The link to Hagley lies, as all too often, with Donald McCormick in Murder By Witchcraft (see Chapter 16) but Superintendent Williams had made a step in the right direction in 1953. In the context of Anna of Claverley and the mysterious Van Ralt, he told reporters that he was in the process of contacting Dutch authorities in search of the girl stuffed into the tree to sober up.
The lack of any labelling in the dead woman’s clothing and the failure to find a relevant Bella, led Williams to accept that she probably was foreign. Whether his enquiries were carried out directly or via Interpol, set up in 1923 but not called that until 1956, is not clear. There is no reference to this line of enquiry in the Archive.
Into the gaping void of the Dutch connection leaps McCormick, the intrepid researcher, with a cheerful disregard for the complexities of research abroad. ‘I was able to make enquiries in Holland,’ he says, and discovered that Bella was not only Dutch, but a secret agent. The Netherlands had remained neutral for as long as they could, although it was clearly in British interests to keep a careful eye on events in the Low Countries. On 9 November 1939, during the ‘phoney war’ when nothing seemed to be happening in western Europe, two MI6 officers, Major Richard Stevens and Captain Sigismund Payne Best, were kidnapped by an undercover agent who was actually Walter Schellenberg of the SS. They were grabbed in a slick shootout at Venlo on the Dutch/German border, having been lured there by Schellenberg’s play. Ignoring all their training and contrary to the code of captured spies giving nothing away, Stevens and Best sang like canaries, destroying months of the careful creation of a spy network in the Netherlands.
McCormick gets it right when he says ‘the British secret service at this time was, by the most generous assessment, in a state of flux … controlled and run in a most amateurish fashion.’ As a result – and the folly of employing men like Stevens and Best – a number of British agents were captured and top-secret files raided at The Hague. It is no exaggeration to say that in the months before Dunkirk (May 1940) British Intelligence had virtually no information of events in Europe.
We are not told by McCormick who he contacted in Holland (any more than we are by DI Williams) but he then throws up the name of Dronkers, a name that has been linked with the Hagley Wood case ever since. Johannes Marinus Dronkers was born in Utrecht in April 1896. His first post was as a seaman but he was working for the Dutch post office shortly before the war. The Netherlands at the time was a melting pot of intrigue. Most Dutch people opposed Nazism but the Germans had been their neighbours for eighty years as citizens of sovereign states and for centuries before that. There was a strong thread of support for Nazi ideals and, as we have seen, two major Dutch Nazi parties vying with each other. Johannes Dronkers had joined one of them and underwent Lena training for a mission to Britain. By the time he left Holland, in May 1942, the United States had joined the war and Dronkers’ brief was to report on American and Canadian troops in Britain. He used that quaint, centuries-old technique of invisible ink (lemon juice) and had a series of undercover addresses in neutral countries as contacts.
His yacht was picked up by a British trawler risking the U-boat menace to get fish for ‘fortress Britain’ and he tried the usual ploy that he was a refugee on the run from the Nazis. Once on British soil, he was quizzed by the authorities and admitted that he worked for the Abwehr. He was tried at the Old Bailey, under strict security, and was hanged by Albert Pierrepoint at Wandsworth on 31 December 1942, the twelfth spy to be executed thus far during the war. According to McCormick, before he cracked, Dronkers nearly got away with it, even making anti-German broadcasts on Free Orange Radio run from London by the BBC. And, specifically, nowhere does McCormick say that there is a Bella link. We are left to surmise a connection because of the Dutch angle.
McCormick then changes tack, this time to the Verbindungsstab organization of Rudolf Hess. This group, roughly translated as ‘liaison staff’ oversaw the work of the Abwehr, the Gestapo and the SD (Security Service). Of particular importance was a group within that had gathered information from diplomatic circles since the First World War. The shadowy members of the Verbindungsstab not only had little faith in Canaris’s Abwehr, they were almost certainly involved in organising Hess’s mission to Scotland in May 1941.
