A Hungarian adventurer, desert explorer, aviator and motoring enthusiast, who claimed to have found the Zerzura Oasis.
Born in Borostyanko, Hungary, now part of Austria, into a noble family, during the First World War Almásy joined the 11th Hussars Regiment and saw action against the Serbians and the Russians. He transferred to the Austro-Hungarian Air Force in 1916, and was shot down over northern Italy in 1918. He became a flight instructor for the rest of the war.
After the war Almásy became a representative of the Steyr Automobile Company. In 1926 while demonstrating vehicles in Egypt and Sudan, he developed a life-long interest in and love for the desert. In 1932 he took part in an expedition with three Britons, Sir Robert Clayton-East-Clayton, Squadron Leader H.W.G.J. Penderel and Patrick Clayton to find the legendary Zerzura Oasis, ‘The Oasis of the Birds’. They found rock art sites in the Gilf Kebir, the ‘Cave of the Swimmers’. In 1933 Almásy claimed he had found the third valley of Zerzura.
In 1932 Almásy’s former sponsor Clayton-East-Clayton died of an infection picked up on the earlier expedition that year to the Zerzura. His wife, Dorothy died in an air crash a year later in somewhat mysterious circumstances.
In 1935 Almásy may have supplied information to the Italians about the feasibility of an invasion of Egypt and Sudan from Italian North Africa. At the outbreak of the Second World War he returned to Hungary and joined the Hungarian Air Force; later he was recruited by the Abwehr for his extensive desert knowledge and took part in Operation Salam, the transportation of two agents from Jalo to Cairo.
After the war he returned to Egypt with the help of MI6. There in 1950 King Farouk made him Technical Director of the Desert Research Institute. He was still obsessed with the prospect of finding the lost army of Cambyses, who according to Herodotus had taken his Persian Army into the desert and promptly disappeared in a sandstorm somewhere between the Farafra Oasis and Bahrein in the Sand Sea. However, his health was failing after years of desert hardship and months of abuse by the Soviet and Hungarian Secret Police.
Within a few weeks of his new appointment he collapsed, and was found to be suffering from hepatitis and amoebic dysentery, which he had first contracted on Operation Salam. At the expense of King Farouk he was flown to Austria for treatment at a private clinic near Salzburg. The doctors found that his liver was seriously damaged and neither blood transfusions nor penicillin could much improve his condition. He had no visitors and barely conscious he rambled about Cambyses and the lost army. He died on the afternoon of 22 March 1951. Abu Ramleh, the Father of the Dunes, was buried in the Salzburg municipal cemetery. The only mourners were his doctor, a priest and his brother Janos Almásy and his wife.
Almásy’s life, albeit distorted, was propelled into the limelight by the novel The English Patient. His grave, which was fast disappearing into obscurity, has now become a shrine with a memorial plaque. A bronze bust of Almásy is now displayed in the grounds of the Hungarian National Geographical Museum at Érd near Budapest.
A British Royal Engineers/Signals officer, who organised the expeditions in the Libyan Desert in the 1930s and founded the LRDG during the Second World War.
Bagnold and his fellow explorers, including Almásy, were early pioneers in the use of vehicles in the desert. He is credited with developing a sun compass which was not affected magnetically by metal. He helped develop methods of crossing the Sand Seas by reducing tyre pressures and using oversized tyres.
In the early years of the Second World War General Wavell allowed him to create a mobile scouting and raiding force in the desert. In six weeks he formed a new unit which became the LRDG. In 1941, Bagnold was promoted and held a more senior position allowing younger officers to conduct operations.
In June 1944 he retired from the British Army with the rank of brigadier to carry out his scientific research. He continued to study the desert for the rest of his life, and received numerous awards in recognition of his work.
A German naval officer who became involved with German intelligence operations during the First World War and also commanded a U-boat. In the late 1930s he became head of the Abwehr.
During the Second World War Canaris led a double and charmed life. Right from the start he was set against the Nazis, and had been working against them before the outbreak of war encouraging the British, through links within MI6, to stand up to Hitler.
During the invasion of Poland he was horrified when Hitler ordered him to witness a series of killings carried out by the SS. Amongst these was the burning of the synagogue in Bedzin with its congregation inside. Canaris kept detailed records of this and other incidents in Poland, which found their way to the German resistance. He reported the massacres to General Wilhelm Keitel, who implored him to drop the matter.
Canaris began actively working to overthrow Hitler’s regime while seeming to cooperate with it. He was promoted to full admiral in January 1940. During 1942–1943 Canaris made several trips to Spain, during which time he is believed to have made contact with British agents, putting out feelers for peace terms if Hitler could be removed.
