She wasted no time in injecting her verbal propagandists into the struggle on the American front. On August 20, 1914, Dr. Karl Oskar Bertling, assistant director of the Amerika Institut in Berlin, landed in New York, and went at once to report to von Bernstorff. The Amerika Institut had of recent years made considerable progress in familiarizing Germany with American affairs; its chief director, Dr. Walther Drechsler, had been master of German in Middlesex, a prominent boys' school in Massachusetts; he returned to Berlin in 1913 and was attached, upon the outbreak of war, to the press office. All who were associated with it knew something of America. It is characteristic of the convertibility of German institutions to war that another executive of this organization, employed in peace times to cement the friendship between the two nations, should be sent on the day war was declared to America to establish a German press bureau.
Dr. Bertling went about delivering pro-German speeches, and prepared articles for the press on international questions. These he submitted to Bernstorff himself for approval--one such story was to be published in a Sunday magazine supplement to a long "string" of American newspapers. Although every editor was on the lookout for any "war stuff" which was written with any apparent background of European politics, he found small market for his wares among the New York newspapers, and some of his speaking dates were cancelled. He proposed to publish, with one of his stories, a set of German military maps of Belgium, but to this von Papen wrote him on November 21: "I entirely agree with you in your opinion in regard to the maps--it is a two-edged sword," and he added: "One observes how very ill-informed the average American is." Bertling's lack of accomplishment drew censure, however, from several sources: the head of the German-American Chamber of Commerce in Berlin chided him for not having carried out his "special mission to supply a cable service to South America and China," and the late Professor Hugo Muensterberg of Harvard waxed righteously indignant over the fact that Bertling opened and read a letter entrusted by the psychologist to him for safe delivery to Dr. Dernburg. Bertling applied to the Embassy for special employment, and on March 19, 1915, the ambassador's private secretary wrote him: