Stanley Grove Spiro

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Stanley Joseph Grove Spiro (born January 17, 1900 in Cape Town , South Africa, † 1948) (code name Lord George Saville Drummond) was a South African pilot and banker.

Life

From 1918 Spiro took part in the First World War as a pilot . He later switched to banking. In the 1920s he made a large fortune through stock market speculation, from which he bought numerous houses, a luxury yacht and a private plane.

In 1921 he married Alice Stephanie Woodland Hunt in Cape Town, South Africa. In 1932 he built a house on the island of Sylt and named it "Haus Stephanie".

After he had been involved in share pushing since 1926 , in which he had been disguised under different aliases and from different addresses, he took control of the Scottish brokerage firm Maclean and Henderson in 1934 . As a result, he used the information about the customers of this company to take advantage of them with the help of salespeople who were hired to manipulate the customers to conclude stock deals that were detrimental to them but very profitable for Spiro's company. Based on the findings of the investigation later launched against Spiro, Spiro relieved its customers of £ 600,000 in savings in a matter of months.

In 1936/1937 the authorities became aware of Spiro's scams. On February 6, 1937, arrest warrants were issued against him and his accomplices. On the same day he first fled to France. From there he traveled via Austria, Czechoslovakia to the United States and Mexico, and then returned to Europe. There he stayed briefly in Norway, Sweden and Denmark. While trying to enter Germany, Spiro was arrested by the Gestapo as an alleged spy. However, he managed to escape and get to Venice.

In March 1938 Spiro returned to Great Britain, where he surrendered to the British authorities. In the following trial he was sentenced to eight years in penal servitude by the London Court of Old Bailey on September 8, 1938 - five years for false pretences in several cases and three years for deceptive bills of exchange ( fraudulent conversion ) - condemned.

The police forces of Nazi Germany continued to suspect Spiro of being a British news agent. In the spring of 1940, the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin therefore placed him on the special wanted list GB , a list of people whom the Nazi surveillance apparatus considered particularly dangerous or important, which is why they should be removed from the occupation troops in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht Subsequent SS special commands were to be identified and arrested with special priority.

In 1942 Spiro was pardoned, allegedly due to the passing on of information about military defenses of the German Wehrmacht on the island of Sylt. The Royal Air Force subsequently used the information it received from Spiro to launch targeted attacks on the Hörnum base .

Spiro died of heart failure in 1948. His house on Sylt (Norderstraße 65, Westerland ), which his son sold in 1953, was a restaurant between 1969 and 2014 (“Hardy auf Sylt”).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ built in 1932 by the architect Otto Heilmann (1888–1945)

literature

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Spiro, Stanley Grove
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Spiro, Stanley Joseph Grove; Drummond, Lord George Saville (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION South African pilot and banker
DATE OF BIRTH 17th January 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Cape Town , South Africa
DATE OF DEATH 1948