With the virtual elimination of the Anglo-Saxon powers, the chief players in the game of nations in Shanghai from 1942 to 1945 were the Germans and the Japanese. The relationship of these allies in China, even more than the parallel Anglo-American relationship, was poisoned by mutual suspicion, conflicting interests, ambitions and objectives.
The Japanese made little effort to conceal their mistrust of their Axis partners. In March 1942 a Japanese army representative told the acting police chief of the French Concession that he was charged with control of political activities by foreigners in the concession – in particular those of ‘German and Italian circles’.1 A Municipal Police report from about the same time took note of heightened discontent among German and Italian businessmen in Shanghai ‘in connection with the restrictions imposed on them by the Nipponese Military Authorities’.
It was originally believed by these circles that Japan’s Axis partners will enjoy right[s] and privileges in Shanghai but now they regard themselves as being treated almost in the same way as enemy nationals.
Thought is gradually gaining ground among prominent Germans and Italians in Shanghai that the Far East will eventually be closed economically and otherwise to all Europeans, including Germans and Italians, and that all trade possibilities will disappear.
The ever-increasing military and economical might of Japan is evidently beginning to worry her Axis partners who consider that there may be no limit to Japan’s expansion.2
Shortly afterwards a British intelligence report commented on severe fractures in the Axis partnership in China:
As long ago as January the German ambassador in Nanking was complaining that the Japanese Government treated the war in the Pacific as peculiarly their own and acted as if they saw danger in Axis cooperation there, and that in Shanghai they were treating all whites, whether enemies or friends, exactly alike, with the result that German interests were suffering … A report received through a secret Allied source states, for what it is worth, that the Japanese have demanded the recall of the German Consul-General at Shanghai because of his having set up an espionage organisation which is highly unwelcome to them.3
The tense nature of the relationship was manifested in things great and small. A repatriated American missionary recalled an incident when ‘a German lady on horseback was stopped at the barrier where Great Western Road crosses the R.R. [railroad] to have her pass examined by the Jap sentry. He made her dismount and kept her waiting for some time during which time her horse dropped a lot of dung. Returning, the sentry ordered her to clean up the place, refused to lend her a brush and dustpan, and made her remove the filth with her hands.’4
Even senior German officials were treated by the Japanese with a discourteousness verging on hostility. In October 1941, for example, SS Colonel Meisinger decided to go to Tokyo but found it almost impossible to obtain a passage on a Japanese steamer. When he finally got hold of one, the Japanese refused to provide a ticket for his wife, and when at length he procured that, they then made difficulties about furnishing railway tickets from Nagasaki to Tokyo. Meisinger was said to be ‘furious over this treatment by the ally of Germany’.5
The Japanese were extremely interested in finding out everything they could about their ally’s secret activities in Shanghai and even interrogated British Municipal Police detectives on the subject.6 So concerned were the Japanese that they made a special search for a suitable detective who would specialize in the delicate matter of German affairs. They had great difficulty in finding a suitable candidate, since they did not wish to appoint either a German or a Jewish refugee. Eventually a White Russian named Brauns, a warder in the Ward Road prison, was offered the job. He said he would accept it only if the British head jailer, Hogg, approved his secondment. When told the purpose of the proposed transfer, Hogg ‘unhesitatingly forwarded the recommendation’.7
According to a post-war American intelligence report, Brauns’s
investigations re German Secret Service, nazi activities, [and] attempts on the part of Germans to conduct a pro-Vlasov campaign among the Russian emigrants* provoked suspicions of [the] German secret service and at one time put the officer in [a] difficult position as [the] Germans used every means to undermine D[etective] S[ub-] I[nspector] Brauns in the eyes of [the] Japanese.8
While the Japanese spied on the Germans, the Germans spied on the Japanese. Meisinger’s network of agents in Shanghai was headed by Dr Paul Rudolf Klare who had worked for the Gestapo under Meisinger in Berlin. Klare was described in a post-war US intelligence report as ‘one of the most brilliant Germans in the Far East’. In 1940 he had been sent to Manchuria to report for the DNB news agency; he probably worked there as an intelligence agent on the side. The following year he was transferred to Shanghai where he lived at the Park Hotel and was employed simultaneously by Puttkamer’s propaganda office and the SS. Klare’s team provided Meisinger with reports on such subjects as Japanese troop dispositions, Nanking (puppet) government politics, ‘anything on the Russians’, German merchants trading with Chungking and the Free French underground.9
Klare organized a number of agents’ rings in Shanghai. One was headed by Frederick Wiehl. Born to German parents at Winfield, New York in 1902, Wiehl held both German and American citizenship. He had qualified in the USA as a lawyer and for a time had practised law from an office at 55 Myrtle Avenue, Ridgewood, Long Island. In 1940 he received orders from the German government to prepare for work as a spy and propagandist. In June 1941 he moved to Mexico City where the German legation issued him with a German passport in the name of ‘Captain Friedrich Awald’. Armed with this new identity, as well as a spare Peruvian passport for emergencies, he travelled by ship to Japan.
