H 
Land Sc Water 
April 25, 191 8 
German Plots Exposed 
Fay and the Bombs — II 
By French StrOther, Managing Editor, "The Woria-s Woric," New York 
Three years ago—on April 23rd, uji^— there arrived in New York, one Robert Fay, a German soldier born at Cologne, 
who had been through the earlier fighting of the war. His avowed intention was to check or prevent the export of munitions 
from America to the Allies. He had lived in America for some years previous to the war, and could speak English 
fluenth: He also had a brother-in-law, Scholz, a civil engineer, in -ike United States ; the two men came together and opened, 
as a blind, a garage in New York for motor repairs. Here they worked at making bombs to attach to the rudders of ships. 
Their main difficulty was to obtain explosives, and with this end the two men got in touch with four other Germans who were 
prepared, for due payment, to help in their schemes. These men were Kienzle. a clock maker ; Bronkhorst, who worked at a 
sanatorium at Butler, New Jersey, run for Germans ; Brcitang, a friend of Kienzle in the shipping business, and Siebs, 
who knew Breitung and was in New York ostensibly to buy copper for a Swedish ComJ>any but really to ship it to Germany. 
At this point the story of " this injernal imagining," of which the first part was told in Land & Water last xveek, continues : 
SIEBS had not liad mucli success in liis purchases of 
copper, and he was finally forced to make a living 
from hand to mouth by small business transactions 
of almost any kind. He could not afford a separate 
office, so he rented a desk in the office of the 
Whitehall Trading Company, a small subsidiary of the 
Raymond-Hadley Corporation. His desk happened to be 
in the same room with the manager of the company, 
Carl L. Wettig. 
When Breitung asked Siebs to buy him some chlorate of 
potash, a chemical largely used in making certain forms of 
explosives, Siebs was delighted at the opportunity to make 
some money, and immediately undertook the commission. 
He had been instructed to get a small amount — perhaps 
200 pounds. He needed money so badly, however, that he 
was very glad to find that the smallest kegs of the chlorate 
of potash were 112 pounds each, and he ordered three kegs. 
He paid for them with money supplied by Breitung, and took 
a delivery -slip for it. Ultimately this deUvery-slip was 
presented by Scholz, who appeared one day with a truck 
and driver, and took the chemical away. 
Fa}- and Scholz made some experiments with the chlorate 
of potash, and Fay decided it was not strong enough to 
serve his purpose. He then determined to try dynamite. 
Again he wished to avoid suspicion, and this time, after 
consultation with Kienzle, he recalled Bronkhorst down at 
the Lusk Sanatorium in New Jersey. Bronkhorst, in his 
work as superintendent of the grounds at the sanatorium, 
was occasionally engaged in laying water pipes in the rocky 
soil there, and for this purpose kept dynamite on hand. 
Fay got a quantify of dynamite from him. Later, however, 
he decided that he wanted a still more powerful explosive. 
Again he applied to Kienzle, and this time Kienzle got in 
touch with Siebs direct. By prearrangement, Kienzle and 
Siebs met Fay underneath the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn 
Bridge, and there Seibs was introduced to Fay. They 
I walked around City Hall Park together, discussing the 
subject ; and Fay, not knowing the name of what he was 
after, tried to make Seibs understand what explosive he 
wanted by describing its properties. Siebs finally realised 
that what F'ay had i;i mind was trinitrotoluol^one of the 
three highest explosives known. Siebs finally undertook to 
get some of it for him, but pointed out to him the obvious 
difficulties of buying it in as small quantities as he wanted. 
It was easy enough to buy chlorate of potash because that 
was in common commercial use for many purposes. It was 
also easy to buy dynamite because that also is used in all 
kinds of quantities, and for many purposes. But trinitro- 
toluol is too powerful for any but military use, and it is 
consequently handled only in large lots and practically 
invariably is made to the order of some government. How- 
ever, Siebs had an idea and proceeded to act on it. 
He went back to the Whitehall Trading Company, where 
he had a desk, and saw his fellow-occupant, Carl Wettig. 
