Johnny Jebsen

Johnny Jebsen

Stumbling block for Jebsen in Hartungstrasse in Hamburg-Rotherbaum .

Johnny Jebsen (* 1917 in Hamburg as Johann-Nielsen Jebsen; † in February 1945 probably in Sachsenhausen concentration camp ) was an "artist" a German-British double agent in World War II . He is considered one of the role models in the James Bond series by Ian Fleming .

Life

Johnny Jebsen grew up in a family of Hamburg's high society and studied in 1936 at the University of Freiburg , where he met and became friends with the later double agent Dušan Popov (1912–1981). He led the life of a playboy , drove eye-catching cars like a Mercedes 540K , and pretended to be an English aristocrat. He rejected the National Socialists and began to work for the Abwehr in order to avoid service in the Wehrmacht . In 1940 he visited his friend Popov in Belgrade and told him about his work. In 1942 he asked him to recruit him for MI5 . Both lived in Lisbon and played at the Casino Estoril , where they also met Ian Fleming, who was then British secret agent and later author of the James Bond novels . Jebsen was supposed to collect information about the German secret weapon V1 for the British and to deceive his superiors in the defense about the place of the planned landing in Normandy, Operation Overlord , which he succeeded. For Popov and Jebsen, working in Lisbon was associated with numerous risks. a. fought with the use of amphetamines . Jebsen had collected incriminating material about employees of the SD and had to fear for his life.

Shortly before D-Day , on April 29, 1944, he was summoned to Aloys Schreiber's Lisbon office, overwhelmed, anesthetized and driven in a suitcase in an American Studebaker through Spain to Biarritz on the French Atlantic coast, by plane to Berlin Brought to Gestapo headquarters , interrogated and tortured. The British learned of the arrest and feared he would report the true location of the invasion, but he did not. He was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. In February 1945 he was interrogated again and killed there. His body was never found. In 1950 he was pronounced dead. After the war, Jebsen's relatives were able to inspect over 1000 pages of MI5 files on him in the British National Archives.

Today a stumbling stone in front of the house at Hartungstrasse 7A in Hamburg-Rotherbaum reminds of him.

literature

• Thomas Hüetlin : Antifascist Playboys. DER SPIEGEL, October 31, 2015, pp. 130–134 ( online ).