Albert van Hees: The Man who Betrayed Josef Jakobs

Introduction

For more than a decade, the name “van Hees” has been a thorn under my skin—a mystery I kept picking at, to no avail. Josef told his MI5 interrogators that van Hees had betrayed him to the Gestapo in 1940. He gave a good description of the man: a First World War veteran, a Berlin address, rental properties in Cologne, and a shadowy past in foreign-currency crimes. But that was it. No first name. No solid data. Just an unsubstantiated rumour. Was it even true? Did van Hees really exist, or was he just a figment of Josef’s cover story? An invention to solicit sympathy?

But these last few months, I kept picking at the brick wall and slowly, cracks started to emerge. A notice in the Deutscher Reichsanzeiger. A line in a wartime wounded list. A father’s death notice in a Cologne newspaper naming his children—and a son who fit every piece. When the puzzle finally clicked into place, I laughed out loud. I did a small, unglamorous victory dance in my chair. I wanted to tell my dad. Because this ghost had been the hardest to bring back into focus. But I’d finally pinned him down. I had found the mysterious van Hees. And Josef had been telling the truth.

Betrayed by a Friend

In the autumn of 1940, while receiving espionage training in Hamburg, Josef spent weekends in Berlin visiting his family and old friends. One of these friends was van Hees, a wealthy man in his fifties who lived off rental income from houses in Cologne but lived at Nestorstraße 45, in Berlin-Halensee. They’d first met years earlier at the Bridge Club of the Lessing High School and still met regularly at Café Trumpf on the Kurfürstendamm.

Van Hees had served two years in prison for foreign-currency offences and liked to grumble that the Nazis were still persecuting him. He had lived in London for ten years and even admitted to listening to the English wireless—a dangerous pastime in wartime Germany. He also dabbled in the black market, buying up coffee and butter and selling them at a large profit. To Josef, that sounded like a kindred spirit—an anti-Nazi he could trust.

Josef confided in his friend about his planned mission to England, and that he had no intention of working for the Nazis. He said he hoped to contact British intelligence or, failing that, travel to America where he had an aunt. He had negotiated a deal with the Abwehr and expected to receive £2,000 of his own money and a Swiss passport. With those in hand, he told van Hees, he could finally get out of Germany. Van Hees encouraged the plan, promised to pass on London addresses and gave his word of honour that he would keep the secret. Each time Josef came home from Hamburg, they met again—coffee, cards, confidences.

Except van Hees lied. And Josef was wrong to trust this man.

In late December Josef came home for Christmas. On 5 January 1941 he was abruptly called back to Hamburg—and straight into an interrogation at the Abwehr offices. The Gestapo had issued a warrant for his arrest for treason. They produced a denunciation, signed by van Hees.

Josef insisted it had been a loyalty test, his word against van Hees’s. Two senior officers vouched for him, and the Abwehr decided to send him to England nonetheless. But the cost was severe: no Swiss passport, no access to his own money, and his family left in Germany as insurance. If he betrayed them, his family would be shot.

For years, that denunciation—and a single name—was all I had to go on. Every lead led to a brick wall.

A Crack in the Wall

And then, cracks began to appear—starting with the street address, the most obvious place to track down a ghost. Except there were no van Hees at Nestorstraße 45. Nothing. Then I thought—the interrogation files were English translations of Josef’s spoken German. Could it be Nestorstraße 54? I had made the same mistake many times: vier und fünfzig (four-and-five-ty) can easily be heard and written as 45 when really it is 54.

And there, I hit the first clue: widow Else van Hees Eweler lived at Nestorstraße 54 in the 1938 and 1940 Berlin address books. A tiny clue. I flipped backward and forward through the digital address books. Else was still there in 1943, but a decade earlier, in 1933, a Hans Eweler was listed at Nestorstraße 54. I debated the possibilities. Initially I had thought Else might be van Hees’s mother but that seemed unlikely given that her husband was presumably an Eweler. Perhaps a second marriage? Or perhaps Else was a sibling of van Hees? Without any other obvious threads, I let the trail grow cold for a few years.

When I came back to the puzzle in 2023, new archival records had been released to Ancestry and I quickly found two key death registrations. Businessman Hans Georg Franz Eweler passed away on 2 March 1931 at his home on Nestorstraße 54. He was married to Elisabeth Maria van Hees and the death informant was his daughter, private secretary Lieselotte Eweler.

