And without wishing to sound too much like the fictional Captain Mainwaring of BBC’s classic sitcom Dad’s Army, the British were ready for any agents who might descend. According to Coley, ‘The harness to the parachutes was found on the [Clent] Hills but not before someone had removed the silk, as it was a favourite material to make underwear.’ This defies belief. However desperate a woman may be for the luxuries of pre-war life, not reporting such a find to the authorities was just not something that would happen in wartime Britain. We know the details of everybody who tried.
Walter Schellenberg dismissed Britain’s ruling class with contempt, pointing out that only 1 per cent of Englishmen attended public schools and yet these people counted for 80 per cent of leaders in all walks of the military and the government. Central to counter-espionage were the Secret Service departments MI5 and MI6, although both the RAF and the Navy had their own intelligence units. Based in Whitehall, but with outposts scattered around the country, they employed a surprising number of mavericks, men (and a few women) whose tendency was to look sideways at espionage problems and come out with often excellent results. There were mistakes, of course, but the code-breakers of Bletchley Park and John Masterman’s Camp XX alone were worth their weight in gold.
Once it was obvious that Britain would have to be invaded in 1940 (this was never part of Hitler’s domination plan and it was fraught with difficulties) Canaris and the Abwehr were tasked with the impossible; send agents to Britain, carry out acts of sabotage and report on the country’s preparedness for war. The agents recruited worked under the codename Operation Lena, run directly by Hauptmann Hubert Wichmann. The organization was so top secret that not many in the Abwehr knew about it and for years it was assumed to be a separate organization. Agents were to be parachuted into England by the Gartenfeld Squadron; Luftwaffe planes commanded by Hauptman Karl-Edmund Gartenfeld. Under him was Nikolaus Ritter, as close to a civilian as anyone could be in a regime where everybody wore a uniform.
The first three agents dropped into Britain were flown in a Heinkel HeIII, painted black for night work, on 26 September 1940. The weather drove them back, but they tried again by U-boat and landed on the coast near Inverness. José Waldeburg was German, Carl Meier and Charles Kieboom were Dutch, with their delicious echoes of Van Ralt. They were caught almost immediately by troops with bayonets and placed under arrest. They were carrying a wireless for communications back to Berlin (or at least Nazi-occupied France) and a large wad of £1 notes, far more than the average man in the street would normally carry. They pretended to be refugees, like so many who had already genuinely crossed the Channel, but the subterfuge failed. Both the radio instructions and batteries were in German and their flimsy cover stories did not hold water. All three were sentenced to death by a special court. Unthinkable in peacetime, such ‘kangaroo’ arrangements were deemed necessary given the desperate situation at the time. Waldeburg and Meier died at Pentonville, hanged by Albert Pierrepoint, the public executioner who would end the lives of far higher profile Nazis at Nuremberg five years later. Kieboom appealed. Not only was he Dutch, not German, but he had been born in Japan and Japan at that time was neutral. He had had his family threatened by the Nazis (of which there is no record throughout the war) and this, he claimed, was sufficient for the court’s leniency. He withdrew this appeal a week later and was hanged at Pentonville by Stanley Cross a week after the others.
The next pair were Robert Petter, also known as Werner Walti and Karl Drucke also known as François de Decker. They were dropped by seaplane off Scotland and came ashore in a rubber dinghy near Banff. They holed and sank the boat then split up, Drucke going one direction, Petter the opposite. Petter did not last long. He was spotted studying a railway timetable at Portgordon station and railway staff were suspicious of him. On arrest, he was found to have an automatic German pistol, a radio transmitter and a bratwurst in his suitcase. The attempts to sink the dinghy had failed thanks to Coastal Command. It was recovered, still afloat, and was found to be a two-man vessel. Drucke was found in Edinburgh, with what remained of his bratwurst in his suitcase along with £327 in sterling (over a year’s wages for most people) and a torch made in Bavaria. They were both hanged at Wandsworth by Thomas Pierrepoint on 6 August 1941.
