 Okay. I'm glad you all came because it's hard to talk to an empty room. It's good to see you here and because this is a nice size class. I don't mean it's a class actually. It's a nice group. But I used to teach a class about this size as a graduate studies class. And they're easy to work with because everybody can take part. And that's what I like to do when I lecture. I'm not lecturing today. I'm talking today. And I would like you to, if you have a question that I go along, please ask me. So hold your hand up so I know it's you that wants to have something to say. And we'll go with that. I find that these things move more easily and people learn more and have more enjoyment if they actually get to take part and get their questions answered at the time instead of having to wait to the end of the class and then, you know, it kind of falls apart. So anyway, if you have a question and have no qualms about saying, hey, hey, hey, me. I want to talk. Okay. Okay, now I have this map on the wall here for a reason that this is where I start. If I don't have this to start from, I can't talk. Okay. What reason this is here is I want to illustrate to you what the nature of the British blockade was. A lot of people know it was a blockade, but they don't understand how it was a blockade. And the British blockade in World War I was absolutely airtight. The only thing that got through the blockade was U-boats, but nothing else got through that blockade. Now, someone was going to say, well, wait a minute. I know that they did early in the war. Yes, you're right. Early in the war, in the first three or four months of the war, they ran some supply ships out of the, out of this north about area up here. They got, yes, they did that. Once these lines represent the 10th Cruiser Squadron patrol lines, once the 10th Cruiser Squadron was fully deployed and reinforced, expanded, they closed that door permanently. That door was slammed shut tight. Down here, see, this thing is not working the way I want it to do. See, the magic, boom, it's gone. Okay, down here at the Dover Straits, they sealed off the English Channel. And that was a piece of cake, because it's not very wide. And so they were able to, you know, without a, they had a lot of ships down there, but they netted it against U-boats, which really didn't work. But as far as surface traffic was concerned, the English Channel was like a closet door. They just closed it, locked it. The only thing that got through going in was what they wanted going in. And the only thing that came out was what they didn't want coming out, which were U-boats. Anyway, the problem with the blockade that the Germans had was two points. The first was that with the blockade, in effect, and them unable to receive anything, supplies of any kind, it meant they couldn't get the war materials that they had to have for their industry, particularly Krupp. Germany imported, I'll give you an idea of what they were up against, Germany imported all of its heavy industrial raw materials. The only thing they had in abundance was sufficient to handle German industrial needs was coal. Beyond that, they didn't have anything. They had to get it. They got ore out of Sweden. They got most of their stuff from us. They got some other, they got, come on, help me here, they got nickel out of Canada. That was before the war, but when the war started, that all closed down. They didn't have any more. As far as their food supplies were concerned, Germany did and does import 33% of its food supplies. Its agriculture, even in its peak operation or production, can't supply Germany with enough food to feed the population. So they import 33% of their food supplies. And in those days, all of that stuff came across the North Sea, and some of it went through the English Channel, but most of it went north around down through the North Sea and down here to where the three big German commercial ports are, Bremen, Bremerhaven and Hamburg. When the British launched the blockade on the 4th of August 1914, overnight Germany lost the use of 74% of her commercial fleet. They were tied up in either neutral ports as in turn, or they'd been seized by the British. What was left, what was left, could only carry on trade, coastal trade along here, and they could carry trade across the Baltic. But the Baltic trade could only supply Germany with 25% of whatever it needed. So you look at the numbers, and from the time the war started in Germany, they were in trouble. And here's another thing. Before the war started, the Germans made no preparations for having any food reserves at all. On the day the war started, they had zero food reserves. They had only enough industrial material to supply Krupp for six months. By November 1914, the German artillery in the field had absolutely no remaining reserve munition supplies. And they had a four-day supply on the western front. And the only way they could resupply was by immediate production. So it all had to come right from the factory, right to the front. That's why earlier in the war there was not a lot of artillery for the Germans. They had very little artillery. Well, now having gone through that part, the dull part, the Germans had two problems facing them. One was that the British and the French were receiving all the supplies they needed from the United States. They got raw materials, they got munitions, they got airplanes, they got guns. They got everything they needed from us. And the supply line from the United States to England was one that the Germans couldn't interdict. Not at that time, not early in the war especially. In the first place, they didn't have enough U-boats. In the second place, the U-boats they had didn't have the horsepower, the range to go out there and actually attack these lone freighters and tankers and things that were coming across the country. Effectively, they couldn't effectively interrupt the supply, the flow of supplies. And on the other hand, the Germans couldn't partake of this bounty of supplies that was available to the United States. So the problems were how are we going to interrupt that flow of supplies to the Allies and how are we going to get our own sources of supplies running again so that we can go ahead and carry on the war. There were two intelligence units that were given the task of solving those twin problems or related problems. One was a German Army Intelligence Unit known as the Geheimdienst. Geheimdienst had two subsections, Abteilung-Dai-B and one called Section Politik, which means political section. Section Politik was charged exclusively with sabotage in foreign countries and more directly sabotage in the United States. I'm going to give you this in two halves because the story is in two halves. They're parallel and they're related and they're caused by the same problem, and not connected in a sense of a cooperative sense. They didn't work together. So the first half, the one that was launched in March, 1915, was a sabotage operation. They sent an officer to New York. His name was Franz von Rintlen. He was a naval officer, Kapitann Leutnant, which in those days were the full lieutenant in the U.S. Navy. He was given about $5 million in credits in New York banks. He had about a half a million dollars to cash with him. His job was to spread that money around and organize three sabotage cells, one in New York, one in Baltimore, and one in New Orleans. His contact man in Baltimore was Paul