Aboard the same ship was another German agent, Herbert Haupt. He was one of eight German saboteurs who later landed from a German submarine on the coast of the United States, were arrested and executed. Haupt suspected that Wiehl was an American spy and at one point tried unsuccessfully to throw him overboard. When he reached Japan, Wiehl was ordered to go to Shanghai, from where he would be sent to Germany on a blockade runner. He arrived in Shanghai in October 1941 and stayed at the Metropole Hotel, but instead of being returned to Germany was retained for work as a propagandist on the German radio station XGRS. His speciality was a weekly broadcast supposedly representing the point of view of the American working-man.
Acting as a kind of under-boss for the Shanghai Gestapo, Wiehl employed a number of sub-agents in Shanghai. Among these was Roland Grutli, also known as ‘Guthrie’ and ‘Kerwyn’. Grutli was about 40, stocky, with blond-brown hair. In November 1941, according to a British intelligence report, Grutli had been working for the Germans in Japan. While lodging at a hotel in Yokohama, he had engaged British and American visitors in conversation, hoping to ‘encourage them by his garrulousness to let drop information valuable to Germany’. Grutli, the report continued, became ‘involved in a brawl in the bar of the New Grand Hotel in Yokohama with a Finn who was audibly insulting the Nazis. Grutly [sic], who is powerfully built and was drunk, beat up the Finn and was later ordered by the German Embassy not only to apologise but to remove his residence from the hotel.’10 Wiehl later wrote of him:
Roland came down from Tokyo where he had just broken the jaw of the Danish Consul General … His orders were to cover the Japanese situation, [an] assignment for which I had no better man. Roland collected information covering all phases of the Japanese position in Shanghai. During this work he often had fights with Japanese whom he used to entertain to excess in order to obtain information. Roland also operated a small prostitution house financed by the German Government for the benefit of Japanese who were interested in White Russian girls. He later became very involved in his work and there were several complications. I was frequently requested to appear before the 2nd Chief Police Commissioner whenever a Japanese was found dead and the suspicion arose that Roland did the killing. Their questions were to find out if I ordered the killings of the Japanese. At that time I was on very friendly terms with the Police Commissioner and was supplied with as many pistols as I wanted for my men …
On the last assignment, Roland got himself into a tight position between the Japanese and the Russians, over a subject being investigated. Roland killed four Japanese on that night and hid in my room until late the next evening when he was planning to leave for Nanking for a rest. However, he was drinking heavy, too heavy, and was last seen being taken from a bar in a totally drunken condition, by two Russians known to have been working for the Japanese. That night he was killed.11
Grutli’s body was found the next morning in an alley in the French Concession. The exact identities of his killers remained in doubt. Wiehl implied that the Japanese were responsible, but another version, unearthed by American investigators after the war, had it that he was killed by a Gestapo agent on orders from Meisinger and Kahner. Meisinger’s estranged wife lent support to that theory by claiming that she had overheard a conversation in which Meisinger indicated that ‘Roland’ was in disfavour; she concluded that Meisinger had ordered his elimination.12
Employment by the Shanghai Gestapo was plainly a far from risk-free undertaking, as is illustrated by the career of another sub-agent recalled by Wiehl in a post-war deposition:
Rudolf Mamlock, age about thirty, short, a former reporter on the Paris newspaper, Soir. He was able to speak French, German, English, Chinese, and Japanese. His assignments were mostly anti-Russian. His work, generally considered, was to contact the Russians on the basis of ‘double-crossing’ me. [Wiehl seems to mean that Mamlock was to act as a double agent in the German interest] …
He was able to get official documents from the Japanese authorities’ offices and Russian offices. He dressed very flashy and created quite a little jealousy among his former pals. Mamlock came to me straight from the Ward Road Jail without shoes or a decent suit. Soon he had several suits and hats, and in fact, I myself looked second-class in appearance [compared] to him. His work was very satisfactory. Finally the Japanese arrested him while he was working on the Liebig case, Mrs Liebig being a Japanese agent. He was placed in the Bridge House and after eight months died of dysentery and beri-beri. Just a few days before dying, the Japanese released him and placed him in a small room in Hongkew where no one knew they had sent him. Evidently this was done to avoid increasing the toll of deaths in the Bridge House.13
Meisinger fell out not only with the diplomats but also with his own subordinates. In January 1943 he transferred Kahner from Shanghai to Tokyo. Kahner’s replacement in Shanghai was SS Hauptsturmführer Franz Huber. Huber was a professional Gestapo officer who had worked as a German agent in Hong Kong, Indo-China, Bangkok and Tokyo. His office was in the sub-station (Dienststelle) of the German embassy at 2 Peking Road. Huber was jealous of his status and argued with Meisinger as to whether he had the right to submit reports direct to Berlin without going through Meisinger. The relative standing of the three top Gestapo officers in the Far East in March 1942 is indicated by their salaries: Meisinger received RM4,760 a month, Huber RM1,830 and Kahner RM1,570.14 Perhaps reflecting Huber’s increasingly autonomous role later, his monthly allotment had risen to about RM5,000 by the end of the war.15
