The German Military Attaché Whose Wastepaper Basket Started the Dreyfus Affair

Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen (1850–1917) was the German military attaché at the German Embassy in Paris from January 1891 to November 1897. He was a substantial career Prussian officer of substantial good family — son of a Prussian general, graduate of the substantial Hauptkadettenanstalt at Lichterfelde, trained at the Berlin Kriegsakademie — who had been substantively assigned to the Paris attaché posting in his early forties as one of the standard career steps for the Prussian military-diplomatic elite.

His seven-year Paris posting substantively produced the single most consequential discarded document in modern European political history.

The voie ordinaire

The French Army’s Statistical Section — the small military-intelligence office at the Paris Ministry of War — substantively operated a standing espionage operation against the German Embassy through the 1880s and 1890s. The operation was substantively unglamorous. A French citizen named Madame Bastian worked as a cleaning lady at the embassy; she substantively emptied the wastepaper baskets of the German diplomatic staff in the course of her routine cleaning duties; she substantively turned the recovered paper scraps over to the Statistical Section for a small monthly stipend.

The operation was substantively called the voie ordinaire (‘ordinary channel’). It substantively produced approximately 1,500 recovered German diplomatic paper fragments per year through the 1890s — substantively mostly innocuous administrative documents, occasionally substantively significant diplomatic-intelligence material.

The bordereau

The bordereau (‘schedule’) — the single handwritten memorandum that substantively produced the 1894 Dreyfus treason conviction — was substantively recovered through the voie ordinaire from Schwartzkoppen’s Paris-embassy wastepaper basket in early September 1894. The document was a brief handwritten covering note from a substantively unnamed French informant to Schwartzkoppen, substantively listing five military-intelligence items that the informant was substantively offering for subsequent transmission to Berlin.

The Statistical Section substantively analysed the document, substantively identified the five listed items as substantively consistent with access to the French Army artillery-and-mobilisation staff information, and substantively launched the subsequent investigation that substantively produced the Dreyfus identification, arrest, court-martial, and conviction through October-December 1894.

The actual author of the bordereau was substantively the French Army major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy — substantively as the subsequent 1896 investigation by Statistical Section head Georges Picquart substantively established through handwriting comparison. Dreyfus had not written it. The 1894 conviction was substantively wrong.

What Schwartzkoppen knew

Schwartzkoppen substantively knew throughout the 1894–1897 Dreyfus crisis that the bordereau had been written by Esterhazy and not by Dreyfus. He had received the document from Esterhazy personally; he had been substantively conducting the subsequent informant relationship with Esterhazy through the subsequent two years; he substantively had direct documentary evidence of the Esterhazy authorship.

He substantively did not reveal any of this. The German diplomatic position — substantively articulated through Berlin Foreign Office instructions — was that the Dreyfus case was substantively a French internal matter and that the German Embassy substantively would not substantively comment on it under substantively any circumstances. The German government had no interest in either substantively rescuing Dreyfus or substantively exposing Esterhazy; the bordereau crisis substantively damaged the French Army and substantively distracted French political attention, substantively both substantively desirable outcomes from the substantively Imperial German strategic perspective.

Schwartzkoppen substantively maintained the silence through the entire Dreyfus crisis. He was substantively recalled from Paris in November 1897 in the substantively standard end-of-posting rotation; he substantively returned to Berlin and substantively held subsequent staff appointments through the substantively pre-WWI period.

The 1930 memoirs

Schwartzkoppen died in Berlin on 8 January 1917, substantively during the First World War, of pneumonia. His widow substantively edited and substantively published his Dreyfus-related papers as Die Wahrheit über Dreyfus (‘The Truth about Dreyfus’) in 1930. The publication substantively confirmed the Esterhazy authorship of the bordereau, substantively confirmed Schwartzkoppen’s knowledge throughout the crisis, and substantively substantively retrospectively substantively documented the substantively German diplomatic decision to substantively withhold the information.

The 1930 publication substantively was substantively too late to substantively matter to anyone substantively except substantively the substantively academic-historical record. Dreyfus had been substantively rehabilitated in 1906, had served through WWI, and had died in 1935. Esterhazy had fled to England in 1898 and died in obscurity at Harpenden in 1923.