Hitler's Spy Against Churchill: The Spy Who Died Out in the Cold

By Jan-Willem van den Braak and Anthony Percy

From the summer of 1940 until May 1941, nearly twenty German Abwehr agents were dropped by boat or parachute into England during what was known as Operation Lena, all in preparation for Hitler's planned invasion of England. The invasion itself would never happen and in fact, after the war, one of the Abwehr commanders declared that the operation was doomed to failure. There is no doubt that the operation did indeed become a fiasco, with almost all of the officers being arrested within a very brief period of time. Some of the men were executed, while others became double agents and spied for Britain against Germany. Only one man managed to stay at large for five months before eventually committing suicide: Jan Willem Ter Braak. Amazingly, his background and objectives had always remained unclear, and none of the other Lena spies had ever even heard of him. Even after the opening of the secret service files in England and the Netherlands over 50 years later, Jan Willem Ter Braak remained a 'mystery man', as the military historian Ladislas Farago famously described him. In this book, the author – his near-namesake – examines the short and tragic life of Jan Willem Ter Braak for the first time. Using in-depth research, he investigates the possibility that Ter Braak was sent to kill the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and discovers why his fate has remained largely unknown for so long.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9781526768780

Book preview

Prologue: About the Origins of this Book

My fascination with espionage

From a very young age I have been fascinated by the subject of espionage. It all started in 1960 when, at eight years old, I heard my father talk about the American U-2 pilot Gary Powers, who had been shot down over the Soviet Union and taken prisoner. Two years later he was exchanged for the Russian spy Rudolf Abel on the Glienicker Bridge, the border between West Berlin and the DDR. Later on, I read about Rudolf Abel, who in real life had been a colonel in the Red Army, in the magazine Reader’s Digest, to which my parents had a subscription. Working in the dazzling New York society from 1948 as an art photographer, he also secretly smuggled classified documents to the Soviet Union. After nine years of treason, he was unmasked as a spy. Once back in America, Gary Powers was blamed by the CIA for not destroying his plane, which had been crammed with secret espionage equipment, and for not committing suicide. Fearing he had been brainwashed, the CIA dismissed him. I understood that a captured spy automatically disclosed all his secrets, but how did that work for those with brains? It all sounded rather obscure.

These were the years of the Cold War, with Berlin as the frontline border city cut in two by the wall, the lurid atmosphere of which was masterfully depicted by John le Carré in his book The Spy Who Came in from the Cold in 1963. I followed the developments around other spies both from the West and East with interest, spies such as Kim Philby, Greville Wynne, Oleg Penkovsky and George Blake. Philby escaped to Moscow in 1963 just in time, after his fellow diplomats Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean had already defected in the 1950s. Together with two more spies, they were later called The Cambridge Five, after the English university city where they had all been fellow students in the 1930s.

Ever since I was a child, my father would occasionally tell me about his wartime experiences in Berlin from the spring of 1943, when he had worked at the AEG factories as part of the Arbeitseinsatz and was liberated by the Red Army.¹ That fueled my interest in war espionage.

Naturally, spying was widespread in the Second World War. In the 1970s I read the autobiography of the Russian Leopold Trepper about his spy network in occupied Europe (the Red Orchestra) and A Man Called Intrepid, about the Canadian William Stephenson from the British Security Coordination, who was responsible for the secret service in the Western hemisphere during the war. Ian Fleming once wrote, ‘James Bond is a highly romanticised version of a true spy. The real thing is … William Stephenson.’

My parents-in-law had Churchill’s war memoirs, bound in six or seven red-covered volumes, sitting in a row on their bookcase. Like many Dutch people who had survived the war, my father-in-law was a great admirer of Churchill, but he didn’t mean that much to me. However, that changed when I read his fascinating biography by the German writer-journalist Sebastian Haffner and realised how important Churchill had been as Hitler’s nemesis. And also in their bookcase there was the recently published The Game of the Foxes by the Hungarian-American journalist Ladislas Farago. I only partially read the voluminous book and because of this, I missed a passage on a spy called Jan Willem ter Braak.

The primary source of this book

On Tuesday, 24 January 1978 I made my regular commuter journey from The Hague back to my home town of Utrecht. At The Hague’s Central Station, I bought Het Parool, the former resistance daily newspaper of Amsterdam to which my parents had had a subscription. On the train I read the front page and then turned to page two. My eyes were immediately drawn to a letter to the editor sent in by a man called Donald McCormick, in the column to the very left (the letter is originally in Dutch):

Who knows J.W. ter Braak?

