A Big Game Hunter, fluent in several European languages, a man who could charm the pants off any lady, a Boer soldier who spoke English with an upper class British accent, a man who served as an officer in four country’s militaries, decorated with the German Iron Cross, an expert fencer, the man who hid the Kruger millions, a killer and assassin, brilliant saboteur, spy extraordinaire, Boer avenger, personal friend and shooting instructor to President Theodore Roosevelt and the leader of the largest spy ring the FBI ever uncovered…Two biographies were written about him, but chances are you’ve probably never heard of him.
Meet, Colonel Fritz Joubert Duquesne. The original “Swart Luiperd”…the real James Bond, Jason Borne and then some!
By Mike Smith
23 Of February 2020
If you ask Afrikaans speaking people today who the greatest Anglo-Boer War heroes were, they will give you names like Koos De La Rey, Piet Joubert, Christiaan de Wet, Danie Theron…their names are quite common in the history books. However, few have ever heard of Fritz Duquesne.
One wonders why this extraordinary man’s name was written out of the history books of South Africa and mostly disappeared down the Orwellian Memory Hole. Maybe it was that they never wanted to create a larger than life example of a true hero for the generations to come. Maybe because it showed how dangerous a single, hate-filled man can be when you have wronged his family in war.
Nevertheless, Fritz Joubert Duquesne (pronounced Do-Caine) was born on December 21, 1877 in the Eastern Cape town of East London. He was the son of French Huguenots descendants Abraham Duquenne and his mother Minna Joubert.
He also had a younger brother and sister, Pedro and Elsbet. When the children were still young the family bought a farm in Nylstroom (today Modimolle) in the country’s far north. His father was a hunter and trader and often away.
One day while his father was away twelve-year-old Fritz’s mother began bartering with a Zulu customer, who attacked her when she would not meet his asking price for goods he wanted to sell. 12-Year-old Fritz killed him with his own assegai.
Later that year a group of blacks attacked the area and Fritz’s family, together with six others had to flee with ox wagons, but were forced to pull a laager and fight off the attackers. Again, little Fritz proved to be one of the best shots.
Fritz’s father was quite a well-off man. At the age of 13, Fritz was sent to England for his education, where he spent the next four years. One biographer, Clement Wood has it that after graduating, Fritz did a year at Oxford, then entered the prestigious Ecole Militaire in Brussels, and had a short stay at the French military academy St. Cyr.
Both biographers, Clement Wood and Art Ronnie, mentions that Fritz trained under the prominent fencing master Julian Mercks and that he was an excellent fencer and took part in many matches at the New York Adventurers Club. According to Wood, Fritz became a champion swordsman in Europe and fought eight duels, in three of which he killed his opponent.
After his four years in England he was sent to Europe to study engineering, but on the ship met an embezzler named Christian de Vries and the two decided to take a trip around the world. Something his father did not approve of.
At the age of twenty-one in the summer of 1899 his father called him back to South Africa as the second Boer War was on the verge of breaking out. When he did return, he spoke with an upper-class English accent.
Fritz was commissioned a lieutenant and assigned to Commandant Piet Joubert’s staff. After being wounded in the shoulder in the battle of Lombard’s Kop in October 1899, where the Boers defeated the forces of Major General John French, who would later be commander-in-chief of Britain’s forces in France during World War I. Fritz was promoted to captain of artillery.
By May 1900 the British were winning the positional warfare and taking the Boer capitals. So, the Boers changed to guerrilla tactics. At this time, President Kruger wanted to ship Gold bullion and important documents for safe keeping to Europe through Lourenco Marques seaport in the Portuguese territory of Mozambique.
Fritz was in charge of the thirty ox-drawn carts headed for the Lourenco Marques. The four white soldiers assigned to the convoy tried to assassinate him and steal the gold. Fritz killed them all. Then all of his native crew, after hiding the gold in caves near the Drakensberg Mountains, were killed by tribesmen. The gold was never recovered. The story persists, though no one can say whether it is true or not.
For a while Fritz led a small commando unit blowing up British trains and sniping British soldiers. He was captured and escaped twice, once grabbing a guard’s pistol and killing him, the second time, with his hands tied, leaping off a bridge into a river. That was when he became known as the Black Panther of the Veld.
He was caught in Swaziland and imprisoned in Lisbon in Caldas de Rainha, a jail used by the British for POW’s. He seduced a guard’s daughter who helped him escape to Brussels where he met up with Boer Agents. He was then sent to England as a “Boer Defector”, volunteered for the British army, was given the rank of lieutenant, and sent back to South Africa. There he was assigned to a light cavalry unit.
Fritz deserted and became a Boer courier. He also ran his own commando group harassing Kitchener’s scouts, led by Chief of Scouts, the American Frederick Russell Burnham.
The incident that changed Fritz forever.
It was during his time as a Boer courier that Fritz Duquesne decided to drop by his old family farm in Nylstroom. He was not prepared for the scene he found. The farm was destroyed, burned down in Lord Kitchener’s “Scortched Earth” policy. The animals were all killed.
An elderly black servant told him that a party of British soldiers had gang raped and then shot his sister Elsbet. They hung his blind old uncle Jan and they raped his mother, who was then taken to a concentration camp. He swore a lifelong oath to wage war against the British and against General Kitchener, who he held personally responsible for the destruction of his family.
Fritz donned his old British uniform again and went to the nearest concentration camp, at Germiston east of Johannesburg to look for his mother. He found her there, starving, infected with syphilis, with a syphilitic infant in her arms. He swore he would make the English pay. He never saw her again. Leaving the camp, he passed two captains and shot them both dead.
Biographer Art Ronnie states, "the fate of his country and of his family would breed in him an all-consuming hatred of England" and "would turn him into what his other biographer, Clement Wood, called: a walking living breathing searing killing destroying torch of hate."
Boer betrayal in Cape Town
In October 1901, he went back to Cape Town masked as a British officer. He recruited 20 Boer sympathizers and planned several acts of sabotage and to kill Kitchener. They were to plant bombs at power plants, munition dumps, rail yards, and bridges. Fritz was personally to blow up the reservoir above the town, releasing a huge flood. Fritz Duquesne wanted to destroy Kitchener even if it meant blowing up and destroying the whole of Cape Town.
Unfortunately for him and his group, they were betrayed by one member’s wife. As British subjects they were found guilty of high treason and executed. Fritz was offered life in prison if he revealed the Boer secret codes. He fooled them by giving them invented codes. He was imprisoned at the Castle in Cape Town for months and tried to escape, by digging a tunnel through the thick stone walls, but was knocked unconscious by a boulder that fell on his head. The British then decided to ship him to a new British penal colony in Bermuda, surrounded by shark infested waters and no prospect of escape…so they thought.
On shipboard, while at a stopover in the Azores, some of the prisoners were allowed on deck. Duquesne tried to escape, grabbing an inattentive guard’s rifle and beating him to death with it. He threw the body overboard, but other guards arrived and the chance to get ashore evaporated. As no observer would testify and there was some chance the missing guard had jumped ship, no charges were filed.
On Bermuda Fritz was handcuffed 14 hours a day and made to do hard labour. There Fritz met and charmed Alice Wortley, daughter of an American businessman from Akron, Ohio, who was serving as Bermuda’s director of agriculture. He would meet her again later in the United States and marry her.
In the mean time the war ended in South Africa and the imprisoned Boers were offered repatriation, but on the condition that they signed an oath of allegiance to England. The irreconcilables refused and remained in prison.
Fritz was transferred to Burt’s Island in Saint George’s Harbour. On June 25, 1902, on a rainy night Fritz slipped past the wire fence and swam a mile and a half in shark infested waters to the mainland coast. He made it to the home of a Boer sympathizer, who gave him clothes and some money and sent him by boat to Hamilton, Bermuda’s diminutive capital, where he disappeared into the slums by the docks. There he acted as a pimp for a black prostitute named Vera for a week until he could stow away on a luxury yacht called “Margaret” sailing for Baltimore.
Fritz jumped over the side in the Chesapeake Bay and swam ashore. He walked and rode freight cars to Paterson, New Jersey, where he had been told to contact a Boer sympathizer. Alice Wortley, having been informed of his destination by his benefactor in Bermuda, visited him there.
The Boer network sent Fritz to Manhattan, where he worked, first as a subway conductor and then as a bill collector for the New York Herald. In 1904 he got a job as a reporter for the New York Sun. Two years later he was made Sunday editor. Between 1904 and 1909 he worked for three major New York newspapers and served as a foreign correspondent. Fritz also wrote three novels, one published in Le Petit Bleu and the other two in South Africa.
In that time Duquesne was best known for his many articles on big game hunting in Africa. He was invited to the White House in January 1909 for a two-hour session with Theodore Roosevelt, who was preparing, as his second term ended, to embark on a two-year hunting expedition in Africa. Fritz was one of several such advisers but became well known on the lecture circuit after his presidential audience.
Here he met again his former enemy, Frederick Russell Burnham, General Kitchener’s former Chief of Scouts. Due to the country being in the throes of a severe meat shortage, the two men teamed up to import hippos into Louisiana’s swamps for their meat, and camels in the far west as draft animals.
In June 1910 Fritz Duquesne married Alice Wortley. They would remain together for nine years, during much of which Fritz was elsewhere. Fritz also campaigned for Theodore Roosevelt. In December 1913 Fritz Duquesne became a naturalised US citizen. Fritz and his wife left for Brazil to do research on rubber trees for “Good Year”.
They were in Manaus, the capital of Brazil’s Amazonas state, when World War I broke out in 1914. America was at first neutral and only joined the war on the 6th of April 1917.
Killing Kitchener
When Fritz heard that Kitchener had been made Britain’s secretary of state for war his hatred was rekindled. Fritz sent Alice home and applied at the German consulate to become a spy. He disappeared under many aliases, traveled around Brazil to Dutch Guiana, Venezuela, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, everywhere with large crates of mineral samples or orchid bulbs to send on outgoing British ships. In fact, in the crates were time-bombs that exploded at high seas. Fritz Duquesne sank 22 British ships and had the audacity to claim from the insurance for his lost crates.
One the places he was staying in a Brazilian port was surrounded by British agents but he escaped over the rooftops.
His last bombing was in February 1916, when he consigned what he claimed was his trunk of motion picture film and sixteen boxes of “minerals” to be shipped to the United States from Brazil on the British ship Tennyson. There was a large explosion and fire at sea halfway to Trinidad. The captain managed to beach the stricken ship but three sailors were killed. The British began a manhunt for Duquesne on a mandatory death sentence charge.
Fritz took off for Argentina, where he contracted with the national Board of Education to produce some educational films. He needed to get back to the United States to buy the film. To throw the British off the scent he faked his death, planting a story in the April 27, 1916, New York Times that he had been killed by hostile Indians while leading an expedition in Bolivia. Seventeen days after the death notice he got a fake story onto the AP wire, saying he had been victorious in the Bolivian battle and had been rescued, badly wounded, by government troops. He arrived in New York uninjured in early May.
Kitchener departed for Petrograd, Russia on the HMS Hampshire on June 5, 1916, from Scapa Flow, base of the main British fleet, in the Orkney islands off the northeast tip of Scotland. At 7:30 pm during a violent storm the ship suffered a massive explosion and sank within fifteen minutes. The lifeboats could not be lowered in the storm. A few large rubber rafts were deployed but of those that made it to the coast they found a steep cliff the refugees could not ascend. Only 12 of the 655 persons on board survived.
The official British account had the Hampshire striking a mine laid that morning by the German submarine U-75 commanded by Curt Beitzen.
Fritz Duquesne’s version of this story had the makings of a pulp thriller. He said that during the twelve days between the report of his death in Bolivia and his supposed rescue he went to the Netherlands, where a Boer Revolutionary Committee working with German intelligence gave him a commission as a colonel. The Germans had learned that a Russian nobleman, Count Boris Zakrevsky, had been assigned to go to England to accompany Kitchener’s party to Petrograd. The Count was kidnapped enroute by the Germans and his papers forwarded to the Boers with orders that Fritz Duquesne was to impersonate Zakrevsky and find a way to assassinate Kitchener.
Fritz, dressed up as a Russian officer, is supposed to have met Kitchener in London, accompanied him and his entourage to Britain’s main naval base at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands north of Scotland, and sailed with Kitchener on the Hampshire. Fritz said he dropped self-igniting water torches out his porthole to identify Kitchener’s ship to waiting German U-boats. One of these fired the fatal torpedo. At the last minute Fritz leaped over the side into a raft in the raging storm and managed to navigate the hundred yards to the waiting submarine. He says he was then taken to Germany, where he was secretly awarded the Iron Cross as well as a medal from the Turkish government and made Baron of Brandenburg. Art Ronnie’s search uncovered no confirmation of these awards, but many German records were destroyed at the end of the war. During one of Fritz’s later arrests a photograph was found among his effects in which he is wearing the Iron Cross and medals from Austria, Turkey, and Bulgaria. Art Ronnie is skeptical that these were really awarded and not purchased somewhere. Duquesne is supposed to have returned to the United States aboard the German submarine Deutschland, arriving in Baltimore on July 10, 1916.
Back in the USA
Nevertheless, Fritz lied low and was not seen again until July 1917 when the USA entered the War. He appeared as an imaginary Australian officer and, complete with swagger stick, presented himself at the offices of a national speakers’ bureau as Captain Claude Staughton of the also imaginary West Australia Light Horse brigade.
During this time, the defrauded insurance companies were still trying to find him under all his aliases. On December 7, 1917, detectives from the FBI Bomb Squad raided Fritz’s Manhattan apartment and took him into custody. They found extensive newspaper clippings on all the ship bombings in South America, the invoice for the shipment aboard the Tennyson, and a letter of commendation from the Austrian high commissioner in Nicaragua. Fritz was charged with two counts of insurance fraud, both following suspicious explosions. Britain filed for extradition for murder.