Although Meisinger’s brief was limited to internal German security in China and Japan, he occasionally sought to prove his usefulness by providing items of external intelligence. Some of this was of questionable value. In August 1943, for example, he reported that wall placards had appeared in a number of Soviet Far Eastern cities, including Vladivostok, with caricatures of Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt as well as handwritten abuse.16 This message elicited a rebuke from Ribbentrop, who declared such reports extremely improbable and instructed the German ambassador in Japan in future to discuss Meisinger’s reports with him prior to dispatch, since the ambassador, by his signature, took some responsibility for the contents of the telegrams he dispatched.17
Meisinger and his men in fact achieved very little in Shanghai. Thuggery was no substitute for serious intelligence warfare. Failing miserably to secure much useful information about Germany’s enemies or even her allies, the Gestapo boss turned his attention to his own countrymen. Local Germans were terrorized and a few were forcibly shipped back to the fatherland on blockade runners, put in uniform and dispatched on what generally turned out to be one-way trips to the Russian front. Meisinger scored a few minor successes in his specialized field of exposing homosexuals, securing the dismissal of a handful of German officials on that account. He also uncovered some instances of embezzlement. But his one major victory was over his main rival in the German intelligence field in the Far East, the local Abwehr chief, Louis Siefken.
In late June 1941 Siefken was joined in Shanghai by another Abwehr officer, Major Lothar Eisentraeger. He had travelled from Germany over the Trans-Siberian Railway and reached the Chinese border post eight hours before the German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June, thus narrowly avoiding capture and internment. Eisentraeger was slim, muscular, balding and dissipated-looking, with a reputation as a ladies’ man. He could claim some knowledge of the region, having worked for a German firm in Manchuria as far back as 1926. His initial assignment in China ostensibly had a commercial purpose. He was to close a tungsten contract with the Chungking government and arrange for the purchase of other important war materials such as zinc and rubber. It was a sign of the flexible nature of diplomatic alignments in China that the Germans could still pursue such commercial deals with the Chiang Kai-shek régime. But the official German recognition of Wang Ching-wei’s Nanking government on 1 July 1941 put a stop to commercial relations between Chungking and Berlin and thus prevented Eisentraeger from carrying out that part of his mission.
The proposed commercial transactions were in any case a cover for other duties. Eisentraeger was an agent of the Abwehr economic intelligence branch and had been sent to Shanghai to set up a reporting station there. Disputes over the demarcation of their respective functions soon broke out between Siefken and Eisentraeger. Siefken could not but resent the order from Berlin that the new arrival was to have his own sources of information and was not to be under Siefken’s control. Eisentraeger, for his part, objected to having to pass all his telegrams to Berlin through Siefken, who could add his own comments although he could not alter them. Eisentraeger’s dependence on Siefken for funding was, no doubt, another source of friction. In settling accounts and eventually superseding Siefken, Eisentraeger found an ally in Meisinger with whom he established close relations. Although Eisentraeger’s initial orders had been confined to the garnering of economic intelligence, he received an order in October 1941 from the head of the Abwehr, Admiral Canaris, to assume control of the entire Abwehr operation in the Far East. Armed with this authority, he moved to destroy his rival.
Siefken’s position was weakened by continuing quarrels between his office and the German diplomatic staff in Shanghai. In July 1942 the diplomats won a round when they obtained approval from Berlin for an instruction to be issued to Siefken that henceforth all his telegrams must be laid before them in plain text for encoding. But Siefken refused to comply and instead dispatched his messages in his own codes direct to Germany from transmitters in the Italian embassy buildings in Shanghai and Peking. He proposed to set up a network of transmitting stations in Nanking, Canton, Saigon, Bangkok and Hsingking (Manchuria), all of them to be kept secret from the Japanese. Siefken told the German ambassador, Heinrich Stahmer, that there was no question of his submitting his telegrams openly to the German embassy or the consulate-general. For his part Stahmer complained that the volume of Siefken’s transmissions from the embassy transmitter had led to its discovery by the Japanese, with the result that transmissions had been systematically disturbed. Stahmer was now obliged to seek Japanese approval for such transmissions from the German diplomatic transmitters in Shanghai and Peking; he therefore urged that Siefken’s proposed network be disclosed to the Japanese. Siefken refused, insisting that his system could remain undetected.18 Siefken from then on sent most of his messages from the transmitter of the Italian naval radio station in Peking, which was powerful enough to enable him to communicate direct with Berlin. He eventually moved his headquarters to Peking, leaving only a skeleton team in Shanghai. But his departure left the field open for his enemies to intrigue against him.