However after the invasion of Russia, Operation Barbarossa, he began to come under suspicion, particularly by Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SD. The two men had known each other before the war when Heydrich served under Canaris in the navy. Heydrich was an ardent Nazi and was angling to replace Canaris as head of the Abwehr. Canaris called him ‘the most impressive of the beasts’. The SD and the Abwehr wasted a great deal of time and effort in plotting against each other. The assassination of Heydrich in Prague in 1942 was partly instigated by MI6 to protect Canaris in his position.
By early 1944 Heinrich Himmler felt that he had enough evidence of Canaris playing a double game and went to Hitler, who dismissed the Admiral. A short time later he was put under house arrest. This prevented him taking part in the July plot of 1944 to kill Hitler.
Himmler kept Canaris alive, hoping to use him in future contacts with the British. However, when it became clear that this was unlikely, Canaris was court-martialled by the SS and sentenced to death. He was executed on 9 April 1945 in Flossenburg concentration camp. He was led to the gallows naked, a final humiliation.
At the Nuremberg Trials many testified to his courage in opposing Hitler. During the war he went out of his way to help those persecuted by the Nazis, saving many Jews by getting them out of Europe via Spain, passing them off as fake Abwehr agents. The Chabad-Lubavitch organisation campaigned for his recognition as a Righteous Gentile.
A British surveyor and desert explorer, who led the first LRDG raid.
Clayton was a pre-war desert explorer along with Ralph Bagnold. He spent eighteen years with the Egyptian Government Survey. In 1931 he helped rescue Sanusi refugees from Italian troops who had occupied Kufra. He often acted as a guide for tourists on desert trips and in 1937 rescued the German Defence Minister who apparently got lost in the area, although more than likely the man was on a reconnaissance mission.
Bagnold sent for Clayton to help form the LRDG when he was commissioned into the Intelligence Corps. He was wounded and captured on the first LRDG operation of the war in 1941, spending the rest of the conflict in POW camps.
After escaping a POW camp at Veano in northern Italy he lived in the mountains for four months, but was recaptured in January 1944 and sent to a prison camp in Czechoslovakia and then on to Germany. He was soon on the camp escape committees, compiling maps and documents for escapees. It was dangerous work, and he later told the story of two friends caught by the Gestapo who were returned to the camp for burial in urns.
On 12 April 1945 he was liberated at Oflag 79 by US troops. When Peter his son met him at the station he only recognised his father by his LRDG shoulder flashes. He was thin and worn out by four years of bad diet and ill treatment in the camps.
After the war Clayton stayed in the army serving in Palestine and Egypt. In 1950 with his wife Ellie he attended the celebration of the Desert Institute in Cairo, where he met old members of the Zerzura Club, including Bagnold and Almásy.
After 30 years spent in the Middle East mapping the deserts, he returned home in 1953. Clayton continued working as a reserve officer until the year before his death in 1962. He was used as the inspiration for Peter Madox in The English Patient.
British author.
Daphne du Maurier, author of Rebecca, has become one of the best loved of British novelists. She was the second of three daughters of the actor manager Sir Gerald du Maurier. Her grandfather George du Maurier had himself written three novels, Trilby (1894) being the most famous.
Daphne’s first novel The Loving Spirit was published in 1931. Her most famous books were set in her adopted Cornwall. Rebecca was published in 1938 and is generally regarded as her finest work, adapted for stage and screen numerous times. The film of the book directed by Alfred Hitchcock won the Best Picture Oscar in 1941.
Notwithstanding the success of Rebecca, many critics believe her macabre short stories were her best work, including The Birds (1963) and Don’t look Now (1973), both of which were adapted for the screen. Rebecca and most of her other books remain in print to this day.
Daphne married Frederick Browning in 1932, later to become Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Browning, who died in 1965. Daphne died at her home in Cornwall in 1989. Her son Christian (Kit) Browning still lives at the family house, ‘Ferryside’, near Fowey.
German/Egyptian Abwehr spy.
After Eppler was arrested in July 1942, he was put through a court martial and sentenced to death, the fate awaiting most spies. However, in view of the volatile political situation in Egypt and his willing cooperation with his captors, both Eppler and his accomplice Sandstette were treated as political prisoners.
He was held in prison until the autumn of 1946, when he was flown to Germany. There he was interned at Hamburg-Neuenganme in a camp for war criminals, but MI6 intervened and he was released.
He then began working in the black market, at which time, according to Eppler himself, the KGB contacted him to spy for them, but he turned them down. Life became too ‘hot’ so he moved to the rural south of Germany to Saarland, where his mother had come from, and started a book business.
