In reality, Wilhelm Canaris did not become head of the Abwehr until January 1935. Singer goes on to record that Wehring/ Oertel served a lengthy apprenticeship in the watch trade, and in time became a proficient craftsman in readiness for an important secret mission:
Equipped with a passport provided by Admiral Canaris in the name of Albert Oertel, nationality Swiss, Wehring came to Britain and in due course settled down in the pleasant, old-world town of Kirkwall in the Orkneys, not far from Scapa Flow. At first he worked for a local jeweller whom he persuaded to take in watch and clock repairs instead of sending them to Leith … His work was excellent, and he soon earned quite a reputation. It was not long before he opened a shop of his own in one of Kirkwall’s quaint, narrow streets. It was a small place, rather like that in Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shop, where Wehring, alias Oertel, sold fancy goods and souvenirs and, of course, carried on with repairing clocks and watches. The people among whom he now lived liked Oertel. He was pleasant, courteous, apparently honest, and his business enjoyed considerable patronage. Several of his customers invited him into their homes. He made many friends. Life in the coastal town was indeed enjoyable, so much so that in 1932 Oertel completed the process of assimilation by becoming a naturalized British subject.
Singer also wrote that Wehring was in wireless communication with his Abwehr masters in Holland, regularly scoured the countryside armed with maps and binoculars, and that he travelled to Rotterdam in September 1939 for a secret briefing about the long-planned submarine attack on Scapa Flow. All of which was demonstrably false. Several investigators, including Nigel West, Wolfgang Frank, Alexander McKee and Gerald Snyder, have all conducted extensive enquiries in the Orkneys, and found no trace of anyone remotely resembling Wehring/Oertel. Home Office records reveal that no one named Wehring, Oertel or any other name attached to the phantom spy applied to become a naturalised British subject, and in 1959 the leading watchmaker and jeweller on Orkney, a Mr Hourston, confirmed to McKee that Oertel had never been in business, or existed. In 1976 all fifteen living survivors of U47’s original crew of 44 confirmed that no spy had played any part in the mission. Prien’s commander, Admiral Karl Dönitz, published his memoirs in 1958, and he too denied any knowledge of Wehring. In 1983 Orkney’s chief librarian confirmed in a letter to Nigel West that:
No watchmaker, Swiss or otherwise, worked in Orkney at that time, either on his own or in the employment of any of the local watchmakers. The name Albert Oertel is pure invention, probably derived from the name of the Albert Hotel in Kirkwall.
In fact Singer seems to have become lost in his own web of intrigue, for he gives two conflicting versions of Wehring’s eventual fate. In his original account, published in 1945, the author offers that Prien and ‘submarine B-06’ kept a pre-arranged rendezvous with Wehring ‘close to the easternmost tip of Pomona Island’ and picked him up in a rubber dinghy. Wehring then handed over his plans and assisted Prien in penetrating Scapa Flow. Their mission completed, the spy returned to Kiel with the jubilant crew:
In the midst of the celebration, one man not in uniform slipped away from the dock to which submarine B-06 was moored. Though the newspapers gave citations to everyone of the crew by name, not a word was said about this civilian. The man had not been invited to the banquet.
By 1959 the plot had changed, for Singer now placed Wehring on dry land on the night of the attack:
The subsequent history of the man who posed as Albert Oertel is shrouded in mystery. It is known that he left Kirkwall shortly after the disaster, suddenly and without explanation. He was serving in his shop one day. The next day he was gone. Some say that he was picked up under cover of darkness by a German submarine and taken back to Kiel. No record of this was found in the official papers captured by the Allies, nor was there any indication that he was given further assignments elsewhere.
