Wulf Schmidt, also known as Hans Hansen, was a German-Danish mixed-race man.
Had it not been for the outbreak of World War II, he might have been a wanderer, attracting bees and butterflies all day. However, history has given him a unique position, making Hansen one of the most famous double agents in history.
On the night of September 19, 1940, German ace pilot Major Gatton Feld piloted a Messerschmitt-110 fighter jet and glided over the runway of a military airport outside Hamburg, Germany, and gently disappeared into the night sky.
The German-produced Messerschmitt-110 fighter was quite mediocre in the Luftwaffe.
This three-seat monoplane heavy fighter, with a large body and clumsy movements, was easy to detect and shoot down, and even in the late Battle of Britain, it was escorted by Messerschmitt-109. It was only in the later fight against the strategic bombing of Germany by the British army, the interception of British bombers at night was a great success, and the average ace pilot did not like this bulky fighter very much.
However, Major Gartonfeld's mission this time was not to engage in an air-to-air fight, let alone to drop bombs, but to drop a special person on the soil of Great Britain.
Messerschmitt-110 fighter
This man, who was now sitting in the position of the gunnery officer behind the plane, was Wulf Schmidt, that is, Hans Hansen.
Hansen's father is German and his mother is Dane, and this kind of transnational marriage is quite common in Europe, so there are many Europeans who can say Chinese much.
He was born in Germany before the outbreak of World War I, but returned to Denmark with his mother in 1914 to escape the war.
By the '30s, Hansen had grown into a standard Nordic guy, more in line with the standards of a so-called "good Aryan" than most of the Nazi tops.
Before World War II, Europe had not completely come out of the shadow of the huge economic crisis of 1929~1933, and under the depressed, heavy air, the Nazis were full of paranoid and impulsive speeches, which were hugely inciting young people with strong flesh.
Hansen was no exception, and although he was a Danish citizen, he was determined to fight for his father's native Germany, and he joined the Nazi Party in Denmark.
It stands to reason that this Lübeck law graduate should have a rational mind, but he is a natural adventurer, and espionage may be a fatal temptation for him.
Therefore, when the German intelligence service approached him and asked him to spy for Germany, Hansen agreed without thinking.
In order to be a spy, he used countless pseudonyms, and Hans Hansen was one of them. For this reason, writers and journalists who planned to study him and report on him after the war took countless detours, and no one can count how many times he changed his name.
After the Battle of Dunkirk, Nazi Germany began to consider attacking Britain, but because the British counter-espionage agency took the opportunity to eliminate all German spy networks in Britain, the Germans lost their main source of British intelligence.
Hans Hansen
In the face of Britain's strict territorial air defense system, the Germans were completely unable to carry out aerial reconnaissance of the British mainland, and as a complete intelligence system, technical reconnaissance and human intelligence complemented and indispensable.
Technical reconnaissance includes aerial photography, radio monitoring, etc., and human intelligence is to send spies to obtain intelligence by stealing, buying, and on-site viewing.
Without the support of human intelligence, it is impossible to know the complete situation of the other side, such as the morale of the enemy army, how the social order is, etc., and the use of technical reconnaissance is not very bright, so the Hamburg station of the German intelligence service was ordered to rebuild the intelligence network in Britain.
In fact, this is really an "impossible task", first of all, it is difficult to send spies to British soil normally.
In peacetime, long-term spies can be sent to a country in the form of journalists, diplomats, visiting scholars, or immigrants, but in wartime, these people are tightly controlled by counterintelligence agencies.
If Germany were to send a spy into the UK as a third-country person, it would have to go through a relatively long cycle of activity.
As for immigration, it is even more impossible, who would risk emigrating to Britain, where the war clouds are dense and supplies are scarce?
At this time, there must be ulterior motives for immigration, and besides, Britain is a relatively stable society, and it takes a long time for outsiders to integrate into British society.
That is, by conventional means, without a cycle of several years, it is impossible to send spies to Britain.
