Great War Saboteur Manhunt

Mills, Bill.  Agent of the Iron Cross: The Race to Capture German Saboteur-Assassin Lothar 

        Witzke during World War I.  Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023.  ISBN: 

        9781538182086

 

Secret agents, sabotage, planned invasions, codes breaking and double agents are often the stuff of spy stories, but can be found in real life as well.  Agent of the Iron Cross documents Lothar Witzke's story as German agent, running loose in the United States and Mexico from 1915 till his capture and trial in 1918.  

 

At the opening of World War I, Witzke was a midshipman on the German cruiser Dresden and wounded in the final battle with the British Navy off the coast of Chile.  He escaped from the hospital at Valparaiso, Chile, and disguised as a Danish seaman who had lost his papers made his way to San Fransisco.  Consul Bopp employeed Witzke as a courier until he hooked up with Kurt Jahnke and became a saboteur.  He helped plant explosives on merchant ships and with involved in the Black Tom Island and the Mare Island Naval Station explosions.  In 1917, Witzke and Jahnke moved to Mexico to stay in communication with their HQ while continuing their operations.  One such operation involved creating labor unrest at mines in southwestern United States so that local US Army troops would be called out while also having blacks in the South rise up in insurrections followed by the Mexican Army invading and occupying parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and California.  All this mayhem would keep the United States out of the war in Europe.  Fortunately, for the United States there were some competent undercover agents and double agents embedded in the German camp so that this plot could be thwarted.  As part of the plot, Witzke crossed the border into Texas and was arrested, his luggage searched and a code found.  The contents of the coded message played its part in the court-martial trial in convicting Witzke of espionage and sentenced to be hanged.  After judicial review in 1919, the sentence was changed to confinement at hard labor.  In 1919, Witzke and two other prisoners broke out of Fort Sam Houston prison but quickly recaptured and he ended up in Leavenworth for several years until released in 1923.  Witzke moved back to Germany and  joined the Abwehr under Canaris before World War II started.  After the war Witzke served in the Hamburg legislature from 1949-1952.  He died on January 6, 1962.

If you are interested in spies, secret agents, double crosses and feats of daring, pick up a copy of Agents of the Iron Cross and pick up a few little known facts!