After the Netherlands was occupied by German troops in May 1940, a young man of about 27 years of age arrived in England. He appeared extremely civilised, said that his name was Jan Willem ter Braak and moved into a guest house in Cambridge. He said he was a Dutch student reading botany of the tropics. Some months later, in March 1941, his body was found in an air-raid shelter in Cambridge. He appeared to have been shot. Later it was made public that Ter Braak had been a spy. He had been sent to England by the Germans, had been in possession of a secret radio transmitter and was known to have made at least one visit to London. As I am writing a book about events that happened during this period of the war, I would be extremely grateful for any information about the young man’s past. Is there anyone in the Netherlands who has knowledge of him? If he still has family in the Netherlands, I will gladly tell them the details that have come to my attention.

DONALD MCCORMICK

(Full address: 8 Barry Court,

36 Southend Road, Beckenham,

Kent BR3 AD, England)

I put the paper down and stared at the landscape through the window as it rushed by. It was bizarre that I had a near-namesake about my age, whose short life as a spy had apparently ingloriously ended in an English air raid shelter. But apart from this, the letter didn’t mean anything to me, and neither did the name of the author. The newspaper cutting disappeared into my archives, where it stayed for many years.

The start of the research

In August 2014 I bought the Dutch translation of a book by Ben Macintyre about the war story of double agent Eddie Chapman, also known as Agent ZigZag, from a bookshop in The Hague’s Statenkwartier. This had caught my attention because of the favourable review on the cover by John le Carré: ‘Grandiose. Beautifully told, compelling and often very moving.’ Le Carré had not exaggerated. Chapman was a criminal who offered his services to both the Third Reich as well as the British, which landed him in impossible situations from which he invariably managed to extract himself, albeit not unscathed. Soon I stumbled across a paragraph about the fear the British Secret Service had about undiscovered spies:

Those fears were exacerbated when the body of a man named Engelbertus Fukken, alias Willem Ter Braak, was discovered in Cambridge… If Ter Braak could survive undiscovered in Britain for so long, then other German agents must be at large.²

And a few months later I found a short paragraph on Engelbertus Fukken in the second chapter of A Spy among Friends, Macintyre’s newly published biography of Kim Philby.

I immediately remembered my newspaper cutting from thirty-six years earlier, recovered it from my archives and resolved to try to find out more about this unknown person, who apparently had two names. Over the following days, I Googled both names and, to my surprise, very quickly found a photograph of his dead body, below which was mentioned that it had been found in an air-raid shelter in Cambridge after he had committed suicide. Clearly he was not killed, as McCormick had stated in his letter to the newspaper. It also became clear that McCormick wrote spy thrillers and had been trying to resolve the riddles surrounding Ter Braak since the 1960s.

On the website of the National Archives in London, I found a copy of Ter Braak’s passport with his passport photo. This passport mentioned that he was born on 28 August 1914 in The Hague and had lived in Noordwijk. The Hague was the town where I lived myself; however, if this information was made up, like his name, it would make the search that I had so recently started much more difficult. But the following evening, on the digital population register of The Hague, I found the irrefutable proof of Engelbertus Fukken’s existence on a family card. He was indeed born on 28 August 1914 in the house at Van Boetzelaerlaan 140 in The Hague, only a few hundred metres as the crow flies from the bookshop! Engelbertus had five brothers and sisters no less, all carrying his mother’s surname: Elizabeth Johanna Fukken, born in 1886 in Rotterdam. His mother was registered as living with her children at the aforementioned home, which was owned by a man called Briedé. Was it a guest house? A home for unmarried mothers? That seemed logical, for what else could it be? I looked at the card again and noticed that his mother had moved to Duinweg, a street in The Hague, in 1916 with her children and to Noordwijk a year later, again, remarkably, to another street named Duinweg there. Only the house numbers differed, numbers 9 and 3 respectively. Reading on, I learned that Briedé had moved with the family on both occasions; so he was very likely the father of the children, or perhaps their stepfather since he was not married to Elizabeth. There was only one possibility that could serve as an explanation: he was already married to someone else. I continued to Google the name Briedé and found out who he was: Willem Hendrik Benjamin Briedé, born in 1873 in Amsterdam and deceased in 1934 in Noordwijk. Subsequently, I found information on the internet regarding a man with the name Willem Briedé who had been prosecuted after the war for war crimes. This could clearly not be the children’s father but then who was he? My further research found a number of different Willem Briedés: was this criminal one of his sons too? And did this mean there were even more children?