To escape the British extradition, he faked insanity and then during the extradition trial…in the middle of the proceedings Fritz collapsed, insisting that he was paralyzed from the waist down.
Several doctors examined him. They stuck needles in his legs and under his toenails. Fritz never flinched. They finally agreed that he was really paralyzed. He was sent to the prison ward at Bellevue Hospital. He faked being paralyzed for two years. Someone slipped him a pair of hacksaw blades, and for five months he spent his days in his wheelchair pretending to be bird watching while quietly sawing away at the heavy iron bars.
A new hearing on May 19, 1919, approved his deportation to England. On the 26th just after midnight he broke out two window bars, fell to the ground from the second-story window, and staggered away into the night. No one helped him. He was scheduled to be sent to England to face murder charges later that morning.
He actually went to Boston, where he started an advertising business under the name Frank de Trafford Craven. The New York police issued a wanted for murder poster for Duquesne. He later claimed that he briefly took a job as a Boston policeman during a police strike, which gave him a chance to destroy the file on him at Boston police headquarters. For years he regularly had friends from all over the world send postcards and telegrams to the New York police, reading “Come and get me,” signed Fritz.
In 1926 Fritz, as Frank de Trafford Craven, went to work for Joseph P. Kennedy, JFK’s wealthy father, who was getting into the silent movie business with a company called Film Booking Offices of America.
In 1930 he switched to the Quigley Publishing Company, which put out a string of movie magazines. He gave himself a military title, and called himself Major Craven. He lived well, often told his war stories, including how he blew up English ships in South America during the Great War. On May 23, 1932, the Alien Squad caught up with him and he was arrested in the Quigley building. Fritz insisted he was Frank Craven and it was a case of mistaken identity. They took him away at gunpoint.
Fritz was booked for homicide and for being an escaped prisoner. He was defended by Arthur Garfield Hays, who had been one of the attorneys for Sacco and Vanzetti, the Scottsboro Boys, and John Scopes in the famous Monkey Trial. By this time Britain did not want to pursue wartime crimes and withdrew the charges. He was rearrested on the escape charge, but a judge threw it out. Fritz Duquesne was a free man.
A German spy...again
Fritz would again spy for the Germans. In the spring of 1934, he secretly accepted the job of intelligence officer for the Order of 76, an American pro-Nazi organization. It has to be remembered that Fritz did not support the Germans, because of an ideological conviction. He had a Jewish girlfriend at the time. In Art Ronnie’s opinion there is no indication that Duquesne held anti-Semitic views. He supported the Germans, because of his intense hatred of what the British did to the Boers and in particular to his family. Germany also supported the Boers through both Anglo Boer Wars.
In 1935 Admiral Wilhelm Canaris became head of the Abwehr, Germany’s division of military intelligence. One of his goals was to establish a network of spies in the United States. He chose for this mission Colonel Nikolaus Ritter, a man who had lived in the United States for thirteen years and was married to an American woman. Canaris instructed him to make contact with Fritz Duquesne, who he knew of from his work in South America in the last war.
Fritz gathered information for the Germans and stole plans of military equipment. Finally, on June 25, 1941 the FBI lured him into a trap and got him on film.
Four days later the feds closed the net, rounding up nineteen German agents in New York and four in New Jersey. The total would run to thirty-three by the time they went to trial. It was billed by the press as “the greatest spy roundup in U.S. history.” Ninety-three FBI agents worked on the case. Fritz was taken in his apartment, by a man who had rented the unit downstairs and pretended to be a friend, who now showed up with two other FBI agents. J. Edgar Hoover branded Duquesne the “most important” of the defendants. During his six-week trial he mesmerized the jury and the audience with a dramatic and often fantastic recounting of his life story.
He said he could visit Theodore Roosevelt in the White House any time he liked and had been there three or four times in one week. He retold how he had killed Field Marshall Kitchener and said he had been rescued from Bellevue Hospital by members of the Irish Republican Army.
Fritz got eighteen years. Colonel Nikolaus Ritter became the commander of a Luftwaffe Panzer division, then an American POW, and, after the war, a businessman in Hamburg. He died in 1974. Admiral Canaris, while running the Nazis’ principal military intelligence service, secretly plotted against Hitler, at one point proposing to have him declared insane and committed to an asylum. He opposed the Holocaust, recruited many Jews into the Abwehr solely to get them credentials that would get them to safety in Spain. He arranged for the escape of the Lubavitcher Rebbe Yosef Schneersohn from Warsaw, for which the Chabad movement has declared him a Righteous Gentile. He was executed by the Nazis just as the war was ending, for having connections to the attempt to assassinate Hitler.