In 1957 Eppler moved to France. In 1974 he wrote his memoirs while living in a flat in Paris on the banks of the Seine. In 1980 Pamela Andriotokis interviewed him for People magazine, after the release of Ken Follett’s novel The Key to Rebecca, Then 66, Eppler was living outside Paris in an apartment near Versailles, a wealthy business man.
A German love song the fictional character of which became the distant sweetheart of all the men of the desert armies.
While serving in the Imperial German Army in 1915, a school teacher called Hans Leip wrote a poem that would become the basis of the famous song. It was published in 1937 as ‘The Song of a Young Soldier on Watch’. It was then set to music by Norbert Schultze in 1938 and released under the title ‘The Girl under the Lantern’. It was first recorded by Lale Andersen in 1939.
Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, tried to stop the song being broadcast saying that it was too ‘sentimental’. The outcry from Axis soldiers, including Erwin Rommel himself, was too great and Goebbels changed his mind. It was these troops who gave the song its popular name ‘Lili Marlene’. Eventually all the desert armies were tuning into Radio Belgrade to hear it.
In 1944 Marlene Dietrich recorded the song for the US Office of Strategic Services musical propaganda broadcasts.
Underneath the lantern
By the barrack gate,
Darling I remember
The way you used to wait
T’was there that you whispered tenderly
That you loved me;
You’d always be
My Lili of the lamplight
My own Lili Marlene
English lyrics by Tommie Connor, 1944
British war correspondent and author.
Mosley was a journalist and war correspondent for The Sunday Times. It was while serving in this capacity in the Middle East that Mosley first came across Eppler and the story of Operation Kondor.
His job soon took him away from the region as the war moved toward Europe. He parachuted into Normandy on D-Day with the 6th British Airborne Division, and reported on the final collapse of the Nazi regime in 1945. However, he never forgot Eppler and tracked him down in Germany in 1956. Subsequently they met several times; on occasion Eppler visited Mosley in his Surrey home. The result was The Cat and the Mice (1958), a somewhat distorted account, but it did bring Operation Kondor into the public arena.
Later Mosley became a renowned biographer, his subjects including General George Marshal, Reichmarschall Herman Goring, Walt Disney and Charles Lindbergh, amongst others. He also wrote five novels.
Lieutenant-Colonel Nikolaus Ritter (1897–?)
German Abwehr officer and agent
At the end of the war Ritter was serving in a Luftwaffe flak regiment as the Abwehr had collapsed. He was captured by MI6 and questioned for a year at various POW camps.
He was told that many of the agents he had run during the war had in fact been double agents, run by the British, a fact that he claimed to refuse to believe at first. His captors knew his various cover names, including Doktor Rantzau – he was fond of being a Doktor – Jansen, Reinhardt and Alfred Harding.
It appears that whatever Ritter told the British, he did, at least at one time, have an inkling of the Allied ‘Double Cross System’. Gwilyn Williams, a Welsh nationalist codenamed ‘Snow’, was an Abwehr agent turned by MI6. Ritter, in his cover as Dr Rantzau, saw Williams in Lisbon in 1941 and accused him of being a double agent (Snow KV 4/444–453). Ritter’s superiors did not agree and Snow was sent back to England on another mission, but his British controllers decided to wind down the operation.
Later Ritter worked for the CIA in Europe. He was last heard of living at Gross Flottbek on the River Elbe near Hamburg.
‘The Desert Fox’, an inventive tactical commander, especially in mobile battle, although his strategic ability and administrative skills were questionable.
Rommel was born in Heidenheim near Ulm. He joined the German Army in 1910, completing his officer training at Danzig in 1911. He was commissioned lieutenant in January 1912. During the First World War Rommel fought in France, Romania and Italy in the 6th Wurttemberg Infantry Regiment and the Wurttemberg Mountain Battalion. He was wounded three times. On 27 November 1916 he married Lucie (Lucia Maria Mollin), to whom he was devoted. Their son Manfred was born on 24 December 1928. In the inter-war period he became an instructor at the Dresden Infantry School, where he wrote a book on infantry tactics: Combat Tasks for Platoon and Company: A Manual for Officer Instruction.
During the 1939 invasion of Poland, Rommel commanded the Führer Escort Headquarters. In February 1940, through Hitler’s patronage, he was given command of the 7th Panzer Division for the invasion of France; he received both praise and criticism for his actions, some observers finding him bold and inventive while others considered him reckless.
In 1941 he was given command of German forces in North Africa, Panzerarmee Afrika, later becoming the Afrika Korps. His object was the capture of Egypt and the Suez Canal. The war rolled back and forth across the Libyan and Egyptian deserts. Rommel’s advance was finally stopped at the First Battle of El Alamein. At Alam el Halfa he tried to batter his way through well prepared British positions but had to withdraw.
