Many years ago, on a visit to the Public Records Office in London, I chanced upon the Metropolitan Police files on Mata Hari. Although her name was faintly familiar, I associated it with a Cold War story from my childhood: I conjured up the image of curvaceous Natasha Fatale, the raven-haired partner of Boris the Spy from my favourite cartoon, Rocky and Bullwinkle. I ordered up the files and settled down to read them.
Soon, sifting through the Scotland Yard interrogations of Margaretha Zelle MacLeod, aka Mata Hari, who was executed on espionage charges by the French military in 1917, the link made sense. Both were products of a romantic trope about female agents which has served to trivialise, distort and dismiss their actual involvement in the field of intelligence. I found Mata Hari's case so strange, so intriguing, and so mired in myth, that it began something of an obsession and became the subject of my 1992 biography, The Fatal Lover: Mata Hari and the Myth of Women in Espionage. Ever since, I have been digging in archives across Europe and North America to discover more about the lives of female agents, with the aim of separating fact from fiction, and to interrogate their meaning. I'm going to be sharing through occasional blogs, some of my findings, including my new discoveries.
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LUISE EMILIE WERTHEIM (1882-1920)
I'm currently back at the PRO, since renamed the National Archives, to research the extraordinary life of Lizzie Wertheim, a German woman convicted on espionage charges at the Old Bailey, London, in 1915. After the war, Lizzie was described in the British press as an 'adventuress', a 'belle of the Berlin night clubs', 'a beautiful little woman, with lustrous brown eyes glowing in a peach-complexioned face, and a mass of gleaming hair.' Other journalists declared her 'Germany's chief woman spy in Great Britain' whose cocaine habit, it was claimed, caused her insanity.
Lizzie Wertheim and her German co-defendant George T. Breeckow using the aliases of Reginald Rowland and George T. Parker, a piano salesman and musician, were charged with gathering information on the movements of the Royal Navy's First Fleet by travelling to ports along the coasts of southern England and Scotland; they were found guilty and Breeckow was executed at the Tower of London. Lizzie was sentenced to ten years in prison but by 1918, suffering from mental illness, was transferred to Broadmoor Asylum where she died of tuberculosis in 1920.
Was Lizzie the dangerous and important German agent of the tabloid press? Or was she, like Mata Hari who was a celebrated modernist dancer and a courtesan before the war, something far more complex? Were these female recruits from the 'demi-monde' simply victims and easy scapegoats upon whom military failures could be blamed, or were they complicit in dangerous acts of intelligence gathering? Since so much more information about these women's lives has surfaced with the passage of time, can we now finally know why and how they were recruited, what role they played as agents and what impact they had?
Born Luise Emilie Klitzke in 1882 into a large, working class family in Berlin, she was in her late teens when she met Bruno Wertheim, the son of a wealthy Prussian banker, Nicholas Wertheim, a naturalised British subject. However, when Bruno took his intended bride back to London 'judicious questioning on the part of the well-to-do Wertheim family soon elicited the fact that whatever Lizzi [sic] Klitzke may have been, she was no suitable bride for a well-educated man'. Despite the Wertheim family's reservations (they were observant Jews and Lizzie was Catholic), in early 1902 the couple, with Lizzie's pet terrier in tow moved into a large house nestled along the river Thames before marrying that summer at Slough Registry Office. Neither the bride nor the groom's family were present.
If Lizzie had married Bruno to escape the poverty of her childhood, she would soon discover that her husband, despite his family's wealth, was a compulsive spender. Following the death of Nicholas Wertheim in a car accident in 1905, Bruno inherited an income from a family trust which he squandered. By 1913, heavily in debt, Bruno delcared bankruptcy and the couple separated with Lizzie, as a creditor, being guaranteed a generous allowance.
The National Archives
Documents from the 1915 trial reveal that the couple had parted on bitter terms with Lizzie's legal representative describing her contempt for Bruno whose 'sole object in life [is] . . . to enjoy himself' while she expressed 'her ardent desire that he should take some step which would lead to his destruction so that she might be rid of him'. Other documents hint at its source. The couple lost their beautifully appointed home on Fawley Road, West Hampstead, effectively rendering Lizzie homeless and their separation rendered her socially precarious in an era when divorces were rare and scandalous. She also faced the loss of her claim to British nationality.
At the outbreak of the First World War, the presumption of Lizzie's British nationality made her valuable as a potential recruit for the German intelligence services. She possessed other qualities as well: her knowledge of French, German and English, her journeys through Europe and America when she stayed at fine hotels and mingled with wealthy, even titled guests. In August 1914, however, Lizzie and Bruno's claim to British nationality suddenly appeared fragile and if they had been deemed 'enemy aliens', they risked internment on the Isle of Man. Bruno's lawyers advised him to remain at the Hotel Richemond in Geneva, where he had rooms and to halt Lizzie's generous allowance which plunged her into uncertainty.
In October 1914, Lizzie left London for Amsterdam, which would become known as 'a veritable nest of spies', and later claim that she hoped to visit her mother in Berlin. Without funds, however, an offer from an old friend, Dr. Johannes Wilhelm Brandt, a 42 year-old reserve officer in the German army, a local town functionary and businessman, might have appeared attractive. Brandt recruited Lizzie with a mission to return to England, where she would gather information about the location of Royal Navy ships and observe those of army troops. Dr. Brandt taught her to use secret ink and a code, which she would use in a series of letters that would evade the censors' attention.
