Page:The web (1919).djvu/95

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this money to purchase the Paris Journal. This paper, however, did not change its loyalty to France, so there was a loud wail on the part of Germany's head spies that they had been swindled once more.

Mr. Becker produced many British secret service documents showing the elaborate governmental arrangements in Berlin to establish and maintain spy systems, both before and after the war. These documents listed, as agents, journalists, college professors, bankers, business men, consular attaches, and others of all ranks. Mr. Becker showed that a former German reservist, later an auditor of accounts in New York City, was told as early as 1909 that he would be valuable in case of war as a German propagandist in the United States. It was intended to get a good system of distribution of German "kultur" established in America. Then there could at once be put before American readers such stories as that systematic attempt made in 1917 to advance the idea that Germany was on the verge of revolt and that the Kaiser soon would be overthrown. The German censor was back of the dissemination of these reports, it being maintained to paralyze the prosecution of the war in this country, where we had the pleasant theory that the German Kaiser and the German people were not at one as to the war.

Mr. Becker also went into many transactions of Ambassador von Bernstorff, showing him to have been quite willing to buy the Paris Journal with German money if need be. He placed in the record correspondence which showed that when Dr. Dernburg left Germany for the United States in August, 1914, the German government deposited 25,000,000 marks with M. M. Warburg & Company of Hamburg, which Mr. Becker stated was for propaganda purposes in the United States. Dr. Dernburg brought to this country a power of attorney from the Imperial Secretary of the Treasury, which gave him the distribution of the fund. Of this fund, $400,000 was turned over to Dr. Albert, head of German finances in New York, by Dr. Dernburg.

Mr. Becker gave a long list of banks which had participated in the sale of German bonds in this country, these banks being located in the principal cities of the east and