Regina Diana

Seductress, Singer, Spy

Vivien Newman, David A. S. Semeraro

• Publisher: Pen & Sword History
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781473861527
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Intelligence et espionnage

The Untold Story of Rgina Diana tells of the rebellious daughter of working-class French-Italian parents from a run-down area of Geneva who, trained by the most ruthless spymaster of them all, Elisabeth Schragmller (aka Fraulein Doktor), became a much-adored French caf-concert singer, a discreet and highly prized prostitute plying her trade, and a successful German Great War spy.Reginas spy operations were full of intrigue: a network spanning four countries based in the shamed city of Marseille, with her performing abilities and sexual charms allowing her to lure men from privates to generals into giving her vital information.This book is not just about Rgina, but also explodes the much-vaunted myth of Swiss neutrality. Switzerland, a nest of spies, was riven between support for Germany and France; in an extraordinary penetration of the upper echelons of Swiss society, the Swiss Army Commander-in-Chief was married to former German Chancellor Otto von Bismarks daughter.Yet exhuming Rgina from her unmarked grave involved a tantalizing journey - getting past her disavowal by both France and Switzerland, unraveling the truth behind a three-line report about a pretty Swiss singers execution and overcoming the obfuscation of French military archivists. Even her execution was fittingly exceptional. So determined were the French authorities that she should die, her firing squad numbered not the usual twelve, but twenty-five smoking rifles.

Chapter 1

Who WAS Régina Diana?

My first interest in Régina Diana was sparked in early 2013. I was in the middle of writing We Also Served: The Forgotten Women of the First World War and was researching the spy Mata Hari. Flicking through the contemporary The War Illustrated, which gave subscribers a rather unbalanced view of the war as it unfolded, I noticed on 17 November 1917 a multi-photograph spread entitled ‘Agents of Prussia’s World-Wide Espionage’. Adjacent to the picture of Mata Hari ‘the celebrated Hindu dancer’, was another, equally grainy, image. The caption informed readers this was ‘Régina Diane [sic], a Swiss singer who had been condemned to death in France on being found guilty as a German spy’. Having been brought up in the Swiss city of Lausanne, I was immediately intrigued. Despite my early love of history and interest in the Great War, I had never heard of a Swiss singer/spy. Who was she? A quick search of the internet would surely resolve this question – or so I thought. Instead, a lengthy search produced two miniscule ‘hits’ from an Australian newspaper site but beyond the supplementary information that ‘Régina Diana’ had been condemned to death at Marseille and had, by 7 January 1918, been shot, there was little to add to The War Illustrated one-sentence teaser.

Musing over this Marseille execution, I remembered having read the diary of Nursing Sister Burgess held at the Peter Liddle Archive. Referring to Marseille in December 1917, she had asserted, ‘the town is full of spies’ and that sisters were only allowed out in ‘twos or threes during the day or in fours or sixes at night.’ Having initially dismissed this as the spy fever that was prevalent throughout the war in England, France, Germany, and, as I would eventually discover, neutral Switzerland, I had thought little of it. But, was Sister Burgess maybe referring to Régina Diana? Despite the press restrictions about reporting spying, was news of her trial and its verdict common knowledge in Marseille?

I contacted my sister, an English teacher still living near Lausanne. Perhaps she could try to track down elusive Régina Diana via a former student, a journalist for a Lausanne newspaper. She held out little hope but, used to strange requests from her history-obsessed sibling, she agreed to see what she could discover – which, despite her best efforts, turned out to be strictly nothing. She mentioned Régina to her son David, my ‘Swiss’ nephew and now co-author, and it was as though he had been hit by a lightning bolt. We HAD to find her. Undeterred by my comment that, however determined the researcher, some-times the past will not give up its secrets, this, he announced, was one secret he and I were going to uncover. We spent hours on various newspaper archive sites and got excited whenever we got a ‘hit’ with the search term ‘Swiss spy’, but the excitement turned to frustration as the spy was never ‘Régina Diana’. We tried putting requests for information on numerous English and French Great War related forums but again to little avail.