Wettig had been engaged in a small way in a brokerage 
business in war supplies, and had even taken a few small 
turns in the handling of explosives. Siebs had overheard 
him discussing with a customer the market price of tri- 
■ nitrotoluol some weeks before, and on this account thought 
possibly Wettig might help him ou-.-t When he put the 
proposition up to Wettig the latter agreed to do what he 
could to fill the order. 
In the meanwhile, Fay had sent another friend of Breitung's 
to Bridgeport to see if he could get trinitrotoluol in that 
great city of munitions. There he called upon another 
German who was running an employment agency— finding 
jobs for Austro-Hungarians who were working in munition 
factories so that he could take them out of the factories 
and divert their labour from the making of war supphes for 
use against the Teutons. The only result of this visit was 
that Breitung's friend brought back some loaded rifle cart- 
ridges which ultimately were used in the bombs as caps to 
fire the charge. But otherwise his trip was of no use to Fay. 
Carl Wettig was the weak link in Fay's chain of fortune. 
He did, indeed, secure the high explosive that Fay wanted, 
and was in other ways obUging. But he got the explosive 
from a source that would have given Fay heart-failure if he 
had known of it, and he was obliging for reasons that Fay 
lived to regret. Siebs made his inquiry of Wettig on 
October 19th. The small quantity of explosives that he 
asked for aroused Wettig's suspicions, and as soon as he 
promised to get it he went to the French Chamber of Com- 
merce near by and told them what he suspected, and asked 
to be put in touch with responsible police authorities, under 
whose direction he wished to act in supplying the trinitrotolyol. 
From that moment, Fay, Siebs, and Kienzle were "waked 
up in the morning and put to bed at night" by detectives 
from the police department of New York City and special 
agents of the Secret Service of the United States. By 
arrangement with them Wettig obtained a keg containing 
25 pounds of trinitrotoluol, and in the absence of Fay and 
Scholz from their boarding-house in Weehawken, he delivered 
it personally to their room, and left it on their dresser. He 
told Siebs he had delivered it, and Siebs promptly set about 
collecting his commission from Fay. 
Siebs had some difficulty in doing this because Fay and 
Scholz, being unfamihar with the use of the explosive, were 
unable to explode a sample of it, and decided that it was no 
good. They had come home in the evening and found the 
keg on their dresser, and had opened it. Inside they found 
the explosive in the form of loose white flakes. To keep it 
more safely, they poured it out into several small cloth bags. 
They then took a sample of it, and tried by every means they 
could think of to explode it. They even laid some of it on 
an anvil, and broke two or three hammers pounding on it, 
but could get no result. They then told Siebs that the stuff 
he had delivered was useless. Siebs repeated their complaint 
to Wettig, and Wettig volunteered to show them how it 
should be handled. Accordingly, he joined them the follow- 
ing day at their room in Weehawken, and went with them 
out into the woods behind Fort Lee, taking along a small 
sample of the powder in a paper bag. In the woods the 
men picked up the top of a small tin can, made a fire in the 
stump of a tree, and melted some of the flake "T.N.T." in it. 
Before it cooled, Wettig embedded in it a mercury cap. 
When cooled after being melted, T.N.T. fonns a sohd mass 
resembling resin in appearance, and is now more powerful 
because more compact. 
However, before the experiment could be concluded,. one 
of the swarm of detectives who had followed them into the 
woods stepped on a dry twig, and when the men started at 
its crackling, the detectives concluded they had better make 
their arrests before the men might get away ; and so all 
were taken into custody. A quipk search of their boarding- 
house, the garage, a storage warehouse in which Fay had 
stored some trunks, and the boat-house where the motor- 
boat w.as stored, resulted in rounding up the entire para- 
phernalia that had been used in working out the whole plot. 
All the people connected with every phase of it were soon 
arrested. 
Out of the stories these men told upon examination 
emerged not only the hideous perfection of the bomb itself, 
but the direct hand that the German Government and its 
agents in America had in the scheme of putting it to 
