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I have been unable to discover how far Rintelen was actually guilty of the offences imputed to him; but I can only observe that he, and, in so far as he acted under orders, his superiors, gravely compromised the position of the German official representatives in the United States, and afforded our enemies an excellent opportunity of inflaming public opinion against Germany.
Rintelen, who was a banker by profession, and during the war held a commission as Captain-Lieutenant in the Imperial Naval Reserve, appeared in America in April, 1915, and presented himself to me during one of my periodical visits to New York.
I now propose, in conclusion, to deal with the illegal activities attributed by American opinion to the secret agents controlled by the German military authorities, and sent by them to the United States. As regards the machinations of Franz Rintelen, my first information about him reached me in the late autumn of 1915, and even now I have to rely for most of the details on the American papers.
Bielaski's unconfirmed evidence as being reliable, the total number of individuals convicted on these charges in the American Courts of Justice amounts only to sixty-seven, of whom apparently only sixteen were German nationals; and their offences fall under the following heads: the case of the Hamburg-Amerika Line and the five cases of falsification of passports already mentioned: the so-called Indian plot: one case of successful and three of attempted sabotage in Canada: and finally the cases numbered ten to fourteen and twenty-four in Bielaski's list of the illegal acts planned by the agents Rintelen, Fay and Sternberg.
I was told by a friend in the Foreign Office that the notorious von Rintelen was sent to America to buy up the entire product of the Dupont powder factories, and that he exceeded his authority if he did anything else. In December, on the night of the day of the peace interpellation in the Reichstag a call was issued by placards for a meeting on the Unter den Linden.
It is not known whether this undertaking brought Rintelen and his assistants within the reach of the Sherman Act against conspiracies inciting industrial disorders, or whether he had, in addition, made efforts to bring about strikes in munition works.
Von Rintelen's manifold activities as chronicled acquired a tinge of romance and not a little of fiction, but the revelations concerning him were deemed sufficiently serious by Germany to produce a repudiation of him by the German embassy on direct instructions from Berlin, i. e.: "The German Government entirely disavows Franz Rintelen, and especially wished to say that it issued no instructions of any kind which could have led him to violate American laws."
After America's entry into the war, Rintelen and his accomplices were sentenced on this count to fairly lengthy terms of imprisonment, and these sentences they are serving at the present moment in the Federal prison at Atlanta.
Lansing, the Secretary of State, however, informed me that, as a matter of fact, Rintelen, while in England, had confessed himself to be an emissary of the German Government. I then heard from Captain Boy-Ed that Rintelen, by representing himself as empowered to purchase large stocks of raw material for Germany in the United States, had obtained a considerable advance from the Embassy's funds.
During the spring of 1916 a German agent, von Igel, who occupied the former offices of von Papen, was arrested, and the activities of Franz von Rintelen, who had placed incendiary bombs on vessels leaving New York with food and supplies for the Allies, were published.
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