by Helen Fry
In early March 1943, Lustig was on leave and staying in London. His mother’s cousin had introduced him to two friends in the city, Norman and Christel Marsh. Christel was of German origin and her husband, a barrister by profession, was a captain in the Intelligence Corps. Lustig visited them several times during his army leave and often expressed frustration at not being able to do something worthwhile for the war effort. Norman listened patiently but gave nothing away. He asked Lustig if he would be willing to transfer to a special unit that was looking for fluent German speakers. Behind the scenes, Norman put his name forward.
On 18 March 1943, Lustig arrived outside the Metropole Building in Northumberland Avenue, London for an interview. Inside were about a dozen other candidates waiting for interview, all ex-refugees from Germany or Austria. Some of them had already transferred to other units and were no longer serving in the Pioneer Corps. He was ushered into an interview room where a board of six officers that included one woman (now known to have been Catherine Townshend) sat around a horseshoe-shaped table. He made a sufficiently good impression to be asked for a second interview after the lunch break. He recalled:
The second interview was with two civilians who I am convinced were from MI5. There was little they did not know about me – they knew for instance that I had corresponded with my parents while they were still in Germany, and that they were now in Portugal. As far as I can recall, I was not interrogated about my political views at all.11
Lustig left that afternoon with no idea whether he had been accepted. He returned to the Pioneer Corps and life carried on as before. Two months later, on 17 May 1943, he received a telegram asking him to report again to the Metropole Building. The following day, he arrived there to be informed by intelligence staff that he was to take the Metropolitan Line to Chalfont & Latimer where he would be met at the station. Having been handed the necessary train ticket, he left the building none the wiser about his new unit. That same day, he penned a letter to his parents, uplifted by new military successes in North Africa after Montgomery’s 8th Army had taken Tunis:
We have been reading the reports of English journalists about Germans streaming into captivity, who this time – for the first time – have not been fighting to the bitter end, as if they were fairy tales – too good to be true. Let’s hope that German morale will soon start to break in other places as well.
The next day, 19 May, Lustig took the underground to Chalfont & Latimer. At the railway station, he was met by a driver in military uniform and driven to nearby Latimer House. On arrival, he discovered that the unit was a special prisoner-of-war camp. He was immediately issued with three stripes – the sleeve insignia of a sergeant – and told to report to Colonel Kendrick the following day. ‘I was stunned,’ he said, ‘by the fact that I had been promoted from private to sergeant – three ranks in one go!’
The contrast to life in the Pioneer Corps could not have been more stark. Sergeants and sergeant-majors had their own Mess with easy chairs for relaxation and a wireless to listen to radio broadcasts. Sergeants of the intelligence staff had their own Mess and did not mix with staff not involved in intelligence activities. Personnel were not allowed to discuss their work with each other.
Lustig vividly remembered his first meeting with his new commanding officer. Colonel Kendrick explained the nature of the work as a secret listener and impressed on Lustig the importance of not telling anyone about it, not even family or close friends. Kendrick passed him a form and asked him to sign the Official Secrets Act. Before dismissing him, Kendrick said something which Lustig never forgot: ‘Your work here is as important as firing a gun in action or joining a fighting unit.’
The irony was not lost on Lustig. Back in November 1938 when the Nazis had unleashed Kristallnacht, he and his family had feared for their lives and, like many Jews, had gone into hiding. That terrifying night they were expecting a telephone call from Lustig’s brother who had already escaped to America. The Gestapo were known to tap the telephones of Jews and political opponents of the regime. Fritz recalled:
Many people even suspected that secret microphones had been attached to their telephones which would enable the Gestapo to listen in to conversations while the receiver was on the hook, and therefore piled several cushions on top of their telephones in order to muffle the sound reaching the supposed microphone.
