Page:The web (1919).djvu/103

 There were German spies in our chemical works, metal industries, textile concerns, and in every line of our commerce. They had a fund, mentioned at different times in the Overman Committee testimony, which was somewhere between thirty millions and sixty millions of dollars—all of it to be used in propaganda, subsidizing, subornation and destruction.

There were three or four German firms in America which had much to do with the German declaration of war. They were instrumental in piling up the gigantic quantities of American metals, to prepare that country for its onslaught in 1914. There were great stocks of copper accumulated in America to be sold to Germany after the close of the war. The actual ownership of these things was so very carefully concealed by a masquerading interchangeable personnel that it required months of investigation to get at the real facts and to discover that the real owner was Germany itself. In taking over these metal businesses, Alien Property Custodian Palmer broke the German control of the metal industry of America. It has been intended to wipe out these industries so completely that they cannot get a start again.

The New York Times of November 3, 1918, printed a quarter-page story in regard to some of these revelations which should be made not only a part of the record of the Senate Committee but of the records of America itself:

When on April 6, 1917, America declared war on Germany, there was in New York as American representative of the Deutsche Bank of Berlin, a German by the name of Hugo Schmidt. As the world now knows, it was the Deutsche Bank which financed the von Bernstorff-Bolo Pacha plot to debauch France, which formulated a scheme to corner the wool market of the world, a plot the object of which was to gain control of the after-the-war trade in South America, and which, through its agents in this country and South America, was keeping tab on the political situation in this hemisphere for the Foreign Office in Berlin. How these plots and numerous others were planned and how they were to be carried out, was disclosed in a great mass of documents which will go down in history as the "Hugo Schmidt Papers."

Despite the fact that he was one of the first of the Kaiser's subjects to be arrested after this country entered the war, and