Emil Josef Roos, Revisited: New Swiss, German, and Dutch Files (1901–1941)

N.B. I had done an earlier post on Josef Emil Roos in 2020, available here.
This current one expands on his life story.

Across four decades, Josef Emil Roos turned paper into power—until the paper stopped moving. In 2020 I traced the path of Emil Josef Roos as a shadowy swindler orbiting the likes of Hans Wolpe, Jürgen Ziebell, and Arthur Albert Tester. Fresh files from Switzerland and historical newspapers from Switzerland and Germany widen the frame: Roos wasn’t merely adjacent to fraud—he engineered it, country after country. For such an impressive swindler, Roos actually came from rather humble beginnings.

Early Life and Family Roots

Josef Emil Roos was born on 27 January 1880 in Mosbach, Baden, the youngest of nine children. His parents, Franz Martin Roos and Maria Florentina Barbara (née Schweitzer) were married in the Mosbach Roman Catholic parish church on 14 May 1867. Franz worked as the head teacher in Mosbach and was well-known in the community. The couple had a large brood of children:

• Maria Josepha Joanna Roos – born 20 March 1868, buried 26 July 1868
• Maria Roos – born 31 May 1869
• Joseph Hermann Roos – born 1871, buried 1 October 1872 in Mosbach
• Maria Anna Roos – born 1872 – buried 15 October 1872 in Mosbach
• Ludwig Roos – baptized 28 September 1873 (certificate #39)
• Gottfried Roos – baptized  28 September 1873 (certificate #40)
• Clara Amalia Roos – born 1875, buried 25 August 1875 in Mosbach
• Maria Amanda Roos – born 12 May 1878 (married Theodor Flum on 5 October 1899)
• Josef Emil Roos – born 27 January 1880

By the early 1890s only a few of the Roos children remained, many having died as young children, and Josef—barely a teenager—was ready to make his own way. In 1893, at the age of 15, Josef apprenticed at a pharmacy in Würzburg, learning basic business practices and bookkeeping. After completing his training, he moved from city to city, sharpening the business instincts that would later serve him in less honest trades.

His older brother, Ludwig Gottfried Roos set his feet on a different path. He studied at the Juristische Fakultät (Faculty of Law) at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität in Heidelberg and graduated on 8 February 1898. The accolades and celebration of having a lawyer in the family would be short-lived, for less than two months later, on 24 March, their father passed away. A year later, Dr. Ludwig Gottfried Roos moved from Karlsruhe to Mannheim where he found work as a Bankbeamter (bank employee).

With 9,800 Marks from his father’s estate, Josef booked passage to England—a decision that would set the pattern for the rest of his life: chasing fortune abroad. Although life in England might not have been all that he expected. The Daily Telegraph published a “Job Wanted” ad on 6 February 1900, which might be our young lad: “German (21), thoroughly acquainted with bookkeeping, German correspondence, stenography, typewriting, and general office work, wants EMPLOYMENT. Good knowledge of English. Would go first as volunteer.–Address Emil Roos, 37, Bernard-street, Russell-square, W.C.”

If this ad was his (and he did sometimes go by “Emil”), it marks the first public trace of a man already selling himself—skills, connections, credibility. London would become both his launching pad and his undoing. Within a few years, the earnest young clerk offering “bookkeeping and general office work” would discover far easier ways to make money than through honest labour.

Baden-Baden Venture I (1903-1905)

By 1901, Josef Roos was back in Germany and hustling Baden’s famous mineral water abroad. At first he sourced it from a water-rights holder named Vogel, but ambition outgrew the arrangement. Why buy water when you could own the spring?

In 1903, Josef and his brother, Dr. Ludwig Roos, set their sights on the Darmstädter Hof hotel in Baden-Baden. The property came with its own thermal source — perfect for bottling and export. They agreed to buy it for 630,000 Marks, financed through a joint-stock company, the Baden-Baden Mineral Springs Co., registered in England under their names. But word spread that “foreigners” planned to corner Baden’s spa supply. The Grand Ducal Civil Treasury swooped in and bought the hotel instead, securing the thermal spring “for all time for Baden’s public spa facilities.”

Denied the prize, the Roos brothers struck a compromise: the Treasury would sell them thermal water for bottling. They took a purchase credit of 25,000 Marks and, in early 1904, bought a new property at Waldseestraße 1 for 123,000 Marks. Within days, they mortgaged it for more than four times that amount and began costly renovations—installing machinery, laying water lines, and converting rooms for production.

