Tales From the Tower of London (31 page)

Blissfully unaware that everyone, particularly his staunchly conservative Irish Catholic comrades were deserting him like rats from a sinking ship, as late as 14 June Roger Casement stated in a letter, ‘The British Government dare not hang me (they don’t want to either – as individuals, I think). They simply dare not. . . . They know quite well what the world would say.’ He was right. The government knew exactly what the scandalised world was going to say. It would say nothing.

Following his conviction Roger Casement was transferred from the Tower to London’s Pentonville prison to await execution. During his incarceration there he requested the prison chaplain, Father Carey, to arrange his acceptance into the Catholic Church. The archbishop agreed to the request, but stated that Casement would have to confess his regret ‘for any scandal he might have caused by his acts, public or private’. Shocked and distressed, Casement wrote to his cousin, ‘They are trying to make me betray my soul.’ Whether he, or the archbishop, was referring to his treasonable acts against Great Britain, or his private life, remains open to question. In either case, Casement refused. It was only when Father Carey discovered that Casement’s parents had baptised him both in his mother’s Catholic religion, as well as in his father’s Protestant faith, that the conversion was allowed without Casement’s confession.

On 3 August 1916 the disgraced Roger Casement, last of the plotters in the disastrous Easter Sunday Rising, was led to the scaffold at Pentonville. To the end, Casement denied the right of an English court to condemn an Irishman. In a speech from the scaffold he stated that, ‘Since in the acts which have led to this trial it was the people of Ireland I sought to serve – and them alone – I leave my judgement and my sentence in their hands.’ It was almost the same ploy Mary Queen of Scots had used three centuries earlier when she insisted no English court had jurisdiction over a foreign monarch. It had not worked for Mary then, and it did not work for Casement now.

Accompanying him to the scaffold was Father Carey. Deeply impressed with the way Casement conducted himself in his last minutes, Carey later wrote, ‘He feared not death . . . he marched to the scaffold with the dignity of a prince.’ The hangman, Mr Ellis, had a similar reaction, saying, ‘Mr Casement was the bravest man it [ever] fell my unhappy lot to execute’.

It was inevitable that the execution of a man who had undergone such a sensational trial and dramatic fall from grace would make headlines. On the day of his execution the
Irish Times
wrote, ‘Roger Casement’s death is a miserable end to a life which, for the most part of its course, was honourable and distinguished.’ Germany’s Foreign Minister, Arthur von Zimmerman, wrote that he had never known, ‘a man of loftier mind, of higher honour, of more burning love of home. It was a matter of personal grief to me when I heard he had made up his mind to accompany the [Irish] expedition. . . . So I urged him . . . to remain with us and to do work among the prisoners. . . . But he only shook his head, saying “I must go, I must be with the boys”.’

Nearly ninety years after Roger Casement’s execution, his tragic story still raises eyebrows and arguments by historians, politicians and Irish Republicans in Ireland, Britain and the US. Since word of the Black Diaries first leaked out, and even more so since their publication in the late 1950s, the argument has raged as to their authenticity. Many, particularly the Irish, insist they were clever forgeries, concocted by the British government in an effort to discredit a man whose life had become a rallying point for the spirit of Irish Republicanism. What is certain is that only days before he went to the gallows, Casement wrote a letter to an ex-lover referred to in the diaries only as ‘Millar’. Years later, the man was identified as Joseph Millar Gordon, a Belfast bank clerk. What all this says about Roger Casement is left to the judgement of history.

By the twentieth century, the Tower of London had long since given up any real military role. Beyond its capacity as a well-guarded storehouse for the Crown Jewels, it served primarily as a museum dedicated to displaying a massive collection of ancient arms and armour that had seen action centuries earlier. The one important role it did maintain, however, was that of an enduring symbol of the monarchy and the British Empire. Even during the darkest days of the Second World War, when German bombs threatened to destroy London, King George VI and the government agreed that the Tower would remain open to the public as long as it remained safe and intact. The Tower, like the British people, would stand defiant in the face of the Nazi onslaught.