What was truly bizarre about those landings – and has the vaguest of nods to Bella – is that there was a third member of the team, Vera Chalburg. Despite the fact that she was a Russian Jewess from Kyiv, Ukraine, her brother had been killed fighting for the Waffen SS on the eastern front against Poland in the brief September War in 1940. The geopolitical alliances of 1940–41 are complicated; Russia and Germany were allies (however unlikely that seemed later on) and people like Chalburg chose their sides accordingly. It is highly unlikely she was not aware how the Nazis treated Jews, but perhaps she was able to conceal her faith. She was clearly a cut above the usual downtrodden German frau, being at one time the mistress of Hilmar Diêrks, head of the Abwehr marine intelligence unit.
Vera turned king’s evidence against her fellow agents and after her imprisonment was released and went on to marry a British officer. Perhaps it was the famous British sense of chivalry that saved her. She told her story to MI5’s interrogation centre, Camp XX (which came to be known, for obvious reasons, as the Double Cross Committee) which specialized in turning agents. There is no evidence that Vera was ever used as a double agent, nor is there any mention of her or any of her aliases in John Masterman’s The Double Cross System written soon after the war ended.
Next came Josef Jakobs, at 43 one of the oldest agents to be sent by Lena. He was born in Luxembourg but was a nationalized German and had worked for the German army, attached to the Meteorological Office. He was parachuted in and buried his helmet and flying suit and set off in search of somewhere – perhaps anywhere – that he recognized from his weeks of poring over British maps. Again, he was carrying the tell-tale evidence that would lead to his execution – a radio transmitter, a spade and the always-incriminating sausage! He lasted for twelve hours before his arrest. Uniquely in the history of espionage in this period, he was shot in the precincts of the Tower of London on 14 August 1941.
Another agent who kept an appointment with a member of the Pierrepoint family, was Karel Richter, who used the alias Fred Snyder. He parachuted into a field near London Colney, Hertfordshire, in May 1941, hiding in a wood for two days. Unluckily for him, he was stopped by a lost lorry driver asking for directions and of course could not help. His responses were so surly and monosyllabic that the driver happened to mention it to a passing policeman on his bike, who was able to tell him his way. The constable overtook Richter and, not happy with the answers he gave, took him into custody. In his luggage was a wad of bank notes, a compass and a map of East Anglia. A police search of the area turned up his parachute, a pistol, a radio transmitter and a crash helmet, complete with swastika! He was hanged at Wandsworth on 10 December 1941.
The other agents dropped under the Lena operation are outside the scope of this book because they were caught after the summer of 1941 and were of the wrong sex to be Bella. Jose Key and Alphonse Tinnerman were found guilty of separate espionage offences and were hanged by Albert Pierrepoint in July 1942. Duncan Scott-Ford was a home-grown agent, as opposed to one flown in. As a merchant seaman he was potentially very valuable to the Abwehr but he was caught and executed at Wandsworth in November 1942. Franciscus Winter, posing as a steward on ocean liners, was arrested in possession of British, French, Belgian and American currency. His job, he told his interrogators, was to report on Royal Navy convoy movements. Pierrepoint met him in January 1943. Oswald Job was, at 58, the oldest man to be hanged for espionage during the war. Offering his services as a double agent, he was hanged at Pentonville in March of the same year.
What has never been fully explained is why the Lena agents were so inept. Most of them were captured within hours or days at most of their arrival and their ‘covers’ (refugees fleeing Nazi Germany) were easily blown. They do not seem to have been properly briefed and above all, there was no friendly infrastructure to help them once they arrived. When, later in the war, the agents of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) were parachuted into occupied France, various Resistance units were there to hide and help them. The Abwehr should have known that anyone with a foreign accent (it did not have to be German) was likely to raise suspicion in a country as paranoid as Britain had become by 1940. In June of that year, a Dane and a Swede arriving in Liverpool were each fined £15 by a magistrate ‘on account of their foreign appearance’!
There was one agent, however, who requires further investigation in the context of Bella. He was Engelbertus Fukken, a Dutchman who used the alias Jan Willem ter Braak. Masterman wrote:
The date of the man’s arrival is unknown [it was 31 October/1 November 1940] but he took lodgings in Cambridge, at the beginning of November. His body was discovered on 1 April 1941, in a half-built air-raid shelter in Cambridge, where he had committed suicide. The identity card found on [him] contained five gross technical errors – a good instance of the importance of such documents for counter-espionage purposes. The rest is largely surmise, but it is more than probable that he was a parachute agent (perhaps the only agent) who succeeded in eluding capture, but who was unable to make contact with the Germans. He perished when his stock of money was exhausted. It is not altogether fanciful to speculate how much more happy and more useful his career might have been if he could have fallen into the hands of the Security Service and become a double agent.
