Gustav Steinhauer

Gustav Steinhauer (* 1870 in Berlin ; † around 1930 ) was a German naval officer and head of department for England in the naval intelligence service of the Admiralty.

Life

Gustav Steinhauer was born in Berlin. After graduating from high school, he had completed basic nautical training and gained relevant professional experience at the Pinkerton Detective Agency in Chicago during a longer stay in the USA . Therefore he was able to speak the English language, with a distinct American accent. During the funeral services for the death of Queen Victoria (1810–1901) in London in February 1901, he was responsible for the personal protection of the German Emperor Wilhelm II. During this mission, he and the British detective William Melville (1850-1918) thwarted an attempted assassination attempt on the German ruler.

In naval intelligence

After his return to Germany, Steinhauer was assigned to the naval intelligence service of the imperial admiral's staff , which was in the process of being established, as head of department for the area of ​​operations in England. At the side of the head of the admiralty staff Arthur Tapken (1864-1945) and the lieutenant captain Georg Stammer, his area of ​​responsibility was the secret gathering of information about the British naval armaments, the deployment of the English fleet, its movements, armament and personnel as well as the monitoring of port and shipyard facilities in the English coastal towns. To this end, around 1902 he began to build up a network of secret informants at the interfaces important for the Navy. This group of people mainly included people living or doing business in Great Britain, including traveling salesmen from Germany or those working on ships of the German Navy. The first informants he won and used can be identified from 1902. One of them was Adolf Frederick Schroeder, who worked for the naval intelligence service until 1914.

Almost at the same time, Carl von Coerper, who resigned as a naval attaché in London in September 1903, received instructions on December 7, 1903 from Wilhelm Büchsel (1848–1920), the head of the Admiralty's staff in Berlin, to set up a secret naval intelligence organization in and for Great Britain, without the outside world Office may get to know. Above all, this concerned the establishment of a network of secret informants at all important English seaports and shipyard areas, as did Gustav Steinhauser. This was a clear caesura that Germany had now started to set up a naval intelligence service independent of Section IIIb of the General Staff. His acting partner on site was Carl von Coerper, with existing contacts in Great Britain and 5 years of experience in England. From October to December 1904 he was again sent to the Reichsmarineamt and the Admiral's staff for information and was preparing for his next attaché assignment from December 5, 1904 in London.

In 1904 Wilhelm II commissioned Steinhauer, whom he trusted as a temporary bodyguard, with a secret investigation into the private life and activities of his brother-in-law, Prince Friedrich Leopold . The reason was his eccentric lifestyle, which constantly aroused public offense, and the result was his extensive exclusion from social life.

Steinhauer was a very active and successful intelligence officer in the years up to the beginning of the First World War. He stayed several times in Great Britain until 1914 in order to know exactly the on-site conditions, to inspect future areas of activity of informants and to recruit potential candidates for intelligence gathering. Contact points for the transfer of orders, news material, intelligence aids, but also for travel and fee money, had been set up in Copenhagen, Brussels and Paris. The most important way of gaining informants was that Steinhauer wrote to previously typed people who lived or did business in England, invited them to introductory talks and made appropriate agreements with them when it was determined that they were suitable for obtaining information. These included a great many German business people who had settled in Great Britain or were traveling as travel agents. In the years from 1911 to 1914 alone, 1,189 such letters that could be clearly assigned to Steinhauer's person were documented. The network he created for gathering information was divided into the following groups of activities: He had used particularly reliable people who worked at “inconspicuous” intersections as “intermediaries”. These were personal contact points in Great Britain that served as a stopover for handing over messages or even important documents, for storing aids such as secret ink or code lists, but also for handing over the money. These included Otto M. Krüger from 1910, Wilhelm Croner and Gustav Neumann from 1911. This group of people included a striking number of owners of hairdressing businesses. This network was supplemented by individual cover addresses to which material could be sent by post in camouflaged form. The second group was much more extensive, that is, the informants themselves who lived or worked here in important port cities, near shipyards, naval depots or reloading points for ammunition or ship supplies. Some of them were also at points where important information for the German Navy came together. These were restaurants that were primarily visited by naval personnel, post offices in the port area or at supplier companies or technical outfitters of the shipyards. From 1909 Karl Hentschel belonged to them, from 1910 Lieutenant Siegfried Helm and from 1911 Heinrich Grosse. In 1912 Steinhauer hired the Berlin-born Armgaard Karl Graves (born 1882) to do intelligence work. He had been convicted by an English court in South Wales in 1910 and had evaded the sentence by moving to Germany. The recruitment of Graves took place in Berlin in 1911 by Steinhauer together with the head of the naval intelligence service Arthur Tapken and the lieutenant captain Georg Stammer. It was used from 1912 in Scotland in the Glasgow area, on the River Clyde, and in Edinburgh, an important base area of ​​the English Navy.

