Elsbeth Schragmüller

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Elisabeth Schragmüller , called Elsbeth; alias Mademoiselle Docteur, Fräulein Doktor, Fair Lady, La Baronne, Mlle Schwartz (born August 7, 1887 in Schluesselburg , district of Minden ; † February 24, 1940 in Munich ) was a German political scientist and during the First World War the head of the German espionage department against France in the intelligence service of the Supreme Army Command .

Life

Elisabeth Schragmüller was the oldest of four children of the Prussian officer and bailiff Carl Anton Schragmüller and his wife Valesca, née von Cramer von Clausbruch. Her younger brother was the later SA leader and police chief of Magdeburg Konrad Schragmüller .

Schragmüller first spent her childhood in Schluesselburg and then from the age of two to nine he lived with her grandmother in Münster , where she attended elementary school. She was then taught at a girls 'boarding school in Weimar and finally sent to Germany's first girls ' grammar school , the Lessing grammar school in Karlsruhe , which was founded in 1893 , where she graduated from high school in 1908. From 1910 to 1914 Schragmüller studied political science at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg . She finished her studies in 1913 with a doctorate on the subject of "The Brotherhood of Borers and Baliers in Freiburg and Waldkirch". She was one of the first women in Germany to graduate from university. After completing her studies, she worked as a lecturer in civics for the Berliner Lette-Verein and provided social services for the people's welfare .

When the First World War broke out in 1914, Schragmüller met the German Governor General Colmar von der Goltz in occupied Brussels and was appointed by him to Section VII of the commandant's office of the Brussels garrison , which evaluated confiscated letters from Belgian soldiers. She later moved to the intelligence agency and, after a short period of apprenticeship, worked in Department III b ( military intelligence ) of the General Staff in Lille . In 1915, Walter Nicolai made her head of the section of the ' Antwerp War Intelligence Unit '. At the end of the war she had the rank of first lieutenant and was awarded the Iron Cross 1st class. She was Mata Haris Chief Executive Officer . After the end of the First World War in 1918, Schragmüller resumed her academic career and became the first female chair assistant in Freiburg with the economist Karl Diehl . A few years later, she and her family moved to Munich. Soon after the death of her father and her brother Konrad, who were shot during the Röhm affair , their professional careers also broke off abruptly in 1934 for unknown reasons. One reason could have been lack of money.

Schragmüller died of bone tuberculosis in 1940 at the age of 52 in her Munich apartment. In the opinion of Walter Nicolai, with whom she was friends, she would probably have been reinstated by the secret service in World War II .

Speculation

At that time, a woman was in such a leading position and in the secret service was such a novelty that numerous myths were spun around her. Already during the war, various legends were circulating on the side of the Allies about "Mademoiselle Docteur", whose identity the Allied secret services did not know. The sources are correspondingly thin.

After the end of the First World War, the spy was anonymously advertised for a search. Elisbeth Schragmüller revealed her identity herself in 1929 in her article From the German Intelligence Service , she was known in the 1930s. In 1931 she reported to officers in Freiburg or at a meeting of the Fleet Association of German Women in Berlin about her work for the German espionage service and her connection with Mata Hari. In 1934 the false news spread that Elisabeth Schragmüller had died under the name Anne-Marie Lesser in a sanatorium near Zurich. They were identified in 1945 when the American occupation fell into the hands of Major General Friedrich Gempp's dossier for the former Reichswehr . (The report was then stored at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Washington, DC until it was returned to Germany in the mid-1970s and is now in the Freiburg Military Archives .)

In 1929 Hans Rudolf Berndorff summarized numerous rumors about her life in a fictitious novel, which also became the plot for several films and a play. After that, they should have a dead child as mistress of an officer with 16 years born and have been thrown by the parents out of the house, and later among other drug addict have been to end after the war in an asylum. In between, disguised as a young student or disguised as a cleaning lady, she experienced rows of erotic adventures and spied on the Allies. As' Dr. Anne-Marie Lesser 'appeared in the English film version Under Secret Orders .