Among the agents of the Verbindungsstab, McCormick claims, was one with the name Lehrer. There is no Christian name and it is not clear whether this is actually his surname or a code nom de guerre which many wartime agents on both sides of the Channel used. Lehrer was a high-ranking officer involved in recruitment, but in this particular instance, he came over himself. In the diaries of Abwehr III, McCormick maintains, is the proof of this – ‘an attempt is to be made to set down the agent Lehrer with a wireless operator on the coast of South Wales in order to establish better communications’.
McCormick mentions two Operations, codenamed Green (Fall Grun) and Whale in this context. In fact, there were at least eight of these, all of them as precursors to Operation Sealion, the actual invasion of England, and all of them involving the Scots and Welsh nationalists and particularly the Irish. Since 1923, Eire had been an independent nation and its hatred of the English went back centuries. This untapped source of opposition was something the Germans could exploit. None of these Operations got beyond the planning stage and without exception they had been abandoned by the summer of 1941.
We now have the names of the key figures involved in this espionage work, both the organizers and the key agents. Unless it is a very obscure alias, the name Lehrer occurs nowhere. Not that that deters McCormick. According to him, Lehrer had a Dutch mistress who knew Britain well and had had an affair with a man in Stourbridge, only five miles, of course, from Hagley Wood. This woman had lived in the Birmingham area in the 1930s and even spoke with a ‘Brummy’ accent.
McCormick’s contention was that the Abwehr sent five agents from Holland between March and April 1941. Two were captured and two came by boat. The fifth was a woman, codenamed Clara, and she was dropped by plane in the Midlands between Birmingham and Kidderminster. ‘If one draws a line,’ McCormick wrote cryptically, ‘between Kidderminster and Birmingham, it runs very close to Hagley Wood.’
The area might well have been of interest to the Lena agents – Hartlebury RAF base had vital aircraft components and Birmingham was a centre of arms production. Clara, said the Abwehr records, went missing – nothing more was heard from her by radio or any other means. This was circumstantial dynamite. But it is a lie. Jan Willem ter Braak ‘went missing’ too, as far as the Abwehr were concerned, because he had no means to contact anyone with any information he may have gleaned.
And unless MI5, the police, the army and vast numbers of paranoid snooping civilians had missed a number of tricks, all the Abwehr/Lena agents dropped in 1941 were accounted for. The only female involved was, as we have seen, Vera Chalburg, a Russian Jewess, not a Dutch girl and was picked up in the company of Karl Drucke and Werner Walti. She was not the mistress of the fictional Lehrer but of Hilmar Diêrks of Abwehr Marine Intelligence. Far from being stuffed into a tree in Hagley Wood, she was caught, imprisoned and later released to marry her British army officer.
McCormick was undeterred by any of this when writing in 1968. As far as he was concerned, Clara had been parachuted between Kidderminster and Birmingham and McCormick’s task was to establish that Lehrer’s mistress and Clara were the same person. Dutch police records and Nazi files made no comment on this. His researches in the papers of Abwehr III (Counter Intelligence run by Major-General von Betivegric) should have led him specifically to Abwehr IIIF involving infiltration into foreign Intelligence. He latched on to three people who might be able to identify Clara. One was Otto Behne who, McCormick says, was once reputed to be the wannabe gauleiter of Britain had Hitler’s eagle landed in 1940 (in fact, it was Franz Six). Another was a Nazi named Kuhnemann who was linked with Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, and the third was Franz Rathgeb. Try as I might, I could find no reference to any of these men in an extensive search of Nazi literature. Kuhnemann is probably a minor, obscure official, one of the ragtag misfits who carried on correspondence with the BUF before and just after the start of the war. Behne, however, ought to be high profile, if he was considered worthy to run a gau the size of Britain. Franz Six, nominated as the actual controller of Britain had it fallen in the summer of 1940, is well-chronicled, down to his membership numbers of the Nazi party and the SS.