I found a very helpful website about the history of Noordwijk and yet another one about houses and villas in that town where, during my research, I would return a number of times. The blogger on this site mentioned the life of the Briedé-Fukken family in Noordwijk on various pages, but due to the size of the family had not been able to establish who was who exactly. When I closed my laptop one day, I noticed a flash on the bottom of the page showing that the date was 28 August 2014. Exactly 100 years to the day after the birth of Engelbertus Fukken.

A few days later I visited Van Boetzelaerlaan. On scanning the front of Engelbertus Fukken’s birthplace, no noticeable sign of life could be seen behind the windows. The house looked neglected, with paint flaking on the window frames. The front door was in the same state, with two plastic doorbells with illegible name plates. Behind each window were dirty, closed net curtains.

In the weeks that followed, I frequently looked at the digital archives in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague and slowly but surely began to reconstruct the family trees relevant to this book. A week later I spoke with the partner of a deceased nephew of Engelbertus who lived in Noordwijk. We met on a warm September day in one of the beach restaurants and she took notes she had made about the history of the Briedé family out of her bag. Some time later, I came into contact with five of Engelbertus’ cousins at their homes in The Hague, Leiden and Haarlem, where they showed me photographs and documents. Two of them let me read exercise books full of memories written by their mother, which are the source of this book. One of them didn’t even know about the existence of his uncle Engelbertus, the others had only vaguely heard about him from their parents. ’Yes, Uncle Bert, Beer!’ one of them exclaimed; apparently, they were his nicknames. But they had no idea what had happened to him exactly.

And so, my research continued to take shape.

About fiction and non-fiction

In this book, Ter Braak’s short life is reconstructed in detail for the first time. All of its facets have been followed up as well as possible and thus justified by the study of literature, a list of which is included at the end of the book, as well as by my own research, to which reference is made in the footnotes. The puzzle could not be completely laid out as some pieces have been lost forever in the mist of history. I have developed a few hypotheses about this.

Biographies usually belong to the realm of non-fiction. But even a biography is not about the ‘objective’ life of the writer, but rather a life story, woven with the help of as many facts as possible, gathered from all sources. In this sense, a biography – and even an autobiography – is also fictitious, as it were the limit of all literature that is by definition fictitious. It is a product of the mind. As V.S. Naipaul once wrote, ‘Fiction is a version of reality. Like non-fiction’. That’s why I took the liberty to include ‘real’ fictitious elements in a few places in this biography; for clarity’s sake they are printed in italics, so that they are visually distinct from the ‘real’ biography. Does the historical relevance sufficiently justify a biography about this man, who played such a modest role in the history of war, no matter how remarkable? And how can you ever really know such a man? Writing a biography is also, in a way, writing about oneself, about one’s own interests. As a writer, you’re literally in the middle of it yourself (inter-esse).

This book is the answer to Donald McCormick’s letter of 1978, about a story that happened eighty years ago.

Long ago, yet forever so fascinating.

MI5/MI6, Abwehr and RSHA (1940-41); Dutch Secret Service (1945-49)

MI5/MI6

MI5, the British counter-espionage service established in 1909, is an abbreviation of Military Intelligence, Section 5. Jasper Harker was acting director-general from June 1940 to April 1941, until he was succeeded in April 1941 by David Petrie.

MI5’s B Branch, which actually engaged in espionage and sabotage, was headed by Guy Liddell. He had studied music in Germany, had fought in the First World War and had worked for MI5 since 1931. The counter-espionage subdivision was headed by Thomas Argyll (also known as ‘Tar’) Robertson, the son of a Scottish banker.

The MI5 headquarters had been in Wormwood Scrubs prison since 1939, but moved to Blenheim Palace near Oxford, where Churchill was born, in the late summer of 1940 due to the ongoing bombings. However, part of the MI5 top management remained in London in a large building on St James’s Street, with a large ‘To Let’ sign nailed to the wall.