G. L. Hilken, an American citizen who had been born in Baltimore, raised in Baltimore. His father was a German immigrant. He and his dad owned a Schumacher company, which was a tobacco import company. Paul was also the American representative in Baltimore for Deutsche Lloyd, which is the North German Lloyd does, in DL to them. He was representing for them. He was also the Swedish Vice Council in Baltimore. The reason that he was Swedish Vice Council is because Sweden was very sympathetic to Germany, so was Paul. Being the Swedish Vice Council in Baltimore gave Paul the opportunity to use the diplomatic mail to transmit and send information back to Germany that he wanted him to know about. Paul had been a member of the Navy's Intelligence Unit, which is a big Navy unit. It's called the Nakhvishn Dienst, Marina Nakhvishn Dienst. But the unit he was involved in was called the Atopin Dienst. Atopin in German means supply. The Atopin Dienst charge at the time was to resupply, provide resupply for all German surface raiders operating away from areas like in the Caribbean, the east coast of South America. Wherever they were, they were to resupply them with coal, food, spare parts, water, anything they needed to operate their ships at sea. The Atopin Dienst did this through cells known as Etapa. They had Etapa cells all over the world and in every major port in our country, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charlotte, North Carolina, the New Orleans. In my city, San Francisco, they were very active, too. But they want to make this clear to you. The Atopin Dienst and its cells did not get involved in espionage nor did they get involved in sabotage. They were strictly a clandestine supply operation. Admittedly, the way they were supplying these ships at sea would attract the attention of the federal authorities in this country, which it did. And so they had to be very careful that they weren't exposed and they could work quite... Etapa and Dienst cell members were almost all American citizens. All of them were involved in the shipping industry in some way so that they would be useful in being able to put goods ashore into boats or ships that could go to sea and resupply these German ships. So on one hand, you've got the Navy, the Atopin Dienst, operating this clandestine supply route and operation out of the United States. And on the other hand, you've got Section Politique who has now sent their first saboteur or organizer to the United States. The two prongs, if you want to look at it, that began operations... Sabotage in March 1915 and the submarine side of the thing, the supply side of the thing, began actually in America in February 1915. So here we go. When von Rindland came to the United States, he organized these three cells, New York, Baltimore and New Orleans, and they all went to work. And he had a fellow in New York and Dr. Shealy, who was a German citizen. Dr. Shealy ran a dummy corporation out of New Jersey that was called the American Agricultural Company and he was able to acquire, because he was in the agricultural and chemical fertilizer business, he could get all the chemicals that he needed. The job was to make the bombs that these three sabotage cells were going to plant in ships and factories and silos and trains, anywhere they could to blow up munitions before they were delivered to the Allies. The original bomb that they made started out as a lead sheet, thin lead sheet, and it was the interned sailors and ships in New York Harbor made the casings out of this lead for these bombs. Usually guys worked in the engine room, they wouldn't be bothered. And they would roll these things up, put a little disc about the size of a half dollar in there, and then they would send the finished disc, the sealed disc, the sealed roll and the disc. That went to Shealy's plant. And Shealy's people put the explosives in it. They stuff that would make this thing go off. Acid in one end, and I'm not a chemist, I can't tell you what, but some kind of potassium is at the other end that would ignite and produce an enormously hot flame. And they would cap it with wax. The problem with these things is that once you put them together, they're ready to go off. And the problem is, you don't know when they're going to go off. It depended on how quickly the acid got through the little copper plate in the center. Because once it got through through, it was bye-bye baby. So anyway, the way it worked in New York is they worked out of American Humborn lines. Everybody else, they hired stevedores, paid them a certain amount of money, told them to take these things out of the ships that you're working on, particularly those that carry munitions of grains and cotton, and put them where they'll do the most where they'll start the biggest hottest fire, and hopefully, either blow the ship or make it burn so much that it'll sink when a lot happened to it. And they did. It didn't all, they got about 50 ships that way. In Baltimore, he gave Paul Hilken the same pitch. And Hilken organized a work crew and he had his straw man, his right-hand man, was a guy named Friedrich Hinch. Hinch had been a captain, an NDL captain whose ship, the Neckar, was interned in Baltimore. He was also a German Naval Reserve officer, like all of those guys were. So anyway, he said, sure, he'd be happy to take part in this program. And the way it worked is that Rintlen had left Hilken about a half a million dollars to work with. And it was cash in the bank. And Hilken was to take that money and he was to pay people to do the things he needed done. So they hired stevedores off the run. Actually, all that ended up being African-Americans. And they hired all these guys off of the front. There were three of them. Eddie, in that camera, his last name, Eddie was the straw boss. And Eddie had two fellows that worked for him and the way it worked, Hilken gave Freddie the money. He said, okay, here are all of these things I want you to hand out and get distributed appropriately. When you're done with that, here's the money to pay these guys with. You get paid out of it, and then you're hitting those guys. So Freddie got to decide how much these guys were going to make. So I don't know if you've ever seen the Three Stooges routine where he's dividing the dollars. One dollar for you, one dollar for me, two for you, one, two for me, three for you, one, two, three for me. That's the way Freddie did it. So Freddie did this throughout the war. I'll tell you right now before we go any further. The Baltimore sabotage cell was the most effective, the most efficient, the most active German operated sabotage cell in America and it was never caught, never uncovered, they never got a smell of it. It wasn't until 1928 that all of this stuff came out. Anywho, so he's handing out all this money to these guys. They're happy as clams that I water because they don't have jobs, but go ahead. How did it come out, just out of curiosity? I love it. In 1928, the United States, through the mixed claims commission, was suing physically, literally suing Germany for the damage done to Black Tom, which the Baltimore is now dead, and the plan in New Jersey, the Kingsland Munitions assembly plant in Kingsland, New Jersey, which they did, right? And they kept losing. The Americans kept losing their case at all the hearings because the Germans simply denied it. They didn't do it. Prove it. And so then, I love these things. I see this one