He served twelve years, seven months, and sixteen days, five years of which were in solitary confinement. In his last months in jail he filed one last appeal, claiming that when the FBI had arrested him, they had seized a bag of uncut diamonds worth $3 million, and the map to the long-hidden Kruger gold. He was released on September 19, 1954; he was seventy-seven.
His health had deteriorated greatly. He fell frequently, was partly deaf, had a dislocated shoulder that was not treated and set badly, and was thought to have dementia. He had had a stroke that left him partly paralyzed. He returned to New York, where a few old friends met him. The city’s Welfare Department placed him in a nursing home.
He died of a stroke on May 24, 1956, at the age of seventy-eight. Hero, fool, madman, villain…Fritz Duquesne was all of these.
Source
Meet, Colonel Fritz Joubert Duquesne. The original “Swart Luiperd”…the real James Bond, Jason Borne and then some!
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| Fritz Duquesne, Boer soldier |
By Mike Smith
23 Of February 2020
If you ask Afrikaans speaking people today who the greatest Anglo-Boer War heroes were, they will give you names like Koos De La Rey, Piet Joubert, Christiaan de Wet, Danie Theron…their names are quite common in the history books. However, few have ever heard of Fritz Duquesne.
One wonders why this extraordinary man’s name was written out of the history books of South Africa and mostly disappeared down the Orwellian Memory Hole. Maybe it was that they never wanted to create a larger than life example of a true hero for the generations to come. Maybe because it showed how dangerous a single, hate-filled man can be when you have wronged his family in war.
Nevertheless, Fritz Joubert Duquesne (pronounced Do-Caine) was born on December 21, 1877 in the Eastern Cape town of East London. He was the son of French Huguenots descendants Abraham Duquenne and his mother Minna Joubert.
He also had a younger brother and sister, Pedro and Elsbet. When the children were still young the family bought a farm in Nylstroom (today Modimolle) in the country’s far north. His father was a hunter and trader and often away.
One day while his father was away twelve-year-old Fritz’s mother began bartering with a Zulu customer, who attacked her when she would not meet his asking price for goods he wanted to sell. 12-Year-old Fritz killed him with his own assegai.
Later that year a group of blacks attacked the area and Fritz’s family, together with six others had to flee with ox wagons, but were forced to pull a laager and fight off the attackers. Again, little Fritz proved to be one of the best shots.
Fritz’s father was quite a well-off man. At the age of 13, Fritz was sent to England for his education, where he spent the next four years. One biographer, Clement Wood has it that after graduating, Fritz did a year at Oxford, then entered the prestigious Ecole Militaire in Brussels, and had a short stay at the French military academy St. Cyr.
Both biographers, Clement Wood and Art Ronnie, mentions that Fritz trained under the prominent fencing master Julian Mercks and that he was an excellent fencer and took part in many matches at the New York Adventurers Club. According to Wood, Fritz became a champion swordsman in Europe and fought eight duels, in three of which he killed his opponent.
After his four years in England he was sent to Europe to study engineering, but on the ship met an embezzler named Christian de Vries and the two decided to take a trip around the world. Something his father did not approve of.
At the age of twenty-one in the summer of 1899 his father called him back to South Africa as the second Boer War was on the verge of breaking out. When he did return, he spoke with an upper-class English accent.
Fritz was commissioned a lieutenant and assigned to Commandant Piet Joubert’s staff. After being wounded in the shoulder in the battle of Lombard’s Kop in October 1899, where the Boers defeated the forces of Major General John French, who would later be commander-in-chief of Britain’s forces in France during World War I. Fritz was promoted to captain of artillery.
By May 1900 the British were winning the positional warfare and taking the Boer capitals. So, the Boers changed to guerrilla tactics. At this time, President Kruger wanted to ship Gold bullion and important documents for safe keeping to Europe through Lourenco Marques seaport in the Portuguese territory of Mozambique.
Fritz was in charge of the thirty ox-drawn carts headed for the Lourenco Marques. The four white soldiers assigned to the convoy tried to assassinate him and steal the gold. Fritz killed them all. Then all of his native crew, after hiding the gold in caves near the Drakensberg Mountains, were killed by tribesmen. The gold was never recovered. The story persists, though no one can say whether it is true or not.
For a while Fritz led a small commando unit blowing up British trains and sniping British soldiers. He was captured and escaped twice, once grabbing a guard’s pistol and killing him, the second time, with his hands tied, leaping off a bridge into a river. That was when he became known as the Black Panther of the Veld.
He was caught in Swaziland and imprisoned in Lisbon in Caldas de Rainha, a jail used by the British for POW’s. He seduced a guard’s daughter who helped him escape to Brussels where he met up with Boer Agents. He was then sent to England as a “Boer Defector”, volunteered for the British army, was given the rank of lieutenant, and sent back to South Africa. There he was assigned to a light cavalry unit.