The mortgages—far above the property’s value—brought in a flood of easy money, little of which reached the tradesmen doing the renovations. Perhaps Josef and Ludwig siphoned some of the funds into their own pockets (salaries) or perhaps they used it to fund their next business venture. It was Roos’s first real experiment in conjuring cash from paper and leaving the debts behind.

Then came the slide. Payments to contractors stopped. Creditors petitioned for bankruptcy in June 1904, and by December the company was under a receiving order. The property was auctioned the following summer, advertised in the Karlsruher Zeitung as a 2 889 m² estate with house, courtyard, and farmland, valued at 147,000 Marks. A buyer named Wetzke took possession and the contractors walked away empty-handed with no hope of recovery.

The Treasury tore up its contract, the creditors took what they could, and the rest vanished into Baden’s ledgers. Josef Roos was only twenty-four—with his first bankruptcy under his belt, already moving on to the next idea.

Strasbourg Box Factory (1907-1910)

By the spring of 1907, Roos had crossed into Alsace and was once again in motion. On 4 April he registered the Straßburger Kistenfabrik GmbH—the Strasbourg Box Factory Ltd.—and promptly bought out the A. Mauch company, excluding its debts, but keeping its equipment and name. The new firm’s share capital was 20,000 Marks, with Roos and local merchant Achill Kien listed as joint managers, each empowered to act alone.

The venture looked practical enough: Baden’s bottled mineral-water relied on wooden crates for shipping, and Roos may have seen a way to tie packaging to his earlier bottling business—or to shuffle what was left of his Baden funds into a new concern. Either way, the pattern repeated. By December 1907, the Kistenfabrik had filed for bankruptcy. Creditors were summoned before the Imperial District Court in Strasbourg, and the bankruptcy proceedings dragged on for several years before concluding in July 1910.

Another company gone, another trail of creditors. Roos had merely changed cities, not methods.

Baden-Baden Venture II (1909-1910)

Just when it seemed Roos’s Baden-Baden adventures were finished, the name reappeared—on paper, at least. On 1 October 1908, the Baden District Court registered a new firm in the Commercial Register: Baden-Baden Company Limited, a joint-stock company headquartered at 6 Holborn Viaduct, London, with a branch office in Baden-Baden. Its stated purpose: to exploit the local thermal waters for commercial sale.

And yes—this was seemingly the same company Josef and his brother had founded back in 1903. The court record traced its supposed formation to May 1904, with resolutions extending into late that year and fresh amendments filed in May 1908. On paper, its capital stood at £120,000, split evenly between preference and ordinary shares, each of £1. The London board delegated full authority to one man: Josef Emil Roos. By the end of 1908, the company was bankrupt once more.

Undeterred, Roos tried again. On 15 April 1909, he registered the Baden-Baden Mineralbrunnen-Betrieb (Baden-Baden Mineral Springs Operation) under his own name. A year later, on 22 April 1910, he launched yet another entity—the Société des Eaux Minérales de Baden-Baden GmbH, with 20,000 Marks in capital. Both he and his brother Ludwig were listed as managing directors, each authorized to act alone. This, too, collapsed within months; it was formally dissolved on 3 June 1910.

The sequence is baffling. The London arm of Baden-Baden Mineral Springs Co. had gone under years earlier, yet here it was again—revived, replicated, and repackaged. Did German authorities ever learn that the original company was already bankrupt? Did Roos still have leftover stationery from London to lend legitimacy to his claims? And where did the capital come from this time—if it existed at all? Did he siphon it out of the Strasbourg Box Factory before it collapsed?

What is clear is that Roos had learned from his earlier failures. By adding a “branch office” in Baden-Baden, he could present the firm as partly domestic rather than wholly foreign. It was a clever pivot—one made before the dust of the last collapse had even settled.

Karlsruhe & Paris: The First Prison Sentences (1913-1914)

Until 1913, Josef had always moved faster than the law could catch him. Bankruptcies trailed in his wake, but courts chalked them up to bad luck or over-ambition. That illusion ended in Karlsruhe.

On 19 June 1913, Der Volksfreund, a working-class daily, devoted an entire column to a single trial before the Karlsruhe criminal chamber. The accused was Josef Emil Roos—born in Mosbach, late of Baden, living in Strasbourg—charged with bankruptcy offences and fraud. The hearing stretched on for hours, with a parade of witnesses and financial experts. Roos, now thirty-three, faced a catalogue of accusations.