Liddell’s department had a detention and interrogation centre at Latchmere House near Richmond. It was called ‘Camp 020’, a complex of sombre and therefore somewhat menacing buildings surrounded by barbed wire fences. It was led by Lieutenant Colonel Robin ‘Tin Eye’ Stephens, a veteran of the British Indian Army, who wore a monocle. Spies were (also) interrogated in this complex by Stephens himself, who did not allow physical violence.

In addition to MI5, there was MI6, which dealt with espionage abroad and was also known as the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). From November 1939 to mid-1952 it was run by Colonel Stewart Menzies. Kim Philby joined MI6 in 1940.

MI5 considered using each spy arrested as a double agent as part of the Double-Cross System, which was still relatively new to MI5. In early 1941, MI5’s Twenty (XX) Committee was set up under the chairmanship of John Cecil Masterman, who, rather like a schoolmaster, supervised the execution of the counter-espionage operations. The Committee remained in existence until the end of the war.

Abwehr

The German Abwehr (intelligence service) was set up as early as 1920. Since 1935 it had been led by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris; Hans Piekenbrock of Abwehr I (espionage), Erwin Lahousen-Edler von Vivremont of Abwehr II (sabotage) and Franz Eccard von Bentivegni of Abwehr III (counter-espionage) all reported to him. The Abwehr fell under the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW), with headquarters located next to the OKW office at Tirpitzufer in Berlin.

The Abwehr had offices all over Germany (Abwehrstelle, abbreviated as Ast) and later also in the occupied countries. These sometimes had branches (Nebenstelle, abbreviated as Nest) and/or outside offices (Aussenstelle, abbreviated as Aust).

There was a special elite unit of commandos, the Brandenburg Regiment or Brandenburgers, which came from Section II of the Abwehr. Units of the Brandenburgers operated on all fronts from the beginning of the war. The headquarters of these battalions were established after the campaign in France in the coastal towns of Caen and the Belgian Nieuwpoort. They were among the first landing troops and then had to penetrate deep into the hinterland on light motorcycles to carry out all kinds of assignments and create confusion.

RSHA

On 17 September 1939, the Reich Main Security Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt or RSHA) was established, which consisted of the Secret State Police (Gestapo), the criminal police department (Kripo), and the domestic and foreign security service (Sichterheitsdienst or SD). The RSHA was the culmination of Himmler’s ambition to turn the SS, which had been established back in 1925, into the comprehensive, ideological security and terrorist body of the Nazi state. It was under the command of SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich until his death and was based on Prinz-Albrecht-Straβe.

The leader of the counter-espionage department (Amt IVE) was SS Sturmbahnführer Walter Schellenberg.

The Dutch secret service (1945-49)

The Bureau of National Security (Bureau Nationale Veiligheid or BNV) was established on 29 May 1945. Louis Einthoven was appointed director. From 1947 the activities of BNV were continued by the Central Security Service (Centrale Veiligheidsdienst or CVD), and from 1949 by the Homeland Security Service (Binnenlandse Veiligheidsdienst or BVD).

PART I

THE LIFE OF ENGELBERTUS FUKKEN (1914-40)

CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE (1914-31)

Chapter 1

Family tracks

In the nineteenth century, the Dutch population registers included the names of adult men and (unmarried) women as well as their professions, which indirectly revealed the social status of each person and their family. The church to which they belonged was also mentioned. Researchers should be grateful for this. In fact, this information gives us an overview of the branch of the Briedé family that moved from The Hague to Amsterdam in the first half of the nineteenth century; male children of the family were all baptised Willem Hendrik Benjamin in the Dutch Reformed Church. Many of the sons were entrepreneurs, from a wine trader to a commercial agent, an agent of a telegram agency, a travel agent, a stockbroker etc. They all built up a reasonable personal wealth, and most of them were not known as excessively frugal. It appears that no major legacies were left behind and every descendant had to start more or less from scratch, including Willem Hendrik Benjamin Briedé, who was born in 1873. He was the eldest child in the family and had six younger siblings. Of course, we do not know whether it was a happy family, but apparently having a large family made such an impression on him that he later had even more children of his own. But maybe that was just the result of great fertility combined with the marriage morality of the time.

At the beginning of the new century, Willem joined forces with five partners to set up N.V. Amsterdamsche Maatschappij Cereales, an import-export company specialising in the flour trade, of which he became the sole director. In this role, he made regular business trips to Belgium and Germany.

