Jordan played vital role in subversive operations
married German waiter Frederick Jordan, from Hamburg, while working in Dundee. They moved to his home city, she became a German citizen and their first child was born in 1914.
Her husband was killed on the western front in World War I. She became a hairdresser to support her family, then remarried and tried to make it as a singer and actress. Officially, she returned to Scotland aboard the SS Europa to Leith in 1937 because she had just divorced her second husband Baur Baumgarten and needed family Baumgarten a documents.
But in reality, she was sent by German intelligence Abwehr officer Jennie Schluetter to sketch drawings of naval bases then send them to Hamburg help the Luftwaffe in bombing to raids.
After travelling around the UK and sending packages to the same Hamburg PO box, which was under surveillance by MI5, she applied to set up her own hair salon in Dundee. But she was no suave spy. Her behaviour was so dodgy that the couple selling the business searched her bag and found a map with military bases marked on it, and passed it to the police. Her main rolle was as a central hub of communication between the UK and New York spy cells and the Abwehr offices in Germany. Tim said: “Jordan is the polar opposite to Mata Hari but what her case showed was that the Germans were determinedly trying to penetrate Britain’s military security.
“At the time, the British lived by old rules of polite fair play. Playing by the rules was of no interest to the Germans, but we continued to do so.
“The book shows they never really interviewed Jordan properly to find out the full details of who she was working for because they felt it didn’t seem fair to do that, and even prevented the US from interviewing her about the New York-based spy ring.
“That happened again and again through the early and middle years of the war – we didn’t learn the lesson.”
Part of her job was to forward mail from New York spies plotting to abduct a US general, and she was the postbox for many active operatives.
But MI5 were watching. In February 1938, she was arrested and sentenced to four years hard labour.
She was interred for the duration of the war and in 1945 returned to Hamburg to care for her grandchildren in the remnants of the old Germany. She died in 1964.
After her arrest, she said: “I did not take this step because I bore Britain any ill will or had become pro-German. Nothing could be further from the truth. I only did it to oblige friends in Germany and because I felt it would afford some excitement.”
An altogether more dangerous sedition ring was the network of aristocratic Nazi agents and sympathisers.
Several Scottish lords and earls were involved in backing the German side at government level – including Lord William Frances Forbes-Semphill, the Duke of Bedford Lord Tavistock, and the 8th Duke of Buccleuch, Walter John Montague Douglas Scott, with the highest profile being notorious anti-Semite Archibald Ramsay and his wife Ismay.
Ramsay was the Conservative Party MP for South Midlothian and Peebles, and lived in Kellie Castle near Arbroath, but was working actively to overthrow the Allied side.
Tim said: “He is probably one of the most serious and dangerous of all the cases – a former World War I soldier with the British Army, he was a rabid anti-Semite and pro-Nazi. He founded his own secret pro-Nazi organisation called the Right Club, which attracted members from across the aristocrat spectrum.
“Under his and his wife’s leadership, the Right Club was one of the organisations which, according to the classified MI5 files, set out to start an armed fascist revolution which would depose the Government and usher in a puppet Nazi regime.
“He had been promised to become commissioner of Scotland in a puppet Nazi government.”
He was captured by MI5, but was so well-connected he was never prosecuted.
Instead, he was interred in Brixton prison as a security threat, but kept his seat, his salary and was even able to pose parliamentary questions by letter.
Tim added: “When Ramsay was finally released from prison in 1944, he strolled back up to the House of Commons and was warmly welcomed back by his colleagues. It’s extraordinary.
“He lost his seat in 1945, but not before he had introduced a bill to bring back medieval statutes on Jewry which would essentially be Britain’s equivalent of the Nuremberg laws in Germany.”
Ramsay died in 1955, but his dark legacy lives on to this day.
Tim said: “He was unrepentant and published his autobiography, The Nameless War.
“It is a vile anti-Semitic tract which is still republished today by neo-Nazi organisations in the United States.”
● Hitler’s British Traitors by Tim Tate, published by Icon Books, is out now.