When McCormick found the third possible link, Rathgeb, he was living under an alias in Paraguay. Rather like the ease of access to Dutch police records and Abwehr material, the casual simplicity of this piece of international detection defies belief. An unknown number of Nazis got out of the shattered Reich in the spring and summer of 1945, following the so-called ‘rat lines’ to South America where no questions were asked of past associations. Bearing in mind that it took Mossad, the Israeli secret service, fourteen years to find Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Holocaust, McCormick’s lightning work is nothing short of miraculous. Not only that, but Rathgeb was only too happy to discuss matters with a man he did not know but had been his enemy in the Second World War (McCormick served in the Royal Navy). Rathgeb told McCormick that he had spent much time in the industrial Midlands before the war and in South Wales. He knew Lehrer and he had indeed had a Dutch mistress who had lived in Birmingham in the 1930s. So far, so pat, but it gets better:
She was well educated, intelligent, attractive and about thirty years of age … possibly slightly under … I can’t recall much about her except that her teeth were slightly irregular and, as she was attractive, this single blemish was perhaps rather more noticeable. She wasn’t tall, probably well below average height for a woman.
Rathgeb could not remember her name, nor even her codename, but he knew she had links with the Birmingham area:
She claimed to be Dutch and said she came from Utrecht. But I have an idea that in fact she was part German … I do know that she had been working for Abwehr III and had helped to infiltrate Dutch Resistance right from the beginning, in the summer of 1940. She travelled between Holland and Germany regularly.
Speculating further, the ex-Nazi, living in Paraguay under an assumed name, went on:
It is therefore quite possible that Lehrer’s mistress and ‘Clara’ were one and the same … the last time I saw [her] must have been about the end of 1940. I seem to remember a party at which she read horoscopes about that time. I never heard any mention of her after that … I thought that she might have been killed in an air raid in Germany. Or even that she was rounded up in the Aktion Hess.
If we had any faith in McCormick’s research, the case of who Bella was would be cleared up, at least circumstantially. Today, it would even be possible, if Bella’s skeleton had survived, to trace her via Dutch/German relatives. But it is all too convenient. Did Herr Rathgeb actually exist? How convenient that Clara should have irregular teeth and be short – the only two characteristics available from Webster’s post-mortem and which had been widely reported in the press.
McCormick speculates further. If Clara was Bella, how did she end up in the wych elm at Hagley Wood? Could she have been a double agent and was it payback time by a disgruntled fellow spy? This was simply not how it was done in the 1940s. If an agent was deemed doubtful, he was either imprisoned or watched very closely by MI5 and/or the police. The fate of such double agents is well known, chronicled at first by John Masterman of Camp XX and later by modern historians/biographers who have catalogued their careers. The secret services did not murder agents, except by the rope and judicial process. McCormick postulates that Clara would have been landed with few, if any, extra clothes and because she failed to contact another agent, must have bought British clothes. But that ignores the lack of labels in any of her clothing and the failure by the police to trace any of them. What stands out about the captured Lena agents is their apparent inability to disguise their German equipment; even in the case of their rations, their bratwurst!
McCormick then suggests that Clara’s mission might have been to meet up with her ex-lover in Stourbridge, that he too, unlikely though he concedes it is, was a Nazi sympathizer. As we have seen, there were Nazi sympathizers in Britain – Mosley’s Fascists, the Mitford family, Lords Brocket and Buccleuch; and even though he had been quietly shipped off to the Bahamas, the Duke of Windsor. These people were either high profile or eccentric or both, not an obscure and anonymous lover of a Dutch girl living in Stourbridge.
‘In my quest for the truth about the Hagley Wood crime,’ wrote McCormick, ‘I had allowed myself to be lured into a blind alley and all I had to show for my pains was a sub-plot in the whole story, an interesting digression, but little more.’