At the height of the terror being inflicted on the Jews of Germany that fateful night in 1938, Lustig’s family managed to get a telegram to his brother warning him not to telephone them for fear of the consequences. Nearly five years later, Fritz found himself working for British intelligence against the Nazis. His loyalty to the country which had saved him was never in doubt, but now his adopted country finally trusted him with their most closely guarded secrets. In a twist of fate, the man who once feared being bugged by the Gestapo was himself about to bug the conversations of Nazis.
How did Lustig feel about bugging German prisoners and spying on his country of birth? He replied: ‘They were no longer our compatriots.’
ÉMIGRÉ LISTENERS
The secret listeners had similar backgrounds and tales of how they fled Nazi Germany. Fritz’s friend, Peter Ganz, was originally from Mainz. The 20-year-old Ganz was firmly agnostic, but this did not save him from the Nazi threat, even though his grandparents had converted from Judaism to the Lutheran Church. Ganz was arrested by the Gestapo as a ‘non-Aryan’ and transported to Buchenwald concentration camp.12 It was six weeks before he was one of the lucky ones to be released after a guarantor came forward. He fled to England where, in 1939, he enrolled as a student of German and Spanish at King’s College London. His studies were interrupted in 1940 when, as an enemy alien, he was arrested and interned on the Isle of Man from where he managed to enlist in the Pioneer Corps and eventually became a secret listener with MI19 at Trent Park.
John Gay (born Hans Ludwig Göhler) finally escaped Nazi Germany after spending time in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Like the other secret listeners, he joined the Pioneer Corps in 1943, then transferred to the Intelligence Corps and was based at Latimer House and Wilton Park. He later became a renowned photographer and wartime scenes of the Wilton Park estate are amongst some of his photographic works.
Also at Latimer were Hans Stern (an eminent professor of linguistics) and Hans Francken (Hannen Geoffrey Francken) who transferred there in August 1943. At the end of the war, like the other secret listeners, Francken was given an exemplary reference from the Intelligence Corps which stated:
This Sergeant has been doing work of great secrecy and has shown all those qualities of tact and discretion that were required. He has a wide experience in handling difficult people and situations and possesses an agreeable personality. He speaks fluent French and German and seems well suited for a position of trust and responsibility.13
Secret listener Herbert Newhouse (born Herbert Heinrich Neuhaus in Berlin in 1908) also received high recommendation: ‘This NCO has been in the Intelligence Corps for more than two years and has been engaged on special and highly secret duties with absolute integrity.’14 Herbert had fled to England with his father in 1933 and set up an import/export company. He went on to marry Ilse Frank, a refugee and the daughter of Theodore Frank, a director of the Deutsche Bank. Herbert was interned on the Isle of Man in 1940, from where he enlisted in the Pioneer Corps, and then transferred to the Royal Army Service Corps. He began working for British intelligence in January 1944, most probably first at Trent Park before being transferred to Latimer House.
Another listener was Rudi Oppenheimer, a lawyer, who had fled Nuremberg with his wife in 1934. After a brief spell in internment, Rudi joined the Pioneer Corps and trained in Ilfracombe, North Devon. He served from 10 September 1940 until May 1942 when he joined the Royal Army Service Corps (RASC). Then from 18 March 1944, he transferred to the Intelligence Corps and was based in the M Room at Wilton Park. He remained with MI19 until 28 December 1945.
Some émigré listeners were sent to Tr
ent Park to listen in to the conversations of the German generals. They rarely crossed between the CSDIC sites because they would learn to recognise the individual voices of the generals. This included Eric Mark who was born in Magdeburg, Germany as Erich (Meyer) Mark, and fled the Nazi regime in January 1935. During the war, Eric enlisted in the Pioneer Corps and transferred to the Intelligence Corps on 1 March 1944. He was posted first to Wilton Park and then Trent Park where he eavesdropped on the generals’ conversations. He remembers the generals talking about the V-2 at Peenemünde, and their reaction to the failed assassination attempt on Hitler’s life in July 1944. Nine months later he was promoted to sergeant major.