Hans’s wife, Else, passed away over a decade later, on 25 April 1945, in the final days of the war. According to her death registration, Else had been born 30 August 1886 in Köln-Mülheim to Maria (née Schneider) and Carl van Hees. She was the widow of Hans George Franz Eweler and had last been living at Cicerostraße 59 in Berlin-Wilmersdorf. The death informant was her daughter, Lieselotte, now working as a Prokuristin (authorized representative) and also living at Cicerostraße 59.

I found some leads on the Geneanet site and learned that Else van Hees (born in 1886) had a brother named Albert (born in 1885). Was that him? It was almost impossible to say. It seemed likely, but “likely” wasn’t strong enough to hold anything. I found some Köln digital address directories and learned that, in 1915, the widow of Carl van Hees was living at Freiheitstraße 111 in Köln-Mülheim. She was still there in 1925, along with Albert van Hees, who was an “Rtn”, a “Rentier”, a person of independent means (possibly living off rental income?). It was possible… but it wasn’t enough. Was I barking up the wrong tree? Wasting my time?

For years it felt that way. Until, suddenly, everything slipped into place

Josef had said that van Hees served in the Imperial Germany Army during the First World War. It was an impossible search with just a surname but now, with a possible first name in hand, I searched the wounded lists and found “Albert van Hees, Lieutenant, 27.1 Mülheim-Cöln.” The earlier Geneanet information had said Albert was born in 1885, so that would mean he was born on 27 January 1885—which in turn led me to his Berlin death registration, which had him living at Cicerostraße 59 in Berlin, the same address where Else van Hees had been living when she died.

And then the Deutscher Reichsanzeiger sealed the deal: Albert van Hees of Köln-Mülheim, living at Freiheitstraße 111—caught up in one of the largest foreign-exchange prosecutions of 1934.

And just like that, the man who betrayed Josef to the Gestapo had been pinned to the wall. Albert van Hees existed—a man with parents, a past, and a paper trail that stretched from Cologne to London to Berlin, right into the jaws of Nazi justice. It was time to find out who he really was.

A Family of Merchants

Albert van Hees was born in Mülheim am Rhein (now Köln-Mülheim) on 27 January 1885, the son of Carl van Hees and Maria Schneider. His father and uncle, Walter, had inherited the family firm, Dierk van Hees, from their father, Julius, in 1875. The company had been a Mülheim institution since the mid-1700s—including gunpowder mills near Elberfeld and, later, a freight-forwarding business with warehouses along the Rhine. After Albert’s uncle Walter died in 1899, the company was wound up in 1904. Albert’s father, Carl, was sixty-two that year; perhaps the dissolution was tied to Walter’s estate, perhaps simply the end of an era.

Like most young men of his generation, Albert likely completed compulsory military service after he turned 20. In 1908 he may have been present when his sister, Else, married Hans Franz Georg Eweler on 6 February. The couple welcomed their first child, Lieselotte Maria Franziska, that December, born in Berlin-Grunewald.

In April 1911 Albert appears on the UK Census in Edgbaston, on the outskirts of Birmingham. He is listed as a German “visitor” from Cologne, lodging with a single forty-year-old surgeon, Harry Whittome, and two servants. One might expect Albert to be apprenticing with a merchant, so it’s a curious entry. That lead went cold however; Whittome later married a woman thirty years his junior in 1928 and had several children.

Later that same year, on 23 October 1911, Albert’s father died in Cologne, and the young man likely went home to support his mother and sister. The family home at Freiheitstraße 111 would become a recurring thread in Albert’s paper trail.

In March 1913 Albert arrived in Southampton aboard the SS Bremen, a ship of the Norddeutscher Lloyd line. He had boarded in Port Said, Egypt, and gave his occupation as merchant. He must have been fairly well-to-do, travelling first class. According to the ship’s manifest, his last permanent residence was in England. Later that year Else and Hans welcomed a son, Carl Heinz Eweler, born 15 September 1913. Albert now had a niece and nephew but seemed in no hurry to marry or settle down.

With the outbreak of the First World War, Albert returned to Germany and joined up. He served as a Leutnant (Lieutenant) and was wounded in 1918, appearing on the casualty lists that October.

After the war he returned to Cologne, living with his widowed mother at Freiheitstraße 111. He appears in the Cologne city directories first as a merchant, later as a Rentier—a man of independent means, likely living on rental income.

