Leonard Ingrams

Leonard St. Clair Ingrams (born January 24, 1900 in Shrewsbury , † August 30, 1953 in Feldafing ) was a British banker. During World War II he was the head of the Political Warfare Executive , the British government's political warfare division. He is not to be confused with his son Leonard Victor Ingrams (1941-2005), who was also a well-known banker.

Life and activity

Ingram attended Shrewsbury School and studied at Pembroke College of Oxford University .

From 1924 he worked as a banker: he became the European representative of the Chemical Bank and Trust Company of New York . In this position he traveled a lot on the European continent and was nicknamed "the flying banker" because he used his own airplane, a Puss Moth , as a pilot .

In 1940 Ingrams was appointed Liaison Officer at the Ministry of Economic Warfare with responsibility for "black propaganda" in Germany. In this position he was subordinate to the Political Warfare Executive, who was responsible for carrying out subversive propaganda in Germany and the German-occupied territories. So he recruited the journalist Sefton Delmer to set up "black" radio stations, i. H. of radio stations that (in contrast to the so-called white stations) did not identify themselves as British propaganda stations, but tried to make their listeners on the continent believe that they were German stations in order to get through the Skilfully sprinkling information that is detrimental to the morale of the war to carry out decomposition work against the war opponent. In addition, he organized a department that monitored the correspondence between Germany and neutral states in Europe and outside Europe - letters were intercepted, sighted and returned to the mail circulation system - and extracted information from the sighted mail for use in British war propaganda.

One of his collaborators later identified Ingrams as imaginative and intelligent, and ascribed him a complex mind.

In the summer of 1945 Ingrams was sent by the Foreign Office to the Allied internment camp in Bad Mondorf - where the most important Nazi leaders who had been captured at the time were being held - to conduct the first interrogations of the highest Nazi officials imprisoned on behalf of the British government. This is how he heard Hermann Göring in June 1945 .

After the war, Ingrams became Managing Director of the Continental Assets Realization Trust.

family

Ingrams was married to Citoria Reid (1908-1997) a daughter of King Victoria's personal physician, Sir James Reid. With her he had four sons, including Richard Ingrams and Leonard Victor Ingrams , and a daughter.

literature

• Who was who: A Companion to Who's Who, Containing the Biographies of Those who Died , Vol. V.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Nicholas Rankin: A genius for deception: how cunning helped the British win two world wars. Oxford University Press, Oxford / New York 2009, ISBN 978-0195387049 , here p. 289.
2. ^ Paul Kluke: Studies on the history of England and German-British relations , 1981, p. 295.