Well, there is always something new. I came across a blog post on the C11 (Compilation 11) website. This is a rather dubious site that has a bunch of posts about “The 10 most…” and the “The 13 most…”. Why one should expect accuracy from such a site is a bit of a mystery… but…
A couple of days ago, there was a post by one Patrick Barnes entitled “12 of the Weirdest Secrets of World War 2“. Item #7 was “The Last Execution in the Tower of London”.
Screenshot from Compilation 11 – 12 of the Weirdest Secrets of World War 2 – segment on Josef Jakobs using the wrong image.
Now, you only have to look at the image of Josef Jakobs on my blog to know that the image used in the Compilation 11 post is not of the same man. The author of the post has unhelpfully confused Josef Jakobs, WW2 German spy executed on August 15, 1941 in the Tower of London with Josef Jacobs, WW1 German flying ace who died in Munich in 1978 at the ripe old age of 84. Two very different men.
The post notes:
“On August 14, 1941, the German spy Josef Jakobs became the last man to be executed in the Tower of London. He was buried in an unnamed tomb and while his boss Rudolf Hess (the last prisoner in the Tower) is remembered, Jakobs has long been forgotten.”
The blog post has the wrong execution date – August 14, 1941 – when it was actually August 15, 1941. Rudolf Hess had absolutely no connection with the German Abwehr (German Intelligence Service) and, if we want to get technical, Josef’s ultimate boss would have been Admiral Canaris.
I have to admit that no one has ever mixed up Josef Jakobs (spy) with Josef Jacobs (WW1 flying ace).
N.B. 2021 – the site no longer seems to exist… good thing.
Featured image – “God of the North Wind by Russell Smith” by aeroman3 is marked with CC PDM 1.0