He was, nevertheless, able to suppose a link between Clara and the Aktion Hess. She read horoscopes at parties according to Rathgeb. Was she rounded up in the witch-hunt that followed Hess’s flight? Heinrich Muller of the Gestapo (one of those who escaped to Argentina as the war ended and was never caught) was on the rampage looking for occultists. In June 1941, another senior Nazi, Hess’s successor Martin Bormann, banned all stage performances which involved clairvoyants.
Rathgeb had suggested to McCormick that he contact a Frau Cremer in Amsterdam. Whoever this woman was, she told McCormick that Clara was probably a code name and that she was related to Johannes Dronker, the spy executed in 1942. ‘She was a very serious student of astrology,’ Cremer remembered, ‘and had attended conferences. She was a friend of Baron Keun von Hoogerwoerd … who had taught Louis de Wohl astrology in Berlin long before the war.’1
De Wohl was utilized by SOE, the black propagandists. He made bogus, doom-laden predictions, as we have seen, for leading Germans in a tour of the United States. De Wohl was every bit as dodgy as any of his comrades in the Secret Service – or the Abwehr, come to that – Ellic Howe remembered him swaggering down Whitehall in an army officer’s tunic he had no right to wear. As for the grandly named von Hoogerwoerd, he is nowhere in the Net today. This does not mean that he does not exist, but his total absence is suspicious, especially as Frau Cremer claimed that he ‘was always believed to have trapped your Captain Payne Best into being kidnapped by the Gestapo early in the war’.2
As we have seen, the Venlo incident in which Payne Best and Stevens were kidnapped was the work of Walter Schellenberg. There were a number of others involved, many of them using aliases, but none of them was von Hoogerwoerd.
The tireless McCormick soldiers on, looking for a spy operating in the Midlands in 1940–41. He met the usual brick wall of government departments. Even now, over eighty years after the event, some of the Whitehall files on the Hess flight remain closed – of such facts are conspiracy theories made! ‘During World War II,’ McCormick claimed, ‘a German spy, never positively identified, carried out a remarkable number of coups in Britain over a long period.’ Sadly, this cross between the Scarlet Pimpernel and James Bond is a creation, like them, of fiction. He was invented to cover up the ineptitude on the part of the British establishment – a brilliant master spy being a preferable alternative to good, old-fashioned incompetence. McCormick claims that the spy produced a detailed report on docks, airfields and ‘shadow factories’ in the Birmingham/Coventry area. This is unprovable. Docks and airfields were common knowledge – they appeared on Ordnance Survey maps freely available before the war and in aerial photographs taken by the Luftwaffe during it. The only incident which is verifiable is the sinking of the HMS Royal Oak in Scapa Flow and that is a hoary old chestnut fully exposed by, among others, Simon Hayward in his Myths and Legends of the Second World War.
On what came to be known as Black Saturday, 14 October 1939, U-boat U47 commanded by Lieutenant Gunther Prien took his vessel through Kirk Sound into the Royal Navy’s harbour off Scotland. He had the skill and the nerve to travel on the surface and fired three torpedoes at the Royal Oak. He fired two more rounds and the ship sank in a mass of flames in thirteen minutes. There was a huge loss of life because the order to abandon ship was not given in time.
So smug was the navy and so confident in its defence of ‘impregnable’ Scapa Flow that they immediately started hunting for ‘agent W’, working as a watchmaker. This man was a fiction, despite various attempts to name him and ten years after he wrote Murder By Witchcraft, McCormick rubbished it too. Instead, he created another story which we will investigate later. The bottom line in the Royal Oak tale is that the navy was caught with its bell-bottomed trousers down and seized on any opportunity to evade responsibility.