In the decade after the war’s end, several other accounts published in Europe and America promulgated the myth of the phantom spy. In Britain a former Czech resistance fighter named Edward Spiro wrote a series of less than reliable books on intelligence matters under the pseudonym E.H. Cookridge. The first of these, Secrets of the British Secret Service, published in 1947, contained an essentially identical account of the sinking of Royal Oak, albeit with names and nationalities altered:
In 1927 … a Dutch citizen, Mijnheer Joachim Van Schullerman, arrived in England, as the representative of a Swiss firm of watchmakers and jewellers … By 1932, as he had been a resident for five years in Britain, Schullerman applied to the Scottish Office for naturalization. Everyone in Kirkwall knew him well, and it was not difficult to find a few leading citizens to vouch for him. The papers went through without a hitch.
According to Cookridge, Van Schullerman was in fact a German naval captain named Kurt von Müller:
Knight of the Iron Cross, Knight of the Military Merit Order personally awarded by the Kaiser for gallantry at the Battles of Jutland and the Kattegat, he had endured the shame of watching the defeated German navy sail into surrender at Scapa Flow in 1918.
Like Singer, Cookridge invented a wealth of personal detail, including a trip to Rotterdam in September 1939, on the pretext of visiting his terminally ill mother:
A few days after his visit to Rotterdam Schullerman returned to Scotland, clad in deep mourning. He received plenty of sympathy as he told how he had arrived a few hours too late to comfort his mother. People noted how terribly cut up the little man was during the following fortnight. He seemed to have no zest for life, and often did not trouble to take the shutters down from his tiny shop, doubtless spending his time in meditation and prayer in the back room.
Cookridge also duplicated Singer’s original ending, while adding a twist of his own:
In Kiel a great celebration was held as the submarine entered the dock. Admiral Dönitz was there to congratulate the captain and crew. Few people bothered about the short, stoutish man in civilian clothes who unobtrusively emerged from the conning tower and was hurried to a waiting aeroplane which took off for Berlin …
The omission of Müller from the long list of awards seems to indicate that Canaris had a plan to use his henchman’s abilities in some other direction later, but it is certain he never played an active part in espionage in the British sphere. His name appears for a time as an official in charge of departments of the Nachrichtendienst in Holland and France, and then disappears into oblivion. So far he has escaped the Allied dragnet, and unfortunately it must be admitted that a man who could play the part of a watchmaker unfalteringly for twelve years would have little difficulty in posing as an anti-Nazi or Displaced Person in some quiet corner of the occupied Reich.
In truth, it was displaced persons such as Singer, Spiro and the anonymous ‘central European’ discussed by Farago who lie at the heart of the fiction, no doubt finding themselves short of funds in a strange land, and unable to resist falsifying history in exchange for a feature fee or modest advance from a publisher. That is almost certainly the root of the tale of Wehring/Oertel/von Müller, although perhaps the strangest twist came in 1956 with the publication of The Schellenberg Memoirs. Since early 1940 Walter Schellenberg had been head of the Sicherheitsdienst, the SS intelligence service, and died in Italy in 1952 after serving three years in prison for war crimes. His purported autobiography, although assembled from questionable sources, was authenticated by the distinguished academic and historian Alan Bullock. Despite these credentials, however, Schellenberg’s account of the phantom of Scapa Flow was almost identical to that given by Reiss and Singer more than a decade earlier, and does much to support the view that The Schellenberg Memoirs are bogus.
How important intelligently planned long-range preparatory work can be – and how rewarding in the end – is shown by the successful operation of the German U-boat Commander, Captain Prien, against the British naval base at Scapa Flow in October 1940 [sic]. The success of this operation was made possible by careful preparatory work over a period of fifteen years. Alf
red Wehring had been a Captain in the German Imperial Navy and later joined the military sector of the Secret Service. After the First World War he became a traveller for a German watch factory. Working all the time under orders from the Secret Service, he learned the watchmaker’s trade thoroughly in Switzerland. In 1927, under the name of Albert Oertel and with a Swiss passport, he settled in England. In 1932 he became a naturalized British subject, and soon afterwards opened a small jewellery shop at Kirkwall in the Orkneys, near Scapa Flow, whence from time to time he sent us reports on the movements of the British Home Fleet.
