"3. The pride and imagination of the Americans with regard to their culture should not continually be offended by the assertion that German culture is the only real culture and surpasses everything else.
"4. The publication of purely scientific pamphlets should be avoided in the future as far as the American people are concerned, as their dry reading annoys the American and is incomprehensible to him.
"5. Finally it is of the utmost importance that the authorities as well as the German people cease continually to discuss publicly the delivery of American arms and ammunition, as well as to let every American feel their displeasure about it."
The Foreign Office never saw fit to act upon the investigator's proposals, for less than a month after he had written his report, it appeared, verbatim, in the columns of a New York newspaper. Axiom: The most effective means of fighting enemy propaganda is by propaganda for which the enemy unwittingly supplies the material.
[Illustration: Copy of a check from Count von Bernstorff to the Fair Play Printing and Publishing Company]
Motion pictures appealed to the Germans as a practical and graphic means of spreading through America visual proof of their kindness to prisoners, their prodigious success with new engines of war, and their brutal reception at the hands of the nations they were forced in self-defence to invade. So Dr. Albert financed the American Correspondent Film Company, two of whose stockholders were Claussen and Dr. Karl A. Fuehr, a translator in Viereck's office. As late as August, 1916, Karl Wunnenberg and Albert A. Sander, of the "Central Powers Film Company," which was also subsidized to circulate German-made moving pictures, engaged George Vaux Bacon, a free-lance theatrical press agent, to go to England at a salary of $100 a week, obtain valuable information, and transmit it in writing in invisible ink to Holland, where it would be forwarded to Germany. The two principals were later indicted on a charge of having set afoot a military enterprise against Great Britain, and were sentenced to two years in prison; Bacon, the cat's-paw, received a year's sentence. (Sander, a German, had been involved in secret-agent work on a previous occasion when he assaulted Richard Stegler for not disavowing an affidavit explaining his acquisition of a false passport.) The secret ink they gave Bacon was invisible under all conditions unless a certain chemical preparation, which could be compounded only with distilled water, was applied to it.