SPY CAUGHT BECAUSE HE WAS NEVER TAUGHT TO PARACHUTE!
JOSEF JAKOBS was the spy who never got started. Born in Luxembourg, the former dentist and travelling salesman was dropped by the Nazis into a Cambridgeshire potato field (having never previously practised a parachute jump), broke his ankle on impact and was captured the next morning right where he had landed.
Among the possessions found on him when searched by the Home Guard was a German sausage and a photograph of a cabaret singer.
Yet what might initially sound like an ’Allo! ’Allo! comedy of errors would ultimately have deadly consequences for Jakobs. For exactly 80 years ago today – on August 15, 1941 – he became last person to be executed in the Tower of London.
Though many historical figures were imprisoned there before meeting a similar end, most of them – including Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell – were beheaded on nearby Tower Hill. Only a select few died within the confines of the Tower itself, including Henry VIII’S doomed wives Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, and the hapless nine days’ queen Lady Jane Grey.
The story of how Jakobs came to face a firing squad, aged 43, in the same surroundings had begun long before that fateful January night in 1941, when he took off from Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport in occupied Europe on his mission for the German army’s intelligence service, the Abwehr.
His granddaughter Giselle Jakobs, who wrote about his case in her book The Spy In
The Tower, says: “Josef was clearly not ideal spy material.
He was a not a young ardent Nazi who spoke perfect English, but the Germans were desperate for agents.
“They were prepared to recruit any person for a mission that some had already called Himmelfahrt [“journey to heaven”], a euphemism for a suicide mission.”
Had it not been for the Great Depression of the 1930s, Jakobs might never have found himself in such circumstances.
A First World War veteran, he had trained in dentistry, married a fellow member of the profession called Gretchen and become a father of two boys and a girl.
But after the economic downturn wiped out his practice he resorted to desperate measures.
After joining a counterfeit goldmaking scheme with a friend in Switzerland he was caught and jailed for three years. He was released in 1937 and began selling books and typewriters. But he then got involved in providing black market passports to Jewish citizens anxious to flee Nazi Germany. Jakobs found himself in trouble with the authorities again, this time in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, north of Berlin.
At some point, almost certainly so as to not undergo further torture, he agreed to work as a spy.
The Abwehr sent him to Hamburg for training – where he fell for Clara Bauerle, a singer with a local orchestra. They became lovers and Jakobs tried to pass her off as a colleague to the more than sceptical Gretchen. He was sent to The Hague in Holland for his final training, from where he wrote to both his wife and Clara.
The lack of any parachute experience in that training was what cost Jakobs on the night of January 31.
After his agonising landing near the market town of Ramsey in a field at Dove House Farm, he spent the night immobilised and smoking his way through his ration of cigarettes, while trying to bury his attaché case before daylight broke.
Satisfied he had done all he could, Jakobs fired three shots from his Mauser pistol as distress calls.
They alerted the attention of farmhands Charles Baldock and Harry Coulson on their way to work.they found him lying on his back covered largely by his camouflaged parachute, and having surrendered by throwing his pistol into his helmet once they arrived.
But the two men spotted a corner of his case poking out of the earth that Jakobs had not entirely concealed.
They pointed it out to two
local Home Guard officers who came to take him into custody at the Ramsey police station in the back of a horse-drawn cart.
As well as the sausage, the case contained a wireless transmitter, maps, a torch, and £500 in British currency, as well as forged identity papers in the name of a Londoner who had died during the 1940 Blitz.
LATER, fragments of a torn up cipher disc, carrying the codes for radio transmissions, were found near where Jakobs had lain. He was transferred to London where he was interviewed by MI5, before spending two months in hospital while his ankle healed.
The intelligence service is known to have turned other German agents similarly captured here. So why not Jakobs? He had after all been caught by the highly classified operation set up for that task, known as the Double Cross System. MI5 had known in advance that Jakobs was arriving, thanks to information passed by a Welsh nationalist called Arthur Owens, a double agent who the Abwehr had in its pay.
But his British spymasters came to the conclusion that Owens was a slippery customer who was playing them and the Germans off, and later interned him for the duration of the war.
Hopes which he had confided to a friend before the mission – that he could turn himself in to the British in exchange for safe passage to the US – were dashed.
Quizzed about the photograph of Clara Bauerle, Jakobs said she had also been recruited as a spy because she had previously spent years performing in the Midlands, and could speak English with a convincing Brummie accent.
He confessed she had been meant to join him had he been able to establish radio contact.
Nothing more was heard of her – though later it was speculated that she might have been the victim of a notorious unsolved murder involving a skeleton found by four boys out bird-nesting in a hollow tree trunk in Hagley Wood, Worcestershire, in 1943. A postmortem exam later put the date of death at around October 1941.
But Bauerle was nearly 6ft, while the remains found in the case that became known as “Who put Bella in the Wych Elm?” were of a woman no taller than 5ft.
Finally, research conducted in 2016 established that Bauerle had died in a Berlin hospital in December 1942.
Jakobs was court-martialled by a military tribunal in August 1941.
He was convicted of espionage under the recently passed 1940 Treachery Act, and condemned to death by firing squad – rather than hanging – because he was captured as an enemy combatant.
Fourteen other German spies, who were civilians, were hanged at London’s Pentonville and Wandsworth prisons.
It was from Wandsworth that Jakobs was taken to the Tower on his final day. Its governor would later recall of the prisoner, “his soldierly manner, his courtesy and his quiet courage.”
He was executed at the miniature rifle range in the grounds of the Tower, after being blindfolded and bound to a chair. Eight Scots
Guards, armed with .303 Leeenfields aimed at a matchboxsized cotton target pinned over Jakobs’s heart. His final words for the firing squad were said to be: “Shoot straight Tommies!” They fired at 7.12am and Jakobs was immediately pronounced dead.
Today, the plain brown Windsor chair in which Jakobs died remains on display at the Tower of London – the bow of its back and one of its spindles snapped where the bullets hit them after exiting.
He is buried in an unmarked grave at a cemetery in London’s Kensal Green.
HIS widow Gretchen died in 1970 never knowing what had happened to him. A letter that Jakobs wrote to his family on the eve of his death was not released from MI5 files until 1993, when it was handed over to his granddaughters.
In it he wrote: “Dear, best wife, thousands and thousands of times over, thank you for all the good you have done for me. But even so, I beg you a thousand times for forgiveness for all of the conscious and unconscious hurts I have given you. Endure your loss bravely, don’t dwell on it, but think that you are also in God’s hand, remember above all that you must be prepared for a sudden death. For I hope above all, that we will see each other again in Eternity.”
It was signed with the pet name “Jubs” that Gretchen called him.
Giselle says of her grandfather: “He was a rogue and a scoundrel – but he was not a Nazi.”