As a director of the Baden-Baden Company Ltd., he had failed to keep proper books, fabricated accounts, and spent company funds with no regard for legal limits. Ledgers were missing or chaotic, balance sheets never prepared. He was accused of lavish withdrawals for “personal needs, travel, business equipment, and advertising,” far beyond the firm’s means. In short, it was virtually impossible to determine the financial position of the business. And in one particularly bold move, he had persuaded a Mannheim merchant to accept 20,000 Marks in company shares as down-payment on a house for Roos’s wife—a deal that collapsed when bankruptcy followed, leaving the merchant out 800 Marks in costs and commission.

In short, the financial books were fiction and the money was gone. The court heard that Roos’s financial freedom had been nearly absolute, thanks to a Paris banker named Wucher—a German deserter who had arranged the flotation of shares and poured some 300,000 francs into the London company between February and August 1908. Much of it funded Roos’s private life: daily expenses of 100 Marks, travel with his wife to Berlin and even to America. By late 1908 the company was bankrupt again. Roos was acquitted on the Mannheim fraud charge but convicted of bankruptcy offences and sentenced to five months in prison. Instead, he slipped across the border to France. Trouble followed.

On 5 February 1914, the Court of Appeal in Paris sentenced Roos to six months for complicity in fraud. Nine days later, France ordered him expelled (likely after he served his prison sentence). He then surfaced in Switzerland, now a wanted man. On 16 July 1914, the Swiss Police Gazette carried a notice that Josef Emil Roos, believed to be in Zurich, was wanted by the Karlsruhe Public Prosecutor to serve his five-month sentence for bankruptcy offences.

Luckily for Roos, war burst onto the European scene within weeks. The Swiss and Germans had bigger things on their plates than a small-time fraudster. He timed it well: by slipping into neutral Switzerland, he also dodged military conscription. At thirty-four, he might have been a little old for the front lines—but not too old to know an escape when he saw one.

Neither prison nor prosecution slowed Roos for long. Each sentence was only a pause between ventures—a chance to study the system and perfect his next deception. He learned from every arrest, growing quicker, more elusive, more fluent in the language of fraud. Roos wasn’t driven by need so much as compulsion; each collapse only taught him how to rebuild the illusion faster. He was addicted to motion, convinced that if the paperwork looked solid enough, reality would fall into line. He moved through Europe with charm, audacity, and an utter absence of shame—less a businessman than a fast-talking artist of deceit.

By the time the Great War engulfed Europe, Roos had already found a new refuge—and a new audience. Neutral, prosperous, and humming with wartime capital, Switzerland offered the perfect audience for a man who could turn paper into promise.

Swiss Shell Game (1916-1919)

Zurich’s wartime commercial pages mark the moment when Josef Emil Roos reinvented himself yet again. He was no longer the hawker of bottled spa water but a financier—a man of paper wealth and industrial ambition. In early 1916 his name appeared beside that of Brazilian Max Emil Willy Jaeckel, first as vice-president of the Dolomitwerke in Verlaine A.G. (Dolomite Works near Verlaine, Belgium), then, within weeks, as co-founder of a larger concern, the Montan-Syndikat A.G.

The Dolomite Works was nominally created to exploit Belgian dolomite deposits owned by Dr. Ewald Voß, a chemist in Cologne, but its financial structure tells a different story. The initial 100,000-franc share capital—100 bearer shares of 1,000 francs each—was largely theoretical: only twenty percent had to be paid in. Within a month, the company announced a capital increase to 1,745,000 francs, all “subscribed and partly paid.” On paper, Roos’s enterprise had grown seventeen-fold in just two months; in reality, no new assets had appeared to justify the leap. The expansion was almost certainly achieved through fresh share issues rather than real investment—an accounting sleight-of-hand designed to create the appearance of substance where little existed. One newspaper even reported that “larger German and Belgian steelworks” were interested in the venture, a claim sure to spur investors.

In 1916, Germany’s industries were desperate for minerals like dolomite and feldspar, vital for steel and chemical production but increasingly scarce under the Allied blockade. Neutral Switzerland became a convenient staging ground for paper companies that could claim to source such materials abroad. Roos’s choice of a dolomite enterprise fit that wartime logic perfectly: it sounded patriotic, profitable, and plausible—all while masking a speculative shell.

