Una Hainsworth might have been working with the best of intentions when she contacted Quaestor, but she was relying on the hearsay of a mentally ill man who drank heavily and she seemed to have met a character who did not actually exist. Una herself was of questionable integrity. She had approached Quaestor in 1953 because, via the Express and Star, he had offered a cash reward of £100 (around £3,000 today). According to the Kenilworth CID, when Una left Kenilworth, she owed a number of people considerable sums of money and they, in the words of the police, ‘would have been delighted to have got their hands on her’. In the meantime, in 1953, while Quaestor was rekindling the horror of the woman in the wych elm and ladling it on with a trowel, Bella’s murder was no nearer to being closed.
Chapter 11
The Spies Who Came in From the Cold
There is one phrase in Una Hainsworth’s statement to Superintendent Williams that was music to the ears of Donald McCormick and everybody else since. When referring to the mysterious Dutchman, Van Ralt, she said, ‘but in my opinion it might have been that he was a spy…’
‘The first casualty of war is truth,’ wrote Senator Hiram Johnson in 1917 and that can be said to apply to almost all the Hagley Wood case. Behind the lethal machinery of the Second World War, the tanks, the aircraft, the bombs, was a whole underground industry devoted to espionage. All nations used spies, agents of differing backgrounds and abilities and both sexes, to discover what they could about the enemy, to probe and exploit his weaknesses.
Little of this was known to most of the public in the Second World War. There was censorship everywhere, from actual government legislation to the limited amount of newsprint available for ordinary people to read. Had the body of Bella been found today, every national would carry long stories on it, with exclusives, photographs of the supposed murder sites and interviews with locals, if only to reassure the readership that ‘such things don’t happen here’. And of course, television and social media would get in on the act with a vengeance, about the vulnerability of women in the MeToo generation. As I write, the Mail on Sunday carries a very small article, rather lost on page 19, with the headline ‘Police find “body of mother” in woodland’. The vital difference between this case and Bella’s is that we know who the victim was and someone has already been charged with murder. Had that not been the case, that the remains could not be identified, it would have hit the front page by Monday with speculation drifting on for days.
In 1941, there was nothing traceable about a woman who had gone missing among the hundreds who made up such a list. In 1943, in local papers like the Birmingham Post and the Wolverhampton Express and Star, there were a few scattered columns devoted to the finding of the body. One or two nationals mentioned it briefly – the Sunday Despatch and the Sunday Mercury – but most of the newspaper coverage comes from the assertions of Dr Margaret Murray (see Chapter 14) and Quaestor in the early to mid-1950s, by which time the case was as cold as the grave.
Much of this comes from the wartime admonishment that ‘careless talk costs lives’ and that some things were best not discussed in public, if at all. But it was the sheer anonymity of Bella that set off alarm bells in the minds of the detectives involved in the case at the time. There were no labels in any of the dead woman’s clothing. Her shoes, that looked so promising as a clue at first, had yielded nothing. Her wedding ring was anonymous and ‘fake’. Even the most likely item to produce identification results – her ‘snaggle’ teeth – drew a firm and resounding blank. That blandness, that lack of traceability, locally or even nationally, led some to the conclusion that Bella was not a local; she was not even a British national. And that in turn led to a more bizarre suggestion. Bella might have been a refugee; after all, there were hundreds of them in England in 1941. And what about Una Hainsworth’s assertion, that Van Ralt had a ‘Dutch piece’ in tow who had had too much to drink and had been stuffed into a tree?
The previous year, when Hitler’s awesome war machine was poised to invade Britain, the SS’s Walter Schellenberg drew up, as we have seen, a ‘black list’ of the Reich’s most wanted: people who had crossed the Nazis already throughout Europe and had run for their lives to the relative safety of Britain. Many of the 2,694 names on the list were celebrities, famous, among other things, for open anti-Nazi statements or actions. The singer/actor Paul Robeson was there because he was not only a Communist, he was black; for both reasons, Schellenberg’s people wanted him dead. A large number on the list were home-grown Britons; people like Robeson were just passing through, in his case having made a film in South Wales shortly before the war began. But the majority were foreigners, refugees from the various European countries that Germany had invaded by the summer of 1940.
