Hellfire Boys

by Theo Emery

  Born in Cologne, Scheele came from a prominent Rhineland family. Though Fritz Haber had become infamous as Germany’s godfather of gas warfare, Scheele’s bloodline also had strong ties to German chemical warfare. He claimed to be related to the great eighteenth-century Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele, who was famous for having discovered the existence of oxygen and many other elements. Carl Scheele had also discovered chlorine gas and prussic acid—or hydrogen cyanide—both of which the German army would later adopt as war gases. Naturally, Walter Scheele studied chemistry when he attended the University of Bonn, then enlisted in the army. He reached the rank of lieutenant in an artillery regiment before he was ordered to go to the United States and report to the German military attaché. Promoted to major, the unassuming druggist became one of the top-ranking—if undercover—German staff officers in America.

  An accomplice accompanied Scheele to the United States: Hugo Schweitzer, the chief chemist of the Bayer Chemical Company. Their job was to report back to the German military attaché in Washington with intelligence about chemical manufacturing, ammunition factories, and commercial food production, with details about increases in manufacturing. Schweitzer would generate the reports; Scheele would review them and bring the reports to Washington three or four times a year, where the military attaché would pay him in cash. The men were also instructed to report on promising patents; when they found them, German companies snapped them up, keeping the formulas out of the hands of American industry. They did the same with chemists themselves. When a prominent scientist emerged, German companies would hire him away, whatever the price.

  The two years Scheele had planned to be in America stretched into two decades. He lived in Baltimore and then New York City, never becoming a citizen. He knit himself into Brooklyn’s booming enclaves of Bavarians, Prussians, and Westphalians. Bushwick was like a little Berlin, with dozens of breweries and soaring new mansions built by the Braumeister who grew rich on the thirst of their expatriate countrymen. Scheele mingled with his compatriots at the German Club, sang with them at the Freemasons Lodge, and raised his glass at the pubs where German was spoken freely.

  In 1913, the new German military attaché, Franz von Papen, summoned Scheele to his Manhattan office. The attaché’s address was on Hanover Street, in a room above G. Amsinck & Company, a German import-export company tucked into the humming financial engine of Wall Street. War was coming, von Papen told Scheele, and he should prepare for a new kind of work. He instructed Scheele to catalog locations of ammunition and explosives factories and to study American manufacture of acid, fertilizers, and chemicals. Schweitzer would continue to investigate the commercial chemical industry, but Scheele would redirect his attention to military research and the manufacture of chemicals.

  Scheele carried out his mission steadfastly. As Europe teetered on the brink of war in 1914, the doctor and Schweitzer traveled to Germany together for a briefing and to consult with government officials; they also brought back secret instructions for German embassy officials. He continued to bring reports to von Papen month after month, and the attaché handed him his pay of fifteen hundred dollars a year in twenty-dollar bills.

  When the Continent finally toppled into war, another summons arrived from von Papen in early 1915: “Very esteemed doctor: I have been trying to find you since several days… .Come at once. Great haste.”

  When Scheele arrived at 6 Hanover Street, von Papen had new orders for him. Scheele must get free of the drugstore and begin work solely for the German government producing goods that had become difficult for Germany to acquire as a result of the Allies’ naval blockade. Using his skills as a chemist, Scheele needed to devise ways to break down scarce commodities into their components, conceal them, and smuggle them safely through neutral countries and into Germany. Von Papen gave Scheele a check for ten thousand dollars to start up this new enterprise.

  Scheele quickly sold the drugstore and moved with Marie from Brooklyn to Hoboken, New Jersey. They rented an apartment in a brick building six blocks from the Hudson River and the Hoboken piers, where the streets around the shipyards teemed with boilermakers streaming into the foundries, and stevedores swarmed the packet ships in the dry docks.

  On von Papen’s orders, Scheele looked for a factory to lease; he found one for fifty dollars a month at the intersection of Clinton and Eleventh Streets. It was an ugly two-story building with clapboard siding tucked into the industrial landscape of Hoboken. His next step was to find a manager for the business, a confidant who could be trusted. Scheele asked around in German expatriate circles, and the name he was given was Carl von Kleist, a naturalized American from a prominent German family. His wife was a former opera singer. His daughter was a morphine addict, and the family had fallen on hard times. Von Kleist himself was elderly and slow, but he was dependable enough as a watchman and superintendent for the day-to-day affairs of the factory.

