File No. 341.622a/85
The Ambassador in Great Britain (Page) to the Secretary of State
[Received April 5.]
Sir: With reference to my despatch No. 3259 of March 17, 1916, and to previous correspondence relative to the S. S. China, I have the honor to report for the Department’s information that I have learned incidentally from the Consul at Dundee, in the course of correspondence [Page 636] regarding American shipping matters, that the British authorities at Kirkwall, on or about the 14th of January last, removed from the American S. S. Ausable the third officer of that ship, one Paul Otto Waldemar Leiztritz, believed to be a sublieutenant in the German Naval Reserve.
It appears from information communicated to Mr. Consul Latham by the consular agent at Kirkwall that this vessel, which was bound for Esbjerg from Galveston with a cargo of cotton-seed cake, having no orders to call at Kirkwall, was brought to that port for examination on January 14 last in charge of a British officer and armed guard. On her arrival she was boarded in the usual way by a British examining officer, and as a result of his examination the said Leiztritz was taken into custody and removed on the ground that he was a German subject. The consular agent had no opportunity of seeing the man, since his first information of the occurrence came from the captain of the Ausable who called him some days later with the object of paying Leiztritz off. The consular agent then learned on inquiry that the man had been sent to Edinburgh.
I have just ascertained from the Prisoners of War Information Bureau that Leiztritz is at present interned at the camp at Stobs, Hawick, Scotland, and that in his original examination by the British authorities he gave his age as 28; his occupation as third officer of the Ausable; his home address as 13 Wilhelmstrasse, Neusalz-on-the-Oder and his birthplace as Neusalz-on-the-Oder ...
I have [etc.]