When Eisentraeger uncovered suspicious-looking relations between the Siefken bureau and the Japanese, he thought he had found Siefken’s Achilles’ heel. The Abwehr office routinely supplied the Japanese naval intelligence office with reports on Allied ship movements in the south-west Pacific area.19 Siefken’s main contact with the occupying power had been Commander Otani Inaho, who had served since August 1941 as assistant naval attaché and head of the foreign affairs section of the Japanese navy office in Shanghai (and in that capacity had been the patron and employer of ‘Captain’ Pick). Eisentraeger claimed to have discovered ‘that the friendship [between Siefken and] Otani had a commercial basis’ and that the two men had been engaged in shady private financial transactions.20 Exploiting this allegation against Siefken, Eisentraeger achieved a dramatic coup.
In September 1942 Siefken fell ill with typhoid fever, followed by an eye infection, and underwent treatment in a Peking hospital. Meanwhile he was accused of homosexuality; no doubt Meisinger’s expertise in this area of criminal investigation proved useful here. Siefken, who enjoyed the support of German naval officers in the Far East, denied the accusation but the charge stuck and was the proximate cause of his downfall. On a trip to Tokyo in late 1942, Eisentraeger was able to persuade the local German naval authorities to recall Siefken. Siefken was so upset at being bundled aside that he destroyed all the records maintained by his office – a serious setback for the German intelligence effort in the region. In November 1942 he was removed from any active role in intelligence work and ordered to return to Germany on a blockade runner. Pleading ill health, he remained in China until the end of the war. The Siefken bureau was thereupon disbanded and entirely replaced by Eisentraeger who took the cover name of ‘Ludwig Ehrhardt’ (as we shall now call him). His organization was henceforth known as the Ehrhardt Bureau and was assigned a budget of about RM25,000 per month.
By contrast with Siefken, a quiet character, his successor was a gregarious loudmouth. According to a US intelligence report, Ehrhardt ‘tried hard to look and act like a Prussian officer, but it is also said that he does not quite succeed in this’. He was ‘arrogant and jealous of all possible rivals to his authority’.21 Ehrhardt’s secretary, Gerda Kocher, in post-war interrogation by US counter-intelligence officers, painted a picture of her boss as a fun-loving playboy:
He is a jolly fellow and he likes a good drink, good food and to enjoy life. His house was open to everybody who wanted to have a drink and was willing to keep him company. He hated to be alone and therefore he was almost always out or had somebody at his place. He [was] very talkative, especially when he had drunk one too many. He invited almost the whole of the German community. During the first two years in Shanghai he went very often to the night club Hungaria in Yu Yuen Road. He urged me to come with him. I went there twice (in 1941), but I disliked the place.22
Miss Kocher added that Ehrhardt was a babbler, boaster and spendthrift. She expressed wonder ‘how such a man could be appointed to this job’.23
In post-war depositions to American investigators, Ehrhardt specified the main tasks of his bureau as espionage against the Soviet Union, observation of Japanese activities and gathering information about raw materials in the Far East. Omitting any mention of the western Allies was probably deliberate. In fact, his assignment included gathering information on American and British armed forces in China and the Far East in general.24
The Ehrhardt Bureau succeeded in acquiring a significant volume of data concerning the Soviet Far East, dealing with such matters as food supply, transportation, manpower, raw materials, river and ocean navigation, harbours and political developments. Ehrhardt later boasted that these reports though always of local character and sometimes even very narrow in scope, were nevertheless very accurate in detail’.25 The bureau also kept an eye on Soviet activities in Shanghai, employing for the purpose a German-Russian agent, V. Heyking. Ehrhardt at first found his reports quite useful, but later considered that they had deteriorated in value. As a result, Heyking was dismissed and pensioned off with German citizenship papers.26
Ehrhardt’s deposition of Siefken had earned him the hostility of Siefken’s alleged Japanese business partner: ‘Otani was very embittered against me for this disruption of his dirty dealings … and he now pursued me with his hatred. As a result I never again succeeded in establishing any kind of contact with the Japanese navy, not even through Tokyo.’27 To his consternation, Ehrhardt made the additional discovery that his predecessor’s connection with the Japanese navy had damned the Abwehr for ever in the eyes of the Japanese army: ‘At that time I had not yet realized that the internal rivalry between the Japanese Army and Navy in Shanghai virtually bordered on enmity.’28