During this period, Lizzie was peripatetic, travelling between Amsterdam and London where she stayed with Wertheim relations or with friends. Meanwhile, Breeckow who had been engaged as a courier between the US and England by the German's espionage 'N' (naval) bureau in Antwerp, arrived in Tilbury in May 1915. He contacted Lizzie and for the next month, they travelled to cities on the South Coast, spotting warships in the ports and troop movements at army camps. Lizzie also headed north to Scotland and at Inverness, hired a car to motor along the coast looking for warships.
However, a woman speaking with a heavy German accent and traveling alone in Inverness, then deemed an area prohibited to foreigners, soon aroused the suspicions of chief police officer John McNoughton. He interviewed Lizzie at her hotel about her passport, signed on the day the war broke out, and about her absent husband, upon whom her British nationality rested. Since Lizzie gave contradictory answers about the reason she was traveling to areas with naval and military camps, McNoughton alerted Scotland Yard. She and Breeckow were arrested in London in June 1915.
News of Breeckow and Lizzie's arrest was not made public and their trial, heard at the Old Bailey, was held in camera. A female German spy presented the War Office with an dilemma: Lizzie had been issued a British passport, claiming her rights as a naturalised subject via Bruno Wertheim so was entitled to be tried either in a civil court by a jury, or by court martial. She chose the former, explaining that "I only want what is best for [Breeckow]; I am one of those persons who don't care a bit about myself."
But the British authorities had yet to grapple with the appropriate legal punishment for female agents who were still regarded as rare. Major-General Vernon Kell, Britain's first security service director would remark in an internal MI5 memo after Lizzie's trial, 'The employment of women as German spies in this country is on the increase and one must consider the fact that the class of information they can acquire is very often of more value than what the ordinary male spy can obtain, and just as effective.' Major R. J. Drake concurred with Kell, warning in a memo that Lizzie Wertheim's lenient sentence could open the flood gates to 'an influx of German women agents', and arguing that all spies should be tried in court martials.
The matter of Lizzie's punishment was further complicated by wider political events.
A month after her sentencing for treason in a court martial, English nurse Edith Cavell was executed by firing squad in the Brussels. She had operated a successful escape service across the Dutch border for Allied soldiers and refugees, along with more than three dozen compatriots. After Cavell's execution on 12 October, the Germans quickly mobilised her case as a cautionary tale for other Belgians who opposed their military occupation while the British took the moral high ground, condemning the barbarity of their enemy.
In an interview withThe Times on 26 October, Alfred Zimmerman, the German under-secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, justified not only Cavell's execution but the principle of capital punishment for women. 'It is indeed hard that a woman has to be executed but think what a State is to come . . . if it allows a woman to pass unnoticed a crime against the safety of its armies because it is committed by women,' said Zimmerman. 'No law book in the world, least of all those dealing with war regulations, makes such a differentiation, and the female sex has but one preference, according to legal usage, namely that women in a delicate condition may not be executed.'
Zimmerman warned that without the threat of capital punishment, 'it would open the door for the evil activities of women who are often handier and cleverer in these things than the craftiest male spy.' In reply, Home Secretary Sir John Simon, told the Associated Press, 'no woman who has been tried for any military offence in [Britain] has suffered the death penalty'. He alluded to Lizzie Wertheim's case without mentioning her name, as an example of such mercy: despite compelling evidence of espionage, she was sentenced to prison, not a firing squad. Sir John's argument for sparing female spies trumped Kell and Drake's support for their capital punishment.
Although the archival documentation is relatively rich, there remain so many unanswered questions about Lizzie Wertheim. How did Luise Klitzke, a daughter of a train stoker, meet the wealthy banker Bruno Wertheim? Were these two young people simply enjoying the delights of Berlin's night clubs who happened to cross paths? Was Lizzie/Luise a sex worker as several post-war accounts suggest or were they connected through someone or something else? Was it a fear of poverty that lead her to Dr. Brandt who willingly recruited her as an agent to fulfil his own intelligence mission for the German state? What tipped Lizzie into mental illness?
Lizzie's silence on these questions is telling. Her Broadmoor Asylum medical record notes that 'Mrs. Wertheim was never willing to give any details as to her family or personal history.' She avoided speaking with the other patients, some of whom regarded her 'with feelings of deep aversion'. Over her months at Broadmoor, she became increasingly isolated and, the matrons noted, '[she] never speaks to anyone and seems to take little interest in her surroundings'. Her delusions focussed on her conviction that she was 'somehow an important person'.
Perhaps this fantasy had been fostered first through her marriage to Bruno, and the glittering world in which she lived, briefly, before the war. Then, through Dr. Brandt and through Breeckow, she had a sense that her mission for Germany provided her with the status she had lost through her separation from Bruno. Despite their estrangement, Bruno travelled to Crowthorne to inspect his wife's body in 1920, and to collect a thin list of belongings: clothes and one framed photograph, packed into a thick leather suitcase. Later, Bruno would change his name to Wortham by deed poll, perhaps to distance himself from the scandal of Lizzie, while she, like Mata Hari, would be remoulded by post-war spy writers as another drug-addled strumpet who had once threatened the nation.
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