resourcefulness of the master criminal minds of the world. As showing the thoroughness with which Germany works, one of the accused stated that when he came out of Germany to confer with his associates, the German censors destroyed all his papers, examined all his clothing, and stripped him and washed him with a solution of alcohol to eradicate any message which he might have painted on his skin! They were not above a suspicion on their own part. The Alien Property Custodian took over, as a result of these investigations, the Becker Steel Company, whose plant was located at Charleston, W. Va. The details of this case are extremely voluminous.
The passport frauds have long been "old stuff" in the American journals, and need be no more than referred to here. At the time German reservists were needed in the Old Country (there were more than a thousand very useful officers here who were much needed in the German army), the question of passports came up. These men could not get U. S. passports, so a general system of forged passports was set on foot in which the highest diplomatic officials of Germany in America did not scorn to take a hand. It was their idea of honorable service, one supposes. Certainly, von Bernstorff—whom we kept in this country long after he should have been kicked out—employed a go-between who arranged and carried on a very considerable traffic in foreign passports. The ordinary price was about twenty dollars,—small business, truly, for an ambassador, but von Bernstorff, von Papen, von Weddell, von Igel and others worked together in this thing until the Department of Justice men got too hot upon their trail. A long and intricate story hangs upon this. It is enough to say that the frauds were unearthed and the lower and middle class operatives in the frauds were put away. Von Weddell, the most important of these conspirators, took ship for Norway. However, the ship on which he sailed was sunk by a German U-boat,—tragic justice in at least one instance.
Another of the well known German enterprises against England and her Indian empire was brought to light in the so-called Hindu Plot—also very well known through newspaper publication. It came to a focus in a trial in