Much of London was reduced to ruins during months of incessant bombing, and during these raids the Tower was struck no less than fifteen times, killing twenty-three people and two ravens. But, almost miraculously, little serious damage was done to the medieval fabric of the building. As one of the few public places which was never forced to close its doors, the ancient grey walls saw more tourists than ever flock through its gates, including millions of American GIs, all gaping in wonder at the lurid stories of medieval torture and death on the ‘block’, with which the tower warders regaled the tour groups.

There were always rumours that Hitler’s number one henchman, Rudolf Hess, was stashed safely away somewhere in the vast Tower complex, but no one knew for certain where he was, or even if the stories were true – and the government had no intention of making the whereabouts of their most important prisoner public knowledge.

Of course, Hess was there for a short period and he would have probably remained the last prisoner of the world’s oldest and most venerable fortress, except for one curious incident; and this came and went so quickly that only a handful of people even knew it had taken place. At least, almost no one knew, or remembered, until one day during the summer of 1991 the Tower was once again reminded of the official role it has played throughout history and even within living memory.

It was the height of the tourist season and the tower warders were working double shifts to cater to the massive crowds of tourists flocking daily through the ancient prison doors. As they had done for nearly two centuries, the once fierce Beefeaters were now mostly retired army officers who guided the crowds from one site to another, entertaining them with an endless string of long-ago tales of murder and mayhem. ‘Here is where the young princes were held before they disappeared; probably murdered by their uncle, Richard III’ . . . ‘Here is where Anne Boleyn was beheaded; and they say that her ghost still roams the walkways of the tower, holding her head under her arm. . . .’ It was the same routine every day, but both the Beefeaters and the crowds loved it.

It was during the height of this busy season when one of the warders was leading a tour group from Canada through the ancient, blood-soaked alleys of the Tower. Having finished showing them the site where the headsman’s block had once stood, he was about to gather them up and move on to the next stop on the tour, when a middle-aged woman touched him on the arm and whispered apologetically, ‘Excuse me, but . . . can you show me the place where they shot my father?’ Dumbfounded, the warder could only stare open-mouthed at the woman. He had no idea what she was talking about. When she told the old soldier her father’s name was Josef Jakobs, all the colour drained from his face. Now he knew – the Tower remembered.

Turning the tour group over to one of his colleagues, the guide led the woman to the office of Head Warden Major-General Chris Tyler, and asked her to repeat what she had told him. Again, the woman explained that her father had been Josef Jakobs and that she understood he had been executed in the Tower as a Nazi spy some time during the Second World War. General Tyler assured the woman that he would personally show her the spot and asked her to wait in his office for just a minute. When he returned, he handed her a pair of old-fashioned, wire-rimmed glasses and a small Bible, explaining that the glasses had been her father’s and that he had requested a Bible the day before he was shot. They were hers if she wanted them.

Clutching the only surviving mementoes of her father, the woman followed General Tyler across Tower Green towards a car park. During the war a corrugated metal shed had stood in this area, and it was here that Josef Jakobs was executed by firing squad. As they walked, Tyler told her everything he knew about her father – the last man to be executed in the Tower of London.

An integral part of Nazi Germany’s plan to bring Great Britain to its knees without mounting an actual invasion of the island depended on massive waves of aerial bombardment carried out both by day and night. The notoriously unpredictable English weather, however, made it imperative that updates on weather conditions be broadcast to the German air force, the Luftwaffe, almost continually. To supply this stream of information dozens of spies were smuggled into England, each equipped with a radio transmitter, a code book and a basic knowledge of meteorology.

But spying has always been dangerous work, and in the razor-edged atmosphere of the Second World War any suspicious activity could lead to instant arrest. Consequently, spies were considered nearly as expendable as bullets; pawns in an endless and violent game of power politics and war.

Exactly how Josef Jakobs was recruited as a spy for Nazi Germany remains a mystery. What we do know is that by the time he was drafted into the German army in 1940, he was already forty-two years old and had been a dentist all of his working life – hardly a likely candidate for the high-risk job of espionage.