When the English secret service Security Service MI 5 recognized this approach and Steinhauer's activities, it organized intensive mail surveillance and thus came into possession of numerous letters from the intelligence officer to his informants and in large numbers of potential recruitment candidates. Shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, he himself traveled to Great Britain with false papers under the name "Fritsches", in order to personally convince himself of the situation at individual important locations, but also to meet and instruct some informants himself. He was identified and monitored by the English police, but he still managed to leave the country without being arrested. As a result of this counter-action, MI 5 had important information about the identity of several Steinhauer's informants, above all about his working methods and preferred target regions when obtaining secret naval information. Immediately after the start of the war, at least 22 people from among his informants were arrested in very different locations in England. They were charged by English courts on suspicion of espionage, several of them sentenced to death on the basis of the evidence and executed in the Tower. Armgaard Karl Graves escaped this wave of arrests because he had fled to the USA shortly before.

With the outbreak of the First World War, the working conditions for Steinhauer deteriorated enormously. The previously used travel and exchange routes for his informants had already been cut off a few days before the war began, and stricter control measures and entry conditions were introduced. Several Germans from his network of informants were interned because of the declared state of war or expelled from the country in a very short time. A number of British or foreigners in his network, including mostly Dutch and Belgians, disappeared from the scene due to the tightened war criminal law or out of moral scruples and were no longer "findable" for Steinhauer. German ships were not allowed to call at English ports. Overall, in a few days it became apparent that not enough precautions had been taken for the changed working conditions of the naval intelligence service in a state of war. As a result, there was a state of ignorance for several months and urgently needed information about the English Navy and its activities was not available. It took until December 1914 for new contact points to be created via individual neutral countries, above all via Spain and the Scandinavian countries, to create new information channels and to transmit "unburned cover addresses" to the informants who were still active. In the areas of the port cities belonging to Germany or occupied by it, with shipping lines to England and France, so-called war intelligence agencies were established or the defense agencies previously operated by Section IIIb were handed over to the naval intelligence service.

Steinhauer died around 1930 without an exact date or place of death is currently known.

Fonts

• The emperor's master spy. What the detective Wilhelm II experienced in his practice. Memories . K. Voegels, Berlin 1930; Reprint:
  • Gustav Steinhauer: I was the emperor's spy . Wunderkammer, Neu-Isenburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-941245-03-7 .
• The emperor's detective. Espionage and counterintelligence . PJ Oestergaard, Berlin-Schöneberg [1932].

literature

• The Imperial Spy in Scotland - Sea espionage before the First World War . Exhibition in the National Resord of Scotland 1914, see also: https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/research/learning/first-world-war/the-kaisers-spy-in-scotland-naval-espionage-before- the-great-war
• Biography and professional career of Hilmar Dierks in: www.suche-im-dunkeln.de/_Familie/_familie.html
• Dermot Bradley (eds.), Hans H. Hildebrand, Ernest Henriot: Germany's Admirals 1849-1945. The military careers of naval, engineering, medical, weapons and administrative officers with admiral rank. Volume 1: A-G. Biblio Verlag, Osnabrück 1988, ISBN 3-7648-1499-3 , pp. 216-217.
• Klaus Volker Giessler, The Institution of Naval Attachés in the Empire, Harald Boldt Verlag, Boppard am Rhein 1976, p. 77.
• Jürgen W. Schmidt (Ed.): The First World War . In: Espionage, Double Agents, and Islamic Threat . Ludwigsfelder Verlagshaus 2017, p. 126ff.
• Heiko Suhr: The spy who came from East Frisia. The intelligence service career of Hilmar Dierks from Leer / Ostfriesland . 2017

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Documentation on the exhibition "The Imperial Spy in Scotland - Sea Espionage before the First World War" in the National Resort of Scotland in 2014 in: https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/research/learning/first-world-war/the- kaisers-spy-in-scotland-naval-espionage-before-the-great-war
2. ↑ confirmed by the Reichsmarineamt on December 17, 1903; in: Klaus Volker Giessler, The Institution of Marine Attachés in the Empire, Harald Boldt Verlag, Boppard am Rhein 1976, p. 135f.
3. ↑ Gustav Steinhauer: I was the emperor's spy . Wunderkammer, Neu-Isenburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-941245-03-7 .
4. ↑ Dermot Bradley (ed.), Hans H. Hildebrand, Ernest Henriot: Deutschlands Admirale 1849-1945. The military careers of naval, engineering, medical, weapons and administrative officers with admiral rank. Volume 1: A-G. Biblio Verlag, Osnabrück 1988, ISBN 3-7648-1499-3 , pp. 216-217.
5. ↑ Gustav Steinhauer: I was the emperor's spy . Wunderkammer, Neu-Isenburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-941245-03-7 , p. 132 ff.
6. ↑ Gustav Steinhauer: I was the emperor's spy . Wunderkammer, Neu-Isenburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-941245-03-7 .
7. ↑ The Imperial Spy in Scotland - Sea espionage before the First World War, exhibition in the National Resord of Scotland 1914, cf. also: https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/research/learning/first-world-war/the-kaisers- spy-in-scotland-naval-espionage-before-the-great-war
8. ↑ Heiko Suhr, The Spy Who Came from East Friesland. The news service career of Hilmar Dierks from Leer / Ostfriesland, 2017
9. ↑ Jürgen W. Schmidt (Ed.), The First World War in: Espionage, Doppelagenten und Islamische Threathung, Ludwigsfelder Verlagshaus 2017, p. 126ff.