Next we emailed the City of Marseille archives. Eventually they replied – they had no information. They suggested we contact the Service Historique de la Défense (SHD) in Paris – who only respond (slowly) to written as opposed to electronic requests for information. Eventually, some six or seven months into the quest, they replied. Having expected the written equivalent of the famous Gallic shrug, I opened the letter slightly half-heartedly. To my amazement, they confirmed that a spy with the alias Régina Diana had indeed faced a firing squad in Marseille in January 1918; they provided the additional information that her real name was Marie-Antoinette Avvico and that she was not a Swiss national but had been resident in Geneva all her life (I have since discovered that if the war had broken out only a few weeks later, she would have been granted Swiss nationality and the outcome to her story may have been very different). They even helpfully provided reference numbers for the papers held at the French Military archives at the Chateau de Vincennes in Paris where documents can be consulted by those holding a reader’s pass. Surprisingly for French bureaucracy, these seemed relatively easy to acquire as long as one presented oneself with all the correct paperwork and evidence of need. We were getting somewhere, or so we thought. David and I agreed to meet in Paris, spend a day jointly going through the Avvico files and there would just be time to squeeze a couple of paragraphs about her into We Also Served then she and–at least from my point of view – my nephew, would leave me in peace.

At Vincennes, with our shiny new readers’ passes clutched in our hands, we were directed towards our allocated seats and waited for the pre-ordered documents to surface. David grinned like a Cheshire cat as our names were called and we were presented with two weighty boxes. We opened them and hundreds of dusty papers tumbled out. BUT these related to relatively minor military offences committed by poilus in the Northern French départments (roughly equivalent to British counties) of Oise (60) and Somme (80) in 1915; ‘drunk and disorderly’ was the most common misdemeanour. Sentences consisted of a couple of days in the guardhouse. There was the occasional more serious offence, but no sign of a spy or an execution. We started thumbing through quickly, desperately searching for information relating to the Southern French Bouches du Rhone départment (13) in which Marseille is situated, preferably for 1917. Maybe the papers we needed would be hidden somewhere.

It began to dawn on us that we had got the wrong boxes. I checked against my letter from the SHD and the numbers we had ordered – they tallied. The reference numbers, not the boxes, were incorrect. As these are military archives, the reading room is run along military lines, or so it seemed to my untutored eyes; our request to speak to an official who might be able to help had to go through various levels of the military hierarchy and, this being France, the reading room closed for lunch. David had to return to Switzerland that evening and I to Chelmsford, time was not on our side. Eventually, the officer in charge agreed to listen to our query. Initially we were met with an adamant ‘Non!’ No one could help us to find even the correct references and certainly, even if we found them, the boxes would not be available for at least 48 hours. Then a young NCO who had been listening to our pleas, stood to attention, threw a crisp salute and having been given permission to speak, whispered in the ear of ‘Mon Capitaine’. Having resisted the temptation to return the salute (as a military medic I am sure David would have done the Swiss Army proud), we stood up tall and smiled hopefully – maybe we were getting somewhere. ‘Mon Capitaine’ promised to see what he could do. He suggested we went to have lunch and he kindly wished us ‘Bon Appétit’ – his face suggested he would have preferred ‘Bon Voyage’!

Sitting in a restaurant near to the Chateau de Vincennes, then unbeknownst to us at the very site where Régina herself may have had a coffee when she was in Paris spying on this self-same Chateau de Vincennes, we ‘brainstormed’ why she might have been in Marseille. We produced a long list of reasonable-sounding ideas, and, suitably fortified by lunch, we returned to the fray to test our ideas against the contents of the files that we were hopeful now awaited us.

Back in the hushed atmosphere of the reading room, ‘Mon Capitaine’ summoned us to an inner sanctum where his leather-topped desk was located – not a computer in sight. He regretted to inform us that the papers could not currently be examined. He announced in a whisper that all files held on people who had been executed by the French Army during the war were being digitised; the project would be completed in November 2014 – the month my book was being published. Only then would the documents be available for public consultation. I began remonstrating. Surely this little rule could be bent for 24 hours which we thought would be long enough either to get the gist of her story or at least copy the documents. By now heartily sick of these representatives from perfidious Albion and supposedly neutral Switzerland, he took a fountain pen out of his pocket and, having located a piece of blotting paper and carefully wiped the nib, he wrote down an address – not an email but a postal one. We were instructed to write to a certain colonel who may be able to give dispensation for us to view the files but almost certainly wouldn’t – on no account were we to disclose who had given us the colonel’s name.

Having all but signed a confidentiality agreement, we decided I would write a begging letter to the colonel. (Whether we ever got an answer, I cannot now remember but I think not). In any case, it was obvious that it would be too late to include Régina in We Also Served, although I made reference to her. It seemed we would have to remain patient until the Mémoire des Hommes website went live in November 2014, at that point maybe I could place an article about her somewhere. She slipped to the back of my mind as other projects and books materialised. Then in November, I got an email from David. The site was up and running and there was indeed a database of Great War executions. He had entered her name into the search box and multiple documents had appeared. He phoned a few days later, his excitement was audible. ‘It’s an amazing story; there are pages and pages of information, photographs and the whole of the court case. We’ve GOT to do something with it.’