In 1901, he married Johanna Wilhelmina Sonnemann, who was of German descent. She was the daughter of a musician who had moved to the Netherlands with his wife at a relatively young age, but it is not known why. He became bandmaster (an official rank within the army) of the band of the 7th Infantry Regiment in Amsterdam, holding concerts in parks and concert halls. He died in 1887, when Johanna was only eight years old. When Johanna married Willem Briedé, she was probably already pregnant as eight months later their daughter Madeleine Wilhelmina was born. In 1903 a son was born, who was of course named Willem Hendrik Benjamin. Three years later, father Willem rented a villa in the dunes of the seaside resort of Zandvoort, also taking in his mother-in-law. She kept her daughter company when he was working during the day and sometimes even at night in Amsterdam or elsewhere. She also babysat the children and financially it was a relief for her, given her meagre pension. They had quite a prosperous life together, but unfortunately Willem and Johanna’s marriage failed miserably, according to the family stories, because Johanna was struggling more and more with mental health issues. She left for Berlin in 1910, but they did not get a divorce. In principle, a divorce was only possible in a case of adultery, so it is quite conceivable that Johanna did not cooperate for financial reasons. Or perhaps it was initially intended as a temporary separation, with Johanna receiving long-term treatment in Berlin for her psychological problems.¹

Shortly after, Willem returned to Amsterdam, where the children were placed with family. He temporarily went to live in a guest house at Stadhouderskade 48. It was run by Elizabeth Fukken, the young wife of a Navy ship steward, who also owned the guesthouse. Her father, a cigar maker, had died when Elizabeth was a child, and her mother remarried a blacksmith, which helped the family survive.

Elizabeth had joined the ship steward’s guest house four years earlier as a housekeeper, and she married him that same year. Too young to marry a man who was often away from home, she was soon seduced by her guest Willem Briedé and became pregnant by him. They were very much in love, so Elizabeth divorced her husband, but Willem could not marry her as he was still a married man.

They both agreed it would be wise for them to leave Amsterdam. In May 1912 they moved to a rented house at Van Boetzelaerlaan 140 in a fancy neighbourhood of The Hague, where Willem’s family also lived. From The Hague he could reach Amsterdam by train fairly quickly for his work. As he was also good at writing and administrative tasks, he was appointed secretary of the Association of Dutch Flour Importers. In that capacity, he prepared meetings, drafted documents and wrote letters to parliament, including a scathing treatise against import duties on flour. That showed he certainly had what it takes to work in a management role and as a journalist.²

Three months after their departure from Amsterdam, their first child, a son, was born. Shortly after, the two children from his first marriage also came over from Amsterdam. It was unfortunate but necessary that, since the parents were formally unmarried, the baby was given the mother’s surname. His first name was in honour of his parents: Willem Johan. In 1913 a daughter was born, who was again named after her parents: Elizabeth Wilhelmina.

At the end of 1913 Willem’s wife became pregnant for the third time.

Chapter 2

The birth of Engelbertus Fukken (28 August 1914): nomen est omen

On 28 July 1914, when Elizabeth was heavily pregnant, the First World War broke out when Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. This happened exactly one month after the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Habsburg and his wife had been shot dead in Sarajevo by the Bosnian Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip. In August, one declaration of war after another followed from the Allies (including Britain, France, Belgium, Russia and Italy) against the Entente Powers (including Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey and Bulgaria).

A well-known photo shows swirling masses on the Odeonsplatz in Munich during a demonstration in favour of war participation on 2 August. A young man can be spotted in that photo, albeit with some difficulty, visibly and enthusiastically cheering along. His name? Adolf Hitler, twenty-five years old, son of an Austrian customs official from the border town of Braunau am Inn. Socially, Adolf was a total failure: he was rejected by the art academies of Linz and Vienna, and ended up completely destitute in men’s guest houses, until 1913, when he received his father’s inheritance and used it to move to Munich.

On 4 August, Britain and Germany declared war on each other and he enlisted in the German army. A few weeks later, the spark that ignited the Great War was the first naval battle of the war, which took place by the small archipelago of Heligoland, thirty miles off the coast of Schleswig-Holstein. It was an enormous victory for the British. The order to attack the Germans came from the Minister responsible for the Navy, Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill. He was born on 30 November 1874 at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, which was donated by the royal family to a distant ancestor of his in gratitude for his military merits, in particular his victory over the French in a battle near Blenheim in southern Germany on 13 August 1704.

