i6 
Land & Water 
March 28, 1918- 
The Great Passport Frauds— Part I 
By French Strother, Managing Editor, "The woria 
s Work," New York 
l-V/ien war [was declared, thsre'were a number of Gentian officers in the United States. In order that they 
f night have a safe passage to Europe, it was necessary to provide them with fraudulent passports. This 
was done with the connivance, if not at the instigation, of the German Ambassador at Washington, Count 
von Bernstor^. Hoiv these frauds after hriiiQ- executed were detected by the Department of Justice, is told below : 
■St. n ■■MUtm. 
WHEN C„.i Ruroede, the "gnuu-, of the 
German passport frauds, came suddenly to 
earth in the hands of agents of the Department 
of' Justice and unbosomed himself to the 
Assistant United States District Attorney in 
New York, ''he said, sadly : 
" I thought I was going to get an Iron Cross ; but what 
they ought to do is to pin a little tin stove on me." 
the cold, strong hand of American justice wrung that 
very human cry from Ruroede, who was the central figure 
(though far from the most sinister or the most powerful) in 
this earliest drama of Germany's bad faith with neutral 
America — a drama that dealt in forgery, blackmail, and lies, 
that revealed in action the motives of greed and jealousy 
and ambition, and that ended with three diplomats dis- 
graced, one plotter in the penitentiary, and another sent to 
a watery grave in the Atlantic by a torpedo from a U-boat 
of the very country' he had tried to serve. This is the story : 
• • * 
Twenty-five days after, the Kaiser touched the button 
which publicly notified the world that Germany at last had 
decided that "The Day" had come — to be exact, on August 
25th, 1914 — The German Ambassador at Washington, 
Count von Bernstorff, wrote a letter effusively addressed 
to "My very honoured Mr. von Wedell." (Ruroede had 
not yet appeared on the scene). The letter itself was 
more restrained than the address, but^ in it Bernstorff con- 
descended to accept tentatively an offer of Wedell's 
to make a nameless voyage. The 
vo3'a[ge was soon made, for on 
September 24th Wedell left Rot- 
terdam, bearing a letter from the 
German Consul - General there, 
asking all German authorities to 
speed him on his way to Berhn 
because he was bearing dispatches 
to the Foreign Office. Arrived in 
Berlin, Wedell executed his com- 
mission, and then called upon his 
uncle. Count Botho von Wedell, a 
high functionary of the Foreign 
Office. He was aflame with a 
great idea, which he unfolded to 
his uncle. The idea was approved, 
and just after the elections in 
November he was back in New 
York to put it into execution, 
incidentally bearing vdth him some 
letters handed him by order of 
Mr. Ballin, head of the Hamburg 
American Steamship Company, and 
another letter "for a young lady 
who goes to- America in the interest 
of Germany." If unhappy Wedell 
had let this be his last voyage — 
but that belongs later in the story. 
Wedell's scheme was this : He 
learned in Berlin that Germany 
had at home all the common 
soldiers she expected to need, but 
that more officers were wanted. 
He was told that Germany cared 
not at all whether the 100,000 
reservists in America got home' or 
not, but that she cared very much 
indeed to get the 800 or 1,000 
officers in North and South America 
back to the Fatherland. Nothing 
but the ocean and tlie British Fleet 
stood in their way. The ocean 
might be overcome. But the British 
Fleet ? Wedell proposed the 
answer : He would buy passports 
Spaniards, to whom S25 was of infinitely more concern than 
a mere he — and send the officers to Europe, armed with these 
documents, as neutrals travelling on business. Once in 
Norway or Spain or Italy, to get on into Germanj' would 
be easy. 
For a few weeks, Wedell went along famously. He bought 
])assports and papers showing nativity from Norwegian, 
Swedish, Danish, and Swiss longshoremen and sailors. Mean- 
time, he got in touch with German reserve officers, and' 
])assed them on to Europe on these passports. 
But he was not content with these foreign passports. 
In the case of a few exceptionally valuable German officers 
he wished to have credentieds that would be above all sus- 
picion. Consequently, he set about to gather a few American 
passports. Here his troubles began, and here he added the 
gravest burden to his already great load of culpabihties. 
For von Wedell was an American citizen, and proud of it. 
But he was prouder still of his German origin and his high 
German connections, and in his eagerness to serve them he 
threw overboard his loyalty to the land of his adoption. 
Von Wedell applied to a friend of his, a certain Tammany 
lawyer of pro-German sympathies, who had supplied him 
with a room belonging to a well-known fraternal organisa- 
tion as a safe base from which to handle his work in passports. 
What he wanted was an agent who was an American, and 
who had political acquaintanceship that would enable him 
to work with less suspicion and with wider organisation in 
gathering American passports. Through the law^i'er, he came 
J hi person to 
hu Jtclared 
it fof use in 
afUr^named, ^ 
Tills i/dssfiort 
A^nvy /^//^0/afr{/'Aeru ^?ray /^a 
>rjfi///^/l. ''/'■/■ ///-yj/ ■ /C 
\ 
How Ruroede (Wedell's Successor) Altered Genuine- 
from longshoremen in New York 
— careless Swedes or Swiss or 
This particular passport is one of four genuine passports especially prepared by the State Department for the use 
of the Department of Justice in getting the legal evidence upon which Ruroede was arrested and convicted. .The 
identifying photograph of ** Howard Paul Wright," in tlie upper left-hand corner, was the photograph of an agent 
of the Bureau of Investigation. Another Agent of the Bureau, who had worked his way into Ruroede's coniidence, 
sold this passport to Ruroede, who altered it for the use of Arthur W. Sachse, a German reserve officer. The 
method ot alteration was ingenious : Ruroede pasted Sachse's picture over •* Wright's"' (the picture above shows 
the Sachse picture rolled back and the original Wright picture revealed). In order to get on Sachse's picture the 