‘Doing something with it’ has taken us both on a long physical and metaphorical journey, one that we would never have anticipated on that February day in 2014. It is a story which needs to be set in the context in which it unfolded: a context which encompasses the history of female spies, the crises surrounding Swiss neutrality, skilled and ruthless spy handlers, the seedy world of café concert, lusty French patriotic songs and the troubled wartime history of the city of Marseille situated deep in the South of France far from the fighting fronts. All played their part in turning Marie-Antoinette Avvico into Régina Diana and leading her towards the ‘Champ de Tir du Pharo’ one early January morning in 1918.

(Vivien Newman)

An Unexpected Journey

Little did I know after hanging up the telephone following a brief conversation with my mother, that my life was about to change, profoundly. Little did I expect to be literally obsessed by an obscure woman shot for high treason a century ago. Little did I anticipate the dedication I would muster and that she would become part of my everyday life for over three years. And nothing could have prepared me for taking part in writing a book – and even writing it in English. Although half British, French is my first language and, far from being either an historian or an author, I am a Swiss Army medic.

The request my mother had relayed was, or so it seemed then, quite simple. ‘Can you try and find information concerning a Swiss female spy shot during the Great War.’ This plea came from my Aunt, Dr Vivien Newman, a renowned specialist in women’s often forgotten contributions to the First World War. Being a Swiss resident, my geographical proximity to the source of information seemed to make her request a reasonable one, particularly as she knew I had always loved history. This love was about to become an obsession.

I could never have guessed the ramifications of that simple phone call. Initially, I too turned to the internet. I entered the words: Woman Spy, Shot, 1918 into my browser, all that came back was Mata-Hari. Thousands of results for her but not a trace of the woman I was after. Not the slightest hint. Nothing! An unknown warrior…

I turned to the Archives de la Confédération Helvétique who were unable even to confirm whether Régina Diane (as we then called her) was Swiss. No record mentioned her, let alone provided any information relating to where she came from and where she had lived. One could have expected that if a Swiss national had been shot by France, there would be some trace of her. It was not to be. She was nowhere to be found…

Perhaps the real reason that I have become so intrigued is because I feel that History has been unfair to Régina Diana and I have always hated injustices. It has often been noted that history being written by the victors, spies are divided into categories those who spied for ‘our side’ are ‘good’, those working for the enemy, ‘bad’. But human beings and their actions are more complex. And as you are about to discover, the path along which this ‘enemy’ spy travelled was a fraught one. Why she chose to embark on it we can finally only surmise, but I hope that by the time you have finished reading her story you will agree that Régina Diana was an outstanding agent, despite most certainly not fighting on ‘our’ side.

(David Semeraro)

We both hope you will find this story as fascinating to read as we have found it to uncover.

Chapter 2

‘The Second Oldest Profession’

Exactly 366 days after America entered the war, The (New York) Sun, 7 April 1918, offered readers a dramatic illustrated spread: ‘Queens of the Spy World Whose Intrigues Sway the Fate of Nations’. The article’s sensational title and contents were light years away from the 1899 Hague Convention’s attempts to define and codify multiple aspects of ‘war on land and sea’ including spying which, as both the Convention delegates and The Sun journalist conceded, is integral to warfare. Chapter II ‘On Spies’, both recognized the omnipresence of intelligence and gave spies protection in law:

An individual can only be considered a spy if, acting clandestinely, or on false pretences, he obtains, or seeks to obtain information in the zone of operations of a belligerent, with the intention of communicating it to the hostile party.(Article 29)

Furthermore,

A spy taken in the act cannot be punished without previous trial. (Article 30)

Far removed from the dry language of the Convention, lurid, melodramatic spy novels and supposedly eye-witness accounts penned by those caught up in this murky underworld, gripped late nineteenth and early twentieth century readers, reaching their apotheosis during the so-called Great War for European Civilization. Melodramatic accounts of dastardly undercover wartime agents filled many newspaper columns, even neutral ones, although the veracity of the tales may not always stand up to scrutiny.