The Quiet Years

For nearly a decade Albert disappears from view, his life reduced to directory entries. It’s his niece, Lieselotte (sometimes Liselotte), who makes a splash in the public record.

On 3 March 1931, her father, Hans, died in Berlin. Lieselotte, then living in Amsterdam at Jacob-Obrechtstraat 15, and working as a private sekretary, was the death informant. She had moved to Holland in 1929, though it’s unclear for what purpose. Perhaps it was her father’s death that drew Lieselotte home again. Her father had owned a cookie-and-waffle factory in Halensee, but Lieselotte would not follow in his shoes—or baking tins.

Back in Berlin, living with her mother, she found her footing in the city’s film world. Notices in the Deutscher Reichsanzeiger (German Reich Gazette) track her trajectory. In August 1931 she helped establish Majestic Film G.m.b.H., a small production company on the Kurfürstendamm. Lieselotte was, surprisingly, named managing director—a Kauffrau, a businesswoman in her own right. A year later, on 23 July 1932, she was replaced by businessman Georg von Hülsen but retained Prokura (power of attorney).

In December 1933 producer Franz Tapper joined as co-managing director after the Aryanisation of the firm. By 1941 the company had been forced to cease operations. In its ten-year run Majestic Film produced thirty-one films, many listing Frank Tapper and Helmut Eweler as producers—though who Helmut was, and how he was related to Lieselotte, remains a mystery. Franz Tapper went on to work for Berlin-Film for the remainder of the war and later transferred to Bavaria-Film.

A Name in the Reichsanzeiger

While Lieselotte was making a name for herself in the film world, Albert also appeared in the Reichsanzeiger but in far less flattering notices than those of his niece.

On 27 January 1934, the Reichsanzeiger reported on a case of severe foreign-exchange offenses (Devisenvergehen) against the strict Nazi-era financial regulations. A number of bankers, merchants, and companies in Germany, Switzerland, and France were involved in a fraud consortium referred to as “Leborius & Associates.” As part of the prosecution, the court ordered the seizure and confiscation of all of the accused’s personal and corporate assets—a measure so extreme that it could only be postponed by depositing a staggering one million Reichsmarks (RM), a sum that spelled ruin for anyone caught in its net. One of the accused was merchant Albert van Hees of Köln-Mülheim, who was held in pre-trial detention at Berlin-Moabit Prison.

A year later, in late July 1935, the Reichsanzeiger and several newspapers covered the outcome of the trial. The case had appeared before the Fourth Grand Criminal Chamber of the Berlin Regional Court and lasted ten weeks owing to the complexity of the charges. The press called it the largest foreign-exchange crime of 1934.

Essentially, the accused carried out extensive blocked-currency manipulations (Sperrmarkschiebungen). They fraudulently obtained approval to release capital from blocked marks (Sperrmark) for the supposed purpose of raising funds for “commercially defunct” companies. They were aided by foreign financiers as well as emigrant circles. Instead of using the funds as stated, the capital was diverted and allowed to flow abroad. The authorities noted that the investigation was hampered by the case’s complexity—involving numerous German and foreign firms—but claimed to have stopped some of the fraud, which was estimated in the millions. Newspapers described it as a systematic, large-scale attack on the German currency.

On 29 July 1935, the court announced the verdicts of the accused:

• Willi Leborius, 41-year-old merchant and ring-leader — 13 years penal servitude, 10 years loss of civil rights and a fine of 150,000 RM.
• Gregor Seldowitsch, 45-year-old stateless Jew from Minsk in Russia — 11 years penal servitude and a fine of 120,000 RM. He reportedly left a note calling the Germans “bootlickers” and wishing the judge dead. He was murdered at Auschwitz in 1943.
• Dr. Walter Schott, 42 — 7 years penal servitude, 10 years loss of civil rights and a fine of 60,000 RM.
• Ferdinand Malczyk, 38, merchant — 7 years penal servitude and 10 years loss of civil rights.
• Hedwig Rohloff, 48, managing director — 7 years penal servitude and 10 years loss of civil rights.
• Hans Günther Pechner, 29, former lawyer — 5 years penal servitude, 8 years of loss of civil rights, and a 16,000 RM fine.
• Gustav Baal, 43, merchant — 4 years penal servitude, 5 years loss of civil rights, and a 20,000 RM fine.
• Aurrel Leichter, bookkeeper — 5 years penal servitude and a 50,000 RM fine.
• Albert van Hees, 50, merchant — 2 years penal servitude, 3 years loss of civil rights, and a 20,000 RM fine.
• Erik Helmecke, merchant — 2 years penal servitude, 3 years loss of civil rights, and a 30,000 RM fine.
• Two other defendants were acquitted.

