Ernest Maxse

Ernest George Berkeley Maxse (born November 18, 1863 , † March 1943 ) was a British diplomat and intelligence officer .

Life and activity

Maxse was the eldest son of the Governor of Helgoland , Lieutenant Colonel Henry Maxse and the court actress Auguste Rudloff, and was educated at the Harrow School . He then belonged to the 1st Hanoverian Fusilier Regiment of the Prussian cavalry.

In the 1880s he worked for a time as his father's private secretary. In 1890 he was appointed British Executive Vice Consul in Algiers . After passing the exam in commercial law (Mercantile Law) on December 24, 1900, he received the certificate for civil servants and was appointed Vice Consul in Algiers on January 16, 1891. During the years 1891, 1892 and 1894 he repeatedly represented the British Consul General in Algiers.

On October 16, 1894 he was appointed consul for continental Greece (with the exception of the provinces of Akarnania and Aetolia and the island of Negroponte ) based in Piraeus . On November 1, 1897, he was appointed consul for the Navigators' Islands. On January 24, 1900 he was transferred to Bilbao and on June 9, 1900 to Réunion . In 1904 it was used temporarily in the London Foreign Office from August to December. On September 6, 1912, he was promoted to the consul general in Valparaiso and on March 1, 1913 again transferred to Réunion. On August 1, 1913, he was appointed Consul General in the Netherlands, based in Rotterdam .

From the outbreak of the First World War until April 1919 he took on the role of a Military Control Officer for the Netherlands. In this position he was responsible for the Admiralty for the organization of the British convoys to Holland (Admiralty Convoi Officer). He also acted as a representative of the Ministry of Information and the Ministry of the Interior in Rotterdam. In particular, he worked in Rotterdam during the war as a liaison for the British domestic intelligence service MI5 : for this he was entrusted with the organization of scouting and identification of German spies in Holland. In May 1915, for example, he forwarded a report by the French military attaché to MI5, which identified Richard Sanderson as an enemy intelligence agent and shared him with W. Müller from the Weber Hotel in Antwerp, M. Blanken in Rotterdam and the Brandwijk & Co. related. In August 1915, his work resulted in a Dutch seaman named J van Zwol, whom he had identified as a German agent, was interned in Great Britain. Although the MI5 highly valued its work, the Foreign Office disapproved of its work for it and repeatedly asked it to limit itself to its diplomatic work.

On October 1, 1919, Maxse was transferred to Zurich. On June 24, 1921 he was appointed Consul General for Liechtenstein .

literature

• Nigel West: Historical Dictionar yof World War I Intelligence, p. 199.
• The Foreign Office List and Diplomatic and Consular Year Book , 1920, p. 453.