File No. 701.6211/583a
The Secretary of State to the German Ambassador (Bernstorff)
My Dear Mr. Ambassador: Replying to your notes of April 27 and May 27 concerning the case of Mr. Wolf von Igel, I beg to inform you that the matter of the retention of the papers seized at the office leased by Mr. von Igel in his private capacity “to be used and occupied,” in the language of the lease, “as offices for the transaction of his business as an advertising agent,” has received careful consideration, and that I have reached the conclusion that this Government is entitled to retain these papers for use in the legal proceedings and criminal prosecutions which the Government has brought in its efforts to prevent the use of American territory as a base of hostile operations against a power with which the United States is at peace, operations which menace the national peace and safety of this country. The Attorney General informs me that these papers will be used in the case of the United States v. Hans Tauscher, et al., now pending in the Federal courts, as the papers contain, he states, important evidence, and that it is not believed that any questions regarding the privileges of Von Igel will be involved in the trial of Tauscher and the other accused persons.
I have been moved to make this disposition of the papers on account of the gravity of the crimes to which they relate and the peculiar circumstances of their seizure in a room in a New York office building which had no connection with the Imperial Embassy at the time, so far as the Department of State had been advised by you, and which, as subsequent investigations have disclosed, was not in fact used by your Embassy in the performance of its diplomatic functions. Nowithstanding these facts, I offered, in our conversation of April 19 and in my note of April 24, as a matter of comity and on account of the nature of the contents, to submit the documents to you for inspection and to return to you those which you should identify as official papers of your Embassy. This offer, which my Government was not required to make, was declined in your note of April 27.
While the incident to which I now advert has not influenced me in reaching a conclusion as to the disposition of the papers, I would call your attention in this connection to the unjustified invasion on the night of October 7, 1914, of the premises which were formerly the British Consulate in Berlin. The premises were occupied at the time by the staff of the American Embassy with the oral permission of the Imperial Foreign Office for the relief work which was being conducted, under the direction of the American Ambassador. Nevertheless, the building was raided by German officers under orders as I am advised of the Foreign Office, certain members of the relief force operating under the direction of the American Ambassador were arrested, papers were seized, and demands were made of members of the American Embassy for entrance to the inner rooms of the building. The persons arrested, being British subjects, were confined for several months, and the papers seized, relating to accounts for moneys expended by the American Embassy [Page 814] in behalf of British relief, were never returned, though a request for their return was immediately made by the American Ambassador, and they are still presumably in the possession of the Imperial Government.1
I only refer to this extraordinary conduct of the German authorities in violating the diplomatic immunity of premises previously recognized by the Imperial Government as connected with the American Embassy to show the attitude which your Government has taken in a case in which there could be no question of the immunity of the premises invaded, and in which the prosecution of criminal offenses was not involved.
I have not yet reached a conclusion in regard to the immunity which you claim for Mr. von Igel in respect to his further prosecution for the crimes with which he is charged, but I hope to be able shortly to inform you of my Government’s final decision in this part of the case.2
I am [etc.]
- Correspondence relating to this incident is printed in the following section on “Representation of belligerent governments in enemy countries.”↩
- No further communication was made to the Ambassador on this point. Von Igel was still under indictment when he returned to Germany with other officials after the severance of relations in February 1917, but his bond was canceled on February 13, leaving him paroled on his own recognizance.↩