As would perhaps be expected from a list of anti-Nazi ‘subversives’, the vast majority are men. But there are 231 women in the list; could Bella be among them? This list was not known in Britain at the time. It would not be discovered until the fall of the Third Reich in the spring of 1945, but we can use it as an investigative tool today. In terms of the British hierarchy at the time, there were no women in Churchill’s cabinet, none in the higher echelons of business and positively none in the church. The home-grown women in the list were people like Virginia Woolf, famous on the literary scene, and Viscountess Rhondda and Eleanor Rathbone, politicians and philanthropists. Many of them were in the list because they had lost fathers, husbands, brothers and sweethearts in the First World War and were outspokenly anti-war as a result.
By and large, we can rule out conventional British women as potential Bellas because they were so high profile that their sudden disappearance in the summer or autumn of 1941 would have been noticed. A Dutch woman, Anita Denmer, had been writing anti-German copy for her paper in The Hague before she got out and ended up in Ventnor, Isle of Wight. She survived the war. Another female journalist who was not home-grown was Sigrid Lilian Schulz. Oddly, her name is not in the black list but it should have been. She was born in Chicago and the family moved to Berlin when she was eight. Hating all things Nazi, she steeled herself to interview both Hitler and Goering, head of the Luftwaffe. She may have been an active double agent in Berlin and telephoned journalist William Shirer on 1 September 1939 to tell him that the Germans had invaded Poland. Hurt in a later air raid, she wisely got home to Chicago and was safely there and accounted for by the time Bella died.
Moura Budberg, from Ukraine, often referred to as the ‘Mata Hari of Russia’ was an alcoholic and her life story is full of inconsistencies that do not add up. The widow of a Tsarist count before the Russian revolution, she had a torrid affair with the British agent Robert Bruce Lockhart and was imprisoned for a time in Moscow’s notorious Lubianka prison. In London by the early 1930s, she became the lover of both the writer Maxim Gorki and the novelist H.G. Wells. She is on Schellenberg’s list, but she could not possibly be Bella. She survived the Second World War too and would have been far too old for the body in the wych elm.
One of the few women in the academic section of the list, Mathilde Hertz, had a doctorate in biology and comparative physiology. Not remotely a Nazi, she was nevertheless allowed to continue working after Hitler’s takeover in Germany in 1933. Two years later, however, she was in Cambridge and had stopped working by 1937, disappearing from public life. Dora Fabian was another philosopher from Berlin and, like Bella, was a murder victim. She was born Dora Heinemann and married liberal politician Walter Fabian in 1924. She obtained her doctorate in economics and political science from the University of Geissen four years later. She became an outspoken critic of the Nazis, especially in their misogynistic views, expecting women to be loyal only to the notion of Kinder, Küche¸ Kirche (children, kitchen, church) as well as the Führer, of course. She attended the colossal rallies at Nuremberg just to watch the crowds. When the Nazis took power, Dora was arrested and, after her release, travelled west to England, reaching London by September 1933. She worked as a translator but appears to have been watched by the German embassy. Her flat was burgled twice. On 4 April 1935, she and her roommate, Mathilde Wurm, were found dead in their Great Ormond Street flat. Their bedroom door was locked and the coroner decided that the cause of death was suicide by Veronal poisoning. The substance was widely used as a sleeping pill and was available over the counter in pharmacies throughout the country. Since Dora had been supplying information to an anti-Nazi agent, Roy Ganz, there is a strong suspicion that the Gestapo, free to stroll around London in what was still peacetime, had been looking for payback for some time. But Dora was long dead when the body of Bella was stashed in the wych elm.
If the corpse in Hagley Wood was not a named refugee in the black list, could she be a spy? And, straight away, we are in to the realms of fantasy. If Van Ralt was a spy, handsomely paid by the Third Reich, there was surely every chance that his drunken girlfriend was too.
‘The whole point of a secret service,’ wrote Compton Mackenzie in his novel Water on the Brain, ‘is that it should be secret.’ In wartime Britain, there was a need for all this, but eighty years on, and despite the Freedom of Information Act (2000) there are still files in Whitehall which are closed to the public’s enquiring mind. As a result of the Second World War in particular, Britain, especially Britain’s government, became a secret society where some questions cannot be asked and if they are, no answers are forthcoming. Had they pursued an espionage angle, even the police in 1943 would have met doors closed to them even more surely than they are today.