like questions. The guy, Peasley was the lawyer, was handling the case for Lehigh Valley Railroad. And he knew Rodney King. And he got hold of him and Rodney said, sure, did you guys know that the Germans, the British had broken all the German codes in the first six weeks of World War I? Did you know that? It's the same as the enigma. I mean, in terms of scope and application and result, it's the same as the enigma revelations in World War II. They had all, by the sixth week of the war, the British were reading all German naval mail as it came out. That's how they got the Zimmerman Telegram deciphered, you know, before the guy in Mexico really knew about it. Anyway, King had in his files there when the war ended for something, he got to keep them all. He didn't have any more. He said, have you ever heard of this guy or anything about it? He said, oh, yeah. I've got all the stuff right here. I'm going hunting, but you can have my house for a week and read, copy whatever you want. Take it. So the guy goes through all these intercepts, these radio intercepts that were between Section Politiken and the dummy corporation that the Navy had in their people back to Baltimore. And of course what he's interested in is the sabotage side. Anyways, he starts reading to Paul G. L. Hilken. Whoa! So he goes out to Hilken's house in Baltimore where he lived in Rowland Heights. And he goes, I'm the door open, hi. I'm Paul Peasley. I'm a lawyer. Oh, I'm in trouble. And he said to the guy, I'd like to talk to you a little bit about this Baltimore sabotage cell you were running. And he said, I don't want to talk about that. He said, obviously that would cause me a lot of grief since it would make me a traitor. Peasley said, there's no doubt that you're a traitor. I mean, that's not a question. I'll tell you what I'll do. I will get you immunity to prosecution, but I need you to testify what you did. And he said, can you guarantee that? There'll be no prosecution? Absolutely. Come in and be my friend. And so he turned it all. He had it all. Had it all. Anyway, when he went, when Hilken began to testify, and everything he said is in that transcript, which is, I can tell you, I've seen it, I haven't. It is huge of these hearings, these mixed claims commission hearings. And he just laid it all out. Date and time, people who worked for him, where they did it, who was doing what. For a guy like I, you know, who wanted to write about this thing, that was the mother load. I could, I'd already written a book about the, ooh, Deutschland, the something we were going to talk about here a little bit. I'd already written a book about that 20 years earlier. I never knew this guy existed, other than the fact that he was, you know, part of the company. You know? So I read to this guy, where have I been? This is another book. And I did. I did. I did. Anyway, so that, does that answer your question? That's how he found out. You know, I, I do, I got on a Paul Hilken before I ever got into this other stuff. Did you know the FBI records your own file on the, on, on line? Yeah. It was known as the B of I before it became the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It's called the B of I. And it's all, I went, I know I'm not the poor guys, but there's a lot like the Keystone cops. And, and he, so I was looking for something else. I was interested in something entirely different. And I, I was putting the name Paul Hilken, I don't know why I did it there, but I did it. I put in the name Paul Hilken, boom, 1200 pages, all about Paul Hilken. So I bought the whole file and sat down with it for a long time. And then that's when I, and then when I heard about this, I said, oh man, this is too good to be true. And I'd died going to heaven. I didn't even have to leave my house. You know, it was all right there. It was giving a hand into me anyway. So that's how it all came about. But, so Hilken was out there and around it. People knew about him. They just couldn't put two and two together. And if I have time, I'll tell you why they did that either. Well, we can stop and go to that right now. Anyway, so they had these sabotage cells working and Baltimore is obviously very active and they're out there doing their thing. Oh, they were also spreading anthrax from New York to Savannah. They spread anthrax and glanders up and down the coast from March of 1915. No, it was actually April and May when they first started. April and May 1915 until we declared war in April 1917. And they were very effective with that stuff. It killed so many remounts and dreo animals that the British really got concerned. I mean, they would ask their American counterparts and say, look guys, obviously something's going on here. You got any vets in your country that look after these animals or anything? They're dying before they get here and those that get here are sick. And we ought to do something about this. But we didn't know. We didn't. You know why? Because espionage was not a crime in this country. The feds didn't investigate it. It was investigated at the state and local level. And they never got down that far. I mean, nobody went to the state police and said, hey, well, the British are complaining like kids with a sore toe that their horses aren't getting through to them healthy. You know anything about that? No. I'm just a vet. They've got to come to me. I don't see anything there. It just never got out. It was just the system the way it was. It just never got out. But they did the anthrax. They burned down silos like they were going on style. They did train cars. They did strikes. They did a lot of stuff. Nobody ever got on them. However, in New York, in New York where they were doing the same thing and they were more active doing ships than they were anything else, they went into work in March 1915. And they all got arrested in April 1915, the entire group in New York. New York bomb squad got them. The headline news was there was a bunch of German saboteurs which they were have been caught by the New York police. Paul Hilken didn't face him a bit. He figured there's no way they're going to come to me because nobody knows me. And he was right. The guys in New Orleans go, ooh, bad news. They were under then. They just shut down. So New York PD was responsible for getting rid of the New York Sabotage Cell and the New Orleans Cell at the same time because they just shut down. They all went home. They were not doing this. Don't do this. They let Paul Hilken. Paul Hilken became the paymaster for all saboteurage operations, German saboteurage operations on the East Coast. He also funded all the operations in Argentina, which was exclusive to the anthrax and glanders. He funded all the operations in Mexico, which were two for one to attack the oil fields at Tempico and the other was to organize some kind of gunboat operation on the Pacific Coast to attack shipping. It would be coming out at that time. I think it was, they were using the Suez Canal Panama Canal by then. So he funded that and he funded the espionage operation in Japan. All the money that was given to him by the Germans in these New York banks and in his bank. He was never held accountable for any of that money. It's not accounted for. The only thing that I know that he had was what he testified to to the mixed claims commission about his own operations. But he never did say what happened to the rest of the money that was left. How did he recruit? He didn't have