Only after considerable efforts was Ehrhardt able, through a contact in Berlin, to establish relations with the Japanese army chiefs in Shanghai. To these he complained that he was being ‘shadowed by the police and, since my break with Otani, also by the Japanese Navy, and was being considered a spy’. The Japanese army chiefs were unable to do much to help, though they gave him an introduction to the General Staff in Tokyo. Eventually, Ehrhardt recalled, he finally received ‘some kind of work permit’. A Japanese officer was appointed as a liaison between the Ehrhardt Bureau and the Japanese army. Ehrhardt appreciated his few Japanese contacts ‘as decent and honourable people’, though he lamented the continued hostility of the navy and the Japanese Gendarmerie which both considered his bureau ‘a nuisance and a dangerous foreign element and did not miss any opportunity to warn the army and cause us difficulties whenever they could’.29
With the help of the Japanese army, Ehrhardt established a cryptanalytical branch which sought to decode Allied radio transmissions. Listening stations in Canton and Peking were operational by early 1943. Each employed 30–40 personnel, including wireless experts (mainly ships’ radio men) and cipher specialists. Eventually they were able to hear up to 2,000 transmissions each day. Ehrhardt was astounded by the abundance of secret radio traffic intercepted by these stations. Within a few weeks the Germans had identified 80–90 British, American and Russian transmitting stations, often broadcasting en clair even though they were putting out secret data. Many coded messages were inadequately ciphered and Ehrhardt’s specialists, headed by Captain Otto Habenicht, were easily able to decode them.
Habenicht’s team included a Danish turncoat, Arthur Wedel, a former merchant marine wireless operator with 20 years of experience. He found the German set-up in Shanghai ‘ridiculously inefficient’. Wedel’s contemptuous dismissal of the German radio effort in Shanghai concluded: ‘It was not necessary to sabotage, the Germans did it themselves.’ He added apologetically: ‘I did my part in passive resistance. The harm I did was to collect my salary every month.’30
Another turncoat employed by Ehrhardt was T. M. Thyssen, a Dutchman who, like Wedel, was a marine wireless operator. Thyssen had deserted his ship in June 1941 and offered the Germans secret Dutch naval codes. He was later assigned to work for Ehrhardt’s organization as a radio operator, but after a time the German came to suspect him of communicating with enemy intelligence and he was sidelined.31
The historian of German Abwehr operations in the Far East, Oscar Reile, reports that Habenicht succeeded in breaking the coastal news code of the American navy. This code was never changed and was used by the Americans for all amphibious operations, so Ehrhardt was able to have a rich insight into US naval operations. Valuable information on Soviet military supply movements and on Allied air activity was obtained, as well as messages passing between the Chinese, British and American military units. Ehrhardt passed on the information to the Japanese, although he got the impression that the Japanese did not make full use of it.32 This picture of cryptanalytical success, however, is probably exaggerated. In post-war interrogation, Habenicht stated that ‘very soon after the outbreak of the war with the USA, the easy code-system was abolished, other systems were used and I never again succeeded in translating any messages until the German surrender when my work stopped automatically’.33
In addition to the radio operators, Ehrardt engaged agents in Canton, Peking, Harbin and elsewhere. His highest-paid Shanghai agent was Wolf Schenke, officially a correspondent for the Völkischer Beobachter. Another Shanghai agent, Hans Mosberg, was of Jewish origin but treated as an ‘honorary Aryan’ by the Nazis because of his military service in the First World War (he had been wounded eight times). Ehrhardt was unable, however, to establish the countrywide network of agents that would have been required for him to provide Berlin with a comprehensive picture of the war in China.
The replacement of Siefken by Ehrhardt did not improve relations between German diplomats and the Abwehr Bureau. ‘There existed considerable tension in the relationship,’ Ehrhardt later recalled, ‘as the former considered our activities as an uncontrollable and inconvenient competition.’34 As in the cases of Meisinger and Siefken, much of the acrimony arose over the question of communications. Ehrhardt sent most of his messages home through the German embassy’s ‘postal radio’, but he used special army codes not available to diplomatic personnel, with the result that they were unable to read his messages. Eventually Ehrhardt, like his predecessor, arranged to use the Italian radio transmitter in Peking.
