Hans von Meiss-Teuffen

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Hans von Meiss-Teuffen (also Hans de Meiss-Teuffen , as a film actor pseudonym Hantz von Teuffen , according to British military documents Hans Johann Franz Oskar von Meiss-Teuffen ; * November 25, 1911 in Jägerndorf , Austria-Hungary , † October 9 1984 , Küsnacht near Zurich ) was a Swiss adventurer, single-handed sailor and author.

Life

The offspring of a well-known Swiss-Austrian family grew up in Linz and on the Attersee . His mother Franziska Karolina von Meiss, née Kurz von Hartendorf belonged to the Jeunesse dorée of the Danube Monarchy , father Oskar von Meiss (1879–1946) worked as a cultural politician for the Upper Austrian provincial government and as a fencing and sailing official. His older brother was Gottfried von Meiss , the younger sister, Marielen von Meiss-Teuffen, 1918-2007, lived as a young woman in London and was in a relationship with the grandfather of the future British Prime Minister David Cameron and from 1946 married.

After school and a bank apprenticeship, Hans von Meiss-Teuffen worked for six years as a bank clerk in Vienna, Berlin, Paris and London through the agency of his uncle. But at the age of 23 he quit his job at a London bank and began a wandering life that was unusual for his time and origins, initially with a trip to Italian-occupied Abyssinia. He wanted to reach Abyssinia by land via Italy and then with a fishing boat towards Greece and was mostly a lone sailor - with boats that he bought and then sold again. Meiss-Teuffen initially navigated the Eastern Mediterranean, then immigrated illegally (as a non-Jew) to the British Mandate of Palestine in 1935 and lived on a kibbutz . Meiss was subsequently expelled from the British colonial authorities and finally ended up in eastern Africa in Rhodesia, which was also administered by the British. He then worked in various jobs in British and neighboring Belgian colonial Africa: according to his own statements, he was the manager of an orange plantation, a road construction engineer and demolition engineer in a copper mine, and the maker of short feature films of a popular nature with the aim of emancipating the local population. Furthermore, shortly before the beginning of the Second World War, he built a Busch Hotel in the Congo, which was popular at the time.

After the outbreak of war he returned - as he writes in his two books - to Switzerland for military service, from which he was dismissed because of malaria attacks. Working for an American press agency in Zurich was followed by an attempt to return to Africa in the middle of the war with a sailing ship flying the Swiss flag. In 1941, Meiss-Teuffen set out on a trip to Africa from occupied France in a boat financed by the German naval secret service, the Rütli 650 . This ended in Bathurst / The Gambia with the arrest by the British.

The author writes different versions of this period in his travel books for German and English-speaking readers that were published in the post-war period: In his book Winds of Adventure , London 1953, he sails along the African coast as a German agent in a sailing boat financed by the Nazis and collects information about British activities that he radios to Germany. The goal was to return to his beloved Africa and his abandoned tiger fish hotel in the Congo in this way. At the same time he - according to his own version - worked for the British secret service. After the "Rütli" accident in Freetown, he had himself declared dead in a press report from the British port authorities and ended up on a British freighter - and after a torpedo attack on it - on a British warship to southern England. However, according to the records of the archives of the British Secret Service MI5 , Meiss was not a double agent (see notes). He was then arrested by the British in Gambia , sent to England by ship and interrogated in MI5 prison.

MI5 claims that Meiss-Teuffen's offer of cooperation was rejected. Meiss-Teuffen, however, claims to have been trained by the British secret service for use in Europe occupied by Nazi Germany. According to this, he parachuted over France and spent two years traveling with false papers in Germany and in occupied Belgium and France - with constantly changing locations, identities and assignments. In 1944, after he feared being discovered, he returned to England in a British submarine from the French coast shortly before the invasion. He also worked as a truck driver for the army until the end of the war and started lecturing in English hospitals about his time in pre-war Palestine and Africa.

Shortly after the longed-for end of the war, Meiss-Teuffen set out again in August 1945 as a single-handed sailor, initially from London to Portugal, where he spent the winter. In 1946 he started with the boat Speranza on an Atlantic crossing (from Casablanca via Newfoundland and Nova Scotia ), which he completed in the record time of 58 days.

Meiss-Teuffen then lived in the USA for several years. He spent a winter writing and as a trapper in Alaska, played a Russian spy as "Hantz von Teuffen" in a B-movie ( The Flying Saucer ), gave lectures, traveled to Iraq as a documentary filmmaker for NBC and participated in this context a congenial American (called "Grandma") took a year-long trip around the world in a car. He can also be traced back to Afghanistan in 1953, as a photo reporter and travel companion of Yvonne von Schweinitz, née Countess von Kanitz, the niece of Marion Countess Dönhoff .

Nothing has become public about Meiss-Teuffen's whereabouts after the second half of the 1950s. He did, however, respond to fan mail in the 1970s and at that time was the hotel manager in the Habitation Leclerc luxury resort near Port au Prince in Haiti, which had recently opened . After that he is said to have been an employee of the Lake George Club in the Adirondacks from 1975 .

The adventurer and sailor Hans von Meiss - called Meiss-Teuffen, who lived between 1937 and 1941 in what was then Northern Rhodesia with Erika Susanna, née. Landsberg, who was Richard Crossman's first wife from 1932 to 1934 , gave somewhat contradicting information about his wandering life in his book Ziel im Wind (Ullstein, Berlin 1951), which was very well known at the time and originally published in English by McGraw-Hill . Hans von Meiss-Teuffen also spread the uncontested version in LIFE magazine of January 31, 1955, that he was a double agent during the Second World War .

However, this cannot be proven even after the publication of the MI5 archive and is based solely on the experiences of the author Hans von Meiss-Teuffen that are described and claimed in the book Winds of Adventure .

Works

  • Destination in the wind: On a journey through countries and seas , Ullstein, Vienna, 1951.
  • Poste restante USA , Ullstein, Vienna, 1956.
  • Winds of Adventure by Hans de Meiss-Teuffen with Victor Rosen, Museum Press, London, 1953.

literature

  • Oliver Hoare (Ed.): Camp 020: MI5 and the Nazi Spies. (Secret History Files), The National Archives, London 2000, pp. 189f. ISBN 1-903365-08-2 .

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ^ So the version of Winds of Adventure
  2. ↑ Source: personal testimony of user Robert Schediwy
  3. ↑ See Information Services on Latin America (ISLA) 1973, under Google Books

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Meiss-Teuffen, Hans von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Meiss-Teuffen, Hans de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss adventurer and author
DATE OF BIRTH November 25, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Jägerndorf , Austria-Hungary
DATE OF DEATH October 9, 1984
Place of death Küsnacht near Zurich