All the gates were thrown down to Bolshevism following the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, when Joffe, the Bolshevik Ambassador, was permitted to come to Berlin and establish himself in the palace of the former Imperial Russian Embassy in _Unter den Linden_. He brought a staff of men and women whose sole duty it was to carry on Bolshevist propaganda against the government to which he was accredited. Leading Independent Socialists were frequent visitors at the embassy, and Haase, at an elaborate banquet held there in May, 1918, responded to the toast, "The Red International."
Closest to Joffe of all Germans was Dr. Oskar Cohn, one of the founders of the Independent Socialist Party. Cohn, who is a Berlin lawyer, possesses that curious combination of characteristics so often encountered in extreme Socialism. In his private life of undoubted probity, he rejoiced at an opportunity to accept and distribute money given by a foreign government to overthrow the government of his own Fatherland. Mild-mannered and an opponent of force, he made the cause of Liebknecht's murderous Spartacans his own. Scholarly and of deep learning, he associated freely with the dregs of the population, with thieves and murderers, in furtherance of the cause of the international proletariat. He became the legal adviser of Joffe and one of the main distributors of the Bolsheviki's corruption fund.
The political police were at all times cognizant of the revolutionary propaganda that was being carried on, but they were greatly hampered in their work by a limitation which had been imposed in 1917 upon the so-called _Schutzhaft_, literally "protective arrest." This had been freely used against suspected persons from the beginning of the war, and hundreds had sat in jail for weeks in what was equivalent to a sentence of imprisonment, without having had an opportunity to hear what the charge against them was. The abuse of this right became so glaring that it was provided in 1917 that arrested persons could not be detained without a definite crime being charged against them. The police made a long report on Joffe's activities in June, 1918, and the authorities, with some hesitation, placed the matter before the "Ambassador." He lied bravely, declaring that he cherished no plans against the integrity of the German Empire and that his large staff existed solely to carry on the legitimate business of the embassy.