In May 1940, Rothschild submitted his report on Siemens to Liddell. ‘This combine has branches or agents in every country in the world,’ he wrote. ‘There are also subsidiaries of their own subsidiary companies, so that unless the name Siemens appears in the title the connection is hard to trace.’
Some of Rothschild’s information came from those close to or inside the firm. He drew on an interview with Henry Wright, managing director of Siemens Brothers. This had been the British branch of the company, but it had been confiscated by the British government during the First World War, and Rothschild noted that it was ‘now regarded as an English company’. Although separate from the rest of Siemens, the ties of history meant Wright was able to offer a picture of the parent firm’s link with the German government.
According to Wright, Carl Friedrich von Siemens, who now ran the company his father had founded, was ‘far from pro-Nazi’. He was a social democrat, like his father, and had refused to sack Jews from the firm ‘until the pressure had been too great’, and ‘only his importance had saved him from a concentration camp’.
But if the picture from Berlin was one of passive resistance to Hitler, Wright was less warm towards the company’s new British branch, Siemens Schukert, which he described as ‘a rabid Nazi cell’. An employee had been dismissed there in 1938 because she had Jewish blood.
Some of the British staff at the company’s two small factories in west London had deep reservations about their colleagues. Anthony Bramley had joined at the start of 1937 as a manager, and found the company mystifying. For a start, it seemed to be run at a loss. The firm would always cut a price if to do so would win a sale. Bramley thought perhaps the German parent firm was desperate for foreign currency, or perhaps it was trying to promote the Siemens name in Britain. But then he noticed other things.
Some of the firm’s German staff spent far more time on the road visiting factories than could be justified by the sales they generated. These men also returned frequently to Germany, and when they were in Britain, they were always asking questions. When they heard that he knew the manager of an aeroplane manufacturer, they were highly excited. Bramley started to wonder if it was possible his employer was actually a cover for German espionage.
After war came, Bramley felt it was his duty to go to the police and tell them his suspicions, but they weren’t very interested in hearing that one of the world’s biggest electrical firms might also be a nest of spies.
That would change after they realised that one of his colleagues had disappeared.
Willy Muller was 33 years old in September 1939, and had been working for Siemens for seven years. Though he’d been born in Hertfordshire, his German parents had moved home when he was twelve. In 1932, he’d moved with his wife and stepdaughter to Harrow, west London, where he took a job as a ‘consulting engineer’ for Siemens.
For the next seven years, Muller lived a life of glamour, at least by the standards of Northolt Road, where the family lived a conventional suburban existence in their semi-detached house. He travelled extensively around the country, visiting factories, and took regular flights back to Berlin. His neighbour, a retired policeman, concluded that he had ‘funds beyond his salary in view of his mode of holidays and frequent air trips’.
Muller was tall for the time – just a shade under six foot – and, according to his police report, had, with his blond hair combed back, a ‘typical German appearance’. He was also deeply committed to the Nazi cause, so much so that in the summer of 1939 his own cousin had reported him to Special Branch.
MI5 had actually opened a file on Muller the previous year, after intercepting a letter to him that suggested he was involved in the Nazi Party’s political activities among Germans in Britain. When the Security Service began to draw up its list of Germans who should be interned at the outbreak of war, the Mullers were on it.
But in late August 1939, Muller and his wife drove their new Triumph Coventry to the port of Harwich, in Essex, where they boarded an evening ferry to Antwerp. They’d told their neighbours they were going for a two-week driving tour of Germany, and asked them to water their plants while they were away. Their daughter had gone ahead of them. When the police arrived at their home to serve them with their internment orders on Friday 1 September, they learned that they were away until the following Monday. A watch was put on the ports.
But the Mullers didn’t return. Two months later, their neighbour, still watering their plants and no doubt increasingly troubled by the pictures of Hitler on display, reported that the house had been broken into. When the police searched it, they found swastika flags in the garage, and paperwork that showed Muller had been an active Nazi organiser among Germans locally.
All that certainly explained why the Mullers might have decided that Germany was a more comfortable place for them to stay now that war had broken out. A report came in from a relative that Willy had spent the winter of 1939 working somewhere in eastern Germany. At this point MI5 and Special Branch lost interest.
They revived it when Rothschild began looking at Siemens. The story of Muller seemed to demonstrate that the company was suspicious. He was ‘outspokenly anti-British’, Rothschild noted, and ‘described as a “pig”: disgusting in his treatment of British employees’. Here was a known Nazi who was a qualified engineer and had been visiting factories the length of the country ‘with no apparent results’. He also appeared to have a secret source of income, and had been making frequent trips to Germany. He could have come directly from the pages of Koehler’s book about the Gestapo. It was true that Muller had been working with printing and textile machinery, rather than weapons, but Koehler had offered a comment on that. Munitions and aeroplane factories were important of course, he wrote, ‘but the rubber factory supplying the pneumatic tyres for lorries or gas masks is just as important. And the otherwise innocent oil distillery whose by-product is glycerine is just as vital: glycerine is needed for nitro-glycerine and dynamite. And what about the tar factory with its by-product, benzol, which is a fundamental element of ecrasite and lyddite, the deathly contents of grenades and shrapnel?’
