Horst Goltz - My Adventures as a German Secret Service Agent

You will remember how, at that time, the magnitude of the German plot against the neutrality of the United States became finally apparent. You will remember how, in connection with my exposure, came the exposure of von Igel, of Rintelen, of the German Consul-General at San Francisco, Bopp, and many others. With all these men I was familiar. In the activities of some of them I was implicated. It was I, as I have said, who planned the details of the Welland Canal plot. I shall tell the true story of these activities later.

But first let me tell the story of how I came to be concerned in these plots and to do that I must go back over many years; I must tell how I first became a member of the Kaiser's Secret Diplomatic Force (to give it a name) and incidentally I shall describe for the first time the real workings of that force.

I have been in and out of the Kaiser's web for ten years. I have served him faithfully in many capacities and in many places all over Europe, in Mexico, even in the United States. I served the German Government as long as I believed it to be representing the interests of my countrymen. But from the moment that I became convinced that the men who made up the" Government the Hohenzollerns, the Junkers and the bureaucrats were anxious merely to preserve their own power, even at the expense of .Germany itself, my attitude towards them changed. That is why I write this book and why I shall tell what I know of the aims and ambitions of these men enemies of Germany as well as of the rest of the world.

I was not a spy; nor was I a secret service agent. I was, rather, a secret diplomatic agent. Let me add that there is a nice distinction between the three. A secret diplomatic agent is a man who directs spies, who studies their reports, who pieces together various bits of information, and who, when he has the fabric complete, personally makes his report to the highest authority or carries that particular plan to its desired conclusion. His work and his status are of various sorts. Unlike the spy, he is a user, not a getter, of information. He is a freelance, responsible only to the Foreign Office; a plotter; an unofficial intermediaiy in many negotiations; and frequently he differs from an accredited diplomatic representative only in that his activities and his office are essentially secret. Obviously men of this type must be highly trained and trustworthy; and their constant association with men of authority makes it necessary that they, themselves, should be men of breeding and education. But above all, they must possess the courage that shrinks at no danger, and a devotion, a patriotism that know no scruples.

This, then, was the calling into which I found myself plunged, while still a boy, by one of the strangest chances that ever befell me, whose life has been full of strange happenings.

As I recall my adolescence I realise that I was a normal boy, vigorous,^wilful, fond of sport, of horses, dogs and guns, and I know that but for the chance I speak of, I should have grown up in the traditions of our family Cadet School the University later a lieutenancy in the German Army and to-day, perhaps, death "somewhere in France."

And yet, in that boyhood that I am recalling, I can remember that there were other interests which were far greater than the games that I loved, as did all lads of my age. Mental adventure, the matching of wits against wits for stakes of reputation and fortune, always exercised an uncanny fascination over my mind. That delight in intrigue was shown by the books I read as a boy. In the library of my father's house there were many novels, books of poems, of biography, travel, philosophy and history; but I passed them by unread. His few volumes of Court gossip and so-called "secret history "I seized with avidity. I used to bear off the memoirs of Marechal Richelieu, the Cardinal's nephew, and read them in my room when the rest of the household was asleep.

I recall, too, that there was another tendency already developed in me. I see it in my dealings with other boys of that day. It was the impulse to make other people my instruments, not by direct command or appeal, but by leading them to do, apparently for themselves, what I needed of them.

Such was I, when my aunt, who had cared for me since the death of my parents some years before, fell ill and later died. I was disconsolate for a time and wandered about through the halls and chambers of the house, seeking amusement. And it was thus that one day I came upon an old chest in the room that had been hers. I remembered that chest. There were letters in it letters that had been written to her by friends made in the old days when she was at Court. Often she had read me passages from them bits of gossip about this or that personage whom she had once known occasionally, even, mention of the Kaiser.

Doubtless, too, I thought, there were passages which she had not seen fit to read to me: some more intimate bits of gossip about those brilliant men and women in Berlin whom I then knew only as names. With the eager curiosity of a boy I sought the key, and in a moment had unlocked the chest.

There they lay, those neat, faded bundles, slightly yellow, addressed in a variety of hands. Idly I selected a packet and glanced over the envelopes it contained, lingering, in anticipation of the revelations that might be in them. I must have read a dozen letters before my eye fell upon the envelope that so completely changed my life.

It lay in a corner of the chest, as if hidden from too curious eyes a yellow square of paper, distinguished from its fellows by the quality of the stationery alone, and by its appearance of greater age. But I knew, before I had read fifty words of it, that I was holding in my hands a document that was more explosive than dynamite!

For this letter, written to my aunt years before, by one of the most exalted personages in all Germany, contained statements which, had they been made by anyone else, would have been treason to utter.

Those of you whose memories go back tc the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, will readily recall the notorious ill-feeling that existed between Wilhelm II. and his mother, Victoria, the Dowager Empress Friedrich. Stories have so often been told of this enmity, culminating in the virtual banishment from Berlin of the Queen Mother, that I need not do more than mention them. But what is not so generally known is the small esteem in which Victoria was held by the entire German people. During the twenty years of her married life as the wife of the then Crown Prince Friedrich, she was treated by Berlin Society with the most thinly veiled hostility. Even Bismarck made no attempt to conceal his dislike for her, and accused her to quote his own words of having "poisoned the fountain of Hohenzollern blood at its source."

Victoria, for her part, although she seems to have had no animosity towards the German people, certainly possessed little love for her eldest son, and did her best to delay his accession to the Imperial throne as long as she could. When in 1888 Wilhelm I. was dying, she tried her utmost to secure the succession to her husband, who was then lying dangerously ill at San Remo. "Cancer," the physicians pronounced the trouble, and even the great German specialist, Bergmann, agreed with their diagnosis. There is a law that prevents anyone with an incurable disease, such as cancer, from ascending the Prussian throne; but Victoria knew too well the attitude of her son, Wilhelm, towards herself, not to wish to do everything in her power to prevent him from becoming Emperor so long as she could. In her extremity she appealed to her mother, Queen Victoria of England, who sent Sir Morell Mackenzie, the great English surgeon, to San Remo to report on Friedrich's condition.

Mackenzie opposed Bergmann and said the disease was not cancer; and the physicians inserted a silver tube in the patient's throat, and in due course he became Emperor Friedrich III.