi army, do not have. If we accept all that, where are we in this conflict? Can we predict or influence the next phase in the Arab revolution? Do we really have to go through a ten year period of violence, an attack on the United States (Columbus 1916)? I predict, that a successful Kurdish Peshmerga will claim a democratic Kurdish republic in most of the area now controlled by ISIL. In return for recognition, they will stop the secession in Turkish Kurdistan. 

The worst parallel of all, if we accept that the Arab revolution is now where the Mexican Revolution was in 1914, are we sliding towards another world conflict? In a world as tense and unpredictable as we have today, where is the spark that sets it on fire? Ukraine? I believe, reading up on what happened 100 years ago might be something we all, but especially our leaders should do. Join me in preventing the mistakes of the future from duplicating the one's of our past!

Germany's Sabotage Campaign in the U.S. started 100 Years Ago

On February 19th 1915, one-and-a-half months before war bonds hit the market and three weeks before the Foreign Office approved the sabotage campaign in the United States, the Deutsche Bank deposited $210,000 ($4.4 Million in today’s value) with G. Amsinck and Co. One week later another $790,000 ($16.6 Million in today’s value) appeared as a deposit for the Deutsche Bank. The director of the Deutsche Bank in the United States was Hugo Schmidt. He proved to be an expert in finding ways around the tight control of financial transactions through Britain. Virtually all international financial transactions in one way or another passed through London. British authorities made sure that German transactions did not make it any further. Through dummy accounts, fake bank connections, straw men from neutral countries, especially those in Latin America, Schmidt became the essential lifeline to the German officials in the United States. An assistant, Frederico Stallforth, who had lots of international connections and plenty of financial savvy worked at his side. 

Heinrich F. Albert in his office in New York in 1915

The one million dollars that Albert received in February 1915 were not coded in his ledgers as credits for shipping supplies to Germany as part of the blockade running operation.  These million dollars came from the Imperial War Department with the express purpose of financing the sabotage order that the New York team had received on January 24th. Proceeds from the sale of war bonds further filled the coffers in April 1915. Within weeks of receiving the revenue from the war bonds, Albert and German Ambassador in the U.S., Count Bernstorff, opened dozens of new accounts all over the country, ostensibly to have funds where after nine months the bonds would eventually be redeemed. Rather than cashing the coupons, these regionally distributed bond proceeds actually funded clandestine operations. 

Franz von Papen in 1915 on his way home after he had been expelled from the U.S.

The collection and dissemination of intelligence as well as the dispatch and payment of secret agents occurred at the War Intelligence Office at 60 Wall Street, the office of Franz von Papen and his assistant Wolf von Igel in New York. Every day, German sympathizers and agents sent reports to von Papen’s office. This raw intelligence detailed factories involved in producing supplies for the Allies, named sympathizers who could be approached inside those businesses, as well as all kinds of plans, from inventions to bomb designs, to setting fires, to sabotaging manufacturing facilities. The acting German Military Attaché Wolf von Igel and other officials had destroyed many of these telegrams and letters as American investigators tried to search the premises of the German operation in New York between 1915 and 1917. However, some examples have been preserved that show the amount of intelligence von Papen had at his disposal to decide what to attack, how, and when. For example, he filed one of his bi-weekly intelligence reports copied to his superiors in Berlin, as well as those of Boy-Ed and Albert on February 11th 1915. The New York team was then still planning to corner the munitions market in the U.S. However, in view of the earlier sabotage order, which might or might not have arrived in the U.S. by the second week of February, von Papen seems to allude to potential sabotage targets using words like “there come into consideration...”

  … Bethlehem Steel Works are shipping on the steamer Transylvania 2 heavy naval guns, 16” caliber, which are said to represent a part of a large order… The entire order is estimated at 200 guns. The Savage Arms Co. delivers weekly about 50 Lewis machine guns… Westinghouse Electric Co. … got contracts for 125,000 shrapnel, the J.W. Bill Co. Projectile Works (shrapnel), the Western Cartridge Co., Alton, Ill. (cartridge shells) and the Bridgeport Brass Co. (cartridge shells). Machines for making shrapnel are furnished… by Gisholt Machine Co. and the Steinle Turret Co… For infantry ammunition there come into consideration [underline by author], besides those already reported, the Western Cartridge Co., Alton, Ill (caliber 30-20 and 7m.m. cartridge shells) and the Bridgeport Brass Co. (cartridges, shells and 50 million copper bullets for French machine guns [)]. The Curtis Flying Machine Co. is supplying 400 flying machines to England… These machines are equipped… with the only recently invented gyroscope of the Sperry Gyroscope Co… The well-known parts are produced by the Union Twist Drill Co. and the Union Twist Reel Co…It is rumored that the allies are ready to take as many as 1,000,000 daily.

The shipments of horses and war automobiles continue in increased degree. The Ford Mfg. Co. has received an order for 40,000 vehicles… the factory can produce about 1,000 a day.

The Locomobile Co. of America makes heavy freight automobiles and even sends its trained chauffeurs along to France with the autos… 35 heavy guns were sent by the Bethlehem Co. to Vancouver, to be shipped from there on the steamer Tambov of the Russian volunteer fleet to Vladivostok… The same factory furnished also the ammunition for this gun, and a report is before me that one train took 15 car loads of this. The steamer Tambov is said also to be taking powder from the DuPont Powder Co., also dynamite…

The Baldwin Locomotive Works shipped on the steamer Indradeo twenty-five locomotives to Vladivostoc.