The naval battle took place on 28 August. That same day at ten o’clock in the evening, Engelbertus Fukken was born, the third child of Willem Briedé and Elizabeth Fukken.¹ This is how his short life began, on the day that Britain and Germany actually went to war. According to Chinese astrology, Engelbertus was a Tiger. I randomly quote one of the many websites in this field:

The Tiger is brave, passionate, entertaining and charismatic. He has firm convictions, is strong-willed and determined, alert and intelligent. The Tiger also has an active mind, and is often full of ideas. He loves challenges and struggles to sit still. He is independent and willing to take risks.

He is restless and sometimes quite impulsive, but inside he is often more sensitive than others would think. The Tiger needs variety; office work is not his thing. A few great jobs for a Tiger would be driver, manager, officer, missionary and writer.²

In his case this proved true to a large extent. But why was Engelbertus given this remarkable name? There are several saints with the name Engelbertus, but the Briedé family was part of the Reformed Church, and none of the other children were named after specific saints. He was given this name in honour of his mother’s nephew of the same name who had died earlier, at the age of eight, and whose family had both a Catholic and a Protestant branch.³ In those days parents often named their child after a deceased child in their family or even the newborn’s deceased sibling.

The surname Fukken is a so-called patronymic, a name derived from the father’s first name: son of Fokke (or Focke/Focque/Foeke/Fokko). That first name is derived from the old Germanic Fulco, which meant people. So Engelbertus was ‘a son of the people’. The answer to the question which people can, remarkably enough, once again be found in his first name, the Latin variant of the Germanic Angilbert, which is a compound of ‘angil’, derived from the Angles, a Germanic people and ‘bert’, which is inspired by ‘preht/precht/brecht’: radiant, beautiful, brilliant. So Engelbertus means ‘brilliant among the Angles’. The Angles were a Germanic people in the east of Schleswig-Holstein (Anglia), which in the fifth century crossed over to the large island on the other side of the North Sea, together with the Saxons from the North German lowlands (now the German state of Lower Saxony). The southeast of the British island was flooded, laying the foundations for the kingdoms of Essex, Wessex, Sussex and Middlesex, which formed the Kingdom of England under threat of the Vikings. Their inhabitants are therefore also called Anglo-Saxons. So the name of the protagonist of this book contained references to Germany, England and death: nomen est omen.

And as such, espionage was written in the stars for Engelbertus.

Chapter 3

Two spies (1914-15)

The day before Engelbertus was born, a 37-year-old German landed in Newcastle with the task of spying on the Royal Navy in the Scottish harbours. His name was Carl Hans Lody. He carried an American passport and was fluent in English. Just a month later, he began to worry about his safety because a real ‘spy phobia’ had broken out among the people of Scotland. So he fled to Ireland. That proved the right decision, because his unencrypted messages to the Germans were discovered by the British. However, he was soon arrested in a hotel in Killarney. On 6 November, he stood in front of the firing squad in the Tower of London in the first execution there in over a century and a half. He was buried in an unmarked common grave in the East London Cemetery in Plaistow along with seventeen other men – ten executed spies and seven prisoners who died as a result of ill-health or accidents. The grave received a marker in 1924. The young Bertolt Brecht wrote a eulogy for Lody the following year:

But that is why you left your life –

So one day, in the bright sunshine

German songs should pour forth in a rush over your grave,

German flags should fly over it in the sun’s gold,

And German hands should strew flowers over it.

During the Nazi era, Lody’s memory was appropriated by the new regime to promote a more muscular image of German patriotism. In 1941, another German spy was executed in the Tower of London, as we shall see.

The Netherlands had remained neutral, but the war had had a major impact on the grain trade. The core issue was whether imported grain could be transported to Germany via Rotterdam. In principle, treaty law allowed for the free transit of goods across the Rhine (right of neutral convoy), but at the same time, the countries at war had the right to detain war material for the enemy as contraband. The Declaration of London (1909) had stipulated that this applied exclusively to ‘absolute contraband’ which could only serve a military purpose. However, the British did not ratify the treaty, so those who could not prove that the grain was not destined for Germany ran the risk of it being confiscated and the British threatened to tow all ships bound for the Netherlands and Germany to English ports for inspection. So the key question for the Dutch government was how to deal with the grain destined for Germany. To this end, a government committee was set up in