to recruit. I think that's a good question too. He really didn't have to. He knew who he was. He was a successful, well-known businessman in Baltimore. Frederick Hinch, who was an NDL captain, was in a way his subordinate just to begin with simply because Hilken represented NDL administration in Baltimore and he actually had access to all the manpower he wanted off of those ships. And he did for the submarine side of the thing. He drew crews off of those ships for all kinds of work in his dummy company, the Eastern forwarding company. But as far as sabotage was going, he just went right down to the waterfront and got a little ready and brought him back and told him what he wanted to do and said, there's plenty of money for him and more where that came from. They were off and running. His crew was really small. He got two other people. The other guy that was assigned to him I'm going to digress her a little bit. There were three other people assigned to him as things went on. One of them was Dr. Anton Dilger, an American citizen trained at Johns Hopkins University as a surgeon who had joined the German army as an officer surgeon when the war was declared. He had been in Germany for some time then. Served with them. Somehow, and I've never worked out how, he got interested in anthrax and glanders. Section Politique grabbed him and said, listen, you've got all the credentials we need. You're an American citizen. You have a passport. You can legitimately go home through the blockade. No one will touch you. Will you do me a big favor? We've got this suitcase here. Now, don't open it because it's really deadly. And we want you to take this and set up a lab somewhere where you're going to go. And the guy said, well, I live in a Chevy Chase. Well, that's a good place. Set up a lab in Chevy Chase. Manufacture this stuff. And then, here's the name of the guy to contact. Paul Hylken. You go down to Baltimore, which isn't very far away. You go down to Baltimore and you talk to Paul Hylken. And he'll help you out. He'll give you how you can get this stuff spread around. Okay. So he came home through the blockade reported to Paul Hylken. He says, oh, I'm really glad to see you. How much money do you need? The guy said, well, I need $10,000 to buy a house and build a lab. And right now, it's about it. Well, here you are. 10 grand. Fresh money. Go at it. So he did. So they built this lab up in Chevy Chase. And that's where they manufactured the anthrax. The other guy he got was a guy named Fred Hermann, who was an American citizen, a 22-year-old kid, and was visiting his mother, grandmother in Germany when the war started. No big problem for him. He was an American citizen at a passport. He had to come home. He got contacted right away by a member of the German Naval Intelligence asking if he'd like to have a really adventurous life. And he said, sure. What the heck? And we paid really well. And they did. He said, we want you to go to England and notably Scotland. We want you to hang around where they park all those big ships and let us know from time to time what they're doing, who's there, who's not there, who's coming, who's going, you know, that kind of thing. He said, he's okay, I'll do it. So he went up there and posed as a student at Glasgow University. And he was doing really well when things got on to him and he had to leave the country. He didn't go back to Germany. He went home because they'd given him a lot of money too. So he went home with the money and got home and ran out of money and got bored. So he thought, well, I'll go back and try it again because that's what was an easy way to make money. So he went back through the blockade, not a problem, not an American citizen. I'm going to Glasgow and I'm going to go somewhere right through the blockade. Got back to Germany and as he passed through Sweden, the naval attaché in Sweden got a hold of him and said, would you like to go to work for a different intelligence agency? He said, sure. What do they pay? He said, well, they pay a lot more than the Navy does. He says, here's the name. Here's the address. It's Mölkastrasse 8 in Berlin. He said, you go there and that's called Section Politi. You talk to those people and they'll tell you what they want you to do. So he went to them. No problem went out there. They indoctrinated him, told him what he was going to do, how he was going to work, told him how to read and write secret code and gave him a suitcase full of explosives and little anthrax too. And he brought it back to Baltimore. He gave it to Paul Hilken and said, I'm also here to work for you. And he said, fine, I'll give you, you put you with Hinch. You guys make a list of the factories that we want to destroy and then you divide the list between you and then take it from there. That's how it's going. The third guy you got, he got the third guy late in the program. In October 1960, a German army lieutenant, a guy named Wilhelm Wirst. Okay, Wirst. Wirst in German is Sausage. And so he's Willy Sausage. Mother didn't like him. Anyway, he's Wilhelm Wirst. Wirst. And he comes over here with the required secret bag of anthrax and Glanders and new explosive devices that are made of glass and fit inside a number two pencil. Much more efficient, much easier to hide. Again, pass through security and all kinds of things. And his job, he's supposed to be Hilken's assistant. But Wirst doesn't want to do that. He only has $50,000 in cash in his black suitcase. But he has a million dollars in credits at a bank in New York. He also has a third cousin whose name was Anna Something, who was a dancer and a real knockout. And so he thought he'd go up there and he would just live in New York with his third cousin. Kind of see the lights and have a good time. Because this thing was all going to blow over after a while and then he'd go home. So he told Hilken, I've got another assignment in New York and Hilken never questioned about it. So then he stopped at his mother's, at his sister's house. His sister lived down in Baltimore and he shows up at his sister's house with his suitcase and his black bag. And he sits down with her and he tells her, he said, I'm a German spy. I've been trained in espionage. I can write code. I can read code. I even have a hollow heel where I keep secret messages and things. And look, I've got $50,000 in my briefcase. And I've got a lot of stuff in there that's really bad stuff. It goes boom and other stuff. It's really ugly stuff. But that's what I do. And she was really impressed. I mean, really impressed. And he told me, he said, I gotta leave. He left that night and he got on a train to go. And the next morning at coffee because his sister always had coffee with her landlady in the morning. And she tells the landlady about her really exciting and interesting brother that just came and got him. He was a spy. He had a hollow heel in his shoe. He had a bag full of money and a box full of explosives and lots of secret things he had to do. And the other woman just stirred her and called, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And when she gave her husband a phone, she said, Frank, you know what that woman, our attendant told me? She said that her brother and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Turns out that Frank was the United States attorney for Baltimore. Now, first should have been the spy who couldn't keep a secret, all right? Anyway, the FBI didn't exist. It