In the inter-war period, information on Britain was being collected by the German secret service (Sicherheitsdienst or SD) because that was what secret services did. The German embassy passed on all sorts of information and judging by the quality of information in Schellenberg’s Black List it was extraordinarily accurate. Home addresses, telephone numbers, even car registration details were all typed diligently in the Wilhelmstrasse offices of the SS in the summer of 1940. The Ausland (Outland) organization was a worldwide movement composed of Germans living outside Germany, who were expected to be loyal to the Führer and the Nazi cause. Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy (stellvertreter) was responsible for the British arm of this, collecting random information from hiking and cycling parties who took photographs of each other in dockyards and near aerodrome hangars. The outbreak of war, of course, stopped all that. From 3 September 1939, the only effective way for a German to glean intelligence was to be parachuted in or dropped on the coast. The case of Laura Van Raalte is unique, but at least it can be argued that she was British born and, as things turned out, harmless.
‘Espionage’ wrote Michael J. Barrett, Assistant General of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), with his tongue firmly in his cheek, ‘is the world’s second oldest profession and just as honourable as the first [prostitution].’ Germany’s leading spy organization, the Abwehr, had its headquarters on the Tirpitz Ufer, the embankment of the Landwehr Canal in the centre of Berlin. The word means ‘defence’ but the Abwehr was solely to do with ‘offence’, at least until the rest of the world closed in on the Third Reich by 1945. It was headed by Wilhelm Canaris, a former naval officer, who was both ambitious and competent. Unfortunately, like so many of the second rung officers of the time, he fell foul of the endless bickering and jockeying for position of Hitler’s closest subordinates, men with issues as big as their egos: Himmler, Goering, Heydrich and Goebbels.
Hitler never entirely trusted Canaris or the Abwehr and put more faith in his own black-shirted SS and the SD, which was run from 1931 by Himmler and became entangled with the various police forces of the Reich, especially the secret police, the Gestapo. It was Canaris and the Abwehr, however, who bore the responsibility for planting agents in Britain. Both ways of doing this were fraught with danger for the agents concerned and the risk of detection was high. There are hundreds of bays, inlets and coves around the British coast where a U-boat could sneak close enough to land for a man to swim ashore or row a dinghy. But Coastal Command, the Home Guard, the police and the world and his wife were watching around the clock for this; not for nothing was the country called ‘Fortress Britain’. There were gun-emplacements and barbed wire on the beaches and dunes and every port had an army of guards on permanent watch. When Dorothy O’Grady, a home-grown spy in the Isle of Wight was found wandering on the beach at Sandown, which was out of bounds, the authorities quickly jumped into action and arrested her. She was sentenced to death in 1941 under the Treachery Act because she had sabotaged telephone wires to impede troop movements. Her sentence was reduced to fourteen years in gaol after an appeal.
The alternative was for an agent to jump out of a plane and take his or her chances with a parachute. Thanks to the British invention of radar, which the Germans did not possess or even know about, we were able to locate aircraft coming over the Channel, unless they were virtually at sea level, in which case they were plainly visible from the ground, even at night. Assuming a plane could get through (and some did) the jump itself carried a huge risk. Paratroopers were trained long and hard to do this, but civilian agents less so. If they landed without injury, what then? They had to hide or bury the yards of silk and rope that had brought them down and find their way in an alien country where all the signposts had been removed just to make things difficult for people like them and their comrades-in-arms who were believed to be hard on their heels. In 1940 and even 1941, this was an important point. Operation Sealion had been shelved in the autumn of 1940, but there was no way of telling what project Hitler had up his sleeve. It is likely that the agents parachuted in were firmly of the opinion that they were a secret advance guard to the thousands very close behind them, rather as the Allied glider units were in D-Day, June 1944.
Joyce Coley cites just such a parachute drop in the context of Bella. ‘Later,’ she writes, ‘the police did get a story from Mr Basterfield who, before his call-up, had been a member of the Home Guard.’ According to Coley, he was patrolling in Hagley Wood Lane with a friend. Operating out of a hut in Halesowen, they ‘had turned out to investigate a parachute alert’. We shall look at the Bella-related results of this later, but there is nothing in the Worcester Archive to corroborate it. And we have come across the name Basterfield before. He is likely to have been the son of the widow who lived at 408 on the Halesowen Road in Hasbury, opposite the Rose and Crown where Bella, according to one wall-writing, was supposed to live. His mother was interviewed on 1 August 1943. It is surely too much of a coincidence that he was also in Hagley Wood Lane in 1941. When did he report the incident? Was he the author of the Hasbury graffito, rather enjoying the limelight?
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