Secret listener Alfred Fleiss was born in 1903 in Czernowitz at the eastern end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father was in the textile trade and eventually moved the family to Chemnitz. Alfred studied law in Berlin, Leipzig and Heidelberg, receiving a doctorate in 1926. He became a successful lawyer in Chemnitz, but lost his job when the Nazis came to power in 1933. Because of business connections in England, Alfred was able to leave Germany and start again in London. In 1942, he volunteered for the British forces and joined the Royal Army Service Corps, then transferred to the Intelligence Corps. Fleiss never spoke about his work, but next to wartime photographs in an album, he wrote: ‘Hush Hush job … The rest is silence.’15
Teddy Schächter, who anglicised his name to Teddy Chester, told his family that he had worked for MI5 but could never speak about the work.16 They accepted that and only after his death, as a result of this research, did his wife and family finally discover that he had been one of the secret listeners. He appeared in a photograph with other secret listeners outside Latimer House.
George Pulay was born in Vienna on 5 March 1923, the son of eminent skin specialist Dr Erwin Pulay and Ida Pulay. After Hitler’s annexation of Austria in March 1938, George’s father was immediately at risk because of the Gestapo round-up of Jewish intellectuals and professionals. Dr Pulay came to England during 1938 ahead of his wife and children, aided by Kendrick, who was then acting as the British Passport Officer in Vienna. By 1939, Ida managed to come to England with son George and daughter Uli. At the outbreak of war, George Pulay was not old enough to enlist in the British forces and therefore did not come to MI19 via the usual route. In 1943, possibly as a result of voluntarily enlisting in the British forces, George was drafted straight into the Intelligence Corps and posted to Latimer House where he became close friends with Fritz Lustig.
Secret listener Paul Douglas, who had anglicised his name from Konrad Paul Korn, remembered Kendrick as: ‘A fair man, discreet and the right man for the job. He understood our situation – the situation of the refugees who worked for him.’17 Douglas joined the unit in May 1943 and served in it until the end of the war. He recalled:
Unlike other intelligence staff on the site, we never saw the prisoners and they never saw us. We were never bored. It was a highly interesting job and most of the prisoners were cooperative. I remember on one occasion I overheard a prisoner saying in his cell, ‘the buggers know everything.’ The prisoner was referring to his British captors. We needed confirmation of facts. If something was mentioned 2 or 3 times, or more, from different POWs, then we knew it to be true. Our work was secret and very isolated.18
How did he feel about bugging the conversations of his former countrymen? Douglas replied: ‘I never felt I was betraying Germany. Germany betrayed me.’
Prisoners were not permitted to leave their rooms for any length of time to avoid discussing critical information out of range of the hidden microphones. Apart from half an hour in the exercise yard and visits to the toilet, they remained in their rooms. The environment was always geared towards encouraging the prisoners to talk and therefore they were only permitted one newspaper a day – enough to stimulate conversation between each other. Literature was kept to a minimum so the prisoners spent time talking rather than reading. An exception to this was at Trent Park where the German generals were given newspapers and books, also complete freedom and access to the house and immediate grounds. But not a single moment of the prisoners’ waking day was left unmonitored, as Lustig recalled:
We were organised into squads of up to twelve operators; each squad divided into two shifts of 6 operators and an officer in charge. We worked in two shifts: early and late. The early shift started after breakfast at 8 am and ended at 4 pm. The late shift began at 4 pm and finished whenever the prisoners stopped talking and had gone to sleep. This could be as late as 11 pm or midnight.
A night duty officer always slept in the M Room overnight in case of an emergency.19 Weekends were treated as normal working days but operators were given one day off a week which had to be booked in advance so that there was always sufficient cover in the M Room. Access to the M Room remained highly restricted – the key to it only given to staff working there. Other intelligence staff did not know of its existence.