It was in the beginning of October 1939, that he sent us the important information that the eastern approach to Scapa Flow through the Kierkesund was not closed off by anti-submarine nets but only by hulks lying relatively far apart. On receipt of this information Admiral Dönitz ordered Captain Prien to attack any British warships in Scapa Flow … The sinking of this battleship took less than fifteen minutes – but fifteen years of patient and arduous work by Alfred Wehring had been the necessary foundation for this supremely successful mission.
Since no spy existed, Schellenberg either lied, or else had little to do with writing or editing his own book. Yet another American account, penned by a former intelligence officer named Christopher Felix in 1963, managed to confuse both Wehring’s occupation and the vessel sunk by U47:
A notable example of the ‘sleeper’ agent was the innkeeper whom the Germans introduced into the British naval base of Scapa Flow not long after the First World War. He didn’t stir during all the years until the outbreak of the Second World War; he was then able to provide the information which permitted a Nazi submarine to sneak into Scapa Flow early in the war, torpedo HMS Ark Royal [sic], and escape untouched.
Despite the wealth of evidence that Wehring never existed, the phantom of Scapa Flow continues to haunt the pages of supposedly serious histories. As recently as 1984 a study of the Abwehr by Lauren Paine rehearsed the same hoary tale of the Swiss watchmaker in Kirkwall, who had observed the Royal Oak ‘enter the protected roadstead without having to wait until the submarine nets were lowered, which meant that the ship was vulnerable from the east’.
At least one account identifies the spy not as Wehring, but as Gunter Prien himself. According to Geoffrey Cousins, who published The Story of Scapa Flow in 1965, Prien undertook a solo spy mission to Orkney while a member of the Hitler Youth. No source for this information is given by Cousins, and no year. Nonetheless, by this version:
It was in pursuit of his dreams and ambitions that he spent a holiday on Orkney, apparently just a young German tourist but, in reality, a spy. On his walks to inspect ancient monuments, to watch the seabirds and study the flora of the islands, he observed and recorded in his mind many facts about Scapa Flow and the islands enclosing it, facts which had no antiquarian, ornithological or botanical significance but which were to help him when the time came to plan his great enterprise …
Time after time, his wanderings took him down the road from Kirkwall, past Scapa Pier, to where he could watch the swirling current as the tide ebbed and flowed between the rocks. He studied this channel in all kinds of weather and at all heights of tide, and from his observations deduced that there was a way into Scapa Flow through Holm Sound. A way which would require skill, courage and luck, but still a way … Prien stored all the information he had gained and returned to Germany, where, in due course, he joined the submarine service.
Prien is generally assumed to have been killed in March 1941, when U47 was sunk by the destroyer HMS Wolverine, and so was unable to confirm the truth (or otherwise) of this new slant on the story. However his own short biography, published in Germany in 1940 as My Way Towards Scapa Flow, and in translation as I Sank the Royal Oak in 1954, makes no mention of any such holiday or exploit. Indeed Prien gave no indication that he had ever set foot on British soil.
Yet another spy variant was conjured by Richard Deacon, the pseudonym used by journalist Donald McCormick. In The Silent War, his book on naval intelligence first published in 1978, Deacon dismissed the possibility that Alfred Wehring existed outside the imagination of Reiss and Singer, but then proceeded to construct an equally elaborate fantasy based on the supposed existence of another German agent on Orkney. An entry in U47’s log timed at 01.20 hours on 14 October records that the headlights of a car travelling along the coast road between St Mary and Kirkwall briefly settled on the submarine, before the vehicle sped off in the direction of Scapa Flow. Prien feared his boat had been spotted, but no alarm was raised, and U47 continued on its way unmolested.
Despite the best efforts of the Admiralty Board of Enquiry, the driver of the car was never identified. Against this background, Deacon wondered:
What is interesting is that the mysterious car driver proved as elusive as Oertel: he was never located. Is one possible explanation that the car driver was one of Canaris’ undercover agents whose job it was to frustrate Prien’s mission? Bizarre as such a theory may seem, it is not improbable … Canaris would go along with Dönitz to a certain extent, but from what we know about him it is more than likely that he would not wish to see the Royal Navy suffer too heavy a blow. One ship lost, perhaps, but more than that would be unthinkable. Did he send an agent in a car to flash his headlights and then drive off with the aim of frightening Prien into believing that he had been discovered, thus making him stop at one act of sabotage, instead of sinking other capital ships?