Aware of its readers’ seemingly insatiable appetite for spy material, on 8 June 1916 the widely-read francophone Swiss newspaper, La Gazette de Lausanne had published sixteen definitions of the word ‘spy’ gleaned from the writings of famous nineteenth century men (no woman’s contribution appeared). Amongst these, William Gladstone believed only ‘despotic governments and tyrants’ would surround themselves with spies, the Count of Cavour preferred ‘defeat than a victory achieved through the assistance of spies’, whilst Gustave Modena claimed spies represented the ‘lowest point’ to which humanity could stoop. Lowest point or not, spies have existed ever since mankind has sought military or commercial advantage over his fellows, with women as well as men deeply involved. In his classic fifth Century BC The Art of War, Sun Tzu devotes a whole chapter to ‘The Use of Spies’, concluding: ‘Spies are a most important element in war’; they are the ‘sovereign’s most precious faculty’. Sun Tzu acknowledges that spies come with a price to pay but to ‘grudge the outlay of a hundred ounces of silver in honours and emoluments is the height of inhumanity’.

In times and geographical locations nearer to our own than Sun Tzu’s China, references to spies abound. Doctoral candidate Bertrand Warusfel notes how as the ‘nation state’ became more firmly established in sixteenth to eighteenth century Europe, the ‘practice of secrecy’ became increasingly formalised, with bureaux developing to handle both the spies and the information they gathered.

Although The Hague Convention articles assume that spies will be masculine, a whistle-stop tour through spying in the so-called ‘Modern Era’ (c.1500 onwards) demonstrates that intelligence gathering has never been an exclusively male preserve. Régina and her fellow Great War spies were far from the first of their gender to supply their (pay)masters with crucial information. Women from very diverse backgrounds have left a significant mark on what is sometimes referred to as the ‘second oldest profession’.

(A very few) Female spies in history

Sixteenth century Queen Elizabeth I’s Secretary of State, Sir Francis Walsingham, aware of the plots and intrigues surrounding the monarch, established a network of around fifty spies; believing women’s ‘invisibility’ rendered them ideal for espionage work, some were female. In her doctoral thesis, Hsuan-Ying Tu argues that women played an important role in ‘information management as gatherers, readers, purveyors and writers of news and as spymasters’. Their unique access to the monarch enabled them to relay credible information about England’s ‘capricious Queen’. Eager to foster intelligence gathering about Elizabeth (Spain’s greatest enemy), the Spanish Ambassador cultivated pre-established contacts with Elizabeth Parr, first Marchioness of Northampton who was ‘in favour with the Queen and has served His Majesty [Philip II] when opportunity has occurred’. The queen herself was playing a similar game; she used her women of the Chamber to supply her with intelligence from foreign courts. Although not providing wartime intelligence, several of these female ‘chamberers’ were relaying and receiving information both to and from external sources some-times in the queen’s favour, sometimes, dangerously, working against it.

Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia 1596–1662

If the female spy ring surrounding Elizabeth I remains largely anonymous, more is known about her kinswoman and goddaughter, Elizabeth Stuart, sister to England’s ill-fated King Charles I. Dubbed the Winter Queen, she was a skilled linguist who even as a child was a copious letter writer. Married at the age of 17 to Frederick V, Count Palatine of the Rhine, leader of the Protestant rulers in Germany, she rapidly became the marriage’s dominant partner. Nadine Akkerman has scrutinised letters sent by Elizabeth following the couple’s 1621 exile in The Hague. Whilst those she sent through official channels were anodyne, those dispatched via Antwerp and Brussels contained secret codes and invisible ink as she sought (unsuccessfully) to rally support from diplomats, members of the clergy, and powerful Protestant rulers, for her husband’s return to his lost throne. She wrote hundreds of letters in cipher code, employing at least seven keys during her lifetime, encrypting her letters herself with hieroglyphics and the use of multiple alphabets to avoid the prying eyes of those who continued to plot against her husband. For Lisa Jardine, Elizabeth’s ‘lobbying, bargaining, negotiating and cajoling’, not to mention her cryptographic skills, ‘made her a major player during a particularly unsettled period of European history.’

Akkerman argues that far from Elizabeth’s involvement in espionage being unique in this period, there were ‘at least sixty female spies in overlapping networks’. Payment books for the English Secret Service included the names of many women – although ‘Secret Service’ could be an agent’s euphemism for a visit to a prostitute. Sometimes described as ‘adventuresses’ or even as ‘Royalist heroines’, these women were, like the spies who would walk in their footsteps between 1914 and 1918, drawn from all ranks of society: nurses, shopkeepers, actresses, noble women, even a playwright, they shared a similarity – they could, in modern terminology, ‘slip beneath the radar’. Being female, they could move about without anyone noticing or suspecting them. Régina, as we shall see, was constantly, seemingly innocently, on the move.

Aphra Behn (1640–1689)

Aphra Behn is renowned for being among the earliest female English playwrights. Her ‘other’ career is far less well known. A (possible) short-lived marriage to a Mr Behn, a merchant of Dutch extraction living in London who died in 1665, provided her with distinct advantages for the widow...