Siemens had been a cover for spying, Rothschild was sure of it, and it might still be. ‘An organisation like Siemens Schukert, which had been so well organised before the war, might perhaps have left some kind of Kriegsnetz behind,’ he mused.
One option was simply to shut down the company and intern all its dangerous staff. But Rothschild was more ambitious than that. His colleagues had failed so far to find the network of German spies that they were certain must be operating in Britain. Perhaps he could do it. If there were agents in Siemens, they might reveal others. The question was how to tease them out.
Rothschild’s report listed fifteen members of Siemens staff who might be of further interest. Some, like Muller, had already left Britain. Others had been interned. Neither category applied to the man who was thirteenth on the list. A clerk in his early thirties who had been in the company’s Brentford office for two years, he had been born in London, of a British mother and a German father. ‘Very pro-German,’ the report said. ‘Reported to have had numerous Nazi visitors from Germany. Denounced by Mr Bramley as being unsafe.’
The clerk’s name was Walter Wegener, and in him Rothschild saw an opportunity.
7
‘So stupid and so obvious’
Eric Roberts had now been an MI5 officer for a little over six months, and was finding the experience a mixed one. The investigations and the undercover work he was good at, but he’d known that when he’d been one of Maxwell Knight’s agents. His disappointing discovery was that the Security Service was home to just as much bureaucracy, officialdom and snobbery as banking. A clue lay in the nickname that staff gave their headquarters: the Office.
Sat behind his desk in Blenheim Palace, Roberts read the files that the Office had built up on fascists and other persons of interest. These were folders to which he had made his own contributions over the years. So it was disturbing to
him to find that many of the files were, in his words, ‘grossly inaccurate’. He had personal knowledge of these people, and found mistakes about them everywhere. Worse than that, from the point of view of the person who now found himself reading them, the files were ‘hopelessly boring’. Intercepted letters, agents’ reports on meetings, Special Branch background checks, internal notes between case officers and their superiors, the institutional memory of MI5 was held in paper. To Roberts, this was not what being a spy was about. He enjoyed the face-to-face work, using his gifts for deception to win people’s confidence.
He found his immediate superior difficult, as well. Edward Blanshard Stamp was a promising lawyer whom MI5 had recruited at the start of the war. Stamp disliked Roberts only slightly less than Roberts disliked him. He had a low opinion of Roberts’s abilities, and repeatedly reported him to Curry, who privately assured Roberts that he paid no attention to such complaints.
Stamp was uncertain about why he had a bank clerk in his section at all. The other men who had been swept into the Security Service at the start of the war were brilliant minds like himself and Rothschild. Roberts hadn’t been to university, and only a provincial school. He was clearly not officer material, yet he was held in strangely high regard around the office. What background, Stamp asked Roberts during one row, did he have for intelligence work? Roberts sourly replied that his only qualifications were years of undercover and surveillance work.
Seeing MI5 from the inside, aware of its weaknesses, Roberts started to have doubts, too, about its security. British intelligence was trying to understand the Abwehr. Surely the Abwehr was trying to do the same to them? As he knew better than most people, there were plenty of people in Britain who had felt warmly about the Nazis before the war began. Might not some of them have been recruited? It wasn’t as though fascism had been a movement restricted to the lower classes. The man who recruited him to MI5, Maxwell Knight, had been a supporter in the 1920s. Could his support have lasted longer than that? And who else had he brought in, alongside Roberts, from the British Fascisti?
And then there were the geniuses that had swept into MI5 at the start of the war. Stamp’s comments about schooling had stung Roberts. But they also revealed something of the way that the English upper orders thought: you judged a chap by the school he’d gone to. That attitude didn’t lend itself to the effective screening of recruits, especially when most of the recruits were coming from the top schools and the top universities.
As Roberts considered the organisation he’d fought for so long to be a full member of, a doubt had lodged itself in his mind about whether all of these people were themselves to be trusted.
And then, in early 1941, just as Roberts was pondering all this, he was summoned to MI5’s counter-sabotage section, known as B1C, to meet its chief, Victor Rothschild. There was a job that required his special talents. The briefing for the operation covered the Siemens company in general, and the Wegener family in particular.
In 1900, at the start of a new century, Carl Wegener stepped ashore in England. He was nineteen years old, and had left his native Germany three years earlier. After living in Paris and Brussels, he had decided to seek his fortune in London. And if not a fortune, he found a life: work as a hairdresser, and, in 1904, marriage to a local girl. A daughter, Dorothy, swiftly followed, and then in 1907 a son, Walter, was born.
Carl was prospering, and had begun applying for British citizenship, when war came. A month after Britain declared war on Germany in July 1914, the British government ordered the arrest of every German male of military age – between seventeen and fifty-five – in the country. Along with 25,000 other civilians, Carl was interned.