Fritz deserted and became a Boer courier. He also ran his own commando group harassing Kitchener’s scouts, led by Chief of Scouts, the American Frederick Russell Burnham.
The incident that changed Fritz forever.
It was during his time as a Boer courier that Fritz Duquesne decided to drop by his old family farm in Nylstroom. He was not prepared for the scene he found. The farm was destroyed, burned down in Lord Kitchener’s “Scortched Earth” policy. The animals were all killed.
An elderly black servant told him that a party of British soldiers had gang raped and then shot his sister Elsbet. They hung his blind old uncle Jan and they raped his mother, who was then taken to a concentration camp. He swore a lifelong oath to wage war against the British and against General Kitchener, who he held personally responsible for the destruction of his family.
Fritz donned his old British uniform again and went to the nearest concentration camp, at Germiston east of Johannesburg to look for his mother. He found her there, starving, infected with syphilis, with a syphilitic infant in her arms. He swore he would make the English pay. He never saw her again. Leaving the camp, he passed two captains and shot them both dead.
Biographer Art Ronnie states, "the fate of his country and of his family would breed in him an all-consuming hatred of England" and "would turn him into what his other biographer, Clement Wood, called: a walking living breathing searing killing destroying torch of hate."
Boer betrayal in Cape Town
In October 1901, he went back to Cape Town masked as a British officer. He recruited 20 Boer sympathizers and planned several acts of sabotage and to kill Kitchener. They were to plant bombs at power plants, munition dumps, rail yards, and bridges. Fritz was personally to blow up the reservoir above the town, releasing a huge flood. Fritz Duquesne wanted to destroy Kitchener even if it meant blowing up and destroying the whole of Cape Town.
Unfortunately for him and his group, they were betrayed by one member’s wife. As British subjects they were found guilty of high treason and executed. Fritz was offered life in prison if he revealed the Boer secret codes. He fooled them by giving them invented codes. He was imprisoned at the Castle in Cape Town for months and tried to escape, by digging a tunnel through the thick stone walls, but was knocked unconscious by a boulder that fell on his head. The British then decided to ship him to a new British penal colony in Bermuda, surrounded by shark infested waters and no prospect of escape…so they thought.
On shipboard, while at a stopover in the Azores, some of the prisoners were allowed on deck. Duquesne tried to escape, grabbing an inattentive guard’s rifle and beating him to death with it. He threw the body overboard, but other guards arrived and the chance to get ashore evaporated. As no observer would testify and there was some chance the missing guard had jumped ship, no charges were filed.
On Bermuda Fritz was handcuffed 14 hours a day and made to do hard labour. There Fritz met and charmed Alice Wortley, daughter of an American businessman from Akron, Ohio, who was serving as Bermuda’s director of agriculture. He would meet her again later in the United States and marry her.
In the mean time the war ended in South Africa and the imprisoned Boers were offered repatriation, but on the condition that they signed an oath of allegiance to England. The irreconcilables refused and remained in prison.
Fritz was transferred to Burt’s Island in Saint George’s Harbour. On June 25, 1902, on a rainy night Fritz slipped past the wire fence and swam a mile and a half in shark infested waters to the mainland coast. He made it to the home of a Boer sympathizer, who gave him clothes and some money and sent him by boat to Hamilton, Bermuda’s diminutive capital, where he disappeared into the slums by the docks. There he acted as a pimp for a black prostitute named Vera for a week until he could stow away on a luxury yacht called “Margaret” sailing for Baltimore.
Fritz jumped over the side in the Chesapeake Bay and swam ashore. He walked and rode freight cars to Paterson, New Jersey, where he had been told to contact a Boer sympathizer. Alice Wortley, having been informed of his destination by his benefactor in Bermuda, visited him there.
The Boer network sent Fritz to Manhattan, where he worked, first as a subway conductor and then as a bill collector for the New York Herald. In 1904 he got a job as a reporter for the New York Sun. Two years later he was made Sunday editor. Between 1904 and 1909 he worked for three major New York newspapers and served as a foreign correspondent. Fritz also wrote three novels, one published in Le Petit Bleu and the other two in South Africa.
In that time Duquesne was best known for his many articles on big game hunting in Africa. He was invited to the White House in January 1909 for a two-hour session with Theodore Roosevelt, who was preparing, as his second term ended, to embark on a two-year hunting expedition in Africa. Fritz was one of several such advisers but became well known on the lecture circuit after his presidential audience.
Here he met again his former enemy, Frederick Russell Burnham, General Kitchener’s former Chief of Scouts. Due to the country being in the throes of a severe meat shortage, the two men teamed up to import hippos into Louisiana’s swamps for their meat, and camels in the far west as draft animals.
