A few years ago, Jan Willem van den Braak, a Dutchman, wrote a book, Spion tegen Churchill, about a German spy who went by the name Jan Willem ter Braak (no relation!). The spy, whose real name was Engelbertus Fukken, parachuted into the UK in early November 1940 and managed to escape detection for five months. He eventually committed suicide in a Cambridge air raid shelter in March 1941. Given that ter Braak was the only spy (that we know of) to escape detection by the British, his story is a fascinating one. Van den Braak (the author) has apparently dug up some information on Fukken’s background and I’ve been patiently waiting for the book to be published as an English translation. The wait will soon be over.
Hitler’s Spy Against Churchill
The book is due to come out this spring, possibly as early as May 2022. Pen and Sword has a page on their website where interested readers can either pre-order the book (£20) or put their name on a notification list. So far, the book is not appearing on the Amazon (Canada) site although it does appear on the Amazon (UK) site for £25. The write-up on the book states:
From the summer of 1940 until May 1941, nearly twenty German Abwehr agents were dropped by boat or parachute into England during what was known as Operation Lena, all in preparation for Hitler’s planned invasion of England. The invasion itself would never happen and in fact, after the war, one of the Abwehr commanders declared that the operation was doomed to failure.
There is no doubt that the operation did indeed become a fiasco, with almost all of the officers being arrested within a very brief period of time. Some of the men were executed, while others became double agents and spied for Britain against Germany. Only one man managed to stay at large for five months before eventually committing suicide: Jan Willem Ter Braak. Amazingly, his background and objectives had always remained unclear, and none of the other Lena spies had ever even heard of him. Even after the opening of the secret service files in England and the Netherlands over 50 years later, Jan Willem Ter Braak remained a ‘mystery man’, as the military historian Ladislas Farago famously described him.
In this book, the author – his near-namesake – examines the short and tragic life of Jan Willem Ter Braak for the first time. Using in-depth research, he investigates the possibility that Ter Braak was sent to kill the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and discovers why his fate has remained largely unknown for so long.
Jan Willem van den Braak kindly shared the full dust jacket with me…
The cover is quite well-done to my mind and I rather like the subtitle – “The Spy Who Died Out in the Cold”, a nice play off of John Le Carré’s book, “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold”. I also find it interesting that the English title adds a word to the original title. Rather than just “Spy Against Churchill”, a direct translation of the Dutch title, the Pen & Sword version is “Hitler’s Spy Against Churchill”. Perhaps that will market better in an English-speaking market.
I thought I might pre-order the book through Pen & Sword but they wanted a £20 shipping charge on top of the £20 book cost! That’s a bit steep so I will just have to wait until the ebook and/or Amazon.ca version is available.
I’ve pre-ordered the book here in the UK from Amazon. I’ll be interested to see if the book discusses the anomaly that Braak’s death certificate records that he committed suicide with a revolver and yet the photograph of his body at the scene of his ‘suicide’ clearly shows an automatic pistol. Common error many people still make, or something more sinister?
Hi John,
Thanks for the comment!
Yes, I’ve noticed that same problem in Josef Jakobs’ files – his Mauser was sometimes called a revolver and sometimes called a pistol. Was the word used interchangeably back then or was it perhaps sloppy language? Or, as you say, something else…