  Scheele began paying him fifteen dollars a week as the first employee of the New Jersey Agricultural Chemical Company, the name he chose for his firm. Rubber was one of the commodities that had become scarce in Germany, and Scheele came up with a way to break it down into a powder and ship it through neutral companies to Germany, where it could be chemically reconstituted. He came up with a similar method of breaking down and reconstituting lubricant oil as well. The first shipment of one thousand bags labeled as fertilizer went to Copenhagen on a steamship with MADE IN U.S.A. stamped on the tags.

  On April 10, 1915, the Scheeles’s maid heard a knock on the apartment door. It was late on a Saturday night, a strange time for an unannounced visitor to drop by. When the maid answered, a man was standing on the stoop in the dark. Is Walter Scheele home? he asked. He is out, the maid told him. The man handed her a business card and asked that she give it to him when he returned, then disappeared into the darkness. When Scheele returned that night, the maid handed him the card. “Captain Eno Bode, Secretary, Hamburg-American Line” was printed on the card with a phone number and an address. On the back was a hand-written message from von Papen. Give the captain “any information he desires,” the note read.

  The next morning, Scheele headed to the address on Bode’s card. The captain’s house was about a mile north in Union City, on the other side of Weehawken Cove. When Scheele arrived, Bode invited him inside. They sat and talked for half an hour. Bode said von Papen had a new assignment for Scheele. A junior member of the German Admiralty named Captain Franz von Rintelen had recently arrived in the United States, Bode said, bringing stacks of cash to bankroll sabotage of Allied ships that set sail from American ports. The Admiralty had a particular form of sabotage in mind. Not exactly a bomb, nor sticks of dynamite like the anarchists used. They wanted a slow-burning incendiary device—a chemical bomb—that could be smuggled onto cargo ships. At a given hour, the device would combust, and a fire would break out, igniting anything flammable or explosive that was in the cargo hold and burning the device up in the process. Could Scheele make such a thing?

  Scheele said he would have to think the matter over and told Bode to meet him at the chemical works the next morning. He put his hat back on and left, probably worrying a cigar between his teeth as he ambled back toward his house, deep in thought.

  When Bode arrived at the chemical factory in the morning, Scheele told him he had devised a combination of chemicals that would function as a slow-acting incendiary device exactly as the Admiralty wanted. With funding from Bode, Scheele hired new employees and ordered new components. By April 20, they had 150 of the devices. Bode and two other men—one of whom was Captain Otto Wolpert, the pier superintendent for Atlas Lines—came to the factory for a demonstration of the devices and their assembly. Scheele had an intense dislike for one of the men who showed up for the demonstration; though he went by the name “Steinberg,” his real name was Erich von Steinmetz, a captain in the German navy. He entered the United States disguised as a woman, carrying germ cultures to release in a kind of primitive bacteriological warfa
re. When Steinmetz brought the germs to Scheele’s lab, the chemist was so infuriated that he knocked Steinmetz to the ground in a fistfight.

  This time, there was no violence. One by one, Scheele let the men in after peering at them through the peephole in the door. On the way to the lab, the men walked past hogsheads of chemicals in a back room. Chickens roamed in a courtyard, and von Kleist kept a pet alligator in a tank near his office. The men crowded around Scheele as he demonstrated how the bomb worked.

  The devices were roughly the same size as the cigars that Scheele smoked—a slim, seven-inch lead tube, with two compartments. One end had a larger compartment which contained a powdered mixture of one-third urotropin—the commercial name for hexamethylenetetramine—and two-thirds sodium peroxide. The smaller compartment on the other end contained about an inch of sulfuric acid. Stoppers capped each end, and a thin metal plate separated the two compartments. The acid slowly dissolved the divider until it broke through to the compartment holding the powder. When it did—two hours, four hours, four days, or eight days later, depending on the thickness of the plate—the combustion erupted from the stopped ends, igniting anything packed around the devices and melting the tube into a nugget of lead.