One of the main objects of Ehrhardt’s mission was to provide Berlin with reports on the war-waging potential of the Japanese. ‘This was the most difficult part of my task,’ Ehrhardt later recalled, ‘which I had to attend to essentially personally’ Ehrhardt confessed that the quality of intelligence acquired concerning Japan was poor; the effort ‘could not be pursued energetically without endangering the whole scope of our activities’ – reasoning with which Berlin finally concurred.35
While spying on his ally, Ehrhardt was also supposed to exchange intelligence information with them. Mosberg prepared weekly reports on his behalf for submission to the Japanese. Ehrhardt recalled that Japanese dissatisfaction with what they received was registered in the quality of what they gave in return: ‘obsolete military news about Soviet Russia which were generally already known in Berlin’ and other low-grade information. Ehrhardt had succeeded in penetrating the Soviet diplomatic establishment in Shanghai by securing the services of a courier at the Russian consulate-general. This man supplied Ehrhardt with information about internal politics at the Soviet consulate as well as observations on developments in the Soviet Union after his frequent trips there.36 This valuable information was not, however, passed on to Germany’s Far Eastern ally.
In 1943 the Japanese discovered what they thought was a reprise of the Sorge affair in the shape of another suspected German-Soviet double agent. Dr Ivar Lissner was a German ‘half-Jew’ who had worked in Germany for the Nazis, concealing his ‘non-Aryan’ background. After his racial origin was discovered he was allowed to move to China with his family and some of his property. He established himself in Shanghai and later moved to Harbin, ostensibly as a news correspondent for the Völkischer Beobachter, in fact as an informant for the Abwehr. He established a highly effective intelligence network in Manchuria and wrote a number of well-received reports on Japanese political activity in the area. Among his achievements was the penetration of the Soviet consulate in Harbin. So highly was he regarded that he was awarded the Kriegs Verdienst Kreuz, 1st class, and, according to Meisinger, was made a Nazi party member, notwithstanding his ‘non-Aryan’ blood.
Meisinger, who was anxious to avoid any repetition of the Sorge affair, had become increasingly suspicious of Lissner and launched a rigorous investigation of his activities. Meisinger’s hostility was given an added edge by reports that Lissner was claiming to be Gestapo chief in Manchukuo, a usurpation of Meisinger’s own purported authority over the whole of the Far East. According to Meisinger’s account (in a post-war interrogation), the Japanese accused Lissner of collecting intelligence through agents in Japan and passing data on to the Russians. Meisinger reported the Japanese suspicions to Berlin and added his own denunciation of Lissner. The matter was brought to the personal attention of the Führer, who particularly resented the claim that he had issued a decree certifying that Lissner was of Aryan stock. Hitler said he had never heard of the man, that he should be recalled immediately, and that ‘the best thing would be to shoot such people straight away’.37 The Abwehr chief, Admiral Canaris, defended Lissner and insisted that he was not a Soviet agent, that his reports were extremely valuable and that he should be allowed to continue his intelligence-gathering in Manchukuo. Lissner was nevertheless arrested by the Japanese on 5 June 1943 and accused of espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union. The Germans ultimately disavowed him and he disappeared. He re-emerged a few years later as a journalist in West Germany.38
Later in the war the local Russians continued to play a major role in the Shanghai security apparatus. In May 1942 the Japanese reorganized the Municipal Police Special Branch and amalgamated most of its sections to form a new Foreign Affairs Section, headed by Superintendent H. Yamaguchi. This consisted of about eight senior Japanese, 20 foreign detectives, mainly Russians, and a larger number of subordinate Chinese staff. The removal of most of the British police officers in the course of 1942 gave the Russians, many of whom felt that their promotion to senior positions had been blocked by the British, an opportunity to move up in the service. Chief Inspector B. Maklaevsky, the first Russian to attain that rank, told the Shanghai Times in January 1943: ‘We have finally been given a chance to improve ourselves, as the Japanese authorities have shown their appreciation of the work of the Russians in the S.M.P’.39 Maklaevsky’s press statement was criticized by other Russian officers as tactless and it sharply antagonized his remaining British colleagues, but it undoubtedly expressed a commonly held view among Russian members of the force.
Although the senior Russian officers in the Foreign Affairs Section were relatively well treated by the Japanese, most held back from wholehearted collaboration with the occupiers. A typical and influential case was that of Chief Detective Inspector Prokofiev, whose conduct was analyzed in an American intelligence report:
One of the oldest Special Branch detectives. A man of exceptional integrity and scrupulously honest, he commanded and commands respect of everyone who had an opportunity to serve with him. Throughout his service he was connected with Russian emigrant affairs. Loathing any kind of hypocrisy, he used every ounce of his influence in [the] Russian community to prevent cooperation with Japs and Germans. He is one of those Russians who helped General Gleboff, the late chairman of [the] Russian Emigrants’ Committee, to steer [the] local Russian community clear of various pitfalls prepared by the Japs and their sympathizers. An authority in his field of work, he was tolerated by the Japs in spite of the fact that on many occasions he flatly refused to be used for such purposes with which he could not honestly agree.40
Some allowance should perhaps be made for hyperbole in this unsigned report which was written partly with the object of rebutting accusations of collaboration directed against foreign police officers, but at least in Prokofiev’s case the conclusion seems fair.