There were roles too for other émigrés who had fled Nazism. Unbeknown to the family until decades later, Czech refugee Ernst Lederer, grandfather of comedian Helen Lederer, worked at Trent Park for British intelligence. Ernst was originally from Teplice, Sudetenland, and spoke fluent German and Czech.20 He fled in the 1930s and came to England. Having contacts in Britain, he began rebuilding his business and then in 1941 was conscripted into the Home Guard where he was purportedly tasked with guarding Hampstead Heath. It was believed he kept in touch with people from the Czech resistance, which brought him to the attention of the British intelligence service. Granddaughter Helen Lederer recalls:
Little did my Grandmother know that when she waved him off to guard the Heath that Big Baba, as I called him, was heading for Trent Park to take up a very different role. Only letters and medals have since revealed what he did. His job, as an officer, was to oversee the ‘tapping of Hitler’s Generals’. This role was highly secret – and having been recruited by M19, he kept his secret to the grave. Big Baba was known for his charm and I can see that his infamous ‘affability’ would have been most expedient when it came to leading and goading information out of the incarcerated generals, where he was tasked with assessing their character and interviewing them personally in German. They must have wondered who he was in Home Guard uniform with fluent German! In fact, the work he did was vital in working out who the German prisoners were, where they fitted into the Nazi hierarchy and what intelligence they could be coerced to give up. This not only gave an indication into attitudes towards Hitler, but also crucial information on weapons, tactics and vital evidence into the Holocaust. However, I know this opportunity would have been especially bitter sweet for him – given his memories of the country he had to leave behind. He saw his own mother drop dead in the street from shock and many close family members perished in concentration camps.21
In the family’s possession is a letter addressed to Captain Lederer from Major General J.A. Sinclair (the then Director of Military Intelligence):
I wish to convey my real gratitude for and appreciation of the assistance you have given to my interrogation organisation in respect of POWs captured during recent operations on the Continent. Your keenness and self-sacrifice in volunteering to assist in this work, and the efficiency shown in its execution, have materially contributed to these satisfactory results. Thank you again for what you have done.22
Such a personal letter from the Director of Military Intelligence is rare. The secret listeners and other intelligence personnel did not routinely receive a personal letter. It is now believed that Lederer aided the interrogation teams by posing as a stool pigeon, discarding his Home Guard uniform for that of a fellow German officer.23
LAYERS OF DECEPTION
The deception plan was multi-layered and included not only surreptitiously recording the private conversations of the prisoners, but also their formal interrogations. The main reason for emphasising the camp’s function as an interrogation centre was all part of MI19’s complex gambit. German prisoners expected to be interrogated aft
er capture, and British intelligence believed that if the POWs underwent extensive interrogation they would not suspect their informal conversations too were being bugged in their cells. The interrogation rooms were ‘miked’ back to the M Room where the secret listeners monitored and recorded information which the intelligence officer was gaining from a particular POW. The interrogator could not take notes during questioning without running the risk of a prisoner clamming up, thus a fairly relaxed but prolonged interrogation was carried out to enable the prisoner to feel less inhibited. At their sets in the M Room, the secret listeners quietly recorded aspects of the interrogation which they had been primed to listen for. Today, the reports of interrogations also survive in the National Archives.24
There was yet another dimension to this. Having heard the interrogation through the earpieces, the secret listener knew what aspects were likely to come up in conversation once the prisoner had returned to his cell. ‘All prisoners were interrogated several times,’ recalled Lustig. ‘Always by officers not working in our monitoring section. We never dealt with any of them face-to-face. Their reaction to interrogation was often particularly fruitful. They would tell their cell-mate what they had been asked about, what they had managed to conceal from the interrogator and how much we (the British) already knew.’
Lustig commented: ‘The prisoners never complained about their conditions, so they must have been reasonably comfortable.’ British-born Cynthia Turner (née Crew), who worked in the Air Intelligence section, corroborates this and adds: ‘I certainly never saw any written complaints about accommodation from the prisoners. I saw a few complaints from German Prussian officers about the way Hitler was conducting the war.’25