GERMANY ACCUSED

Wairarapa Times-Age, 18 October 1938, Page 6

GERMANY ACCUSED

BY AMERICAN PROSECUTOR LN SPY TRIALS DIRECT CHARGES MADE. SPECIFIC DETAILS CITED. (Received This Day, 1.50 p.m. NEW YORK, October 17. Casting aside all tradition in espionage matters, the United States Attorney, Mr Lamar Hardy, in his opening address to the jury at the trial of Johanna Hofmann, Otto Herman Voss and Erich Glaser, said: “This conspiracy was conceived and directed from Germany," and disclosed sensationally:— (1) A plot by German spies to forge President Roosevelt’s signature on White House stationery in an attempt to obtain vital secrets regarding American aircraft carriers. (2) A boast by Berlin intelligence chiefs that they had obtained blue prints of certain American destroyers and found defects of construction. (3) The riflling of trans-Atlantic mail pouches on German ships and the opening of an envelope containing a Soviet armament contract with the Bethlehem Steel Works. (4) A display of thousand dollar notes supposedly destined for the payment of informers on periscope designs. (5) A plan of an open house in Washington, where Army and Navy officers would be entertained with ‘wine, women and song’.” Fourteen others were indicated to be safe in Germany. Gustav Rumrich is awaiting sentence after pleading guilty.

Gunther Rumrich, a deserter from the United States Army who was arrested in June, pleaded guilty to the charge of espionage. Sentence was deferred.

It was announced that he would be a Government witness against the other defendants, the trial of whom was postponed until October 17 after the election of the jury. The other defendants are Johanna Hoffman, a hairdresser on the German liner Europa, Erich Glaser, a U.S. Army private, and Otto Hermann Voss, a German-born naturalised American mechanic at Siversky works, who were charged with selling information to Germany.