The Bernstorff affair

On 21 September 1917 the American Secretary of State Robert Lansing published, without a word of comment, a short cable that the former German ambassador in Washington, Count Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff, had sent to the Foreign Office in Berlin on 22 January 1917. “I request authority to pay out up to $50,000 in order, as on former occasions, to influence Congress through the organisation you know of, which can perhaps prevent war. I am beginning in the meantime to act accordingly,” Bernstorff wrote. He added that in the circumstances an official German declaration in favour of Ireland would be highly desirable, as it would win Germany the support of the influential Irish in America. Lansing did not reveal where he had obtained the text. He noted only that the cable had not gone through the State Department, which suggested that the Germans had sent it through the mission of some neutral country.

Congress in uproar

The cable dated from the day on which President Woodrow Wilson called in the Senate for “peace without victory”, and from the last weeks before the breaking off of relations. Soon afterwards Lansing added that Bernstorff already knew at that time of the unrestricted submarine warfare Berlin was planning, because no later than 19 January he had forwarded to Mexico the Zimmermann telegram, which mentioned its resumption on 1 February. According to the State Department, then, the money was meant to soften the inevitable American outrage.

The publication caused a storm among senators and congressmen. Congressman James Thomas Heflin of Alabama declared in the House of Representatives that he could name thirteen or fourteen members of Congress who had behaved suspiciously. William Howard of Georgia claimed he could point to men who had received some of the money. Three days later, on 24 September, the House had its stormiest sitting in years. Amid catcalls and jeers from the floor, Heflin again and again evaded giving names, and two resolutions calling on him to prove his charges were sent to the Rules Committee. When it turned out that his suspicions were groundless, the uproar died down. The press quickly concluded that Congress could not be bought for $50,000, and that Bernstorff had rather intended to pay for a campaign of letters, telegrams and petitions to congressmen.

American newspapers recalled what the “former occasions” might have been. In 1915 an organisation called Labor’s National Peace Council had operated on German money, and from November of that year the American Embargo Conference, which bombarded Congress with demands for an arms embargo against the Allies and for restrictions on Americans’ right to travel on British ships. As early as February 1916 the Providence Journal had written that it had been created by Bernstorff and financed by the office of the German financial agent in New York, Heinrich Albert. Bernstorff himself was by then far away: after leaving America he had become ambassador in Constantinople.

The Luxburg cables

The Washington revelation was the second within a couple of weeks. On 8 September Lansing had made public three cables that the German chargé d’affaires in Buenos Aires, Count Karl von Luxburg, had sent to Berlin in May and July. They had been transmitted by the Swedish legation as its own cipher telegrams to the foreign ministry in Stockholm. Luxburg advised that small Argentine ships sailing to France should either be spared or sunk “spurlos versenkt”, that is, without trace. This was read as advice to sink them together with their crews, so that no one could bear witness. He called the acting Argentine foreign minister a “notorious ass and Anglophile”. On 13 September the State Department added a letter of 1916 from the German minister in Mexico proposing that the Swedish chargé d’affaires Folke Cronholm be decorated for passing on German cables.

Riots broke out in Argentina. Crowds burned a German club and the offices of German newspapers in Buenos Aires and were dispersed only by the army. On 12 September Luxburg was handed his passports, and on 19 September the Senate voted 23 to 1 for breaking off relations with Germany. President Hipólito Yrigoyen hesitated and demanded explanations from Berlin. On the day the Bernstorff cable was published, the German Foreign Secretary Richard von Kühlmann assured the Argentine minister that Germany firmly disowned Luxburg’s ideas, which had been his private opinion. Although a few days later the Chamber of Deputies also voted for a break, Yrigoyen maintained neutrality.

The two affairs, published two weeks apart, strengthened the image of German diplomacy in America and in Latin America as a nest of intrigue. The State Department had not yet said its last word. In October it disclosed further cables from 1916 linking Bernstorff’s embassy to sabotage plans in the United States and Canada.