Agent Zigzag

by Ben MacIntyre

  Praetorius was popular at Southampton, where he was nicknamed “Rusty” by his contemporaries on account of the reddish tinge to his receding hair, and remembered as a “kind, gentle type12 of personality.” But he was also deeply impressionable, one of nature’s extremists and liable to fits of excessive and irrational enthusiasm. When he returned to Germany in 1936, his obsession with folk dancing was soon replaced by an even more extreme passion for fascism. According to British police files, his mother was already a “rabid Nazi,”13 and young Walter embraced the new creed with characteristic fervor and naiveté, rising swiftly through the ranks of the Hitler Youth. The “superiority of the German14 and Anglo-Saxon races over all others” became an article of faith. The outbreak of war was an opportunity to demonstrate German strength in the ranks of the SS. The death of his only brother, Hans, in Poland in the early days of the war served merely to inflame him further. Rusty, the gentle flutist with the passion for country dancing, had become a committed, unquestioning Nazi.

  Adopting the spy name “Walter Thomas” in honor of his Scottish forebears, SS Oberleutnant Praetorius set to work diligently trawling through paperwork and scouring prisons, refugee centers, and POW camps in search of ideal spy material. He traveled to Jersey in search of collaborators, and stayed at the Almadoux Hotel. He interviewed criminals and deserters, British citizens trapped in the occupied territories, and even IRA sympathizers, Irishmen who might be recruited to fight against Britain. None would suffice. Then, in late March 1942, Praetorius sent an excited message to the newly appointed chief of the Nantes Abwehr station (or Abwehr-stelle), reporting that he had located an English thief in a Paris prison who “might be trained15 for sabotage work,” and was going to interview him at once.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Dr. Graumann

  CHAPMAN BEGAN TO explore his new home, with Praetorius (alias “Thomas”) as his guide and guard. Chapman’s bedroom, on the top floor of La Bretonnière, was directly above that of Graumann, whose suite occupied most of the first floor. Next door to Chapman slept Keller, whose bedroom was also the radio room. Wojch and Schmidt shared a room, and Praetorius occupied the bedroom next to Graumann. The ground floor consisted of the dining room, an elegant smoking room with wall panels painted in the style of Fragonard, and a large study with desks around the walls and a steel safe in the corner. A pretty gardener’s cottage stood alongside the main building, the ground floor of which had been converted into a chemical laboratory for making explosives, with pestles and mortars, scales, and rows of sinister-looking bottles lining the walls.

  La Bretonnière had a full contingent of domestic staff: thirty-year-old Odette did the cooking and housekeeping, aided by Jeanette, a teenager. Two gardeners—one a released prisoner—came daily to cut the grass, tend the flower beds, weed the vegetable patch, and feed the chickens, goats, and pigs housed on the grounds.

  Chapman’s training began at once. A Morse set was produced, and under the tuition of Keller and Praetorius he was taught to distinguish between a dot and a dash. From there he graduated to the letters with two elements, then three, and finally the entire alphabet in German. He was taught elementary radio shorthand, tricks for memorizing sequences of letters, and how to assemble a radio set.

  Three days after his arrival, the gardeners were sent home early and Wojch set off a timed explosion in the garden, followed by a demonstration of “chemical mixing” in the laboratory. The red-faced saboteur handled the volatile compounds with extraordinary dexterity, and Chapman, who prided himself on his knowledge of explosives, was impressed: “He just got hold1 of the stuff, looked at it, tasted it, and started mixing. I don’t think he was a chemist, he’d simply been very well trained.” Every day, Chapman and Wojch would work in the laboratory, making homemade bombs and incendiary devices from simple ingredients such as sugar, oil, and potassium chlorate. Chapman was set to work memorizing formulas.

  Leo began teaching him how to jump and roll in preparation for his parachute drop. A ladder was erected against the tallest beech tree in the garden, and the height of Chapman’s jump gradually increased, until he could leap from thirty feet without hurting himself. After the years of imprisonment, he was in poor physical shape, so Leo devised a strict exercise regime: Chapman would chop wood until his shoulders ached, and every morning Praetorius would accompany him on a four-mile run along the banks of the Erdre. Chapman was deeply affected by “the beauty of the river near Nantes,” reflecting that it was only since leaving prison “that he had begun to realise how much beauty there was in the world.”

