Atrocities

At the bar of Japanese justice in Port Arthur last week stood four stolid Germans and a Swiss, thieves, murderers and pirates all. Not since the desperate days of Chinese opium smuggling by 19th Century white cutthroats has the Orient seen Occidentals charged with such a combination of atrocious crimes. To assure them a fair trial, Mayor Yoneoka of Port Arthur, famed Japanese barrister, was assigned to their defense.

Two summers ago the five whites were cursing their luck in Tientsin's sleazy port. Waiter Muller and George Schroeder, two brawny mechanics, were tired of snatching purses. Hamfisted, square-headed Heinrich Westermann had failed in Shanghai as a restaurant keeper, then as a butcher despite Shanghai's boom. Eagerly these three Germans fell in with a plan proposed by a smooth German seafarer. Captain Hugo Taudien, who talked figures bigger than kidnap money. Rat-faced Arthur Gautschi, a Swiss ex-convict, was cut in on the project because, as an ex-silk tester, he was thought to have "brains."

On June 26, 1933, Captain Taudien & friends boarded the stinking but seaworthy Chinese cargo steamer Sheng An near Tientsin. Cried her Russian master Captain Boris Vikhmann, "Ah, my good friend Captain Taudien, this voyage will be a joy!" In five minutes the German had persuaded the Russian to trust him and his friends for their passage money to Foochow (1,500 miles), where the Sheng An was to deliver a cargo of coal.

Out around Shantung and into the Yellow Sea the Sheng An clanked steadily in the swell of a monsoon. Captain Vikhmann regaled Captain Taudien and his friends with vodka, smoked salmon, caviar. The Russian captain slept mostly with the first mate's Latvian wife but nobody seemed to mind, least of all First Mate Nicholas Azariev, hospitable and easy going. Finally one night when the Sheng An was 200 miles off Shanghai, the Germans and the Swiss went to work.

First they shot and killed the Chinese wireless operator as he slept in his bunk. Next Captain Vikhmann and the first mate's wife were murdered in his bed. Aroused by the shots, Mate Azariev rushed up from below decks, crumpled beneath a hail of Mauser bullets. To show precisely where everyone stood, Captain Taudien & friends then shot six unresisting members of the Chinese crew, two of whom were killed as they slept.

"Paint another name on this ship!" barked Pirate Captain Taudien. "What name? Donnerwetter, any name! When we get to America I'll sell her and her cargo for half a million."

After the name Whali had been substituted with Teuton neatness and dispatch, the ten dead were dumped overboard, bloodstains scrubbed, everything made shipshape. Meanwhile, even though the Chinese freighter's cargo was chiefly coal, she could not steam to California without taking on food. In almost any port on the China coast she would be recognized. Shrewd Captain Taudien decided to put her in at the Japanese port of Dairen on the nether tip of Manchukuo. Clumsy, he ran her aground.

Undismayed, the pirate captain locked his Chinese crew aboard, sent his pirate friends ashore led by the supposedly brainy Swiss silk tester. They failed to come back. That night Captain Taudien paced his decks. Next morning he went ashore, was also nabbed by Japanese water front police. "We know who you Germans are," said the Japanese police captain wisely. "Sugar smugglers, that's what you are! We've had orders to watch out for sugar smugglers." Taking a long chance, the pirate captain roared, "Search my ship from stem to stern and you won't find a single bag of sugar!"

Sure enough, the Japanese found only coal, but they found also the locked in Chinese crew. Shrilling and chattering, the yellowmen rushed ashore with their tale of ten cold-blooded murders by white pirates on the Yellow Sea. Ever since this revelation the four Germans and the Swiss have denied their guilt, trying to get their case appealed to a higher Japanese court. Last week their defense counsel, the Mayor of Port Arthur, argued crushingly in the Superior Court at Dairen, "There is no Japanese law covering piracy. The defendants can only be punished for having entered Dairen illegally."

Not denying Mayor Yoneoka's piratical point,* the prosecution argued that anyhow the Death penalty must be meted out, "because otherwise a bad example would be set," encouraging desperadoes of all races to commit piracy and seek haven at Dairen. This lucid view impressed the Japanese judges. They not only confirmed the lower court's sentence of Death upon Captain Taudien and Butcher Westermann, considered the ringleaders, but ordered the life sentences of Silk Tester Gautschi and Mechanic Mueller stiffened to execution. Only Mechanic Schroeder, whose protestations of "my innocence, so help me, Mein Gott!" have been especially moving, was let off with ten years imprisonment.

"We appeal!" shouted Port Arthur's Mayor, and chances seemed good that the five white pirates may stand trial eventually before Japan's Supreme Court.

*Queried by the U. S. State Department in 1930, the U. S. Embassy in Tokyo replied: "There are no laws in Japan which relate specifically to piracy. Acts of piracy are prosecuted under the appropriate section of the criminal code, persons committing acts of piracy generally being prosecuted as robbers, or burglars, or murderers."

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