  To demonstrate, Scheele gathered the men around. He dripped the acid from a glass tube into the urotropin-peroxide mix. A flame spat from the mixture, hot and searingly bright. “That’s chemistry!” Scheele crowed. Because of the size and shape, and perhaps because they slowly smoldered for so long, the men called the bombs “cigars.”

  The saboteurs were satisfied. The cigars were carefully packed into wooden boxes, three to four per box, and the boxes set into satchels. Scheele packed the acid separately, in glass bottles, along with a spoon and tubes for funneling the acid into the compartments. Then the men set out with the suitcases for Scheele’s old neighborhood of Bushwick. On Willoughby Street, they stopped outside a long three-story brick building called the Labor Lyceum. The men descended into a basement apartment, where they met a young building manager, Eugene Reister. Wolpert handed the satchels to Reister, and Scheele demonstrated again how the cigars worked. Wolpert took out a fat roll of bills and gave it to Reister, who was in charge of bribing the electricians and stevedores and carpenters who would assemble the cigars and plant them in the cargo holds of the ships lining the piers in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Hoboken.

  A kind of executive body, which included Scheele, met secretly in a Midtown Manhattan hotel to direct the sabotage. For weeks, German dockworkers assembled hundreds of the incendiary bombs aboard the Friedrich der Grosse, one of the impounded ships of the German Lloyd Line. Though the interned ships were forbidden from leaving, they were still sovereign German territory where the work could go on without fear of American authorities. Reister passed the finished devices to shipyard workers, along with bills that he peeled off from Wolpert’s roll. Most of the bombs never made it on board ships, because some of the men, seeking to profit without actually carrying out the sabotage, took the money and then just threw the bombs into the water. But some of the men followed through. They smuggled the assembled bombs on board in bags of sugar, made their way to the holds, and placed them among the rest of the cargo before returning to the deck and disappearing back into the throngs on the wharf.

  Scheele was never told which ships the cigars were placed in; Wolpert directed their placement. Deep in the hold, the sulfuric acid ate through the tin wall, a slow-motion chemical fuse smoldering in the darkness as the ships steamed across the open ocean. Once the acid broke through the divider separating the compartments, it reacted with the hexamethylenetetramine-sodium-peroxide mixture, an explosion that sent flames spewing from the bombs, melting the tube and setting the cargo around it ablaze.

  On May 1, the crew of one of the grandest ships on the Chelsea Piers pulled in its gangplank and cast off. The great turbines shuddered to life, the whistles blasted, and the huge four-stack luxury liner set its course for Europe. The ship was the RMS Lusitania, sailing to its watery doom. If Scheele’s devices were aboard, it’s unknown whether they ignited, because on May 7, near the end of the Lusitania’s voyage, a German sub sank the ship, killing 1,195 passengers, including 123 Americans and inflaming American opinion against the Germans. One of the great mysteries of the Lusitania disaster was a second explosion that ripped through the ship. One theory for the later blast was that one of the ship’s boilers exploded. Another was that a second torpedo hit the ship. Still another suggested that ammunition or ordnance detonated in the hold. The likelihood that the cigar bombs might have caused that second explosion is extremely remote but adds a layer of morbid intrigue to a horrific maritime tragedy.

  During April and May alone, some thirty-five ships mysteriously caught fire at sea. Though the cigars were effective, they didn’t work every time. That proved to be the undoing of the plot. The cigars aboard another ship, the SS Kirkoswald, never ignited, and the vessel escaped unscathed. The ship steamed to England, then passed through Gibraltar and on to Marseille, France, where it docked on June 12. After the passengers disembarked, the third officer cracked open the door of the number 2 hold, just forward of the bridge, so a gang of longshoremen could unload the cargo. The men heaved the sacks of sugar under their arms and over their shoulders. It was about 11:00 a.m. when one of the men hefted a partially opened bag on the portside of the hold. Four metal tubes dropped from the bag and clattered to the iron deck.

  “La bomba! La bomba!” the Italian longshoremen screamed as they fled the hold. The Kirkoswald’s chief officer ran belowdecks. He found the third officer gingerly holding the metal tubes in a handkerchief. The chief officer took off his hat and held it out, and the third officer carefully dropped the four pipes inside to turn over to the police.