  For Chapman, these were strangely idyllic days. A bell would summon the men to breakfast at 8:30 a.m., and at 10:00 a.m. Chapman would practice sending radio messages to the other Abwehr posts in Paris and Bordeaux. The rest of the morning might be taken up with sabotage work, coding exercises, or parachute practice. Lunch was at 12:30 p.m., followed by a siesta until 3:00 or 3:30 p.m., followed by more training. In the evening, they might play bridge, or bowls on the lawn, or walk up the road to the Café des Pêcheurs, a small wood-paneled bar in the village, and watch the sun go down over the river, drinking beer at 3 francs a glass. Sometimes, accompanied by other members of the team, Chapman would drive out into the countryside to purchase black-market food: fresh eggs, bread, hams, and wine. The negotiating was done by one of the drivers, a Belgian named Jean, for the French farmers would charge a German more. The food was expensive—a ham could cost as much as 2,500 francs—but there seemed to be no shortage of money.

  At La Bretonnière, the alcohol flowed copiously. Dr. Graumann’s drinking was particularly spectacular: Chapman calculated that the chief put away at least two bottles of wine a night, followed by glass after glass of brandy. It seemed to have no effect on him whatever. On Saturdays, the household would climb into the unit’s four cars, each with French registrations and an SS pass, and drive into Nantes, where they would dine at Chez Elle, dance at the Café de Paris, or visit the cabaret, Le Coucou, where black-market champagne cost 300 francs a bottle. Chapman paid for nothing, and was issued as much “pocket money”2 as he desired. On these trips in to town, Chapman spotted “V-signs,” the mark of the French resistance, chalked on walls in public places. Some diligent Nazi had inserted a swastika inside each V, “thus reversing the propaganda.” A few of the men visited the German-controlled brothel in town—pug-faced Albert was a regular at the establishment, and extolled the charms of les jolies filles there with such gusto that the others nicknamed him “Joli Albert,” a most inapt description.

  Chapman found Wojch to be particularly good company: “He liked life,3 he always had plenty of money, [he was] rather flashy, liked the girls and the drink.” He, too, was a former boxer and formidably strong. He would challenge the others to a form of wrestling match in which each contestant would clasp his opponent’s hand and then try to force him to his knees. Wojch invariably won.

  Chapman began to imagine these men as his friends. He never doubted that the names he knew them by were real. He once heard Thomas referred to as Praetorius, but simply assumed this must be a nickname.

  But for all their bibulous bonhomie, his new companions were guarded in their words, furtive in their behavior, and secretive in their activities outside the walls of the compound. From time to time, Wojch or Schmidt would disappear, for a week or longer. When they returned, Chapman would discreetly inquire where they had been. The conversation, he recalled, tended to follow the same pattern:

  “Had a good trip?”4

  “Yes. Not too bad.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “Oh, out of the country.”

  Chapman learned never to demand a direct answer. Once, when drunk, he asked Wojch if he had ever been to America. Wojch’s smile was cold. “What do you want5 to ask questions like that for?”

  Beneath a veneer of informality, security was tight. All important documents were held in the office safe. From time to time, Chapman would observe Graumann go into the garden with a secret do
cument or letter, “take it out and light a cigarette6 [with it] and burn the whole envelope.” At night, two ferocious Alsatian dogs roamed the grounds, keeping intruders out and Chapman in. One morning, Keller found Chapman alone in the radio room, and brusquely ordered him to leave. The door was always locked after that, and rigged with an electric alarm. When Graumann discovered that Chapman had taken to swimming in the Erdre in the early morning, he assembled the staff for a ferocious roasting: “Good God!7 Is he going out alone? He has no papers on him. What if the French police pick him up?”

  Later, the chief took Chapman aside and gently explained: “Look here, if you8 are going out swimming, take one of the boys along with you. If ever you want to go out, they have orders that you have only to ask, and one of the boys will go with you.”