In June 1910 Fritz Duquesne married Alice Wortley. They would remain together for nine years, during much of which Fritz was elsewhere. Fritz also campaigned for Theodore Roosevelt. In December 1913 Fritz Duquesne became a naturalised US citizen. Fritz and his wife left for Brazil to do research on rubber trees for “Good Year”.
They were in Manaus, the capital of Brazil’s Amazonas state, when World War I broke out in 1914. America was at first neutral and only joined the war on the 6th of April 1917.
Killing Kitchener
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| Duquesne in German uniform |
One the places he was staying in a Brazilian port was surrounded by British agents but he escaped over the rooftops.
His last bombing was in February 1916, when he consigned what he claimed was his trunk of motion picture film and sixteen boxes of “minerals” to be shipped to the United States from Brazil on the British ship Tennyson. There was a large explosion and fire at sea halfway to Trinidad. The captain managed to beach the stricken ship but three sailors were killed. The British began a manhunt for Duquesne on a mandatory death sentence charge.
Fritz took off for Argentina, where he contracted with the national Board of Education to produce some educational films. He needed to get back to the United States to buy the film. To throw the British off the scent he faked his death, planting a story in the April 27, 1916, New York Times that he had been killed by hostile Indians while leading an expedition in Bolivia. Seventeen days after the death notice he got a fake story onto the AP wire, saying he had been victorious in the Bolivian battle and had been rescued, badly wounded, by government troops. He arrived in New York uninjured in early May.
Kitchener departed for Petrograd, Russia on the HMS Hampshire on June 5, 1916, from Scapa Flow, base of the main British fleet, in the Orkney islands off the northeast tip of Scotland. At 7:30 pm during a violent storm the ship suffered a massive explosion and sank within fifteen minutes. The lifeboats could not be lowered in the storm. A few large rubber rafts were deployed but of those that made it to the coast they found a steep cliff the refugees could not ascend. Only 12 of the 655 persons on board survived.
The official British account had the Hampshire striking a mine laid that morning by the German submarine U-75 commanded by Curt Beitzen.
Fritz Duquesne’s version of this story had the makings of a pulp thriller. He said that during the twelve days between the report of his death in Bolivia and his supposed rescue he went to the Netherlands, where a Boer Revolutionary Committee working with German intelligence gave him a commission as a colonel. The Germans had learned that a Russian nobleman, Count Boris Zakrevsky, had been assigned to go to England to accompany Kitchener’s party to Petrograd. The Count was kidnapped enroute by the Germans and his papers forwarded to the Boers with orders that Fritz Duquesne was to impersonate Zakrevsky and find a way to assassinate Kitchener.
Fritz, dressed up as a Russian officer, is supposed to have met Kitchener in London, accompanied him and his entourage to Britain’s main naval base at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands north of Scotland, and sailed with Kitchener on the Hampshire. Fritz said he dropped self-igniting water torches out his porthole to identify Kitchener’s ship to waiting German U-boats. One of these fired the fatal torpedo. At the last minute Fritz leaped over the side into a raft in the raging storm and managed to navigate the hundred yards to the waiting submarine. He says he was then taken to Germany, where he was secretly awarded the Iron Cross as well as a medal from the Turkish government and made Baron of Brandenburg. Art Ronnie’s search uncovered no confirmation of these awards, but many German records were destroyed at the end of the war. During one of Fritz’s later arrests a photograph was found among his effects in which he is wearing the Iron Cross and medals from Austria, Turkey, and Bulgaria. Art Ronnie is skeptical that these were really awarded and not purchased somewhere. Duquesne is supposed to have returned to the United States aboard the German submarine Deutschland, arriving in Baltimore on July 10, 1916.
Back in the USA
Nevertheless, Fritz lied low and was not seen again until July 1917 when the USA entered the War. He appeared as an imaginary Australian officer and, complete with swagger stick, presented himself at the offices of a national speakers’ bureau as Captain Claude Staughton of the also imaginary West Australia Light Horse brigade.
During this time, the defrauded insurance companies were still trying to find him under all his aliases. On December 7, 1917, detectives from the FBI Bomb Squad raided Fritz’s Manhattan apartment and took him into custody. They found extensive newspaper clippings on all the ship bombings in South America, the invoice for the shipment aboard the Tennyson, and a letter of commendation from the Austrian high commissioner in Nicaragua. Fritz was charged with two counts of insurance fraud, both following suspicious explosions. Britain filed for extradition for murder.
To escape the British extradition, he faked insanity and then during the extradition trial…in the middle of the proceedings Fritz collapsed, insisting that he was paralyzed from the waist down.