In contrast, the German intelligence service is much easier to send spies to the United States, the United States itself is a society of immigrants, regardless of a person's origin, accent, race, in the United States will not cause surprise, moreover, the United States is far from the war zone, wartime immigration applications fly like snowflakes, so the German intelligence service can easily establish an intelligence network in the United States, and quite a harvest.
Faced with this problem, in order to send spies to Britain, the Hamburg station of the German intelligence service had no choice but to use the most stupid method: smuggling or parachuting into Britain.
The German intelligence service still had some confidence in this method, because they also had a hidden spy in their hands that had not been discovered by the British, Joni.
Therefore, before and after each dispatch of spies at Hamburg Station, Joni had to be notified to try to settle it, however, Joni had already surrendered to Britain, and the German intelligence service was eventually planted in the hands of this Joni.
But Hamburg Station is unaware of Joni's mutiny, and Hansen is even less aware that at the moment he is enthusiastically undergoing espionage training, such as using the radio, skydiving, and so on.
However, the most important thing he had no chance to solve, Hansen could read and write English, and he could speak a little, but his English pronunciation was full of German flavor, and if he were sent to the United States, there might not be any problem, because a large group of people set foot on the American continent every day in broken English.
However, as soon as he was put among the British and impersonated as British, he would immediately reveal the stuffing, and he also gave himself the British name Harry Johnson.
After the training, Hansen was highly praised by his superiors: "... Ideologically fully armed, energetic, educated of the first degree, educated, elegantly behaved ..."
Let's go back to the beginning of the article, in England in late September, it was autumn, the brilliant red leaves and yellow leaves were beautiful, but Hansen in the night sky could not see these views, and even if he did, he had no intention of appreciating them, Major Gartonfeld threw him into the dark night and hurried home, at the junction of Cambridgeshire and Hadfordshire, dozens of kilometers from London.
However, Hansen was horrified to find that there was an airfield below him, and at the end of the runway was full of anti-aircraft guns, and Major Gartenfeld actually threw himself at the guns of the British!
Fortunately, the wind of the autumn night helped Hansen, who quickly drifted away from the anti-aircraft gun group, but when he landed, Hansen hung on a tree, and he jumped to the ground in the dark and sprained his ankle.
In fact, the German agents who dropped the airdrop often forget one thing: the average temperature in London in September is 19 degrees Celsius in the south of Germany, while the temperature in Hamburg is only 13.5 degrees Celsius.
Moreover, the cockpits of German fighters were not sealed, and pilots had to wear enough cold clothing to withstand the cold in the sky.
In this ending, Hansen and many of his accomplices all landed in thick winter clothes into the warm autumn nights of England, which was easily recognized by the British people.
However, Hansen was not recognized because of this, he was not caught on the spot after landing, moreover, there was still time to calmly hide the parachute and radio, limp to a nearby village, and sleep overnight in the bushes on the edge of the village.
The next morning, recuperating in spirits, Hansen decided to embark on a journey, calmly entering a nearby village, buying a new watch, a newspaper, and breakfast, and decided to take the train to London.
However, at this time, his ankle pain was getting worse and worse, and in order to relieve it, he found a pump in the village and planned to flush his feet with cold water, but unexpectedly, such a stay aroused the suspicion of a British National Army patrolman.
The British "militiaman" immediately pointed his old Lee Enfield rifle at the handsome Danish man, asking him to take out his documents. When he took out the papers, Hansen was stuffed.
Here we come across a very puzzling problem, Germans have always been known for their craftsmen, but the fake documents produced by the German intelligence service for agents are so clumsy that even non-specialists can easily see that they are forged.
We have no way of knowing how the German intelligence service could have allowed this to happen, and perhaps the truth has been lost in the dust of history.
The British National Army found that there was a problem with Hansen's documents, and even more wrong after a little conversation, his German accent was too obvious to work no matter how much he disguised.
