* After America entered the war, Rintelen was sent back to the United States, where he was tried for conspiracy with the National Peace Council to foment labor agitation. He was convicted and sentenced to a fine of two thousand dollars and a year’s imprisonment. A German offer to exchange him for twenty-one Allied officers of equal rank was not accepted. Two more trials and two more convictions followed in 1918 on charges of passport fraud and conspiracy to plant bombs on British ships. Altogether he was sentenced to a total of four years and two months. The Mexican conspiracy was never one of the charges. On November 19, 1920, he was released and his sentence commuted by the Attorney-General to the astonishment, indignation, and avid speculation of the public, or at least of the press. The rest is anti-climax. Embittered by the German Republic’s disavowal of his mission after the war, he published his version of the truth in two volumes of memoirs notable for a Munchausen-like quality of stretching the possible into the preposterous. Befriended by Admiral Hall, he took up residence in England and on the outbreak of World War II, predicting that Hitler would soon disappear and be replaced by Pastor Martin Niemöller, he offered his services to the British Navy. They were not accepted. He survived the war in an English detention camp for aliens, from which he emerged, grandiose to the last, with an offer to go to Nuremberg to defend the ten leading Nazis in the war crimes trials, describing himself for the occasion as a “specialist in international law,” a designation that raised eyebrows on people with long memories. He died in London in 1949, aged seventy-two.