Ronald Turnbull

Ronald Turnbull (born May 29, 1914 in Edinburgh , † March 2, 2004 in Pencaitland, East Lothian ) was a British news agent.

Life and activity

Turnbull was the second of four children of Bruce Turnbull, an officer in the British Army in India, and his wife Jessie.

He attended the Cargilfield School in Cramond and then the Fettes School. From 1935 he studied at the colleges Gonville and Caius in Cambridge. At times he also spent his studies at the University of Copenhagen .

After completing his studies, Turnbull ran for a seat in the British Parliament as a candidate for the Liberal Party in the Bethnel Green constituency. He then joined the Evening Standard newspaper as a journalist . He also worked for the BBC at times before being recruited by the British secret service in 1939. Due to his language skills, he was assigned to the British legation in Copenhagen in October 1939 as a representative of the secret service, where he held the function of a press attaché for camouflage purposes.

After the German occupation of Denmark , Turnbull traveled on a sealed train through Germany to Belgium, from where he returned to London. There he joined the newly founded Special Operations Executive (SOE) in July 1940 , the department for the implementation of special tasks, especially intelligence tasks.

In 1941 Turnbull was sent to Stockholm as a representative of the SOE : From there, his task was to act as the SOE's liaison to the Danish resistance movement against the German occupation and to support them in their activities (passing on information from Denmark to Great Britain and from there to Denmark, making available know-how and resources, etc.) and to organize individual resistance measures. He reached Sweden - which is 900 miles from Great Britain - with a detour of 11,000 miles, going from Great Britain to Cape Town in South Africa and from there via Cairo (Egypt), Palestine, Istanbul (Turkey), Odessa and Moscow (Soviet Union) as well Finland entered the Scandinavian country. In the following years he organized the infiltration of members of the Danish resistance trained in Great Britain into their home country, usually by dropping them as parachutists, who had the task of gathering information about the crew and carrying out acts of sabotage there. Outstanding secret service operations for which Turnbull was responsible during his activity in Stockholm were: The organization of the escape of the Danish physicist Niels Bohr from Copenhagen across the Baltic Sea to Sweden, shortly before he was to be abducted by the German secret police to Germany, for his knowledge to make the German war effort subservient; and the procurement of plans for the German V1 missile system , some of which was tested in Denmark. He was able to forward the plans to London several months before the start of the V1 attacks on Great Britain.

Turnbull was classified as an important target by the National Socialist police forces as early as 1940: In the spring of 1940, the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin put him on the special wanted list GB , a directory of people whom the Nazi surveillance apparatus considered particularly dangerous or important, which is why they should be successful if they were successful Invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht should be located and arrested by the occupying troops following SS special commandos with special priority.

After the war, Turnbull went to Brazil , where he worked in the advertising business.

family

On May 20, 1940, Turnbull married Maria Thereza do Rio Branco, a daughter of the Brazilian ambassador to Denmark. The marriage resulted in two children, a son and a daughter. Turnbull's wife died in a car accident in 1945. In his second marriage, he married Maria Helena Arantes Negro († 1982) in December 1946, with whom he had two other sons and three daughters. There were also two other sons from another relationship.

literature

• Obituary in: The Times March 11, 2004.

Web links

• Obituary for Turnbull at Scotsman.com

Individual evidence

1. ^ Entry on Turnbull on the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London) .