Carl Hans Lody
Gustav Carl Gottlieb Hans Lody , pseudonym Charles A. Inglis (* 20th January 1877 in Berlin , † 6. November 1914 in London ) was a German naval officer and an informant of the Marine intelligence officer in the First World War . He was the first German spy to be captured , sentenced to death and executed by the British during the First World War .
Life
Carl Hans Lody was born as the son of the lawyer and mayor Gustav Carl Theodor Lody (1833-1883) and his wife Johanna. Wiedemann, (1849–1885) born in Berlin. His father was employed in the civil service , became mayor of Oderberg in 1878 and second mayor of Nordhausen in 1882 . Carl Hans had 3 sisters and a brother. From 1882 he attended the preschool of the Real-Gymnasium Nordhausen. A year later his father died and when his mother died in 1885 he had to move to Leipzig. He was accepted as an orphan by a childless couple in Leipzig and continued to attend school there. He later returned to Nordhausen and was accepted into the family of senior teacher Dr. Hoffmann. From this family he then moved to the orphanage of the Francke Foundations. After his confirmation in 1891 he returned to Leipzig and began teaching in the retail grocery Hugo Wilhelm Haacke. He broke this off after two years and hired in Hamburg as a cabin boy on the sailing training ship “Sirius”, where he began a nautical training under Captain Behrens. Here he rose to become a sailor, from 1899 even took on some officer duties and then began formal nautical training at the navigation school in Geestemünde . On June 27, 1900, he graduated from the naval school by passing the helmsman's examination. Immediately afterwards he joined the Imperial Navy as a one-year volunteer ; After completing his military service, he was first and second officer on German merchant ships between Italy , Australia and the USA . After attending the seafaring school in Wesermünde again, he received the captain's license in April 1904 . Between 1905 and 1909 he was second and third officer on HAPAG steamers, but was unable to get a captain's post due to deteriorating eyesight. For this reason, he changed as a tour guide in 1909 , first for an American travel agency, then later for the HAPAG line. During this time, Carl Hans Lody was married to the American Louise Mare. While in New York, he saw a woman and a child fall from the jetty into the harbor basin. He saved both of their lives and was awarded the US Lifesaver Medal for this. When he went ashore in Germany, he often visited his siblings in Nordhausen. In August 1914, shortly after the outbreak of the First World War, he traveled to Berlin and offered the German Admiralty his services as an informant abroad. Because of his good language skills, he was accepted and used as a "reporter" (BE) for the naval intelligence service in the England area. His commanding officer was the head of the NI department of the news office N in the Admiral's staff in Berlin Fritz Prieger (born 1877). Lody then procured a false passport that identified him as the US citizen Charles A. Inglis and traveled indirectly via Denmark and Norway to Edinburgh to his assigned area of operation. He arrived here on August 25, 1914 and obtained initial information about the British naval base Rosyth , an important hub for the British Navy.
On August 30, he forwarded his first telegram message to the address provided by Adolf Buchard in Stockholm . It contained parts of the text in German, some openly formulated, and caught the attention of the English secret service MI 5. In addition, he had given his hotel address as the sender. The telegram contained information on several English battleships that were being repaired at the Edinburgh shipyard. Presumably, the information in the admiralty staff in Berlin led to the fact that on September 5th the German submarine U 21 was able to sink the first ship of the war, the British cruiser Pathfinder . In the next few days Lody collected further information that was important for war purposes, but had changed hotels in Edinburgh as a precaution. Here he had found shelter with the Englishwoman Julia Brown. But he was already under observation by the British secret service MI 5, mainly due to his conspicuous behavior and other letters intercepted by the English postal control on September 14th and 26th 1914. In which he again had information of military content in only slightly encrypted form shown. During one of his travel activities around the country, he was arrested on October 2nd at the Great Sautern Hotel in Killarny, Ireland. Although he posed as Charles A. Inglis, a US citizen, a search of his hotel room revealed a list of German addresses and several letters, including a copy of the August 30 telegram. He was transferred to London and further verification of his person resulted in actual proof of his identity. In one of the accommodations checked by the investigators, they found a jacket with a note from the Berlin tailor and his real name, Carl Hans Lody.