At the Second Battle of El Alamein the Afrika Korps was in a desperate situation but Hitler refused permission to retreat, which Rommel accepted with misgivings. Hitler later rescinded the order.
The retreat from El Alamein continued for 1500 miles apart from brief rearguard actions all the way to Tunisia, against a vastly superior Allied force that had air supremacy. In February 1943 Rommel inflicted a heavy defeat on the US II Corps at the Kasserine Pass. In March, due to ill health, he handed over command of Armeegruppe Afrika to General Hans-Jurgen Von Arnim and left for Germany, never to return to Africa.
In July Rommel took command of Army Group E to defend Greece against possible Allied landings. With the overthrow of Mussolini he went to Italy to command Army Group B. When Field Marshal Albert Kesselring took command in Italy, Rommel went to France with Group B, his instructions being to prepare the defence against Allied invasion. Although most of the German commanders, including Hitler, believed that the Allies would land in the Pas-de-Calais, Rommel thought it more likely they would land in Normandy. His view was that the invasion should be stopped on the beaches, because Allied air superiority would expose large movements of troops to heavy punishment. In contrast, Field Marshal Gerd Von Runstedt thought that the heavy German mobile reserves should be held further back in a position from where a more traditional counter attack could be launched. Hitler vacillated between the two plans but picked neither, instead placing the reserves farther forward, but not close enough for Rommel or far enough back for Von Runstedt. Rommel was on leave when the D-Day landings began. He returned to the front and on 17 July his staff car was strafed by a Spitfire. Rommel was wounded and hospitalised.
Rommel was indirectly implicated in the 20 July plot against Hitler, in which some of his closest friends were involved. However he himself held the view that Hitler should not be assassinated but rather arrested. He was given the choice of facing the People’s Court or committing suicide. Knowing that the former almost certainly meant execution and that his family would be badly treated, he chose the latter. On 14 October 1944 he took cyanide and ended his life. The official Nazi line was that he had died of a heart attack brought on by his wounds. He was buried, against his wishes, with all the pomp the Nazi state could muster.
Many soldiers and military historians believe it was Rommel’s skilful use of desert terrain that cemented his reputation. As Winston Churchill said in a speech to the Houses of Parliament, ‘We have a very daring and skilful opponent against us, and, may I say across the havoc of war, a great general.’
German Abwehr spy.
Sandstette was born in Oldenburg and educated in Germany, where he lived until 1930. That year he went to West Africa, going on to work in several African countries until the outbreak of the Second World War. He was repatriated to Germany in 1940 as part of an exchange of British and German civilians. With his African background he was chosen for Operation Kondor while working in the Abwehr map department.
When Eppler and Sandstette (nicknamed Sandy by Eppler) were captured in Cairo and imprisoned he tried to cut his throat but botched the job, and spent several weeks in hospital.
Like Eppler, at the end of the war Sandstette was flown back to Germany. Finally obtaining release from a camp for war criminals, he returned to East Africa and took up farming.
A British insurance salesman who served in the Field Security Service (Intelligence Corps) for most of the Second World War.
After the arrest of Eppler and Sandstette in 1942 – the high point of Sansom’s career – he continued to serve in Cairo as a security officer. He dealt with a variety of factions, from Egyptian nationalists wishing to cast off the British imperialist yoke, to mutinies within the Greek forces then serving in Egypt that heralded the civil war in Greece. He was also faced with the machinations of various Zionist groups who had their eye on Palestine.
After the war Sansom was appointed as security officer in the British Embassy, Cairo. In July 1952 the Egyptian Army took over the government. Anwar el Sadat became the First Minister of State in the revolutionary Egyptian government and King Farouk was deposed as head of state.
Sansom had to leave in a hurry, given his background of having arrested most of the leading revolutionaries during the war years, who had openly vowed revenge. He returned home to England, a country he had spent little time in. He had to learn to live without his luxury flat and servants in an austere post-war Britain, but his service to the nation was recognised with the award of the MBE recorded in the New Year’s honours list for 1953.
In 1960 Sansom met Eppler again in London at a reception for the premiere of the film Foxhole in Cairo. In 1965 he published his memoir, I Spied Spies.
The details of Sansom’s last days are not clear. However, there is an Alfred William Sansom, apparently born in Egypt, buried at the Ta’ Braxia cemetery in Malta. His date of death is given as 19 February 1973. Did Sansom spend his last years on the sunny island of Malta? It is to be hoped, for if there is one hero in this story surely it is ‘Sammy’ Sansom.