Just as in the Second World War, the Great War internees were held on the Isle of Man, though not in the relative comfort of houses. Instead, they spent the years, muddy and under-nourished, in a vast camp of hastily thrown-up huts that only partially protected them from the wind and the rain, with the Army, the island government and Whitehall engaged in circular arguments about whose problem they were.
The separation had a deep effect on Carl’s young family. More than twenty years later, his son could still remember how long his father had been locked up – four years, two months. Neither of them yet ten years old, Dorothy and Walter discovered that the land of their birth viewed their father – and by extension, them – as enemies. By the time Carl was finally released, they were also vanquished enemies. But one day, their father told them, being German would be something to be proud of once again.
When Walter was sixteen, his father decided to take him to discover his roots. It was 1923, and London was shaking off the effects of the Great War. Unemployment was falling as the men back from the front found work. An exciting new technology, the wireless, was revolutionising communications – the British Broadcasting Company had just launched. In Egypt, Lord Carnarvon had opened the tomb of Tutankhamen.
But in Berlin, the Wegeners found little to be optimistic about. Germany was a defeated nation, and the victors were determined it shouldn’t forget it. Punitive reparation payments were demanded from the struggling new democracy. ‘People were still walking about then without shoes and stockings,’ Walter recalled later. ‘There was a mother and two children who were physically weak from lack of food. They were holding onto the railings from weakness.’ As his son looked on, Carl wept for his country.
Although he continued to live in London, Carl never renewed his application for British citizenship. When Walter had needed a passport for their trip, Carl had applied for a German one for him. To be treated as an enemy by his adopted country and locked up for so long had left deep scars. Carl died in 1929, aged forty-eight.
Their mother had died two years earlier, so Dorothy and Walter were now alone in the world. Walter had a head for figures and by now he was working for a stockbroker in the City of London. He would stop for a beer sometimes at Schmidt’s German restaurant on Charlotte Street, whose owner had been interned with his father. The year after Carl’s death, Walter and Dorothy visited Germany together, both on German passports. Then in 1932, Walter moved there. Staying initially with a friend he’d met in Schmidt’s, he lived in the industrial city of Erfurt, in the centre of the country, learning the language, teaching English and doing translation work.
Nine years after his first visit, Walter found a different country. He liked the newly elected leader, Adolf Hitler. ‘He had only been a paper hanger, and had assumed the position of Chancellor of Germany,’ Walter said a decade later, trying to explain his feelings. ‘I have always admired a self-made man, and a man who has worked himself up by his own efforts. But my main liking for fascism was that it was directly anti-Communistic.’
The Nazis were also restoring some national pride to Germany. ‘I admired the strict discipline of the youth,’ Walter said. Seeing a picture in a German paper of Sir Oswald Mosley taking a march past from fascist girls in Hyde Park, Walter wrote to BUF headquarters in London, applying to join.
After just over two years in Germany, Walter had a row with his landlady and decided to return home. He said later that he was made to feel uncomfortable there as a foreigner, but it didn’t seem to dent his enthusiasm for Germany, and in 1938 he took a job with a German firm in England, Siemens Schukert.
Here he found enjoyed a special status as one of the few English staff who spoke German. As a supporter of fascism, he was drawn into an inner group within the firm that was working on the Nazi state’s behalf. By his own account, he’d restricted himself to propaganda, rather than getting involved in spying. He was confident that most of the company’s British staff were unaware of their activities, though the arrest the day after war broke out of one of his colleagues, an engineer with both British and German citizenship, caused Walter some doubts on that score. ‘Everybody at the office thought the British authorities have found out something,’ he recalled.
But though he didn’t know it, he was outspoken enough to be the subject of a Special Branch inv
estigation the following month. ‘There is no doubt that both Walter and Dorothy Wegener are strongly in sympathy with Nazi Germany,’ it concluded.
When news came through in the middle of September 1939 of the first engagement between the Royal Navy and Germany’s U-boat fleet, which had ended with the torpedoing of a British aircraft carrier, Walter hadn’t bothered to conceal his feelings. ‘Has recently gloated over the sinking of HMS Courageous, and the fact that so many of the staff of Siemens have been called up for service whilst he is free,’ reported MI5’s file on him.
When Churchill gave the order in May 1940 to widen the internment of Germans, Walter got a knock at the door. The police searched his house, and took him to Brixton Prison.
The day after his arrest, Walter wrote to the Home Office asking to be released. ‘I have at no time in the whole of my thirty-three years of my life acted in any way hostile to this country or to the reigning government of His Majesty’s Crown,’ he began. But he had a humanitarian case for release, as well: Dorothy. ‘My sister is at present living alone and her health is in a very critical state,’ he explained. ‘She is suffering from severe depression.’
Dorothy had attempted to kill herself that January, Walter revealed. ‘It was purely due to a miracle that the hospital doctors were able to save her life.’ After a month in a mental hospital, she had been allowed to come home, on condition that her brother would care for her. ‘Doctors and specialists who have attended her have given me specific instructions not to let her live alone,’ he wrote. ‘The reaction would certainly prove fatal.’
Agent Jack Page 12