Page:The web (1919).djvu/92

 Secretary of War Baker had commanded Captain Lester of Military Intelligence to make public some of the secrets of this division which heretofore had been reposing in the silence of the tomb. Captain Lester testified to the confession of a former German officer, who admitted having been sent here as a propagandist. This man told the federal officials that in June, before the Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated, the German government was plotting the war. Captain Lester quoted this man as saying that in the middle of June, 1914, Bethmann-Holweg sent out inquiries to various scientists, professors and other intellectual persons to learn whether they were ready for foreign service in the event of war. There were one hundred and thirty of these who were told to be ready for instant call to service in North and South America, Japan and China, as directors of propaganda. They met in the Foreign Office in Berlin, July 10, 1914, and three weeks later sailed from Copenhagen for New York under charge of Dr. Heinrich F. Albert. In order not to arouse suspicion, most of them traveled steerage.

Captain Lester, after a long day of testimony, referred to the "Golden Book"—a book in which German-Americans wrote their names after they had contributed to a German War Relief fund. This book was to have been presented to the Kaiserin. The purpose of this book, in the belief of Captain Lester, was to get certain prominent German-Americans signed up as loyal to the fatherland, without letting them know they were doing it.

Captain Lester, in later testimony before the Overman Committee, said that of the one hundred and thirty trained and educated German propagandists sent out nearly a month before the war started, thirty-one landed in the United States two weeks after hostilities had started in Europe. They became the starting point of an organization comprising between 200,000 and 300,000 volunteers, in large part German-Americans, who were secret spies in this country and who reported regularly to German consuls and agents in widely scattered centers of the German spy system in the United States.

It may cause a certain horror and revulsion in the hearts