was the BMI and they didn't do spies and saboteurs. They were told about him. The Baltimore office run by a man named Billups Harris. Billups Harris. I love that name. He heard all about him and they all agreed, you know what, this is amazing. We have a real, live, honest-to-gosh, card-carrying, living, warm German spy right here in our town. Yup, we sure do. Well, you think you ought to go out and look him up? No, I think I'll report it to Washington first to see what they want to do. Well, by the time he's reported to Washington, worse was long gone. He was up in New York doing his other thing. Anyway, when we declared, when we broke diplomatic relations with Germany, first he said it was time for him to go home. Things are not going to turn out well for him. So he got, I don't know how he did it, but anyway, he got himself hooked up with the German diplomatic group that was leaving and he went out with them. And so when he got back to Berlin, oh, before he left, by the way, he did stop at the bank and take out all one million dollars. All right? Plus, while he'd been there, he'd been scamming money off of Hylken at about $1,000 a week. His $50,000, I don't think he ever touched it, but he still had it. So he went home with quite a bit of cash. A lot more money than a 28-year-old guy ought to have in, say, in 1917 in Germany. A lot of money then, a whole lot of money. Go ahead. All this emphasis on anthrax, was that designed for, as you said, horses or for population? No, no, horses. Their whole function, they were there to kill the remounts. That was their job. They were going to the supply line. I don't realize how much World War I ran on horses. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It was a horse-drawn army. All of them were. We had trucks and things, but we used to use a lot of horses. Hey, we had cavalry still. And officers rode. Horses were really necessary. All the armies. They had cavalry in 1936, a full division of Kansas. Yeah. They only had six tanks. Yeah. I was a tank commander in eight years. I had an old first sergeant who had come out of the horse cavalry and in armor. He used to tell me, he said, I've driven every track the army has in the case it came in. And he was still wearing Jodper's and Spurs. Anyway, yes. They were around, yeah. Was anthrax that easy to make? Oh, yeah. It was real easy. It's been around for years. And the cultures were made for them in Germany. And they expanded them here. And then Dillgaard was a doctor. He was a medical doctor. He still knew about this, but trained in this stuff. It was a big lab. They manufactured that stuff. Is it as lethal to humans as... I don't know. I don't know. I know that it killed a lot of horses and mules, and that's what they were trying to do. I'll tell you how they... They had these syringes that were made for them. They were glass, made needle-in full of stuff. It was liquid form. And they would walk along the crowd, wherever they... They were... These holding pins were close to the waterfront. They even got on the farm zone. They just go down the pin-side, jab the animals in the shoulder or the thigh or the hip. And then they went by kaboom, kaboom, kaboom, and try to knock you out as many as they could. Then of course, when one animal got it, then the other animals got it. They threw the stuff in their food when they could. It was pretty effective. But I tried to find out how many we really lost, because I know it was really a problem for the British. But there was one estimate that said that of all the remounts that were sent to England before we went to war, about half of them were killed. Died-in, routed, died-in. These were remounts, but basically they were thrown. They were basically stray horses, stray animals, yeah. But they were always carried as remounts. That was how... Remounts, remounts, right now. So does that answer your question? Then again? The... Where was I? What was I talking about? Well, rain in California. We don't have any. There's some ground out there. Got any. We'll take it with me. Anyway, the... I've got to get back on track here for a second. Well, I was telling you about Verst, yeah. I was telling you about Verst, yeah. He gets back to Germany, and he goes out to Mokastrasse-Ach where he was eight, where he was... where they governed him, where they ran him, you know? And he goes... And they let him in. And the guy goes, what are you doing here? He goes, well, I'm back. They broke diplomatic relations, and then I came back. He goes, I don't care. They broke diplomatic relations. You're supposed to be in the United States. That's what he's supposed to be working. Well, it seemed to me like we're not going to get to work there much longer. It was time for me to get out, and then I'm back. And they fired him, which really broke his heart. Anyway, when they fired him, he was now out of the Army. So he went home with a million dollars and change, right? Which he used to live on until 1928. And to get this. And this is where the Hylken thing comes together at the question in the back earlier. He got hold of Hylken. I don't know how he did it, but probably by letter because they could exchange letters there. And told him that he was out of money and he needed a little financial assistance. And he was perfectly willing... Now that Hylken was a criminal, he was a traitor that maybe first said I might want to talk to some people in Washington about you. And that got worse to think... What's his name? Hylken, I'm thinking. So that when Peasley contacted him, he was very happy to roll over. It all came together. But anyway, first, like all young guys with a lot of money and no brains, they spent it all. Had a good time doing it. Anyway. Now let's talk about this U-boat on the other side for a while. Because the other sabotage cell goes on. Sabotage in the United States ended on the declaration of war here. And those guys all went to Mexico. All except Hylken. He stayed here. Okay. The idea was now to get a supply line built that would carry cargo from the United States back to Germany and from Germany to the United States. The Americans needed antelan dyes because our dye industry, our fabric coloring industry over here was in deep trouble. They depended entirely on German dyes. They tried to make synthetic replacements. They did. They were okay, but they weren't very good. So they really wanted those antelan dyes. And Krupp had over a thousand tons of nickel here. Plus they wanted rubber and they wanted cotton and all. The first boat out of the barrel. And she came across the Atlantic. It actually took her 26 days. She went into Baltimore and the crew was really well received because Baltimore was a big German colony there. And one of the purposes of this thing was positive propaganda. And they got it. It was really quite an accomplishment. It doesn't do much for us today, I guess. But they think, wow, a submarine all the way across. And the idea that this thing could come across and go back with its own fuel load had another propaganda aspect to it was. It was sort of a veil threat in the United States is that we can do it. And the war can come to your doorstep. We can do it. And this boat demonstrated that. And that veil threat did not go unnoticed. Anyway. So they're here in Baltimore. And they were wind and dying. They're giving all kinds of neat gifts and things and made over and all. And there was this big deal about when they were going to