  Inevitably, however, Chapman began to glean snippets of information from his housemates. Leo, Wojch, and Schmidt were “more or less reckless,9 the lads of the village.” Wojch boasted that he had been an Olympic boxer before the war. He plainly knew London well, and he waxed sentimental over a former girlfriend, an Irish chambermaid in the Hyde Park Hotel. From casual remarks, Chapman picked up that Wojch had been involved in the dynamiting of a Paris hotel before the invasion of France, an attack in which many Allied officers died. Small but telling details emerged about their earlier lives. Thomas wore his English university boating tie at every opportunity, and boasted that he had been the best oarsman at Southampton. Albert revealed that before the war he had been an agent for a German firm in Liberia. Leo had been a boxer and prizefighter.

  When Chapman asked Schmidt where he got his Cockney accent from, he explained that before the war he had worked as a waiter in Frascati’s, the London restaurant. He had visited several of Chapman’s old Soho haunts, including Smokey Joe’s and the Nest, and recalled the tea dances at the Regal Theatre near Marble Arch. Slowly, it dawned on Chapman that these men must be more than mere instructors; they were experienced, active spies and saboteurs, who had been deployed in France and Britain since before the outbreak of war.

  But if some of “the boys” were coming into sharper focus, their leader concealed his past behind steel shutters of politeness that fired Chapman’s curiosity. For wireless practice, Graumann would set him the task of transmitting English nursery rhymes such as “Mary had a little lamb”10 and “This little piggie went to Market.” “These were things,”11 Chapman reflected, “which I thought only an Englishman would know” but Graumann claimed to have visited England only once. When Chapman remarked to Graumann on his “terribly English accent,”12 he batted away the implied question, saying he had been taught by a “very good private tutor.”13

  One night, over dinner, the conversation turned to dogs. “I’ll show you a photograph14 of my dog,” said Graumann, rising from the table. Several minutes later, he returned with a torn photograph. The dog was visible, but the face of whoever was holding it had been torn away.

  “Dr. Stephan Graumann” was, in reality, nothing of the sort. His real name was Stephan Albert Heinrich von Gröning. He was an aristocrat of impeccable breeding, great wealth, and luxurious tastes; indeed, the “really good brandy”15 he had poured down Chapman on his first evening at La Bretonnière was a fitting leitmotif for his life.

  The von Grönings had been the first family in the northern city of Bremen for some eight centuries, amassing a vast fortune through trading well and marrying better. Over the years, the powerful clan had supplied seventeen members of the Bremen parliament and one notable eighteenth-century diplomat, Georg, who studied with Goethe at Leipzig and then served as ambassador to the court of Napoléon. In recognition of this achievement, he was awarded the aristocratic title “von,” and the von Grönings had been getting steadily richer, and grander, ever since.

  Born in 1898, Stephan had been brought up in circumstances of extreme privilege. His mother was an American heiress of German extraction named Helena Graue (hence his nom d’espion: “Graumann”). At home, the von Grönings spoke English, with an upper-class accent. Home was an enormous town house in the main square of Bremen, a self-satisfied statement in stucco and stone with five stories, a fabled library, several old master portraits, and an army of servants to wait on young Stephan: to polish his shoes, to cook his meals, to drive him to an exclusive private school in a carriage with glass windows and bearing the family crest.

  Von Gröning’s pampered life very nearly came to a premature end in 1914 when World War I erupted, and he joined the army. But not for young Stephan some dowdy and uncomfortable billet in the trenches; he was commissioned as an Oberleutnant in the legendary White Dragoons, perhaps the most elite cavalry regiment in the imperial army. Von Gröning took part in one of the last cavalry charges in history, during which most of the regiment was annihilated by British machine-gun fire. He survived, and was awarded the Iron Cross, second class, for bravery. Von Gröning’s war was a short one. He contracted pneumonia, then tuberculosis, and was invalided out of the army. His mother sent him to recuperate at Davos, the fashionable health spa in Switzerland, where he met and fell in love with a Welsh woman named Gladys Nott Gillard, who was also tubercular and highborn, but penniless. They married in St. Luke’s church, in Davos, on December 19, 1923.

  The von Grönings rented a large mansion in Davos, called the Villa Baby, and then set off traveling, back to Bremen, to Hamburg, and finally to Bavaria. Along the way, von Gröning acquired a coffee business—Gröning and Schilling—which almost immediately went bust. Then he began gambling on the stock exchange, and lost even more money. Had he not considered it vulgar to count one’s wealth, he might have realized that apart from the great house at Bremen and some fine oil paintings, he was heading for bankruptcy.