Automobiles are shipped on every steamer leaving Vancouver for Vladivostok, and the Case Automobile Co. is specially to be mentioned here… Signed Papen

The financial control of the intelligence operation rested with Heinrich Albert’s office around the corner in the Hamburg-America building on 45 Broadway. Any sum over $10,000 had to be approved by Albert. The German agent and creator of the fire bombs that destroyed American factories and Allied ships, Walter Scheele, told investigators in March 1918, “In all matters of policy, it is stated that Dr. Albert ranked Bernstorff, Von Papen [sic] and Boy-Ed by many points. They all had to go to him. There was no plot or scheme which was unknown to him. As a result, literally nothing of import went on without Albert’s approval or at least his knowledge.”

Four weeks after Albert received the first funds to start the sabotage campaign, on March 17th, von Papen reported in code to his superiors in Germany, “Regrettably steamer [SS La] Touraine has arrived unharmed with ammunition and 335 machine guns.” Von Papen was being facetious. She had indeed sailed on February 27th from New York to Le Havre, France, and caught on fire five hundred miles off the coast of Ireland on March 6th. The New York Times reported the next day, “only the barest facts of the disaster on the Touraine are known, and there is no hint of the cause of the fire on board the vessel… A message from Queenstown said that the fire on the Touraine was ‘fierce.’” The fire had broken out in two separate cargo areas. French authorities immediately suspected foul play. After a thorough investigation authorities identified a suspect who, as it turned out, had not caused the fire. Either way, von Papen’s superiors now had evidence that the sabotage campaign they had ordered was in full swing. If it had been Scheele’s work, the bomb maker had scored a first, documented success. Of the eighty-four passengers nobody was hurt. However, the cargo was ruined. The Touraine was the first casualty of what would become a staggering crisis for the U.S.: Over fifty freighters damaged or destroyed, three U.S. warships destroyed in dry dock, sky rocketing insurance premiums, billions of dollars in losses from factory fires, labor strikes across the rust belt, and hundreds of casualties not the least 128 American passengers on the Lusitania. Except for the Lusitania sinking, Heinrich Albert financed every aspect of the sabotage campaign that year.

Orders to blow up the Tampico Oil Wells 100 Years Ago

German war planners kept a close watch on the southern border of the U.S. Since German activities in the United States took on a distinctly more violent character in 1915, Mexico presented both a military target and a distinct opportunity to create more troubles for the United States. The military target was the oil-producing region around Tampico. Most of the wells belonged to British and U.S. interests and, to a large degree, fueled the sizeable British fleet in Atlantic waters. The Admiralty also ordered the Secret War Council to disrupt the oil production there upon getting the authorization to commence sabotage against U.S. munitions production.

Franz von Papen, German Military Attache in the United States in 1915

The newly appointed German minister to Mexico, Heinrich von Eckardt, had supported the viewpoint of German businessman Eugen Motz in early January 1915, that “the Tampico oil fields could and actually should be almost completely in German hands…” The German envoy seemed to endorse a more peaceful approach to keeping Mexican oil from the British fleet, namely financing a clandestine takeover by German capital, and interrupting supplies through strikes. However, war planners in Berlin, who probably realized that there was no chance of acquiring the Mexican oil wells in a short period of time, ordered them dynamited instead. Von Eckardt had arrived in Mexico City from Havana in the beginning of February. He left the Mexican capital to meet with “representatives” of the naval and military attachés, Franz von Papen and Karl Boy-Ed, in Galveston and New Orleans on February 22nd and 24th 1915 respectively.

The sabotage campaign against the Mexican oil wells in Tampico was at issue. One of the identities of the mysterious “representatives” seems to have been Military Attaché Franz von Papen’s designated sabotage agent for Mexico, Carlos von Petersdorff. Von Papen had promised the German General Staff “to create the greatest possible damage through extensive sabotage of tanks and pipelines.” Added von Papen, “given the current situation in Mexico, I am expecting large successes from relatively little resources.” Sommerfeld likely represented the other, in charge of Karl Boy-Ed’s interests. If von Eckardt took the opportunity to meet with Villa while at the Mexican-American border, Felix Sommerfeld would have accompanied him to the general’s headquarters. However, the German envoy did not file a report about meeting Villa, which favors the conclusion that the encounter never took place.

German records indicate that von Eckardt and the German “middlemen” who represented attachés von Papen and Boy-Ed met to finalize the sabotage plans against Tampico. However, the German Admiralty instructed Captain Boy-Ed to call off the action on March 11th in a nebulous communication that read: “Significant military damage to England through closing of Mexican oil resources not possible. Thus no money for such action available.” Apparently, the German Admiralty was expecting the Standard Oil Company, which had strong financial ties to the Mexican Petroleum Company, “to show itself favorable” to the German Government. As a result, no noteworthy acts of sabotage occurred in Tampico during 1915-1916, perhaps due to Standard Oil’s intentions, or perhaps due to miscalculation by the German Admiralty. The next German attack on Tampico almost came to fruition in 1917.

 Read more in Felix A. Sommerfeld and the Mexican Front in the Great War…