go back to sea with this full load of stuff they had with them. Copper, nickel, tungsten, oil, lots of rubber and cotton. And the boat was only 214 feet long, 30 feet wide and 37 feet from the rim of the conning tower of the bottom of the keel. And the pressure hull, you all know how they're built. I'll tell you anyway. The pressure hull is inside the boat like this. And then the casing is built around that. The pressure hull is just a cigar. Flat tube, long tube capped off of the ends. And then they've got a boat for them built around. Looks like a real boat. Inside this casing it was so much room deliberately made that they could store all the cargo inside there that could stand immersion in salt water. And the tank deck on the boat if you went down through one of the hatches and you stood on the tank deck, now you're inside the casing of the pressure hull right next to you. The tank deck, these are the fuel tanks water tank, ballast tanks, you stand on that I could have stood underneath that. No problem. So the access to this as a whole there, it was really pretty simple. They just had to be really careful what they stowed way out because that's where the exhaust ports came out and they did get in trouble. One of them put some rubber back there and they got the stinkin' pretty bad for the most part that was right. Then they had two big holes inside where they put the dry cargo that couldn't stand immersion and they had a forward section of the boat that was with the hold afterwards and these little passageways that went through and into the control room and then in the conning tower that went up and the back was another big hole and the engine room was clear at the back of all of that. The boat had been built on the cheap. The diesel engines that it used for propulsion were not propulsion engines. They were generators. They were made to create lights on larger ships and to run some machinery and things like that. They were 400 horsepower diesel stationary diesel engines. They had to be modified to drive this submarine. They worked okay as long as they only had to drive a submarine that was in commercial work. Once they converted that boat and all the others like it to a war boat, those engines were really bad. They broke down. They failed all the time. A lot of problems with it. The design of the boat because it was the aspect ratio between its length and its width was there's almost as much width in the sense as it was linked. It was a big aspect ratio. They would only make on a good day in smooth water they would only make 10 knots on the surface that's going flat out. That was as a cargo boat. As a war boat 9, 9 and a half knots was about the best they could do. That meant that as a war boat on the surface this submarine couldn't even chase a tramp freighter that was trying to get away from it. Most tramps went 10 knots. So all he had to do was just fire it up all the way and he'd fall behind. The other problem they had was when they would get into these extended chases all boats without exception one or both diesels would quit. And then they'd find themselves half a drift on a one engine speed or totally a drift on no engine speed. So the boats didn't work out as war boats. But as cargo boats they worked out quite well. They were slow divers, took them 5 minutes to get completely under on a good day and heavy weather they probably could not get clear under very fast. Kearney tried it up when he went around the Orkneys on his trip out. He tried to dive in very heavy weather. He thought he was about to run into it. He thought it was a cruiser coming his way and he wanted to get under and he had to find a force and what he did is he he was flooded forward and forward bow planes were down. The bow wouldn't go down it would bounce when it would keep going up. So finally his chief engineer who was actually the diving officer and the man in charge his chief engineer ordered the boat to go back to diesel engines and go all ahead. What he was going to do is drive her forward and hydro dynamically and bow down. Then he was going to shut down the diesels and flood the stern tanks kick in the electric motors and get her down. What happened is that he got the bow to go down but the problem is the bow went down boom 45 degrees and that's a lot and people in the inside started doing the tumble routine and the stuff started coming off and falling down and the big problem was the props were by that point because the bow was down it's like a teeter time right here in the center the props were up in the air the only thing that's taking that boat down now is just the weight in her bow and whatever momentum she has at 110 feet boom she hit bottom and she was lucky for them because they didn't ever come back and they built a base of their little shelf and they knew in several hundred fathoms of water all around it and they hit that one but they hit it so hard and it wasn't rocky that they buried the bow in the mud and stuff that was down there so now they're sticking out of the water like an arrow with its feathers flashing around up in the sky and as the waves break over the stern and it would go up and down like this and the propellers would throw a sprain here up too you know if there's really a cruiser or destroyer up there the spray he's throwing up even though it's night time is going to be visible forever we've got to get that stern under water that was Cleese's job so he said he shut the motors down that was first smart move number one and then he started trying to flood aft, well he couldn't flood aft because he was sticking up out of the water the keekstone bowels were out of the water too so he said okay what are we going to have to do is we're going to have to physically shift ballast aft and that looks great in these old war movies where the U-Boots ran their guys forward you know they really did that everybody was running for it, it was not working they made human ballast in the bowel everybody would run aft everybody would run here, everybody would go here those cruises were 36 people maybe 50 people sometimes the Joyce only had 28 people aboard three of them were officers, 25 guys a third of them on station all the time I don't know, maybe one of them got left over 9 or 10 guys to run for but they had these poor guys running aft so then they tried to carry extra weight aft and finally they were able to get the bowel they get the stern down just enough that they would get some water up and they were able to get their propellers under water now Cleese decides we'll start we'll go a stern we're working back and forth the problem was that they were still so near the surface the boat was doing this she was going this way and what that does, can you imagine the stress that put on the bowel that was buried in the mud these guys were sweating bricks worried about what have we opened the bowel we're in deep deep we're already in deep pebble my buddy anyway, so they keep working on it and he worked on it and after six and a half hours he finally got that boat free they get the no leaks no leaks so then they brought her back up again looked all around nothing was there and then they took off again that was the big I'll tell you why that happened the crew was well trained those guys were all out of War U boats, they all had lots of experience the three officers aboard were merchant officers they got a three week submarine commander's training program oh yeah, oh