Jaeckel and Roos quickly leveraged this success into a holding venture, the Montan-Syndikat A.G., with a declared capital of 3 million francs (later reported as 8 million). The new syndicate claimed to own share blocks in other mining and metallurgical firms—among them a feldspar syndicate in Copenhagen and a Swedish mining company—while also holding a stake in the Dolomite Works itself. In reality, it was a self-feeding loop of paper value: the Montan-Syndikat held shares in the Dolomite Works, the Dolomite Works was propped up by funds from Roos’s own Société Générale de Crédit Mobilier, and the bank’s apparent strength came from the very same companies it financed. Each balance sheet mirrored the next until the totals shimmered.

To service the network, Roos and Jaeckel relied on the Société Générale de Crédit Mobilier S.A., a small Zurich bank founded in 1912 with half-a-million francs of capital (up to one million by 1913). In late 1914 Roos had become part of its management, giving him control of the very bank that handled the syndicate’s accounts. In late 1915, Jaeckel joined him on the bank’s management. Through the bank, he and Jaeckel could shift money—or promises of money—among their own companies, sustaining the illusion of liquidity.

By mid-1916 the machinery was already faltering. The Scandinavian Feldspar Syndicate called an extraordinary meeting to consider dissolution, citing Crédit Mobilier’s failure to provide the working capital it had promised. The bank responded in print, blaming the Danish founders for supplying “unsound information,” and insisted it had been both “ready and able” to perform. It was a defensive note in what had begun as a chorus of optimism. One newspaper article noted that although Mr. Emil Roos signed for the Société Générale de Crédit Mobilier, he was “quite unknown in the local business world.” But he would soon make a name for himself.

Two years later the illusion finally collapsed. In March 1918 Crédit Mobilier entered liquidation; Roos told reporters this was “the best solution” after Jaeckel’s death, explaining that an expensive Venezuelan concession belonging to Jaeckel’s estate could not be valued because no copy of the document could be found. Without it, he said, the bank could not prepare a balance sheet. The missing concession neatly erased the need to account for the missing money.

By December 1918, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung noted—somewhat wearily—that it had reported on these companies “repeatedly.” All signing authorities had expired except one: the “well-known Herr Josef Emil Roos.” Within months the Montan-Syndikat was declared bankrupt for lack of assets, but by then Roos was already gone. In mid-December 1918, Zurich authorities had had enough of the fraudster. Roos, still listed as a bank director in Zollikon, was expelled from Switzerland for lacking proof of financial self-sufficiency—perhaps after moving the last of the funds abroad.

What began as a modest-sounding mining company had swelled into a million-franc holding empire sustained by circular accounting and a friendly bank. When the paper stopped moving, it collapsed: the Montan-Syndikat bankrupt, the bank in liquidation, and Roos left as the last name on the filings. For him, it wasn’t an ending so much as an education. After Zurich, Roos slipped quietly back into Germany. In 1920 and again in 1923, he appeared in Berlin directories as a merchant (Kaufmann), living at Taubenstrasse 13—proof that he had found a foothold in the ruins of post-war Germany.

Hydro-Electricity and Oil-Shale (1922-1928)

Three years after his expulsion from Switzerland, Roos reappeared, this time in Munich’s commercial pages, just as Germany was sliding into hyperinflation. New companies were springing up daily, each promising to turn increasingly worthless paper currency into power—or at least into profit. For a man like Roos, it was the perfect moment to start printing his own paper dreams. On 21 March 1922, the Reichsanzeiger announced the launch of Bawag Bayerische Wasserkraft-A.G., a grandly capitalized “hydropower” concern with over ten million marks in share capital—at a time when the mark’s value was evaporating by the day. Preference shares with thirty-fold voting rights ensured that control stayed in the founders’ hands, and Roos was listed among them. Within a year he had attached his name to other paper enterprises: Oberpfalz Bergbau A.G., a mining company, and Bayerische Oelschiefer A.G., an oil-shale venture with half a billion marks in nominal capital. Soon enough, the Dewag Deutsche Wasserkraftbank A.G., a “hydropower bank” became associated with Bawag through a common board director. It was all a house of cards.

By 1924 the edifice was starting to crumble. Bayerische Oelschiefer denied an exposé circulating in Berlin, and that spring Roos resigned from Bawag’s board. Oelschiefer was liquidated the following year, never having accomplished anything, beyond issuing paper shares, while Bawag staggered on—its financial reports delayed, its capital structure disputed, its balance sheets bloated by the collapsing currency. A shareholders meeting discussed dissolving the company and merging with Dewag, but nothing seems to have come of it. When the company finally published its 1924 financials in September 1926, half the directors resigned. Their replacements, Berlin financiers Carl and Otto Lindemann, had their own baggage that would catch up with them.

