Hitler's British Traitors

The Secret History of Spies, Saboteurs and Fifth Columnists

Tim Tate

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781785784057
• eBook ISBN:
  9781785784064
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

'Tim Tate, in Hitler's British Traitors, [explores] the entire grimy landscape of British treachery during the Second World War and the astonishing rogues' gallery of traitors working to help Nazi Germany win. [He makes] excellent use of the vast trove of material declassified by MI5 in recent years.' - Ben Macintyre, The Times 





Hitler's British Traitors is the first authoritative account of a well-kept secret: the British Fifth Column and its activities during the Second World War.





Drawing on hundreds of declassified official files – many of them previously unpublished – Tim Tate uncovers the largely unknown history of more than 70 British traitors who were convicted, mostly in secret trials, of working to help Nazi Germany win the war, and several hundred British Fascists who were interned without trial on evidence that they were working on behalf of the enemy. Four were condemned to death; two were executed.







This engrossing book reveals the extraordinary methods adopted by MI5 to uncover British traitors and their German spymasters, as well as two serious wartime plots by well-connected British fascists to mount a coup d'etat which would replace the government with an authoritarian pro-Nazi regime.







The book also shows how archaic attitudes to social status and gender in Whitehall and the courts ensured that justice was neither fair nor equitable. Aristocratic British pro-Nazi sympathizers and collaborators were frequently protected while the less-privileged foot soldiers of the Fifth Column were interned, jailed or even executed for identical crimes.

CHAPTER ONE

A Wake-up Call

‘Jessie Jordan. The least sentence I can impose upon you, having regard to the grave nature of the offences to which you have pleaded guilty, is that you be detained in penal servitude for four years.’

Lord Justice Clerk Aitchison, trial judge

High Court, Edinburgh, Monday, May 16, 1938

Jessie Jordan did not look like a spy.

The 51-year-old, twice-married grandmother was still pretty, but tending towards fat. Her clothes were plain, not haute couture, and as befitted the owner of a small hairdressing salon in a working-class district of Dundee, her blonde hair was curled but not stylish. She was, in short, unremarkable. Yet, according to the evidence presented in court, for two years the outwardly-respectable woman in the dock had sold military information to Nazi Germany and was the central figure in a major espionage ring stretching throughout Europe and across the Atlantic to New York and Washington, DC.

The discovery of Jessie Jordan’s network should have sounded an alarm inside the British government and its intelligence services, for it revealed both the extent to which Hitler’s spymasters had planted agents in the nations with which Germany would shortly be at war – and the willingness of otherwise unexceptional men and women to betray their country.

*

The Abwehr – Germany’s military intelligence service – began life in 1920 as an unfavoured department within the Reichswehr, the country’s first national army since its defeat in the First World War. The upper echelons of the Reichswehr were dominated by remnants of the Prussian military caste, who viewed espionage as a dishonourable profession; for the first years of its life the Abwehr was staffed by only three regular army officers and seven brought out of retirement.

Despite this unpromising start, by the end of the 1920s, bolstered by an amalgamation with the naval intelligence division of the Reichsmarine, it had grown substantially and had sufficient resources to operate three separate divisions; one began seeking out potential agents in both the United States and Britain. But the first British spy to join the Abwehr’s payroll walked, quite literally, in off the street.

In August 1932, a 21-year-old British Army lieutenant checked into the Hotel Stadt Kiel on Berlin’s Mittelstrasse. A few days later he obtained the address and telephone number of the German War Office from the hotel porter and, from a phone box on the tree-lined Unter den Linden boulevard, called the number he had been given. He was quickly connected to a ‘Major Mueller’ and a rendezvous was arranged under the left-hand arch of the Brandenburg Gate.

The Abwehr officer said he would be easy to recognise: he would be carrying a newspaper and ‘the lower part of his face was covered with scars … caused by the explosion of a hand grenade’.1

The British officer was Norman Baillie-Stewart, the son of a lieutenant colonel in the British Indian Army who had served with distinction during the First World War. Baillie-Stewart had followed family tradition and entered the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, where as a cadet he was appointed as an orderly to Prince Henry, son of King George V. In 1929 he was commissioned as a subaltern with the Seaforth Highlanders and posted to India’s north-west frontier; here, according to notes in his Army file, he earned a reputation as ‘conceited, bombastic and self-important’2 and was unpopular among his men for provoking unnecessary conflict with the Afridi tribesmen ranged against them.

Baillie-Stewart returned to England early in 1932, and requested a transfer to the Royal Army Service Corps. While waiting for orders to report to his new regiment he put in for leave to visit Germany, ostensibly for a holiday. He received War Office approval on August 1, and left Harwich the same day.

His arrival in Berlin attracted attention – not least because his chosen hotel, the Stadt Kiel, was seedy, had a reputation for what MI5 delicately termed ‘ill repute’ and was ‘one at which no British officer should stay’.3 A Russian informant passed the titbit of news on to the British Air Attaché in Berlin, who prepared a report for his masters at the War Office in London.