yeah, that's what I thought too and their job was to command this boat that's why Henry Cleese who was a chief engineer was really the most important guy on the boat he was the only one that really knew how to run one really knew what he was talking about and they relied on the guy heavily for it but that was probably the problem when the Bremen went to sea in September under the same circumstances same kind of boat everything the same when she went to sea she just disappeared and I think she's probably up there in the Orkneys about where where Kearney was but I think she didn't hit the shallow plot I think she took the deep dive and went all the way that's what I think anyway they ran this U boat line the submarine cargo line for two trips with one boat in the meantime the German Navy had decided that clearly this war was not going to end the way we wanted to we've been doing to get through the blockade isn't working the only solution for us is unrestricted submarine warfare and to do that we're going to need every war boat we can lay our hands on and that means that all these are now seven of these things left these seven remaining cargo boats who have this enormous range are going to be converted to big gun cruisers they call them ooh cruiser, undersea cruisers be converted to big cruisers and we're going to send them out far out into the Atlantic clear over to the North American coast and we will interdict their traffic as much as we can at long range with these guys and they were designed they were not designed they were actually equipped and set up at that time to stay at sea for a hundred days and so in a hundred days they thought they could do a lot of damage and that was the concept they lost two of those boats during the war the others were all surrendered after the war along with the Deutschland the Deutschland after the war was turned over to the British they looked over like everybody else looked over what they got out of the war and they decided there's really nothing interesting here for us it's just scrap the guy named Horatio Bottomley who was a politician and a crook that's not self-constitutional no that's not an oxymoron you know he's a politician and a crook he's a politician and a crook he bought the boat from the British for about 300 pounds I don't know what that was about $800 or something like that and he was going to turn it into a show boat he was going to drag it around the coast of the British islands and show it off and people would pay 10 pence to go aboard and look around but before he did that David Contra said you have to disarm this thing ok your expense so he took the guns off it and he took the torpedo tubes out of it and he took all the other stuff out of it but he overlooked an oxygen helium tank a helium tank that had been left in the boat so they towed this thing all around England from 1918 to 1920 and it was predictably in real time on a real ledger it was a flop a failure on bottom of the ledger on bottom of the ledger it was not only a flop it was a huge loss of money he used it as a tax break or whatever else he did with it anyway this thing lay in sort of in a receiving status until 1922 when the Navy ordered it just totally destroyed and they sent it to a ship breakers to be broken up and she was in the yard of the ship breakers they were using apprentices who were all teenagers they were 16, 17 years old or 7 of them they were working on a Saturday and they were working in the engine room cutting the stuff out of the engine room and they had this helium bottle that was in there and up to that time all the other gas bottles that they found they just opened the valves on them and didn't smell anything it was safe they left it there the engine room was where the apprentices weren't really doing their apprentice thing maybe it was they were playing cards having a beer and just generally kicking back and taking life easy and they did this by candlelight because it was dark in there and there was no electricity and somebody somewhere along the line opened the valve on this helium can and it blew up and it blew the boat up and it obviously killed all the kids and terrible thing but it turned the boat to scrap real fast that's the wrecking job that company ever did the scrap and all the metal and the oddball metals was turned into souvenirs which today are huge collectors items I have a collection of this stuff prices going up like crazy you can't even find it they went an iron cross Baltimore made an iron cross a ballast scrap about 2 inches square weighs about a pound I bought one a long time ago for $35 for 450 bucks a piece now on eBay oh man I'm in the wrong business at the wrong time anyway so in the end in the end these two parallel operations by two separate German intelligence agencies failed to do what they were supposed to do in the end the war came anyway they were disbanded the section bulletique was smart enough to burn every record they had in 1918 and of course the German Navy records were kept and luckily I found a guy Fritz Lohmann who was the great grandson of Alfred Lohmann who was the front man for the dummy company in Germany and Alfred before he died had all the records and he gave them to his nephew Fritz and so Fritz gave them to me so I got all the DOR business records for the time that I was doing this dummy business thing really interesting they ran it like a real business but the money came from the Deutsche Bank actually the money came from the German National Treasury to the Deutsche Bank where it was essentially laundered then it was taken over to DOR where it was again laundered and paid back to various government accounts that actually were building the boats and the men on the cruise and paid the troops so on paper if you ever it looks like it was a real honest, private, owned civilian company because the money is coming out of Deutsche Bank the money is going to DOR which is a subsidiary of Norddeutsche Loid the crewmen are all NDL employees here are their records and all that and when the war is over the money all goes back to Deutsche Bank Bingo but I also have the Navy records and they have the other side of the coin which is really interesting hey guys that's about it for me hey thank you you got a question my dear what are you doing basically what was the risk reward considerations done by the German government and was this whole thing run through the entire system so that the diplomatic ramifications were considered or was this strictly a Navy operation in Vegas okay you're talking about what was the view of the German government about America's involvement in the war well no I was thinking more the impact of the the results of the sabotage program offset the effect possible effect on American public okay okay and who in the German government actually was and did that consideration okay basically the civilian German government was opposed to anything they would bring the United States into the war that was Bethmann-Holwe alright the military side of the government who really ran the war they didn't care what you did their feeling was let the United States come into the war by the time they get over here we all won the war it was hubris is what it was but as early as as a winner of 1915-16 there there were a number of German officers general great officers who were pretty well convinced they were going to lose the war they just materially they couldn't carry out the war it was