When the verdicts were read, the courtroom must have felt like a public execution of reputations. The accused were saddled with hard labour in a penitentiary (Zuchthaus), a loss of face (Ehrverlust) and financial penalties. It was a triple sentence; a loss of freedom, a loss of face and a loss of finances.

The convicted may have received credit for their time served in pre-trial detention, which for Albert would have amounted to about eighteen months. They may also have been paroled after serving two-thirds of their sentence. It is possible, therefore, that Albert was released shortly after the conclusion of the trial. But he would have walked out of prison a very different man from the one who walked in.

Albert was now a convicted criminal—one who faced three years of Ehrverlust, literally a “loss of civil rights and honour.” He could no longer vote or stand for election. He could not hold public office or serve the state in any professional capacity. Nor could he act as a guardian or trustee. Being stripped of “honour” was devastating: his commercial reputation and creditworthiness lay in ruins, and socially he was now a pariah.

To understand what he had been caught up in—and why the penalties were so severe—it helps to look at the economic climate that gave rise to such draconian laws.

The Sperrmark System and Nazi Economic Control

After Germany’s banking collapse in 1931, foreign investors fled, the Reichsmark plunged, and the government imposed emergency capital controls to stem the outflow. When the Nazis came to power two years later, they tightened those controls into a rigid system of financial isolation. Out of that web of restrictions came the Sperrmark—and with it, vast opportunities for fraud.

The Foreign Exchange Control (Devisenbewirtschaftung) system became a cornerstone of Nazi economic policy, designed to funnel every last drop of foreign currency toward rearmament. Gold and hard currencies like the U.S. dollar and British pound were desperately short. To conserve them, the regime required all foreign earnings to be surrendered to the Reichsbank, strictly rationing their use for military imports. The Sperrmark (Blocked Mark) was born of this policy: funds belonging to foreign investors were trapped inside Germany, frozen and unconvertible. Because these marks couldn’t leave the country, they traded at steep discounts on international markets—an irresistible lure for black marketeers.

Nominally created to control capital flight, the Sperrmark system soon became a tool for plunder. Jewish families forced to emigrate under the Reichsfluchtsteuer (Reich Flight Tax) and other anti-Jewish decrees, had their assets stripped, and what remained was often locked into restricted accounts. Desperate to start new lives abroad, they became targets for smugglers who offered—at a price—to move their trapped funds. It was a predatory trade built on fear and loss.

Albert van Hees and his co-defendants found profit in these cracks. Their network bought up discounted Sperrmarks from foreign investors and Jewish emigrants alike, funneling the money through a maze of shell companies and falsified transactions. On paper, the movements looked legitimate—capital injections, loans, or exports approved by the Foreign Currency Office. In reality, it was an elaborate currency shuffle designed to spirit German marks abroad, convert them into Swiss francs, and pocket the difference.

The actions of Albert and the others were seen, by the authorities, not as financial misdeeds, but as economic treason. The Nazi regime framed such currency violations (Devisenvergehen) as attacks on the state itself, draining the reserves meant to feed the war machine. The sentences reflected that ideology: years of penal servitude, heavy fines, and the shattering Ehrverlust—the loss of civil rights and honour that left reputations in ruins.

While the Nazi courts called it fraud, it likely masked the illegal export of Jewish or politically endangered capital. Whether Albert joined for profit or pity is impossible to know. His comparatively light sentence suggests a minor role—but by 1935, he had become the kind of man Josef might later have mistaken for a friend: disillusioned, cornered, and already tainted by betrayal.

Echoes through Time

What became of Albert? His commercial life and reputation never recovered. When Josef knew him, he was living with his sister Else at Nestorstraße 54 in Berlin. Josef said Albert lived off rental income from properties in Cologne—perhaps family holdings, or perhaps just a story Albert told. It’s possible that after serving his sentence and paying the 20,000 RM fine, some assets were restored to him, but nothing in the record confirms it. We do know that Else—and likely Albert and Lieselotte—remained at Nestorstraße through 1943.

