The German Spy System from Within. Anonymous

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СКАЧАТЬ factory on the ground acquired; but, long before the present war was declared, Krupp constructed the platforms on which siege-guns could be mounted to command Maubeuge, and totally neutralised the value of the fortifications as well as turning out locomotives.

      Here is evidence, if evidence were necessary, of Germany’s deliberate intent to make war in its own good time; not merely to defend German frontiers, but to attack and reduce a neighbouring State by the use of methods which any nation save this one would regard as too dishonourable for use. Since the system of espionage has reached to such lengths as this, it will be seen that the stories of spies and their work, in which the public delights, are built up out of the doings of comparatively innocent agents, who are credited with dangerous tendencies and many melodramatic and impossible actions. That minor plans and persons do exist is certain, but for the most part the spying of which the public hears is merely incidental to the great whole—a whole composed for the most part of far different elements from the clerks, hotel-waiters, and other minor incidentals on which the imagination is fed, in order that the reality may more easily escape detection.

      There are in existence many books purporting to tell the actual work of spies and to expose the system under which these spies work, but it may be said at the outset that no full exposure of the spy system of Germany has ever been made. Stieber, in his Memoirs, told exactly what it suited him to tell, but he did not give away any essential secrets of organisation, nor has any other writer done this, up to the present. All that we have in the way of real evidence consists in things as well attested by fact and result as the incident of Maubeuge and the gun-platforms, related above; in selections from the Memoirs of spies of those portions which bear in themselves evidence of truth, and in reports of police-court proceedings in England and France. From these sources we can piece together a fairly accurate conception of the whole business of the spy; but, as regards books purporting to detail the experience of spies, or the character of the organisation under which they work, we must accept these experiences and the rest with all possible reserve, remembering that, the more melodramatic and the more plausible they may be, the more they should be questioned as regards accuracy.

      Moreover, there is sufficient evidence to show that the system is so extensive, and that its ramifications are so far-reaching, that no one book could contain all details of the various kinds of work entailed on the German spy system. It is possible only, in a book dealing with the system, to indicate the main lines on which spies in connection with military and naval matters work, and to give some concrete examples of their failures and successes. Naturally, there is far more material available as regards failures, for the work of the successful spy is of such a nature that it rarely comes to light; it is more often unheard of until, as in the case of the gun-platforms constructed in time of peace about Maubeuge, the work itself is put to use.

Chapter Two.

       Table of Contents

      Stieber.

      Those who label Stieber as “von” in speaking of him are about on a level with any who would choose to confer on Crippen, of unlamented memory, the title of baronet, for the two pretensions are about equal, so far as right to them is concerned. Karl Stieber was born at Mersebourg, a town of Saxony in Prussia, in the year 1818. His parents were people of the middle class, good and inconspicuous Prussians who destined their son for the profession of the law, in which he qualified as a barrister, but in which he achieved no distinction. It was not until 1847, when he was nearly thirty years of age, that Stieber first came to notice. In that year he obtained employment in the factory of Schoeffel Brothers in Silesia, where the Socialistic movement that has gained so great a hold on modern Germany was even then beginning.

      Stieber, seeming to throw in his lot with the workmen, was in reality waiting to see which way the cat would jump before he compromised himself beyond withdrawal from either side. In the meantime, he won the heart of a daughter of one of the directors of the firm, and displayed his abilities in the matter of espionage by compromising the other director—his future wife’s uncle—in the Socialistic movement to such an extent that the unfortunate man was accused of plotting against the Government and inciting the workmen to revolt. By his denunciation of Schoeffel, who was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment for acts which Stieber himself had committed, Stieber procured employ in the police service, entering the ranks of the revolutionary workmen ostensibly as one of the warmest adherents of the popular movement, but in reality its worst and most insidious enemy.

      In this guise he succeeded, in the course of popular and excited demonstrations in Berlin, in attracting the attention of Frederick William, the then King of Prussia. The year 1848 was a time of revolutionary movements, and Stieber chose the right side. When, in 1850, the Prussian Government began the measures of repression which have been continued in the case of the Socialist element down to the present day, Frederick William appointed Stieber to the post of Polizierath, a position in which he was superior to and beyond control of the Commissioner of Police.

      This was the inauguration of the system which Stieber perfected. Hitherto, military espionage had been in the hands of the military themselves, and, with their customary reverence for precedent, the military were inclined to resent this appointment of an outsider to the control of what had been especially their department. Further, the regular police viewed Stieber with disfavour—it was not to their liking that an informer such as he should be set over them, and able to work independently of their control. It speaks much for Stieber’s genius for organisation that he combated both these influences successfully, and established himself—with the aid of royal patronage and protection, of course—at the head of a special organisation which was quite independent of either military or police control.

      Up to 1853 the system grew—in his Memoirs Stieber tells, with a conceit quite in keeping with his other qualities, how he worked on the confidence of his sovereign with minute reports concerning the doings of court personages. He seems, in fact, to have taken pleasure in the recital of his meannesses, which his perverted moral sense caused him to see as exploits worthy of pride. It was as if, having nothing of moment on which to exercise his cunning, he kept himself in practice on anything or anybody that might be at hand. Thus until, in 1854, he was charged with the work of extending into neighbouring countries the system he had already perfected in Prussia. The cost of the business was charged against “service of the interior,” and, in addition to the sum expended on internal espionage, a sum of 12,250 pounds was set aside for the campaign which prepared the way for the wars in which Prussia rose to the standing of a first-class European Power.

      Through the severity of his measures in Prussia itself, Stieber caused such a popular outcry that he was relieved of his post as chief of police, but Bismarck, then coming to power, employed his hound in equally useful work outside the bounds of the kingdom by sending him through Bohemia, where, by establishing spies all along the route that the army would have to traverse later, Stieber laid the foundations for the campaign that was to end so disastrously for Austria at Sadowa. By 1866, when the Prussian campaign against Austria opened, Stieber had Bohemia so thoroughly planted with spies that every step of the Austrian forces was known to their opponents before it was taken, every village had its informer ready for the Prussian troops when they entered, and, though the system of mapping out posts of defence and military positions had not then reached to the perfection it has since attained, it may be said that the campaign against Austria was half won by Stieber before it was entered on by the Prussian army. These things have so far passed into history that they have become general knowledge; but how Stieber enlisted and placed his spies—the actual routine and full secret of the work—he is careful not to tell. It may be assumed that, among other qualities, he possessed the power of reading his fellows; he was a genius in psychology, and knew his spy when he saw one. Hence his success, for which he was made chief of the “active service police,” a force never recognised in this way up to his time, and a post created practically by his own ability in his special СКАЧАТЬ