Several doctors examined him. They stuck needles in his legs and under his toenails. Fritz never flinched. They finally agreed that he was really paralyzed. He was sent to the prison ward at Bellevue Hospital. He faked being paralyzed for two years. Someone slipped him a pair of hacksaw blades, and for five months he spent his days in his wheelchair pretending to be bird watching while quietly sawing away at the heavy iron bars.
A new hearing on May 19, 1919, approved his deportation to England. On the 26th just after midnight he broke out two window bars, fell to the ground from the second-story window, and staggered away into the night. No one helped him. He was scheduled to be sent to England to face murder charges later that morning.
He actually went to Boston, where he started an advertising business under the name Frank de Trafford Craven. The New York police issued a wanted for murder poster for Duquesne. He later claimed that he briefly took a job as a Boston policeman during a police strike, which gave him a chance to destroy the file on him at Boston police headquarters. For years he regularly had friends from all over the world send postcards and telegrams to the New York police, reading “Come and get me,” signed Fritz.
In 1926 Fritz, as Frank de Trafford Craven, went to work for Joseph P. Kennedy, JFK’s wealthy father, who was getting into the silent movie business with a company called Film Booking Offices of America.
In 1930 he switched to the Quigley Publishing Company, which put out a string of movie magazines. He gave himself a military title, and called himself Major Craven. He lived well, often told his war stories, including how he blew up English ships in South America during the Great War. On May 23, 1932, the Alien Squad caught up with him and he was arrested in the Quigley building. Fritz insisted he was Frank Craven and it was a case of mistaken identity. They took him away at gunpoint.
Fritz was booked for homicide and for being an escaped prisoner. He was defended by Arthur Garfield Hays, who had been one of the attorneys for Sacco and Vanzetti, the Scottsboro Boys, and John Scopes in the famous Monkey Trial. By this time Britain did not want to pursue wartime crimes and withdrew the charges. He was rearrested on the escape charge, but a judge threw it out. Fritz Duquesne was a free man.
A German spy...again
Fritz would again spy for the Germans. In the spring of 1934, he secretly accepted the job of intelligence officer for the Order of 76, an American pro-Nazi organization. It has to be remembered that Fritz did not support the Germans, because of an ideological conviction. He had a Jewish girlfriend at the time. In Art Ronnie’s opinion there is no indication that Duquesne held anti-Semitic views. He supported the Germans, because of his intense hatred of what the British did to the Boers and in particular to his family. Germany also supported the Boers through both Anglo Boer Wars.
In 1935 Admiral Wilhelm Canaris became head of the Abwehr, Germany’s division of military intelligence. One of his goals was to establish a network of spies in the United States. He chose for this mission Colonel Nikolaus Ritter, a man who had lived in the United States for thirteen years and was married to an American woman. Canaris instructed him to make contact with Fritz Duquesne, who he knew of from his work in South America in the last war.
Fritz gathered information for the Germans and stole plans of military equipment. Finally, on June 25, 1941 the FBI lured him into a trap and got him on film.
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| Duquesne at his trial. |
He said he could visit Theodore Roosevelt in the White House any time he liked and had been there three or four times in one week. He retold how he had killed Field Marshall Kitchener and said he had been rescued from Bellevue Hospital by members of the Irish Republican Army.
Fritz got eighteen years. Colonel Nikolaus Ritter became the commander of a Luftwaffe Panzer division, then an American POW, and, after the war, a businessman in Hamburg. He died in 1974. Admiral Canaris, while running the Nazis’ principal military intelligence service, secretly plotted against Hitler, at one point proposing to have him declared insane and committed to an asylum. He opposed the Holocaust, recruited many Jews into the Abwehr solely to get them credentials that would get them to safety in Spain. He arranged for the escape of the Lubavitcher Rebbe Yosef Schneersohn from Warsaw, for which the Chabad movement has declared him a Righteous Gentile. He was executed by the Nazis just as the war was ending, for having connections to the attempt to assassinate Hitler.
He served twelve years, seven months, and sixteen days, five years of which were in solitary confinement. In his last months in jail he filed one last appeal, claiming that when the FBI had arrested him, they had seized a bag of uncut diamonds worth $3 million, and the map to the long-hidden Kruger gold. He was released on September 19, 1954; he was seventy-seven.
His health had deteriorated greatly. He fell frequently, was partly deaf, had a dislocated shoulder that was not treated and set badly, and was thought to have dementia. He had had a stroke that left him partly paralyzed. He returned to New York, where a few old friends met him. The city’s Welfare Department placed him in a nursing home.
He died of a stroke on May 24, 1956, at the age of seventy-eight. Hero, fool, madman, villain…Fritz Duquesne was all of these.
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