  The discovery of the chemical bombs set in motion a frenzied race to unveil who was behind the conspiracy. After the sinking of the Lusitania, the Bureau of Investigation had put agents on von Papen, the naval attaché Karl Boy-Ed, and Heinrich Albert, the German commercial attaché in New York. By mid-July of 1915, Bureau of Investigation agents were also investigating the New Jersey Agricultural Chemical Company and trailing both von Kleist and Scheele. Albert, who was the paymaster for the entire German spy network, made the mistake of nodding off while riding a streetcar to his office one day. When he awoke suddenly at his stop and leaped off the car, he left behind his briefcase, which the bureau agent tailing him promptly snatched. Albert realized his mistake, scrambled back on the car, and a chase ensued. The agent jumped off the car and onto another, where he told the conductor that a crazed man was pursuing him. The conductor, spotting Albert running behind the car with his arms flailing, sped through the next stop and away from Albert.

  The papers in the briefcase gave bureau agents the outline for the entire German spy and sabotage network, which began to unravel as investigators traced the money trail leading from the German government. President Wilson was briefed on the whole matter, and one of his aides turned the entire dossier over to the editor of the New York World newspaper, which published a blockbuster article about German espionage in August.

  Scheele’s downfall, though, came in spring of 1916, when Scheele’s factory superintendent, von Kleist, made a fatal mistake. After von Kleist took in a family friend’s itinerant son who came to New York for work, the superintendent confided in the young man that Scheele owed von Kleist $235 in back pay. Scheele claimed he couldn’t pay von Kleist until he received another cash infusion from a high-ranking German diplomat named Wolf von Igel. Von Kleist’s young boarder claimed to know someone close to von Igel, so von Kleist wrote a complaint letter demanding his pay and gave it to the man to deliver to von Igel. Von Kleist later went to a bar to meet with an intermediary, where he spilled out the story of his owed money. When von Kleist returned to meet with the intermediary a second time, a detective walked up to the table, and von Kleist realized he had been suckered. The meeting was a sting; the young boarder had delivered von Kleist to detectives
with the New York City bomb squad. Aghast, von Kleist pointed at the man he had trusted. “You Judas Iscariot!” he spat out.

  The officers brought von Kleist to the Tombs, where they grilled him for twelve hours. Scheele had tried to keep von Kleist in the dark, but the superintendent turned out to know a great deal about the bomb plot and had even stolen two cigars as keepsakes, which the police found when they searched his house. He repeated the whole story to a grand jury, and in April of 1916, Scheele and eight other men in the chemical bomb plot were indicted.

  Agents arrested seven of the men before they could flee, but not Scheele. Just before the indictment, von Igel tipped him off to his impending arrest and ordered him to flee to Cuba. The doctor told his wife that he would be back in six weeks or not at all, kissed her goodbye, and boarded a train to Washington. From there, he took another train to Florida. Using forged identification papers that identified him as an American newspaper correspondent named Rheinfelder, Scheele eventually boarded a Havana-bound steamship. Huffing and churning, the boat set out across the gulf, taking the most infamous chemist in America out to sea.

  A few hours after the jury convicted Scheele’s coconspirators in New York, President Wilson went to the rostrum in Congress to ask for the war declaration against Germany. Perhaps he was thinking about Scheele and the ship-bombing ring when he condemned Germany’s “criminal intrigue… which have more than once come perilously near to disturbing the peace and dislocating the industries of the country.” The morning newspapers shared the news of the president’s speech and the convictions in New York; in some papers, reports of the bombers’ guilty verdict ran alongside the text of the president’s speech.

  Toward the end of Holy Week, the trial was in the news again. On Thursday, Van Fleet was back in court in Manhattan to sentence the six ship-bomb conspirators and another German defendant convicted in a separate bombing conspiracy trial. The men showed no emotion as Van Fleet sentenced them one by one. Von Kleist received one of the steepest sentences—two years in prison and a five-thousand-dollar fine. The others, whom Van Fleet considered little more than “tools” of the ringleaders, received lesser sentences. “I am entirely satisfied with the verdict in this case,” the judge told von Kleist. “You participated knowingly and intentionally in the manufacture of these instruments for a purpose which I can only characterize as diabolical.”