In October 1926 the Lindemann brothers were arrested for spirits smuggling and later convicted of fraud and “promoting bankruptcy.” Their financial empire fell, dragging Bawag and its sister company Dewag down with it. In January 1927, the Reichsanzeiger noted that the two companies had been struck from the Commercial Register since their business operations no longer existed. Oberpfalz Bergbau lingered a little longer but entered liquidation by September 1928, completing the clean sweep of Roos’s mid-twenties ventures.

By then Roos had already vanished from Munich. Perhaps he resigned from Bawag ahead of a financial scandal. Or perhaps he had traveled to France to promote the new company and run afoul of the French police. Whatever the case, in July 1925 the Paris Court of Appeal sentenced him to six weeks in prison for violating a banishment order. Every time he reinvented himself, the pattern stayed the same: paper capital, paper profits, and nothing left but a paper trail.

A Banker in London (1926-1933)

With several of his German enterprises awash in bankruptcy—and their directors charged with “promoting bankruptcy”—it was no surprise that Roos looked for greener pastures. On 22 November 1926, he entered England as a financial broker. Scotland Yard knew his name and would have many run-ins with him, but for a time he managed to keep out of the British press. True to form, he couldn’t content himself with an ordinary life.

By early 1930, the Swiss watchmaking town of La Neuveville was in crisis. Two of its largest employers—Favre Fils and Ketterer Frères S.A.—had failed under the weight of post-war recession and changing fashion. A municipal commission was formed to seek new industries to absorb the unemployed. One member, lawyer Dr. Gustave Nahrath, petitioned the Swiss federal police to grant Josef Emil Roos a fourteen-day temporary stay in Neuveville. Roos, then residing at Dahlmannstrasse 24, Berlin-Charlottenburg, was, according to Nahrath, being proposed “in the public interest.”

The Zurich Police soon became involved and asked the Swiss Federal Police whether the 1918 expulsion order against “Josef Emil Roos, banker, London,” might be revoked. Their approval, they noted, would depend on Roos’s criminal record in Germany being clean. Bern officials initially raised no objection and contacted the Munich Public Prosecutor’s Office, which reported that Roos’s name had appeared in both German and Bavarian police bulletins of 1927. The Swiss, in turn, politely informed their German counterparts of Roos’s current address in Berlin—no doubt returning the favour.

Ultimately, the Swiss granted a ten-day suspension of his expulsion, valid until 30 April 1931, requiring him to report in person to Neuveville’s municipal office upon arrival and departure. Whether he ever used the permit remains unclear.

Roos continued to surface in Berlin records. While absent from the 1930 and 1931 directories, he reappeared in 1932 and 1933 at Kurfürstendamm 224, listed first as a Finanzierung (Financier) and later as Montanbüro u. Bergwerksbesitzungen (Mining Office and Mine Proprietor).

Then, on 29 December 1933, the Daily Express reported: “Joseph Emil Roos, a German broker, of Bernard Street, W.C., who was described by the police as an ‘associate of international criminals of some notoriety,’ was accused at Bow Street Police Court yesterday of having, as an alien, failed to register his change of address. He was recommended for deportation.”

The Daily Telegraph offered a fuller account of his appearance at Bow Street that same day. Detective-Sergeant Minter told the court that Roos had “many times been the subject of inquiries by Scotland Yard.” In 1929 he had allegedly passed a worthless £200 cheque to an insurance broker; later, Berlin police sought information on charges of swindling, followed by an inquiry from the Swiss Legation concerning stolen bonds used as loan collateral in London. The solicitor involved eventually recovered his money, but Roos left a trail of unpaid hotel bills across the city.

Confronted in court, Roos blamed “the political situation of the last few months,” claiming he could not access funds in Germany and had misunderstood the registration rules. He portrayed himself as a victim of circumstance rather than a serial schemer. The magistrate was unmoved. Both The Telegraph and The Express reported that Roos, “a German broker and associate of international criminals of some notoriety,” was recommended for deportation.

By this point, Roos had led investigators on a merry chase: from Baden-Baden to London, Zurich, Paris, Munich, Berlin, Vienna, and back to London again. From there, Zurich would want him once more. The man had a talent for reinvention, and the remainder of the 1930s would only solidify his reputation as a fraudster of international scale.

