If you’ve studied the United States’ entry into World War I, you probably know about the sinking of the Lusitania by a German U-boat, and about the Zimmerman Telegram that invited Mexico to invade the U.S. But less well-known are the numerous acts of sabotage perpetrated by the Germans between 1914 and 1917.
At the center of these nefarious activities was Dr. Walter Scheele, whose laboratory at 1133 Clinton St. in Hoboken (now the location of a Board of Education parking lot) was actually a factory for the manufacture of what Scheele called “cigar bombs.”
The casings for Scheele’s devices were made on board the Friedrich der Grosse, a German ship quarantined at the Brooklyn piers for the duration of the war. There German seamen cut lead tubes into specified lengths and divided them into two compartments by inserting discs (made of copper, aluminum or paraffin) of varying thicknesses.
Transported to Dr. Scheele’s lab, the tubes were filled with picric acid in one section and sulfuric acid in the other. The ends were sealed with wax. The result was an ingenious incendiary bomb that produced a flash flame when the two acids met after eating through the copper. The “timer” could be adjusted simply by increasing the thickness of the copper.
The devices were cheap, and since they burned themselves away, virtually undetectable.
A prelude to war
Scheele had been in the United States since 1893 when the Imperial German government established him as its first spy in the United States. His assignment, actually one of industrial espionage, was to gather information on the manufacture of American explosives.
In 1913, he established the New Jersey Agricultural Chemical Company as a front.
His first success was an explosion aboard the S. S. Phoebus, filled with shells bound for the Russian Army. Sympathetic Irish-American dockhands put two of Scheele’s devices in each of the British transport’s three holds. The ship suffered an explosion at sea and had to be towed into Liverpool, its cargo destroyed.
Other successes included the sinking of the S.S. Falaba, a British liner sailing from Liverpool to West Africa. Among those killed when the ship went down in the Irish Sea was an American engineer, whose death enraged President Woodrow Wilson, whose sympathies were already with the Allies.
One scheme was aborted when Franz von Rintelen, the mastermind of the sabotage ring, learned that one of his minions had put two “cigars” in the mailroom of the S.S. Ancona, a British mailboat. Realizing that an accident on a ship carrying passengers but no arms would bring the authorities down on him – or worse, America into the war – he managed to retrieve the bombs, disguised as parcel post packages, before the ship left New York.
The bomb ring goes down
Shortly after this fiasco, Scheele, his patriotism overcome by his greed, demanded $10,000 from von Rintelen. The super-spy gave the scientist a check, then had him followed home to Hoboken by two rough seamen who persuaded Scheele to return the check then and there.
To prevent a recurrence of Scheele’s blackmail, von Rintelen employed a young woman of less than impeccable reputation (seemingly as plentiful in von Rintelen’s entourage as burly sailors) to snare Scheele into a compromising situation. Rather than have his indiscretion exposed, Scheele agreed to continue making his bombs and to stop demanding money.
The cigar bomb ring began to fall apart when two of the devices were found aboard the S.S. Kirk Oswald in Marseilles, France, after the ship had been diverted from its original destination of Archangel, Russia. While its cargo of sugar was being unloaded in the French port, a bag broke, and out fell the bombs. The French police figured out what they were and notified American authorities, who broke the case.
Although most of those involved in the plot were arrested, Scheele escaped to Cuba by way of Florida. He evaded capture until the Havana police picked him up in March, 1918.
At his trial, Scheele admitted manufacturing about 500 cigar bombs, but insisted that only about a quarter of them had ever been placed on ships. He was convicted of sabotage.
Editor’s note: A full version of this column was originally printed in Hoboken History Issue No. 18, published by the Hoboken Historical Museum. Please visit the museum at 1301 Hudson St. for more information. To read past columns from this year-long series, visit www.hobokenreporter.com.