Other senior Russian detectives earned less brilliant reputations. Inspector Kochetoff, a friend and nominee of Chief Inspector Maklaevsky, ‘enjoyed the reputation of a lazy officer’. Inspector Tcheremshansky was accorded an even less flattering report:
The case of this officer is entirely a special one. It is known that his father died in a mental home. In [an] early stage of the Russian revolution he witnessed a brutal murder of [his] brother by the communists and this apparently upset him mentally. Not being an insane person in the usual meaning of the word, nevertheless he shows to an impartial observer many signs of unbalanced psychology. The mainspring of his activities and outlook is unlimited and decisive hate [of] communists. Everything that appears to his unbalanced mind as related to communism is regarded by him with the same hatred. Alone from the whole body of foreign detectives he took part in some public activities with [a] political and pro-Japanese tint … He lacked everything that a detective should possess in the way of mental equipment. He was neither, astute nor discriminate [sic] in dealings with people. His vivid [imagination] prevented him from forming a true picture of any case. His foreign colleagues saw to it that his reports (almost only re communist activities) were taken by the Japs with a large grain of salt. That the grain was really a large one could be seen from the fact that in spite of his many years of experience as a Special Branch detective he was held in little respect by the Jap[s].41
In general, the Russian police officers seem to have aimed at a quiet life under the occupation, not exerting themselves too strongly in any particular direction for fear of making enemies.
In spite of – or perhaps because of – the prominent Russian role in the Municipal Police, Russian criminals in Shanghai enjoyed a field day during the war and, in the absence of most of the pre-war Chinese crime syndicates, came to dominate the Shanghai underworld. They operated at several levels. Some took advantage of wartime conditions to perpetrate minor frauds. Others constructed large-scale rackets. None prospered more than ‘Captain’ Eugene Pick, who acquired several new and colourful recruits to his gang.
One of Pick’s closest associates at this period was Morris Gershkovitch who also went by the alias Boris Gregorovich Mejoff. A British citizen, he was born in Singapore in 1913 to Russian émigré parents.*42 Investigations by US intelligence yielded an informant’s statement to the effect that ‘Subject’s father was a British-Chinese mestizo and his mother was a Russian Jewess. Subject’s father was believed to be the owner of a house of prostitution in Swatow, China, while Subject’s mother, Berta, was “madam” of that house.’ Another informant stated that ‘Subject’s mother was a Russian prostitute known as “Great Berta”’.43 But these may be calumnies: according to another account, his father was a barber. His father died before he was born and his mother later became a Chinese citizen. Gershkovitch was educated at British schools in Hong Kong and Singapore. He later averred that he had ‘changed my religion when [he] was in Protestant School in Singapore’.44
Gershkovitch was a talented linguist: besides English and Russian, he spoke Malay and Javanese as well as seven dialects of Chinese. In the 1930s he worked as a reporter for English papers in Singapore and Hong Kong. He moved to Shanghai in August 1939. At first he worked as a sports reporter for the Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury but resigned after a short time and in 1940 enlisted in the settlement police. There he produced influential reports on, among other matters, Jewish refugee affairs. His colleagues in the Foreign Affairs Section, however, considered him ‘a doubtful and shady character’ and took care to avoid him.45 In May 1942 he was summoned by Superintendent Yamaguchi, and told that he had been promoted and assigned to investigate the black market which, as Gershkovitch recalled in a post-war deposition, ‘was rampant in Shanghai at the time’.46
Gershkovitch’s first contact with Pick was a telephone call in August 1942 in which Pick said he wanted to meet him. At their first encounter Pick accused him of being a Soviet agent and threatened him with disclosure. If Gershkovitch wanted to stay out of trouble he would have to provide Pick with reports on Russian activities in Shanghai. Gershkovitch asked his superior, Yamaguchi, for guidance and was told to do nothing. But shortly afterwards Yamaguchi changed his mind: he told Gershkovitch that his work was unsatisfactory and ordered him to collect information on movements of opinion among foreigners in Shanghai. Gershkovitch gathered compromising information on foreign nationals from the police files which he passed on to Pick in return for cash. Pick used data from such sources to destroy rival racketeering gangs. Those exposed were imprisoned or executed. On one occasion Pick boasted to the German agent Frederick Wiehl of ‘eighteen pieces finished’.47
At the time of the mass internment of British citizens in the spring of 1943, Gershkovitch managed to remain free. He sought to be treated as a White Russian rather than a British citizen; in the police statement he submitted that April he declared: ‘My present passport is that of white Russian No. 14957 issued by the Russian Emigrants Committee on November 23, 1943 [sic].’48 A Municipal Police report in January 1945 indicated that his record in the service had been ‘exemplary’ – but added:
several complaints were received for indebtedness. These complaints were made by various persons including moneylenders. Due to his nationality, termination of services with the Police Force occurred in [sic] December 31st, 1943. He then became associated with persons suspected of being on intelligence service, connected with one person called Pick-Hovans.49
Pick does not, however, appear to have paid him much. Following his dismissal, Gershkovitch complained that he was without any means of support and applied to the Swiss consulate ‘in order to get into a concentration camp’. The application was rejected. In May 1944 he was summoned by the Japanese Gendarmerie to the Bridge House and asked to explain why, as a foreign national, he was not interned. His answers seem to have been satisfactory for he was soon released and resumed work for Pick.