In the court martial on November 2, 1914, which was arranged at short notice , Lody was sentenced to death . The defense had emphasized that Lody had acted legitimately as an officer in the service of his country, but the court did not accept this. On November 6, 1914, he was taken to the Tower of London for execution . Here he refused to be blindfolded. A firing squad then carried out the sentence immediately. The first German spy to be captured in England during the First World War caused a sensation in the press.
Posthumously Lody was awarded the Iron Cross and presented to his next of kin, who, however, had to keep silent about it, as such a case was not provided for in the order's statutes.
Post fame
During the time of National Socialism , Lody was turned into a propaganda figure by the Nazi regime, whereby it came about that only a few details were known about his life. This made it possible to assign him any desired motivation and attitude.
On May 14, 1935, the new destroyer Z 10 ( Type 34 ) was given the name Hans Lody when it was launched in Kiel . The ship survived World War II and was delivered to the United Kingdom in 1946 .
Lody also had one of the first poems that young Bertolt Brecht published as a schoolboy on the subject.
Lübeck Lody Memorial
On November 6, 1934, a Lody monument was inaugurated at the Lübeck castle gate , although Lody had no connection to Lübeck. The memorial - a knight in full armor , trampling a snake, embedded in a wall niche next to the gate and bearing a commemorative plaque - did not attempt to establish such a connection.
In 1946 the memorial was removed by the Lübeck city administration. The badge should also be removed, but this was prohibited by the British occupation authorities. It is still located at the Burgtor today and causes divided opinions in the Lübeck citizenship, as neo-Nazis hold memorial events here. According to the decision of October 29, 2005, the board can be left hanging, but nationalist events in the vicinity should be prevented.
literature
- Hans Fuchs: Lody - A Path to Honor , Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, Hamburg 1936 (with excerpts from Lody's letters and other documents)
- Ortwin Pelc : A memorial from the Nazi era at the Lübeck Castle Gate. In: Alken Bruns (ed.): The car . Hanseatisches Verlagkontor, Lübeck 2002, pp. 132-138.
- Hugo Delmes: From outside and at home ", Stuttgart, approx. 1916 (with a multi-page biography of Lody, written by his brother-in-law, sister-in-law, Richard Lucius)
- Thomas Boghardt: Spies of the Kaiser. German Covert Operations in Great Britain during the First World War Era. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke / New York 2004, ISBN 1-4039-3248-4 . Chapter: The life and death of Carl Hans Lody , pp. 97-104
Web links
- Carl Hans Lody - tour guide and amateur spy
- Carl Hans Lody on the UK MI5 website
- Original documents on the UK MI5 website
- World War One: Carl Lody - Edinburgh's WW1 spy , BBC report of26 February 2014
- Newspaper article about Carl Hans Lody in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
Individual evidence
- ^ Vincent Eisfeld, biography about Carl Hans Lody, Regional Documentations about the City of Nordhausen; in: https://nordhausen-wiki.de
- ↑ Maike Damm, tour guide and spy, Focus-Online from July 25, 2007
- ↑ Thomas Boghardt, Spies of the Kaiser, New York 2004, pp. 97ff.
- ↑ Archive documents on the Carl Hans Lody case, including documents from the court proceedings and biography on Hans Lody Archive MI5 https://www.mi5.gov.uk/carl-hans-lody
- ^ Bertolt Brecht: Hans Lody . In: The poems of Bertolt Brecht in one volume . Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 1981, p. 4th f .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Lody, Carl Hans |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Lody, Gustav Carl Gottlieb Hans (full name); Inglis, Charles A. (pseudonym) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German spy of the First World War |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 20, 1877 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | unsure: Berlin |
| DATE OF DEATH | November 6, 1914 |
| Place of death | London |