By 1945, they had moved to Cicerostraße 59. On 25 April 1945, as the Red Army completed its encirclement of Berlin, Else was killed at the Halensee Bridge. Her death registration reads simply: “ist am Halensee-Brücke gefallen”—she “fell”, or was killed in action at Hallensee-Bridge. To survive years of deprivation only to die within days of the war’s end is almost unbearable to imagine. Her son, Carl Heinz Eweler, born in 1913, was reported missing in action near what is now Kaliningrad on 1 March 1945. These would have been tragic losses for both Albert and Lieselotte.

After the war, Albert resurfaced as a language teacher, still living at Cicerostraße 59, presumably with Lieselotte. In the early hours of 24 June 1949, he died at the city hospital on Albrecht-Achilles-Straße 62/64. He was 64 years old. He was not married and the death informant was the Police President of Berlin—an ominous detail. The cause of death: Schlafmittelvergiftung—sleeping-pill poisoning. Whether accidental or deliberate, the involvement of police suggests suicide.

It’s not hard to see how he arrived there. His career was destroyed. His name had been dragged through the newspapers. He had lost his civil rights, his honour, and his standing. His parents were long gone. His brother-in-law was gone. His sister was dead. His nephew, missing in war, and presumed dead. Only his niece remained. But not for long.

By the early 1950s, even she had left Berlin. A 1955 film credit lists Maria L. Eweler as production assistant on Drei Tage Mittelarrest, produced by Franz Tapper—the same man who had worked with Lieselotte at Majestic Film two decades earlier. After the war, Tapper joined Bavaria Film, later Standard Film in Hamburg. Perhaps Lieselotte followed his trail, and the jobs, west and then north; leaving her uncle alone in Berlin. Perhaps the cascade of losses was simply too much for Albert. He had nothing. He had no one. And so he chose the exit door of life.

Conclusion

When I first started to search for the mysterious “van Hees” who betrayed Josef to the Gestapo, I had no idea how complex the picture would become. I wanted to hate this man—who thought that betraying a friendship was worth saving his own skin. But now, I mostly feel sad. Disappointed.

Albert van Hees had such a promising start. The family business had thrived for generations, only to dissolve just as Albert was stepping into manhood. He served honourably as a lieutenant in the First World War. Afterwards, he lived comfortably from rental income on family property. He had every advantage. And yet, somehow, it wasn’t enough. He joined a dangerous enterprise to move Sperrmarks out of Germany and paid dearly for it. Not as dearly as some of his co-conspirators, but enough to mark him for life. Perhaps the Nazis hounded him in the years that followed. Perhaps they threatened his sister or his niece.

While Albert sat in Berlin-Moabit Prison in 1934 and 1935, Josef was behind bars in Switzerland for his own gold-fraud scheme with Werner Goldstein. By the time Josef returned to Berlin in 1936, Albert was likely free—walking under the shadow of disgrace. Maybe they met later through the Bridge Club at the Lessing High School. By the time Josef was released from Oranienburg in March 1940, they almost certainly knew each other. In the months that followed, as Josef began his Abwehr training, he confided in his friend, Albert—a man who, like him, had ended up on the wrong side of the Nazis. Josef believed Albert was an ally and a trusted confidante. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

Josef would pay the ultimate price for that misplaced trust; executed by firing squad at the Tower of London on 15 August 1941. Albert survived the war but lost nearly everything else—his sister, his nephew, his business, his honour. Afterwards he became a language teacher, perhaps of English, a quieter trade for a broken man. In 1949, he ended his life alone in Berlin. No wife. No children. Nothing left but regret.

I wish I could berate him, but I can’t. Fear will make people do terrible things—things they would never imagine themselves capable of. The sad tale of Albert van Hees is a small but devastating reminder of that: that betrayal is rarely born of malice alone, but of fear, shame, and the unbearable instinct to survive.

Sources

Ancestry – Genealogical information
Geneanet – Genealogical information
Deutsches Zeitungsportal (German Newspaper Portal) – various historical newspapers and the Deutscher Reichsanzeiger
Swiss Newspaper Archives – various historical newspapers
Digitale Landesbibliothek Berlin – Berlin Address Books
Heidermann’s Tree – Hees Family
Film Portal – Majestic Film – Majestic-Film GmbH (Berlin) | filmportal.de
National Archives, Kew – declassified MI5 files on Josef Jakobs – KV 2/25 and KV 2/26
Hallensee Brücke – Facebook Page – Roaring Berlin. Die vergessene Metropole
Wikipedia (German) – Franz Tapper
History of Köln-Mülheim – pdf document at bottom of page

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