Baillie-Stewart, meanwhile, kept his appointment with Major Mueller. Over a light lunch the Abwehr officer handed Baillie-Stewart a ‘questionnaire’ and a list of detailed questions about British military organisation and weapons under development for the Army. The latter was, Mueller admitted, a test: if the young subaltern was, as he claimed, willing to betray his country, he should return home, obtain the information and bring it to a second meeting in Holland.4

On his return to England Baillie-Stewart set about collecting the documents Mueller had asked for: a list of British ‘War Establishments’ and a handbook on the tactics of modern Army formations. On August 28 he took a ship from Harwich to the Hook of Holland and delivered them to his Abwehr handler, receiving £10 in Bank of England notes – equivalent to almost £500 today – for his trouble. They agreed to meet again in the middle of October; at that rendezvous in Rotterdam, Baillie-Stewart handed over the latest War Establishments list and a manual of British military small arms. Mueller was evidently pleased, paying his spy another £10 – and requesting further military information.

Back in England, Baillie-Stewart motored down from London to the Army’s military library in Aldershot. On the pretext of studying for Staff College exams, he borrowed a sheaf of top-secret documents, including the technical specifications and photographs of an experimental tank, details of a new automatic rifle, and mobilisation tables for the Aldershot Command. He delivered these to Mueller on October 30, and pocketed another £10 note in payment.

The Abwehr handler also provided his agent with the address of a German Secret Service accommodation flat in Berlin where Baillie-Stewart was to send further documents, and instructions to sign all his letters with the codename ‘Alphonse Poiret’. Between November 1932 and January the following year, Baillie-Stewart posted to Germany a succession of secret papers, including rough sketches of two more experimental tanks and a list of Army officers Baillie-Stewart believed were employed by MI5 or MI6. For these he was rewarded with two payments totalling £505 – equivalent to £3,000 today.

By this time, the report from the Air Attaché had arrived in Room 505 of the War Office in Whitehall. Its occupant was a tubby 46-year-old major, notionally employed as a staff officer with the 55th Anti-Aircraft Brigade of the Royal Artillery; in reality, William Edward Hinchley-Cooke was MI5’s most senior spycatcher.

He had been born in 1894; his father was British, his mother German, and he had spent the first twenty years of his life in Dresden. On the outbreak of war in 1914 he was repatriated to England where, on the recommendation of a senior diplomat, he was recruited by Sir Vernon Kell, head of the nascent Security Service. Because ‘Cookie’, as he was universally known within the War Office, spoke English with a discernible German accent, Kell found it necessary to inscribe his official pass with the words: ‘He is an Englishman.’6

On November 30, 1932, Hinchley-Cooke obtained a Home Office warrant to monitor letters sent from (and to) Baillie-Stewart’s address in Southsea: the intercept revealed a continuing exchange of correspondence with the German Secret Service; on January 23, 1933 Baillie-Stewart was arrested and charged with ten counts of espionage. In April, two months after Hitler seized power in Germany, Norman Baillie-Stewart was sent to prison for five years.7

His case attracted enormous press and public attention. For the first few months of his sentence, Baillie-Stewart was held in the Tower of London; while MPs filed parliamentary questions,8 sightseers flocked to watch him take his daily exercise in the Tower’s grounds. After his transfer to more mundane accommodation in Maidstone prison, Baillie-Stewart cashed in on his celebrity status as ‘The Officer in the Tower’, selling a serialisation of his life story to the tabloid Daily Sketch.

His motives for treachery appear to have been both financial and political: his Army records indicate that he left India in considerable debt – the result of attempting to maintain an aristocratic polo-playing lifestyle on the relatively meagre pay of a junior subaltern. But more important, according to MI5’s account of his eventual confession, was a desire for revenge.

His life with his regiment had been an unhappy one, especially in India, wher...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Prelude
• Introduction
• CHAPTER ONE: A Wake-up Call
• CHAPTER TWO: Target Britain
• CHAPTER THREE: A Nation Unprepared
• CHAPTER FOUR: ‘The Shadow of the German Sword’
• CHAPTER FIVE: The Last Spies of Peace
• CHAPTER SIX: Phoney War
• CHAPTER SEVEN: ‘Perish Judah!’
• CHAPTER EIGHT: Lords Traitorous
• CHAPTER NINE: Two Weeks in May
• CHAPTER TEN: Assisting the Enemy
• CHAPTER ELEVEN: The Kensington Conspiracy
• CHAPTER TWELVE: ‘A Revolutionary Dictatorship Should be Imposed’
• CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Password ‘Peter Leigh’
• CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Witch-finding
• CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Humble Tools and Real Criminals
• CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Treachery and Death
• CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: ‘Most Frank and Attractive’
• CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: ‘Rosebud’ and the Road to Entrapment
• CHAPTER NINETEEN: Dorothy, Dormouse and Jack
• CHAPTER TWENTY: The Marita Network
• CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: After the War
• Afterword
• Acknowledgements
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Plates
• About the Author
• Copyright