How German Profiteers Saved Their Fortuoes The "Berliner Tayeblatt" narrates a curious history of certain dealings in radium It is noteworthy that, during the war and in the time after the war, the stock of radium in Germany was greatly lessened. What was done was done in secret, and belongs to those things which cannot be plainly proved, but in adept circles it is regarded as certain that in the form of radium whole fortunes were conveyed abroad and concealed within the frontiers.
When, in the years 1917 and 1918. the sun of war profiteering was in its zenith, a demand for radium arose which was even greater than that for platinum and gold. Offers to buy "at highest prices" were to be found in quantities in medical and other professional publications, Aristocrats no less than the "new-rich" insinuated themselves carefully into scientific institutes and the like, and manifested a strange interest in radium. Some profiteers are known to have bribed couriers to smuggle valuable securities into their luggage and take them abroad. Others chartered an airman, who had to throw down jewels on a neutral country., He who stood at the height of research could for a million of money have radium melted into glass hairs, which were y visible, and which could ea: be concealed in the tissue of a home-spun suit, or even in the natural crop of—hair. In this fashion—it caped—the vigilance of the frontier authorities.
For many doctors yeand searchers who had got into—cliff. culties owing to the rapid fall in the value of money it was a great, temptation to acquire a large fortune of a legal sale of tie radium in their possession, and this. indeed, appears to have been done to a large extent.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.