In this way, Hansen had to be escorted towards the Cambridge police station.
Seeing that Hansen was captured by the National Army, the MI5 agents who had been following him began to worry.
Once the spy was handed over to the police system, the news would reach the ears of the press, and the next day's headline would be "The heroic Cambridgeshire military and civilians capture a German spy", and so on.
In this way, MI5 can no longer use him, and can only be executed or imprisoned for a long time. So, the two MI5 agents who followed him "rescued" him in time.
There are two versions of this process in the history books. One version is that MI5 agents intercepted Hansen on the way to escort; Another version is that Hansen was taken away by MI5 in the police station.
In any case, Hansen was crammed into a black van designed to catch spies and drove towards London.
Because the two agents first talked to Hansen in German, he thought that his accomplices had come to his rescue, and when he found out that he had been arrested, Hansen was surprised. However, he is not dead yet, and plans to use the identity of "Danish fugitive" to fool through.
So, how did MI5 target Hansen? It's thanks to Joni.
Before Hansen was parachuted, another Nazi agent, Karoli, also parachuted to Britain, and German intelligence asked Joni to try to resettle Karoli.
However, since Yoni has already surrendered, the person who went to "place" Karoli was an MI5 agent! After Karoli was arrested, in order to avoid the death penalty, he agreed to cooperate with the British and confessed that Hansen was about to parachute into Britain.
MI5 asked Karoli to report to German intelligence that he had arrived safely, and when Karoli complied, he received a call back from the Hamburg station saying that spy 3725, also known as Hansen, would arrive in a few days, and told him the exact location and time of landing.
In this way, before Hansen "took off", he was doomed to be a prisoner of the British under the ranks. As for Major Gattenfeld's ability to safely enter and exit British airspace on many occasions, it was also deliberately put in and released by the British, not because he was skilled or lucky.
During the war, Major Gaton Feld airdropped dozens of spies and a lot of supplies to the British, and served as a "transport group leader" for several years.
MI5 learned from previously captured agents that German intelligence would tell them before the agents set out that the British were already in chaos under the continuous German air raids, and they would see civilians fleeing for their lives and the government paralyzed.
They would also be helped by their companions already lurking in Britain to easily carry out espionage, and the agents would be told that German troops would set foot in British taxis in a few weeks and occupy the entire territory of LinkedIn.
Therefore, MI5 was determined to give the German agents a dismissal to show that Britain was not only not destroyed, but that the people's lives were in order.
Hansen also enjoyed this treatment, and as the car passed through the city of London, the agents made a delusion to show him that the buildings of the various British institutions of government were unscathed, and that the Whitehall, the seat of government, the Houses of Parliament, and Westminster Abbey, the center of British religious faith, were unharmed.
More importantly, the pace of life in London was exactly the same, and Hansen began to recognize a terrible problem: the German intelligence service had tricked him.
After the war, Hansen once spoke to reporters about the "day trip to London" just after his arrest, saying: "The Nazis once described to me that Britain has been completely defeated, the people are fleeing, and no one continues to resist. I am a professional spy and I can easily see how calm the country is and how orderly life is ... I fell for it. ”
After walking zigzagging for a while in the city of London, the car escorted Hansen drove into the interrogation room of MI5 020 base.
Hans Hansen (left)
On the question of how to interrogate Hansen, Colonel Robertson, the head of MI5's dual agent program, was very brainy.
Unlike the weak-willed Karoli, Hansen is a strong-willed man, and if he believes in something, he is willing to pay any price, and simply using the death penalty to persecute him may be counterproductive.
Therefore, Colonel Robertson decided that his faith in the Nazis should be shattered first. He was interrogated by psychology professor Harold Dearden.
The professor didn't look like a man working in the secret service at all, just an old pedant addicted to academics. He wore messy clothes, his personal hygiene was extremely poor, his clothes were stained with soot that fell inadvertently, and although he was kind-eyed, he was completely devoid of the demeanor of an English gentleman.