A recent book on the subject – Hitler’s Spy Against Churchill1 – fills in MI5’s gaps. Ter Braak, along with many other Dutchmen, joined the Nazi cause because he believed in it. His family had no idea of his work with the Lena operatives, believing that he had gone to work in occupied France. His unusually gullible landlady in Cambridge seems to have accepted his story that he was a journalist on the run from the Nazis and did not question his frequent disappearances when he claimed to be visiting London. For much of the time, alone and effectively abandoned by his masters, he seems to have spent his time riding buses in the Cambridge area and sitting about in cafes. His suicide, however, is suspicious. Information about the police enquiry and inquest is almost non-existent. The newspapers, local and national, barely mention it. One of the two surviving photographs of ter Braak’s body on the floor of the air-raid shelter under Christ’s Pieces, shows his head wedged underneath a bench seat. The impact of a bullet from a gun fired by the man himself would have forced his head in the opposite direction.
But the importance of ter Braak is this: MI5 pretended later that they knew all about him, but he was at large for five months with no tail by anybody before the discrepancies in his papers were noticed for the first time. Clearly, he was the one agent who had managed to elude everybody, which was what they all should have done. And if ter Braak could do it, why not someone else? Why not a 5-foot-tall woman, with brown hair and snaggle teeth? Professor Webster’s estimate was that Bella was murdered in the summer or autumn of 1941, within the same time frame that ter Braak had arrived. MI5 never caught ter Braak until he was dead. Could the same be true of Bella? For all the mistakes made by the Abwehr in preparing their agents, a common-sense approach would be to remove all labels from clothing so that nothing would point back to Germany. And as for Bella’s dental work, did those records lie – do they still lie? – somewhere in Berlin or Hamburg or Dusseldorf, beyond the reach of the Worcestershire CID at the time and, indeed, anyone else since?
With his usual enigmatic style, Donald McCormick claimed to have made a ‘lengthy search’ of Abwehr III’s records which included details of a female agent being parachuted into the countryside between Kidderminster and Birmingham in March 1941. This is almost certainly Vera Chalburg and she was not parachuted in to the industrial Midlands at all. If this woman had the same luck as ter Braak, she might well have eluded the authorities potentially indefinitely. We know that European refugees littered the country in the 1940s, claiming all sorts of nationalities and horror stories and the stretched authorities could not keep tabs on them all.
But, as we shall see, the espionage connection does not end there. I have dealt at length with the Lena agents and the ease with which they were captured. If Bella was such an agent, and a more successful one than any of her comrades except, perhaps, ter Braak, how did her body end up in Hagley Wood? It was certainly not the policy of MI5 to murder alien agents and despite a brief tussle between Special Branch’s chief constable and Karl Drucke in an Edinburgh railway station, no violence was offered to them before the hangman’s rope or – in just the one case – a bullet.
Could it be, however, that somebody else wanted Bella dead? Someone closer to home.
Chapter 12
Aktion Hess
‘And what exactly was the Aktion Hess?’ Donald McCormick asks himself and his readers on page 108 of Murder By Witchcraft. And, more importantly, what has it got to do with the Hagley Wood murder?
And if, my Führer, this project – which I admit has but very small chance of success – ends in failure and the fates decide against me, this can have no detrimental results either for you or for Germany: it will always be possible for you to deny any responsibility, simply say I was mad.
On the night of 10 May 1941, a lone German aircraft was spotted flying low over the coast of eastern Scotland. Although the observers from the ground and the Spitfires sent up to intercept it could not know it, the Messerschmitt 110Bf had neither bombs nor guns on board. It had been modified at Augsburg airfield to be able to make the flight to the small airstrip near Lennoxlove House. Something went wrong with the flight plan and the pilot bailed out, letting his plane crash into fields near Dungavel House. Dazed and with a damaged leg from his parachute jump, the pilot was soon arrested. He gave his name as Hauptman Alfred Horn and asked to see a serving RAF officer, the Duke of Hamilton.
