The handwritten *bordereau* that produced Alfred Dreyfus's 1894 treason conviction had been retrieved from the wastepaper basket of a specific person at the German Embassy in Paris. Who?
Schwartzkoppen was attaché 1891–1897. The French Statistical Section ran an espionage operation called the *voie ordinaire* through Madame Bastian, an Embassy cleaning lady who emptied the wastepaper baskets and handed the scraps over for a monthly stipend — about 1,500 fragments a year. The *bordereau* was actually written by Major Esterhazy, who was Schwartzkoppen's informant. Schwartzkoppen knew throughout the crisis that Dreyfus was innocent and Esterhazy was guilty, but said nothing. His 1930 posthumous memoirs confirmed it.
Read the full story →Maximilian von Schwartzkoppen was the German military attaché at the Paris embassy from 1891 to 1897. The bordereau — the handwritten memorandum that produced the original 1894 Dreyfus treason conviction — had been retrieved from his embassy wastepaper basket by the French intelligence service through its routine cleaning-staff espionage operation. He spent the rest of his life refusing to comment.
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