My Adventures as a German Secret Service Agent, H. Von Der Goltz: Hardback: 1918

By Captain Horst Von Der Goltz.

Published by Cassell & Company, London, 1918. Appears to be first edition. Hardback cover, 274 pages. 16 black & white plates.

CONDITION
Overall acceptable condition - see photos. Wear/fading/marks to hardcover, particularly at spine. Foxing to end papers. Binding split in places but holding, with the exception of one colour plate between pages 166 - 167 which has come loose. No names or writing.

The story of a German secret diplomatic agent whose activities on behalf of the German Government began several years before the Great War. His particular areas of operation were Mexico and the USA.

By the time the author came to write this book he had, he says, been in and out of the Kaiser’s ‘web’ for ten years, having served him faithfully in many capacities and in many places – all over Europe, in Mexico and in the USA. 

Despite the title, which, presumably, he himself gave the book, he maintains he was not a spy nor was he a secret agent; he was a secret diplomatic agent. The principle countries of his concern were Mexico, which the Germans before and during the war were trying to turn against the USA (the Zimmerman telegram was the final straw as far as the USA was concerned), and the USA itself. There was a conspiracy, he reveals, already ongoing during the first month of the war, to violate the neutrality of the USA and a plot to blow up the Welland Canal in Canada which connected Lake Ontario with Lake Erie. The author was the man who planned it.

There were plans to suborn German-American citizens and one of the key players was Captain Franz von Papen who would be Chancellor of Germany in 1932 and later Hitler’s Vice-Chancellor.

At one time von der Goltz was a major in the Mexican army, sentenced to death more than once, and in October 1914 he was arrested in the UK and held in prison for fifteen months, expecting to be shot. In March 1916 he was taken to the USA where he had agreed to testify for the Government against one of the German agents and to spill the beans on German activity in the USA.

(Bindery shelves A1)