On the day before his execution at the Tower of London on 6 November 1914 as a German spy following his earlier conviction - the first German to be executed by Britain during the war - Carl Lody wrote three, possibly four letters, two of which are reproduced here. The first was to the commanding officer at the Tower of London, in which Lody gave thanks for his fair treatment. The second was to relations back home in Stuttgart, in which he said his farewells and reiterated that his trial had been handled fairly. London, Nov, 5th 1914 Tower of London To the Commanding Officer of the 3rd Battalion Gren. Guards. Wellington Barracks Sir, I feel it my duty as a German officer to express my sincere thanks and appreciation towards the staff officers and men who were in charge of my person during my confinement. Their kind and considered treatment has called my highest esteem and admiration as regards good fellowship even towards the enemy and if I may be permitted, I would thank you for making this known to them. I am, Sir, with profound respect: Carl Hans Lody. Senior Lieutenant, Imperial German Naval Res. II. London, Nov, 5th 1914 Tower of London (To relations in Stuttgart) My dear ones, I have trusted in God and He has decided. My hour has come, and I must start on the journey through the Dark Valley like so many of my comrades in this terrible War of Nations. May my life be offered as a humble offering on the alter of the Fatherland. A hero's death on the battlefield is certainly finer, but such is not to be my lot, and I die here in the Enemy's country silent and unknown, but the consciousness that I die in the service of the Fatherland makes death easy. The Supreme Court-Martial of London has sentenced me to death for Military Conspiracy. Tomorrow I shall be shot here in the Tower. I have had just Judges and I shall die as an Officer, not as a spy. Farewell. God bless you, Hans.
Britain was swept with spy mania in the opening stages of the conflict. Novelists such as William Le Queux, who wrote German Spies In England, Erskine Childers, author of The Riddle Of The Sands and John Buchan of The Thirty-Nine Steps fame helped stoke a fever of speculation that legions of German agents would be using secret codes and radio-telegraphy to tell Berlin the whereabouts of the British Grand Fleet. One single naval defeat in the Channel or North Sea, it was widely feared, would be enough for the German army – far larger than the British – to be landed on our soil, after which it could have been only a matter of time before London fell. The novelist Saki even wrote a short story, When William Came, about London occupied by the Kaiser. Civilians were asked to be vigilant. All private radio transmitters were ordered to be dismantled. The underwater cables connecting Germany to the rest of the world were cut by the Royal Navy and as one eyewitness reported: “From the waves slowly rose great snake-like monsters, thick with slime and seaweed growths, responding reluctantly to the grapnels which dragged them to the surface and laid their bulk athwart the deck of a boat, soon to be returned, severed and useless, to the depths.” Thousands of German, Austrian and Hungarian aliens were interned and more than 4,000 people were employed by the Post Office to open letters that were deemed to pose a risk. Yet this book reveals how the German attempt to spy on Britain was hopelessly compromised three years before the war began when in 1911 Kaiser Wilhelm II visited London in the company of the chief of intelligence of the German admiralty. One evening the spy chief was followed by New Scotland Yard officers to a hairdressing salon near Pentonville Prison at 402a Caledonian Road, run by a 42-year-old German called Karl Gustav Ernest. British counter-espionage quickly established that this was the HQ of the entire German espionage operation in Britain. When war broke out in August 1914, no fewer than 21 German agents were arrested. Henceforth, the Reich would have to try to get an entirely new operation up and running without any of its most seasoned undercover agents. The people they recruited made every mistake in the book and were so incompetent that it was almost comically farcical – except that for each of the 11 there was only a firing squad at the end of it. Handsome, blue-eyed 39-year-old Carl Lody travelled to Edinburgh in August 1914, booking himself into the North British Hotel under the alias Charles A Inglis. He sent coded telegrams back to the Continent describing the warships he could see in Leith Harbour, and visited London and Liverpool. Yet when using a different alias he merely crossed out the original name on his luggage labels, and when he was arrested in Killarney in Ireland they found £14 in German gold, 750 Norwegian kroner and a cipher key among his belongings. His identity was discovered because he had not removed a tailor’s ticket inside his jacket pocket, which said “Lody”. Carl Frederick Muller, though an expert in five languages, was equally unlucky. Arriving in Hull on January 11, 1915, he travelled to London and booked into a boarding house under the name C Lempret. Using lemon juice as invisible ink to write about troop movements, he sent much useful information but made the mistake of recruiting an accomplice, the far less intelligent John Hahn. When Hahn sent a letter with invisible ink to Rotterdam and stupidly put his address on the back of the letter, Inspector George Riley of New Scotland Yard swooped and arrested both men. Haicke Janssen and Willem Roos pretended to be cigar salesmen, sending orders for cigars back to their controllers that were in reality reports about the movements of Royal Navy vessels. MI5 was alerted by the vast numbers of cigars that the two men seemed to be ordering, when seamen tended to smoke cigarettes and pipes instead. Ernst Waldemar Melin was a Swedish former drug addict who spied for Germany for cash. He reported the zeppelin war over London and occasionally about submarines. British Intelligence intercepted his reports, also written in lemon juice, and when they searched his flat they found a *bottle of it on the mantelshelf. He tried to explain that “he uses the lemon juice for his complexion after shaving” but was found guilty and died “with the greatest resignation, like the gentleman he once was”. Dapper Augusto Roggen arrived at Tilbury in May 1915 pretending to be a buyer of agricultural implements, a subject about which he knew nothing. When police raided his flat they found a piece of blotting paper with the name of another German spy, George Breeckow. Roggen faced death by firing squad, refusing to wear a blindfold. Fernando Buschman, who was caught because he had funds wired to a bank from a suspect address that MI5 was watching, asked to play his violin the night before his execution. Louise Wertheim, an attractive German-Polish divorcee, made the elementary error of signing the register “Wertham” having booked into a hotel under her real name. She was sent to Broadmoor but three other agents were executed – Irving Ries, Albert Meyer and Ludovic Hurowitz-y-Zender. It was fortunate for Britain, fighting for her very existence, that the spies sent were so ill-trained. As this book shows, if that German intelligence chief had not made that fatal trip to London’s Cal*edonian Road in 1911, the Great War might have gone very differently. Shot In The Tower by Leonard Sellers
