Publication of the Papen papers

The British chronology of the war records under 15 January 1916 that the papers of Captain Franz von Papen, until recently the German military attaché in Washington, had been published in the United States. The British had taken the papers from him on 2 and 3 January at Falmouth in Cornwall, where the Dutch ship on which he was returning to Germany had put in. In mid-January their contents reached the newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic; the British press was writing about them by 15 January at the latest. The British government presented a full selection of the documents to Parliament only in February 1916, as the white paper “Miscellaneous No. 6 (1916)”, with an analysis of Papen’s cheques and photographs of some of them.

The search at Falmouth

Papen had to leave the United States because in December 1915 Washington had demanded his recall, and Berlin had finally agreed. Britain and France gave him a safe conduct for the journey via the Netherlands, but on condition that he carried no documents for his government. Papen sailed from New York just before Christmas. At Falmouth British officials searched his luggage. The safe conduct protected the attaché’s person, but not his papers. Among them were found official letters from before and during the war, correspondence with Berlin, letters from Germans in America that Papen was carrying to their families, and above all his chequebooks with their counterfoils. Papen, as authors of books on German intelligence in America later wrote, carefully noted on them whom he had paid and for what.

What the cheque stubs contained

The British analysed Papen’s cheques written between 1 September 1914 and 21 December 1915 and identified those which in their view linked him to German plots. One cheque, of 18 January 1915, was for 700 dollars to Horn. Werner Horn, a former lieutenant of the German Landwehr, had tried on 2 February 1915 to blow up the railway bridge at Vanceboro on the border between the state of Maine and Canadian New Brunswick. Many cheques were made out to Paul Koenig of the New York agency of the HAPAG shipping company, and on two of them “secret service” was written outright. Koenig had been arrested in December 1915 on a charge of conspiring to destroy the locks of the Welland Canal, the waterway between Lakes Erie and Ontario. Other cheques went to “Bridgeman Taylor”, that is, the adventurer Horst von der Goltz, who later admitted to taking part in this plot, and to Hans Tauscher, the representative of the Krupp works in America. On one of the cheques for Tauscher “picric acid”, an explosive, was noted.

The British commentary also drew attention to 100 dollars for Küpferle, probably the same German spy who had taken his own life in a British prison, and to money for the German consulate in Seattle in May 1915, a few weeks before a dynamite explosion in the port there. The statement of payments into Papen’s account showed that some of the money for his “War Intelligence Office” had been passed on by the ambassador himself, Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff, or by the embassy. The documents also showed that until his last days in New York Papen had been dealing with munitions orders at the American works of the Bridgeport Projectile Company, which was linked to German money.

Letters from America

Public opinion was also stirred by private letters. A German publicist in New York, George von Skal, wrote to his sisters that since the beginning of the war he had worked with the attaché in the intelligence office, and called the recall of the two officers an unbelievable act of baseness, demanded only so that the English could do as they pleased in America. He added that Papen had already received the Iron Cross but was ashamed to wear it because he had not yet been under fire. Another New York German bade Papen farewell in a letter advising him to console himself for the “extraordinarily idiotic hostility of the Yankees” with the old proverb: the more enemies, the more honour. In the summer of 1915 Americans had already read Papen’s own letter to his wife about the “idiotic Yankees”, seized by the British together with the mail of the journalist James Archibald. Now similar words went round the press again.

The publication changed little in the situation of Papen himself, who was already in Germany, but it gave American investigators new leads. In the spring of 1916 Tauscher was arrested, and a federal grand jury indicted Papen for taking part in the plot against the Welland Canal. The charge hung over him until 1932, when he became Chancellor of Germany. The British, for their part, gained a strong argument in the contest for American public opinion: proof that German diplomats in a neutral country had financed people accused of attacks.