McCormick’s master spy was so successful that he was still lurking in Britain in 1944 (odd that he seems to have told his bosses nothing about D-Day or the build-up to it). ‘One suggestion from the German side,’ McCormick says, ‘after the war was that he was a German-Canadian called Karl Dickenhoff, who lived in a house in Edgbaston.’ The Birmingham Post got hold of this story in 1956 and were threatened with legal action by Dickenhoff. His real name was Hans Caesar and he was well known in the Birmingham jewellery community before the war. As realpolitik kicked in in 1939, he left Britain, got to Germany and enlisted in the Wehrmacht. Far from spying in the Midlands, he spent the entire war freezing on the Eastern Front, first against the Poles, then against the Russians. He returned to England in 1948 and the Birmingham Post was only too happy (and presumably, desperate) to offer a full written apology.
Even then, McCormick does not give up. ‘It is known,’ he wrote, ‘that he was an associate of … Jan Willem Ter Braak, who, according to Frau Cremer, was a friend of “Clara”, alias Dronkers.’ Hitler’s Spy Against Churchill, debunks this nonsense; Ter Braak did not know Caesar/Dickenhoff. How could they have met since the Dutchman did not arrive in Britain until 1 November 1941, by which time Caesar was ‘somewhere in Eastern Europe’. More relevantly, there is no one called Clara in Ter Braak’s circle – he was a loner with very few friends and had no links with other agents except through his brief training.
‘Edgbaston,’ wrote McCormick, ‘Stourbridge, Halesowen, Hagley Wood … “Bella”, “Clara” Dronkers … a skeleton in the old wych elm … Dickenhoff, Caesar, Willem Ter Braak. What do they all add up to?’
The answer is: an implausible load of tosh we will explore further in Chapter 16.
But there is a curious PS in the story of Aktion Hess. Author Andrew Sparke, in a privately printed work in 2014 (updated 2018) refers to papers found in the possession of the spy Josef Jakobs, the only agent to be executed by firing squad during the war. In Jakobs’ wallet was a photograph of a young woman, smiling at the camera and curled up on an armchair. On the reverse of the photo were the words ‘My Dear, I love you for ever … Your Clara, Landau, July 1940.’ MI5 were able to track her records. She was Clara Sophie Bauerle, born in Ulm in August 1905 and was 36 by 1941, which chimes well with Professor Webster’s theory that ‘Bella’ was about that age when she died. For reasons that are not clear she came to work in England in 1930, working the Midlands Music Halls. The Register of Aliens records her leaving Warwick in June 1932. ‘She spoke English with a Brummie accent,’ Sparke records, ‘and English audiences sometimes called her Clarabella.’ All very pat and circumstantial, but Sparke’s sources are not quoted.
According to the author, Clara met Jakobs in Hamburg where she was performing with Bernhard Ette’s orchestra at Café Dreyer. She was popular with the Nazi elite, vaguely linked with Hermann Goering, head of the Luftwaffe (who liked a pretty face), and had had a lover in the Kriegsmarine. According to Jakobs, who seems to have been extraordinarily gobby, Clara was recruited as an agent and was supposed to be parachuted into the Midlands area to support Jakobs once he had established contact by radio. The odd thing about this is that Jakobs did not believe that Clara had any previous links with England.
Clara Bauerle seems to disappear in Germany after the spring of 1941, despite her party affiliation and apparently successful music career. The Independent’s Alison Vale drew the conclusion in March 2013 that this disappearance is explained by the body in the wych elm; Bella was Clara. The problem with Vale’s assertion is that Clara Bauerle was nearly 6 feet tall, according to Jakobs and Karel Richter, another captured agent. The photograph shows that the singer did not have ‘snaggle’ teeth, eliminating her as a potential wych elm victim. Clara was in fact still performing and recording until her untimely death in Berlin on 16 December 1942. Records show that the cause of her death was veronal poisoning, the insomnia cure that had killed Mathilde Wurm.
What a pity that so many people have latched on to this piece of mischievous mythmaking and accepted it as gospel.
Chapter 13