According to Magnus Hirschfeld (see literature), she is said to have gone to the Belgian front via Paris via Paris to explore the allied cooperation and the Liège fortress ring . Disguised as a peasant woman, she then crossed the front to travel back. Accordingly, she re-established the espionage service in Paris in 1916 and then escaped across the Swiss border . She also traveled to France again in 1918 as a 'South American nurse' and gathered information behind the front lines. Recognized in a hospital, she managed to escape in French uniform.

Movies

Fonts

  • The brotherhood of Borer and Balier from Freiburg and Waldkirch. Contribution to the commercial history of the Upper Rhine. (Economic essays of the Baden universities. NF 30). Braun, Karlsruhe i. B. 1914.
  • Robert Wilbrandt's socialist system . In: Yearbooks for Economics and Statistics 115 (1920), pp. 193–224 ( digitized in the Internet Archive)
  • Guide for economics studies , on behalf of and with a foreword by K. Diehl . (University books. Series 12, University of Freiburg 1/2). Niemeyer, Halle (Saale) 1921
  • The problem of gold values. In: Yearbooks for Economics and Statistics 119 (1922), pp. 145–149. ( Digitized in the Internet Archive)
  • From the German intelligence service. In: Walter Jost, Friedrich Felger (ed.): What we don't know about the world war. Andermann, Berlin 1929, pp. 138–155.
    • (Reprint) H. Fikentscher Verlag, Leipzig 1936, pp. 124-138. ( Digitized version of the Upper Austrian Provincial Library Linz)

literature

  • Heiko Suhr: A woman in the military intelligence service: Elisabeth Schragmüller (1887-1940) . In: Just stolen everything? : the adventurous paths of knowledge : exhibition catalog / edited by Georg Eggenstein / Anja Hoffmann / Olaf Schmidt-Rutsch, Essen 2019, pp. 100–109.
  • Gert Buchheit : The German Secret Service. List, Munich 1966.
  • Hanne Hieber: "Mademoiselle Docteur" alias Elsbeth Schragmüller. A career in the secret service in WWI . In: Heimatblätter. Articles and stories from the Mengede district - supplement , No. 6 from September 4, 2004, ed. from Heimatverein Mengede e. V. ( digitized version from stoeckelschuh - FrauenGeschichteDortmund; accessed on February 25, 2020)
  • Hanne Hieber: "Mademoiselle Docteur": The Life and Service of Imperial Germany's Only Female Intelligence Officer. In: The Journal of Intelligence History. 5.2 (2005), pp. 91-108. ( Google Books ; limited preview)
  • Magnus Hirschfeld: Moral history of the First World War. Dausien Werner, 1980, ISBN 3-7833-8841-4 .
  • David Kahn : Miss Doctor Revisited. National Intelligence Study Center Washington DC. Foreign Intelligence Literary Scene 11.4, 1992.
  • Janusz Piekałkiewicz : World history of espionage. Southwest, Munich 1988.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ drills and polishers; Gemstone cutter .
  2. ^ Hanne Hieber: The boss of Mata Hari: Mademoiselle Docteur alias Elsbeth Schragmüller, head of the espionage department France of the German secret service in World War I in: Contributions to the history of Dortmund and the county of Mark, Volume 96/97 Dortmund 2005/2006
  3. ↑ a b Algemeen Handelsblad dated November 18, 1931 (with reference to an article in Le Matin ), December 2, 1931 ( digitized version) and from December 24, 1931 ( digitized version at Delpher.nl).
  4. ↑ Leeuwarder nieuwsblad of December 7, 1933 (with reference to an article in the Paris-Midi newspaper ) and a.
  5. ^ Sister organization of the German Fleet Club .
  6. ^ Algemeen Handelsblad dated August 28, 1934 ( digitized version ); corrected on September 13, 1935 ( digitized at Delpher.nl).
  7. ↑ Hanne Hieber (1953–2016), qualified pedagogue and researcher in women's history.
personal data
SURNAME Schragmüller, Elsbeth
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Annemarie Lesser; Fair lady; La Baronne; Mlle Schwartz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German spy
DATE OF BIRTH August 7, 1887
PLACE OF BIRTH Shlisselburg (Petershagen) , North Rhine-Westphalia
DATE OF DEATH February 24, 1940
Place of death Munich