Embezzlement of Bonds in Zurich (1934)

News of Roos’s arrest in London quickly reached Swiss ears. The authorities pounced on the chance to finally question the man who had left financial ruin in his wake. On 6 January 1934, the Thurgau Department of Justice asked the Federal Police in Bern to contact their British counterparts and arrange an interrogation. Roos was suspected of involvement in the theft or embezzlement of two bonds from the Zurich Cantonal Bank, and was believed to have once held the stolen instruments.

Less than a week later, Bern replied that before they could approach London, they needed a full summary of the case and a list of precise questions for the interrogation. The Swiss files fall silent after that—bureaucracy moving slower than Roos ever did. On 14 January 1934, England deported Roos. The Swiss had missed their window, and Roos had slipped the net once again.

Or had he?

On 2 April 1935, Roos appeared before the Berlin courts and was sentenced to nine months in prison for fraud. It’s likely that Britain deported him back to Germany, where police wasted no time bringing old charges to life. Whether he received credit for pre-trial detention or served only part of his term is unclear. What is certain is that within months he had resurfaced—this time in Holland, and back in business.

Fingers in Dutch Financial Pies (1935)

In September 1935, Amsterdam police discovered Roos ensconced in the offices of the Crenabank (formally the N.V. Internationale Crediet en Hypotheekbank—International Credit & Mortgage Bank). He claimed to be a patent agent who had arrived from Brussels, giving his last address as Lietzenburgerstrasse 29, Berlin. Roos insisted he had been appointed as the bank’s liquidator and was authorized to bar its Managing Director and Board from the premises.

The police didn’t buy it. Their inquiries showed that the Crenabank, founded in 1921, had lain dormant for years. Earlier that spring its shares had been purchased by a Frenchman, Henri Tailleur. The managing director, a Dutchman named Herman Carl Anton Campagne, was already known as a “notorious swindler.” The board included Thomas Maslin Harris—a close associate of Arthur Albert Tester—and Tailleur himself.

Tailleur, together with Tester, Harris, Butaye, and others, was also implicated in another major swindle that same year, the purchase of shares in the N.V. Patria Verzeekerings Maatschappij of Rotterdam (Patria Insurance Company of Rotterdam). The case dragged through Dutch courts for years and reportedly touched a member of Parliament, as well as a Tester concern known as the Anglo Marine Insurance Company.

Investigators also found that Roos and Heinrich Albrecht had attempted to buy the Amsterdam Insurance Company (Nederlandsche Lloyd) on behalf of a consortium calling itself the Simon Group, which claimed to represent several Swiss insurance firms.

The web of deception was staggering. Roos’s ability to improvise, fabricate, and bluff his way through interrogations remained unmatched. He always seemed to stay a step ahead of the law—and when he didn’t, the punishment was light, the sentence short, and the lessons none.

Extradited from Brussels to Switzerland (1936)

By early 1936, with the Dutch police breathing down his neck, Roos had shifted south to Belgium. On 8 January, Brussels police arrested him at the request of the Zurich Cantonal Police, who were investigating a major fraud involving the credit institution Dakred A.G. – Die Kreditkasse mit Wartezeit. Swiss authorities considered him a flight risk and immediately began a diplomatic extradition request.

Originally a modest building-loan cooperative, Dakred had slipped into chaos. Management siphoned funds to private accounts and hid the losses behind falsified books. In 1935 the firm reinvented itself as a public corporation—but the new capital was entirely fictitious. Desperate for credibility, the directors turned to Roos. They drafted a fictitious contract claiming he would provide a 150,000-franc foreign loan, using it as “proof” of outside capital. When that illusion failed to attract real investors, they printed unauthorized bonds, the same securities later found in Roos’s possession.

Swiss investigators alleged that Roos, working with Dakred insiders, helped issue and distribute these forged bonds—about CHF 1.25 million in face value. Around 2000 of them were transferred without payment to a Brussels financial firm, Paradis Crédit Industriel et Minier; Roos was suspected of keeping another 100 bonds for himself.

With French cooperation, Roos was handed from Belgian to French custody at Quiévrain on 6 March and from French to Swiss officials at Boncourt on 19 March. On 24 March 1936, the Swiss Legation acknowledged receiving sealed evidence from the Belgian Ministry, and another 2000 bonds followed from the Belgian public prosecutor to Zurich.

And then the trail fades. Swiss files note only that the criminal proceedings against Roos were dropped later that year. On 1 May 1936, Roos left Switzerland for Salzburg. A month later, a “J. E. Roos of Amsterdam” appeared in Dutch bankruptcy notices—perhaps him, perhaps not. Either way, he was once again beyond reach.