In July of that year Corporal Jakobs was sent to a training camp run by the German Meteorological Service in occupied Holland, to which he had been assigned. There he underwent three weeks of training sessions in radio communications and meteorology. There seem to have been no special training in espionage techniques, or how to carry out such activities without raising suspicion. This probably did not concern Jakobs too much, however; after all, as far as he knew he was just a weather reporter.

By the end of the year Jakobs was deemed ready to begin his life as a spy. He was issued with a long-range radio transmitter cleverly hidden inside a briefcase, road maps of eastern central England with RAF bases at Upton and Warboys clearly marked so he could avoid getting too close to the military, a false set of identity papers, an ample quantity of counterfeit British money and a Mauser pistol. With these few tools, Jakobs was ordered to parachute into England and establish a clandestine weather station – radioing regular weather reports to German Headquarters in occupied France.

During the night of 31 January 1941, Josef Jakobs parachuted out of a German plane into the cold, quiet countryside of Ramsey Hollow in rural Huntingdonshire. Having no more experience as a paratrooper than he had as a spy, Jakobs’ poor landing in a roughly ploughed field left him with a shattered left ankle. Exhausted, freezing cold and racked by wave after wave of searing pain, Jakobs lapsed into unconsciousness only minutes after pulling the parachute over him in an attempt to keep warm. When he awoke in the cold, grey light of morning Jakobs realised immediately just how desperate his situation was. There was no way he could walk, or even stand, but if he didn’t get help very soon he could very well die of exposure. In a desperate attempt to attract help, he fumbled through the briefcase for the pistol and fired two shots into the air, hoping the noise would attract some attention. It did.

Two farmers out for an early morning stroll with their dogs walked towards the source of the two sharp reports. To their amazement they found a slim, balding man in a business suit and glasses lying unconscious, pistol in hand, nearly covered by a camouflage-patterned parachute, in the middle of a frozen field. While one of the men stayed behind to guard the curious visitor the other went to the nearby town of Ramsey for the police and an ambulance. As a precaution, the local constable asked several members of the Territorial Army to accompany him to the site. As they extricated the semi-conscious Jakobs from his parachute, the soldiers uncovered his briefcase with its radio transmitter, maps and a fistful of banknotes. Obviously, something was very wrong.

After being taken to the local hospital where his shattered ankle was set and put into a cast, the man was subjected to routine questioning by local authorities. Jakobs constantly denied he was working for the Germans, insisting he had only parachuted into England to escape the Nazis. Certain they had captured a spy, the authorities turned the case, and their prisoner, over to the military authorities who moved Jakobs to Brixton prison where he was officially charged as a spy and sent to appear before a military court martial under strict secrecy. Because of the war, everyone accused of espionage was tried in secret to ensure the enemy never knew which of their agents had been captured and which were still roaming free.

Under intense questioning Jakobs held to his story, insisting that he was not even German; he was a citizen of Luxembourg who had spent his life in Germany working as a dentist. He even claimed that he was half-Jewish – he couldn’t be a Nazi. As his story unfolded, Jakobs claimed that he had helped other Jews escape from Germany after the Nazis had come to power, and had been arrested and thrown into a concentration camp when his activities were discovered. Although he admitted he had joined the German army, he said he had only done so as a means of escaping almost certain death in the camps and had agreed to become a spy only as a means of escaping the Nazis. All he wanted was to join the anti-Nazi resistance and fight to free his native Luxembourg from German occupation. It was a good story, but the military judges knew that German spies routinely said they were only trying to escape Nazi-occupied Europe. No final decision would be made on the case until there were more facts to go on.

It didn’t take long for the truth to come out – and it was a strange mixture of Jakobs’ own story and a mountain of far more damning evidence. Josef Jakobs had, indeed, been born a citizen of Luxembourg, but had renounced his citizenship to serve in the Imperial German Army during the First World War. Then, from Switzerland came court records showing that Jakobs had been arrested in 1924 for selling counterfeit gold. And finally came evidence that Jakobs had, indeed helped Jews escape from Germany, but he had charged them extortionate fees for his services. Josef Jakobs was not a victim of Nazi oppression; he was a convicted criminal, an extortionist and a Nazi spy and saboteur. The sentence was death by hanging.