It was quickly established that Horn was actually Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, who was leader of the Nazi Party and before the war had run the Ausland organization which provided intelligence on Britain’s military capacity in the 1930s. At the time, despite reports of the plane’s crashing, details were understandably scant. And, despite the release of previously classified documents over the last few years, we still know relatively little about the extraordinary flight even today. It may count as the most bizarre single event of the Second World War, except perhaps for someone stuffing a woman’s body in a wych elm.
It was left to A.P. Herbert, politician, writer and member of the Naval Auxiliary Unit, to speculate on the Hess flight:
He is insane. He is the Dove of Peace.
He is Messiah. He is Hitler’s niece.
He is the one, clean, honest man they’ve got.
He is the worst assassin of the lot.
He has a mission to preserve mankind.
He’s non-alcoholic. He’s a ‘blind’.
He has been dotty since the age of ten
But all the time was top of Hitler’s men.
(Indeed, from all the tales he had to tell,
Joe Goebbels must be slightly touched as well)
He is to pave the way to Britain’s end.
He is – as dear old Lindbergh was – a ‘friend’.
He’s fond of flying. He was racked with fear.
He had an itch to meet a British Peer.
He thought that Russia was a crashing bore.
He simply can’t stand Hitler any more.
In such rich fancies I am not engrossed,
For this is what appears to matter most –
He came unasked, an enemy, a Hun;
And nobody was ready with a gun.
Eventually, they were; or at least, a ligature. Having escaped execution at the Nuremberg trials on the grounds of diminished responsibility, and having no direct links with the Holocaust, Rudolf Hess was imprisoned for life at Spandau prison in Berlin. For years he was its only inmate, but on 17 August 1987, he was found in a garden summerhouse in the gaol’s grounds with electric flex around his neck. The cause of death was suspension by hanging, but the jury is still out on whether this was suicide or murder. As far as I am concerned, it was the latter. The old man was far too frail to hoist himself or even the cable on to the relevant window catch, but no one was charged with murder. Instead, there was an international sigh of relief – the Nazi era was at last over.
There is little doubt today that the purpose of Hess’s flight to Scotland was to secure a peace deal with Churchill, the prime minister, to give Hitler a free hand in his forthcoming invasion of Russia – Operation Barbarossa. There is no doubt in my mind that if Hess’s mission had succeeded, Hitler’s devastating blitzkrieg would have destroyed Stalin’s Red Army of brainwashed conscripts in record time. But it did not succeed – and the rest is history.
Two things concern us in the context of the Hess flight. The first is the reaction to it in Germany, known as Aktion Hess and the second is; was the Stellvertreter expecting a welcoming committee at Lennoxlove – and could that committee have extended as far south as Hagley, Worcestershire? The response to the flight in Berlin was instant. Josef Goebbels’ press release proclaimed:
It seemed that party member Hess lived in a state of hallucination, as a result of which he felt he would bring about an understanding between England and Germany … The National Socialist Party regrets that this idealist fell a victim to this hallucination. This, however, will have no effect on the continuance of the war which has been forced on Germany.
This, as usual from Goebbels, was nonsense. Hess was party leader, not merely a member and he did not suffer from hallucinations. The most egregious lie of all, of course, was that the Second World War had been ‘forced’ on Germany, not caused by the megalomania of Goebbels’ boss. Hitler himself had flown into one of his famous rages, as usual, carefully acted out, because he must have known of Hess’s plans and probably actively approved them, given the two men’s long and close friendship. Hess’s immediate staff and family were arrested, but all were released soon afterwards. One of the common themes in the weeks that followed 10 May is that Hess was mad. He had suggested it himself to Hitler in the letter quoted at the beginning of this chapter. It formed a ‘plausible denial’, a loophole which allowed Hitler to distance himself from his deputy. Germany and Russia were still nominally allies at this point and the last thing Hitler wanted was to tip Stalin off about a possible German rapprochement with the west, which would have left him free to launch Barbarossa.