Even if Canaris harboured Allied sympathies at this early stage in the war, Deacon’s theory is scarcely credible, not least because such a plan would have left far too much to chance. In any event, in 1980 the likely driver of the car was revealed to be a garage proprietor and taxi driver, one Robbie Tulloch, who had been busy running fares to a dance in St Mary’s.
An altogether different theory was advanced by Alexander McKee in 1959, who in Black Saturday claimed not only that Wehring was a fiction, but that Prien and U47 never penetrated Scapa Flow. McKee based his startling conclusion on several factors, including a supposed lack of torpedo fragments, or any spent torpedoes fired by Prien which failed to find a target. In addition, McKee cited depth and tide data, and supposed discrepancies in the account of the action written up in U47’s log. In fact parts from two other German Siemens torpedoes were located by scuba divers in 1973. Whatever view is taken of McKee’s conclusions, however, it remains the case that many Royal Oak survivors refused to believe their ship was hit by torpedoes, or that Prien entered the Flow at all. Most pointed to the fact that stores stencilled with the name Royal Oak had been left on the dockside for some time, although how many hundreds of kilograms of explosive could have been smuggled on board is quite another matter. Besides which, Royal Oak’s main magazines did not explode.
After diving and salvage operations began, a raft of other more ghoulish rumours began to circulate, as McKee records:
On Sunday, the 15th, diving operations began. What the divers found there echoes still. There were bodies leaning out of the wreck, half in and half out of the portholes; there were corpses in the full, jammed by falling gear; and on the seabed, the bloated corpses of drowned swimmers floated more or less upright, executing in the tides a macabre underwater dance … One of the divers, a Portsmouth man, had had a son on the Royal Oak; he was still in the hull … The scenes found below were still being passed on among the Orkney Defence Force years afterwards; it was said that divers had come up, crazed with horror … Stories were going round among survivors that certain named divers had told them either that the explosions were definitely internal, or that the hull had been blown outwards.
As H.J. Weaver observed in 1980, the loss of the Royal Oak is not a matter of dusty history in Kirkwall. Shops keep a stock of books on the disaster, summer visitors hire boats to make pilgrimages to the site of the wreck, and ‘if you come across a group of men engaged in deep discussion it is an even chance that they are arguing about whether or not Lieutenant Prien ever saw the inside of Scapa Flow’. Profitab
ility prolongs any myth.
In addition to the tale that Prien had carried out his own solo reconnaissance of Scapa Flow years earlier, it was falsely claimed that he was responsible for sinking the Arandora Star in July 1940, on which some 600 German, Austrian and Italian internees perished while en route to Canada. After 1941 it was widely rumoured in Germany that the celebrated U-boat ace had not died in action at all, but in a bathing accident, or else in a concentration camp following a court-martial for mutiny. Other variants insisted that he had been executed by firing squad, and that his crew were sent as punishment to a labour corps on the Russian Front. Wolfgang Frank, author of a booklet published in 1949 titled What Really Happened to Prien?, recorded his own experience of these rumours at the end of the war:
When the German armed forces surrendered I was out on patrol with another U-boat as war correspondent; we put into a Norwegian fjord and were taken prisoner, and I did not return from captivity to Germany till the autumn of 1945. I was amazed at the rumours, all of the same nature, current not only about Prien, but also about other U-boat commanders and Luftwaffe aces. The various versions I heard agreed up to a point: Prien had, so the story ran, refused to put to sea in an unseaworthy boat. Dönitz had had him court-martialled for mutiny, he had been found guilty and sent to the military penal institute at Torgau, from where he had later been transferred to the concentration camp at Esterwegen. There, I was told, he died; according to one version of starvation; according to another stood up against a wall and shot before the arrival of the Allied troops.
Myths & Legends of the Second World War Page 5
