Armgaard Karl Graves

Armgaard Karl Graves , most likely Max Meincke (born May 7, 1882 in Berlin ; † possibly in the USA ) worked as a double agent for the German naval intelligence service and the British MI5 before the beginning of the First World War .

Life

Graves left the German Empire in 1898 . He was charged twice with theft in New South Wales and with harassment of a woman in Colombo in December 1910 . Around 1911 he returned to Germany under the title "AK Graves Dr med." A few months later he was sentenced to six months in prison in Wiesbaden for fraud, but fled to Stettin , where he was arrested.

During the Agadir crisis , Graves was probably recruited directly from prison for the naval intelligence service at its Berlin headquarters in the presence of Arthur Tapken , Georg Stammer and Gustav Steinhauer . As' W. Lewis' he was to watch the movements of British warships off Scotland , especially the Rosyth and Cromarty naval bases , for which he received £ 15 a month.

He reached Edinburgh in early 1912 and soon after went to Glasgow . He was discovered and put under surveillance through postal surveillance of other suspects. His return to Berlin forced the Scottish police to arrest him on April 14, 1912; three months later, he was sentenced to eight months in prison. On December 18, he was secretly discharged on the grounds of poor health, since he had meanwhile offered to Vernon Kell of the British Secret Service (MI5) for £ 2 a month.

Graves traveled to Berlin to obtain a list of spies in Great Britain for MI5 from Admiralty Secretary Stammer . However, he was sent to the United States by him. In February and March 1913 he received money from MI5 on request to return to Great Britain from there, but he did not. Instead, Graves presented himself as a “master spy” in the US press and passed on information about his two employers. On the eve of the war, his autobiography was published and sold 100,000 times. In 1915 a continuation of the book appeared as well as his prognoses about the outcome of the war in various newspaper columns. In November 1916 he extortionately offered the German ambassador in Washington, Count Johann Heinrich Graf von Bernstorff , some letters for money that came from his dealings with Germany via neutral ships. His ghostwriter Edward Lyell Fox had acted as a courier. However, since he considered the material to be worthless, Bernstorff informed the US State Department and Graves was arrested. The German Reich refused the testimony of the embassy employee, Count Hatzfeldt-Trachenberg, and he was released again. Graves was arrested in 1917 for visiting a restricted zone for foreigners in Kansas City and interned until the end of the war in November 1918.

Graves stayed in the USA after the war. In 1928 he was charged with burning a woman alive, but possibly exonerated. He was sentenced to 3 years in prison in 1934 for $ 1,500 by fraud. After his release in 1937 he was supposed to be deported, but complained that the National Socialists would surely condemn him to death , so that “a government agency” intervened and took him from the already sea-clear ship.

Graves believed to have died in the United States.

Fonts

• 1914: The Secrets of the German War Office . with the collabaration of Edward Lyell Fox. on-line
• 1915: The Red Secrets of the Hohenzollerns . London, McBride, Nast & co.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Thomas Boghardt: Spies of the Kaiser. Palgrave-Macmillan, Washington DC 2004.