When the Dakred case finally reached Swiss courts in 1941, newspapers described Roos as “a well-known international financial swindler.” The bank directors had profited at the expense of the cooperative’s patrons—farmers, tradesmen, small savers—many of whom were ruined when the bank failed. Dakred, like every enterprise Roos touched, was a house of cards built on lies and borrowed names.

Slippery Character in a Changing World (1937-1941)

After leaving Switzerland for Austria, Roos continued to drift across a Europe sliding toward war—always one step ahead of the law and one country away from expulsion. The list of nations willing to tolerate him was shrinking fast. On 12 March 1938, Germany annexed Austria, turning what had once been a refuge into a dangerous place for Roos. By then, it appears he had already moved back to Holland.

In July 1938, the British Passport Control Office in The Hague recorded an unusual visit. Lincoln Allen Smith, an English lawyer living in London, appeared on behalf of Josef Emil Roos and Johann Hans Wolpe, seeking visas for both men. Smith presented a letter signed by the Lord Mayor of Dublin, outlining a proposed loan to the Dublin Corporation for public works. He claimed that Roos and Wolpe were prepared to invest heavily in this loan and were even negotiating the purchase of a Dublin brewery—acting, he said, “on behalf of a wealthy group.” Smith vouched for their bona fides.

A few days later, Wolpe chartered an aircraft to Dublin, taking along Roos, Wolpe’s wife, and two Jewish associates from Holland. The trip was a failure. When their plane landed at Croydon Airport on the return leg to Amsterdam, British police briefly detained both men before releasing them. Back in Holland, their luck ran out: Dutch police arrested them on suspicion of fraud. According to official reports, the group claimed they had travelled to Ireland to negotiate a loan for the City of Dublin, but the Dutch authorities were unconvinced. On 24 August 1938, Roos was deported to Germany—though he likely didn’t stay long.

According to later testimony from Josef Jakobs, the duo—Wolpe, Roos—had been working together with Berlin lawyer Jürgen Ziebell to secure Irish naturalisations for Jewish refugees, a humanitarian pretext that masked a financial scheme. Jakobs claimed that by this point Roos was penniless and living off Wolpe.

By 6 December 1938, Roos appeared on a Gestapo wanted list (Fahndungsliste Nr. 50/38) issued by the Erfurt office, requesting his arrest. Somehow, he had already slipped away once more.

Meanwhile in The Hague, Wolpe faced his own interrogation in December 1938 and revealed more of Roos’s ventures. Roos, he said, had been plotting to print bonds to raise money “for the former King of Spain,” using them as collateral for loans from the Rhodius-Koenigs Handel-Maatschappij in Amsterdam. He had also tried—and failed—to raise funds in Italy for the Submar Company, and was attempting something similar in the United States.

British police, alerted by Dutch intelligence, confirmed that Roos was already well known to them. Scotland Yard files on Arthur Albert Tester noted that Roos had been in contact with Tester fairly continuously since at least 1933. The British police had even attempted to arrest Tester, but discovered that he had already set sail aboard his yacht in December 1938, bound for the Mediterranean.

By March 1939, the Dutch Ministry of Justice informed the Swiss Federal Police that Wolpe—then under arrest—had implicated Roos in passport fraud and other international crimes. Roos was reportedly using a false Luxembourgish passport under the name Oros, and had also stolen or purchased a Swiss passport from one Paul Keller, which was later altered to read Ritter.

At the same time, Dr. Alfred Huber-Borer, a Bern attorney acting for businessman Rodolphe Schmid, formally requested a ten-week Swiss entry permit for Roos, ostensibly to assist with an industrial project. The request was swiftly refused. By 1 April 1939, Swiss officials had had enough. One report dryly noted that “Roos is residing in Italy.”

Roos was running out of countries who would accept him.

The Final Years (1939 – 1943)

By early 1939, both Roos and Tester had resurfaced in Italy—an unlikely pairing. Tester was ardently pro-Nazi; Roos, by all accounts, was vehemently anti-Nazi. Yet they shared one enduring conviction: the pursuit of money. With war on the horizon, Roos joined Tester in Naples. We know this because, in 1940, several of Tester’s former employees were questioned by British authorities and described Roos among his circle.