a material war that blockade there was a great book called starvation politics and that was truly people did starve later on they tried to play it down but a lot of Germans died in the winter of 1718 and out that blockade lasted into 1919 war was over and they were still blockaded and people did die it was real hard on the old people real hard on the little kids okay but we're still staying with your question for a minute there was always a concern that the Americans would come into the war they were already at war with the British they were already at war with the French nothing to do about that they were really afraid of the Americans coming to the war on one hand the big issue was the Americans had all the financial they needed to fight a war and all the materials they needed to feed a war plus they had a lot of people and they could draw a pretty good sized army the big thing the Germans were thinking about is that how are they going to get them that's a lot of people being across the ocean and they said oh we'll just to our pedo it'll be a turkey sheet well it wasn't and we did and we ended up there was something over a million people fresh young well equipped healthy that time the French word no record of mutiny and it did tip the scale but when these two operations started it was a conscious effort to not make them public in any way it's hard to keep blowing up a factory out of the public you know it gets in the press and people read it it's all really problematic but they didn't want any connection come back to the German government and this is pure hubris you have a good point there you ask about the diplomatic corps the diplomatic corps was part and parcel of both operations alright on this I'm going to this is on a side entirely as an example of what we're talking about the Atopin deans one of their war time jobs was to run escape routes they ran a route out of Siberia through China across the Pacific across the United States across the Atlantic down through the Nordic states and back to Germany I have a book under consideration now it's about Eric Killinger the first German officer to use that route and the only one to get back to Germany by that route the other routes that they ran were through Russia and back down and along the way the German consulates and embassies would provide these escapees with the necessary identification money, food safe houses, people they could contact as long as they were able because they couldn't be informed in a hostile country but in China they could and in parts of Eastern Europe they could so yes the diplomatic corps took part here in the United States in my city in San Francisco the German consulate in San Francisco was the consulate that held the money and acted as the paymaster for the saboteurs that operated in our area San Francisco, Oregon up to Washington so yes the diplomats were definitely involved and typically if they had somewhere a military attaché as they did in Washington he was the guy that ran that operation if not it was whoever diplomat in the office was federal duty you bet they were all involved in it and they did the same thing on the other side when the U-Boat when the Deutschland was here the diplomats scurried around and did everything and their big policy, their big problem was the British wanted that boat in turn the British argument was hey whoa that's not a freighter that's a U-Boat a rose by a call by any other name is a rose any other name in a U-Boat is a U-Boat it doesn't have guns it may not have guns it's still a U-Boat U-Boats are war boats you can't use a U-Boat for anything else what are you going to do with it well it's a cargo boat not a cargo boat doesn't care 800 times doesn't count well the Americans were in a bit of a pinch they didn't want to be they were getting beat about the head and shoulders for being unneutral in fact so they were going to show some neutrality and so they sanctioned the boat and it could stay and that's what the German diplomatic order they worked really hard to see that that boat was recognized as a commercial freighter and had all the rights and privileges of a commercial freighter doing commercial business in this neutral port does that answer your question I guess how the Germans put this in with their sort of broader outlook on how they would limit the war they didn't want to limit the war they wanted to limit the war in the sense that they didn't want America to come and do it yeah yeah I'll tell you I know you all ready to go I got a hang of this but once they capture you you can't get away I've maintained for years that Germany lost the war in the first six weeks and that's when they didn't attack the British channel traffic that was transporting the British Expeditionary Force to France that would have been a turkey shoot down there there was no anti-submarine capability at all none except ramming if they could do that or shooting the thing with a gun if they could do that but there was no I know all about the English channel I know about its currents I know about its shifting shoals all of that's there to remind people those U-boat skippers and their crews they weren't there on a pleasure cruise they had and they did it because from 1915 on U-boat after U-boat went down through the English channel and they had problems but they got through it could be done I maintained by not doing it in the first six weeks of the war they let the British get a tow hold in France and they stayed there but if they had sunk those ships and killed all those guys the British Labor Party who was opposed to the war anyway they probably would have put a lot of pressure on the government to bring that war to an end or make it a negotiated peace early in the process which is what the Germans really wanted they thought the Germans had fought three wars of unifications and won them all within six or seven weeks and that was their model for war they saw World War I when they got into it it was about a six week maybe maybe four months maybe by Christmas at the most it'll be a negotiated peace and when it didn't happen they didn't have anything to fall back on they had no reserves nothing coming in they were stuck the same thing happened in World War II the same thing happened in World War II in the beginning of World War I when we had I believe the Navy confiscated sixteen German ships oh yeah they did Fattelat was one of them and it carried a lot of American troops to Europe were those diesel-powered ships or were they steam? no they were all steam those were coal-fired ships coal-fired we didn't start getting oil-fired well the oil-fired came in World War I because the four stackers were oil-fired the new class of oil-fired but commercial ships were steam-fired coal-fired and then oil-fired steam after that but World War I that was a coal war when I first went to sea I had a chief engineer who had been on a German submarine and he was on the submarine in St. Lucentania oh for ever see the U-10 or U-20 that would be I'd like to have talked to a guy like that kind of death trap understatement of the year anything else from you guys? when you first mentioned the New York South sending stuff down the bathrobes you meant the two things the stuff that killed all the horses anthrax Glanders Glanders is a similar attacks horses and cattle in the lungs attacks their lungs it's as deadly as anthrax probably meaner but so they used them both thank you very much thank you