  Charming, brave, intellectually gifted but indolent, at the end of the war von Gröning found himself at something of a loose end, which is where he remained for the next seventeen years. He had no desire to study. He collected etchings by Rubens and Rembrandt. He traveled a little, drank a lot, and took no physical exercise of any kind (he rode a bicycle only once in his life, but declared the experience “uncomfortable”16 and never repeated it). After his failed coffee enterprise, von Gröning would have nothing more to do with business or trade, and fully occupied his time behaving as if he was rich, which he blithely assumed he was. “He was delightful17 company, and very clever,” one member of the family put it, “but he never actually did anything at all.”

  Stephan and his wife shared an interest in lapdogs, strong drink, and spending money they did not have; but not much else. They divorced in 1932, on the grounds of von Gröning’s “illicit association18 with another woman.” He was required to provide alimony of 250 marks a month, which was paid by his mother. He then agreed to pay Gladys a lump sum of 4,000 marks, but somehow failed to pay that either. Gladys was reduced to teaching English at a school in Hamburg, while her ex-husband would lie on the sofa in the library of the family home for days on end, reading books in German, English, and French, and smoking cigars. But they remained friends. Von Gröning did not make enemies easily.

  Von Gröning had observed the rise of fascism from a lofty distance. He was a patriotic monarchist and an old-fashioned aristocrat from an earlier age. He had little time for the posturing Brownshirts with their extreme ideas. He regarded anti-Semitism as vulgar, and Hitler as an upstart Austrian “oik” (though at the time he kept that opinion to himself).

  The outbreak of the Second World War gave new purpose to von Gröning’s dilettante existence. At the age of thirty-nine he rejoined the German cavalry—a very different organization from the elegant lancers of his youth—and served on the eastern front as a staff officer attached to Oberkommando 4 Heeresgruppe Mitte. After a year, he applied to join the Abwehr. The secret military intelligence service of the German High Command was something of an ideological anomaly: It contained its share of Nazi fanatics, but alongside them were many men of von Gröning’s stamp—officers of the old school, determined to win the war
, but opposed to Nazism. The Abwehr was epitomized by its leader, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, a spy of great subtlety who ran the Abwehr as a personal fiefdom. Hitler never trusted Canaris, rightly, for the admiral might eventually have put out feelers to Britain, seeking to negotiate an end to the war by removing the Führer.

  Espionage appealed to von Gröning, intellectually and ideologically, while his command of languages and knowledge of English and American culture made him a valuable asset in the secret service. The years spent lounging in the library at Bremen had not been entirely wasted: behind the hooded eyes and jovial manner was a practiced and cynical student of human nature. His outwardly affable demeanor encouraged others to confide in him, but as a von Gröning of Bremen, he always maintained his distance. “He could mix in19 any company, but he always knew who he was.” He was swiftly spotted as the coming man within the Abwehr, and when Canaris was looking for someone to run his new Nantes spy school, von Gröning seemed the obvious person to appoint.

  Von Gröning liked Chapman. He admired the sheer energy of the man, so different from his own aristocratic languor. And he knew he could turn him into a powerful secret weapon.

  The photograph he handed Chapman had once shown Gladys hugging their pet dog, a Sealyham terrier. But before coming downstairs, he had carefully torn Gladys out of the picture. Von Gröning was not going to run the risk, however small, that Chapman might recognize his British ex-wife, and thus obtain a clue to the real identity of “Dr. Graumann.”

  Von Gröning bound Chapman ever closer to the team. The psychology was simple, but effective. The Englishman was flattered and spoiled, drawn into an intense atmosphere of secretive camaraderie. Like many brutal men, including Hitler himself, the members of the Nantes Abwehr section could also be sentimental and nostalgic. Von Gröning set up a Heimecke—a “home corner”20—on the bureau in the smoking room, where the men were encouraged to display pictures of their hometowns, and somehow obtained a photograph of Berwick-upon-Tweed, the nearest town he could to find to Chapman’s birthplace of Burnopfield. Birthdays were celebrated with cakes, gifts, and torrents of drink. Von Gröning encouraged informality, and allowed the men to daub graffiti on the walls of the unused attics. One drew a caricature of Hitler as a carrot. It was Chapman who carefully etched the picture of a blond woman with a striking resemblance to Betty Farmer.