Louiza Ginoris, who had joined Tester’s entourage as a secretary on 7 August 1939, recalled meeting Roos during one of his visits to Naples. She described him as a democratic capitalist who “detested all dictators, including Hitler and Mussolini.” Roos told her he had fled Germany after being sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for his anti-Hitler views—though another account claimed he had spent three and a half years in a concentration camp. He repeatedly expressed the hope that England would win the war. Though German by birth, he maintained that “Hitler had ruined Germany.”

Ginoris confirmed that Roos and Tester were long-time associates, their friendship dating back to 1920 when Tester still lived in Germany. Their relationship endured despite political differences—and despite Roos’s reputation for trouble. Eventually, Roos had to leave Italy “in a hurry,” Ginoris said, as he had become “undesirable owing to certain shady affairs.”

After the outbreak of war, and having surrendered his yacht to the Royal Navy, Tester shifted operations to Greece and invited Roos to join him. Once there, Roos tried to buy up tobacco, claiming he was purchasing for Britain but in fact dealing with Germany. His motives, according to Ginoris, were purely financial. When Roos failed to make the first payment, he left for Yugoslavia under the pretext of obtaining funds—and never returned.

In Yugoslavia, Roos reportedly helped Tester secure 546,000 dinars to pay a debt, though the money was obtained by “dishonest means.” Because all the transactions were carried out in Roos’s name, the Yugoslav police impounded his passport. It was due to run out in October 1941, and the Germans were unlikely to renew it. Roos was stuck.

Ginoris offered her own blunt assessment: “My personal opinion is that Roos is not a bad man, but he is very mercenary and capable of anything for money.”

Pinning down Roos’s alleged time in a German concentration camp is nearly impossible. He moved constantly, always one step ahead of the law. There is a window—between 1 May 1936, when he left Zurich for Vienna, and July 1938, when he reappeared in Holland—during which imprisonment in Germany might have occurred. But no documentary evidence confirms it.

German justice would catch him eventually.

Imprisonment and Death (1943 – 1944)

Trapped within an ever-shrinking circle of countries willing to tolerate him, Josef Emil Roos settled uneasily in Yugoslavia, scraping together a life on the margins. In April 1941, the Axis powers invaded Yugoslavia which collapsed within days. Italy occupied Dalmatia, including the city of Split, while Germany took control of the rest. In many ways, Roos was either very lucky or very shrewd—for he was living in Split, within the Italian zone, and so briefly escaped direct Nazi control.

Eventually, however, his luck ran out. After Italy’s armistice with the Allies in September 1943, German forces swept into Dalmatia, taking Split and the surrounding coast. They soon found the sixty-three-year-old Roos living at Masarykowa 17. This time, there was no escape.

On 9 December 1943, Roos arrived at Mauthausen concentration camp near the Austrian city of Linz. Mauthausen was classified as a Category III camp for “incorrigible political enemies of the Reich.” Prisoners endured starvation rations and brutal forced labour. Roos did not last long. On 3 January 1944, he died in the camp infirmary, the cause recorded as Kreislaufschwäche—circulatory weakness. Given that Mauthausen’s motto was “Vernichtung durch Arbeit”—death through work—the official cause should be understood in context. At sixty-three, Roos’s chances of survival were almost nonexistent.

His death registration leaves one final mystery. It lists him as divorced, but nothing further is known of his wife. Wilhelmine Roos (born 1884) had accompanied him to America in 1908, but after that, the trail goes cold. Did she follow him across Europe, or finally cut ties with her increasingly dubious husband? Did they have children? We don’t know. The genealogical record remains silent—at least for now.

Epilogue

I am almost beginning to think that financial schemes and swindles were par for the course in the 1930s and that everyone participated in such endeavours. Of course, this just might be that these are the sorts of people with whom Josef Jakobs was associated. Which, I think, says more about Josef and his circle of acquaintances than anything else.

Roos, Wolpe, Ziebell, Tester—their names surface again and again in the same murky networks of paper wealth, false fronts, and opportunism. Each man played the game until the war or the law—or both—finally caught up. For some, the reckoning came in courtrooms; for others, like Roos, in the camps. What remains is the pattern: a web of ambition and deceit that stretched across borders and decades, binding together men who could never quite stop chasing the next illusion of fortune.

Sources

Ancestry – genealogical documents
Swiss Newspaper Archives
British Newspaper Archives
Swiss Federal Archives
Roos’s file from Mauthausen Concentration Camp – Arolsen Archives
Gestapo Erfurt – arrest list – Arolsen Archives
Auction site – Bayerische Oelschiefer AG – copy of bearer share

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