Another member of Pick’s gang was a fellow-Russian, Morris Levitsky, who had collaborated with him in earlier criminal enterprises as far back as 1931. Levitsky worked for the Gestapo in Shanghai, serving as a member of the ring headed by Frederick Wiehl. He secured that job thanks to a recommendation from Pick. Wiehl’s account of the relationship, given to American investigators after war, was not a little confused:
Morris Levitsky was sent to me by Hovans [Pick]. Hovans said he could [not] employ him because of personal reasons. Levitsky was in jail with Hovans over the Russo-Asiatic Bank checks forgery case. For that reason and in view of the fact that he was now a big shot with the Japanese Navy Foreign Section, Hovans couldn’t see his way clear to give Levitsky a job. I took Levitsky on knowing that he would betray me at once to Hovans [if it were] worth while, but I knew I could, by doing this favour to Hovans, get any German information of value from him if he happened to come into it before I did. With these lines out, Levitsky was found to be already in the employ of the Soviet information service. I found that Levitsky was pretty down on the Japanese. I gave him anti-Japanese assignments and placed Mamlock to watch him. Every morning he reported to Hovans. However, when I went to see Hovans he acted as though he had not seen Levitsky. From this I took it that Hovans was not objecting to what I was doing with Levitsky (Hovans’ job being to stop just such work). [Wiehl presumably meant that Pick was supposed to stop anti-Japanese espionage activity, not connive at it.] I treated Levitsky very nicely. When he did a very good job, I gave him a pair of shoes, an overcoat, hat, suit, shirts. Pretty soon I had him dressed up in good style and he then turned on Hovans and gave me the whole inside story on Hovans.50
Wiehl, it will be recalled, took great pride in the smart turn-out of his agents.
The so-called ‘pretty boy’ and thug-in-chief of the Pick gang was one of the best-known sporting figures in wartime Shanghai. Paul Lojnikoff, who was in his late 20s, had formerly served in the Shanghai Russian regiment but he acquired local celebrity as professional lightweight boxing champion of the Far East. He won the title in 1942 by knocking out ‘Knocker Nakano’. After that he toured Japan and beat off a succession of challengers there. On his return to Shanghai, however, he was himself knocked out in an engagement at the Burlington Hotel with ‘Battling Fester’. Lojnikoff recovered his crown in a return bout at the Canidrome, but the contest gave rise to controversy as both contenders were overweight. In April 1943 Lojnikoff, apparently still too heavy for the lightweight title, challenged ‘Kid Teddy’, a Polish ex-sailor, for the welterweight championship. Lojnikoff won the fight in the eighth round when his opponent’s doctor threw in the towel. But the match was tainted by untoward publicity. The Shanghai Times reported:
More than ever before the need of a Boxing Commission was felt in Shanghai as there seemed to be every indication that the fight between Kid Teddy, the Welterweight Champion of China, and Paul Lojnikoff, pretender to the Lightweight Crown, at the Auditorium last night was not on the level. Paul Lojnikoff won the fight on a T.K.O. Why? No one in the Auditorium could answer.
The paper added that more than half a million dollars had been placed on Lojnikoff, ‘this fact tending to strengthen the belief that the fight was fixed’.51 A subsequent medical examination by three doctors determined that ‘Kid Teddy’ had entered the ring with a shoulder already injured. This did not deter Lojnikoff’s supporters from backing him in his next fight, against Joe Clara, a Filipino lightweight. In the event, illness prevented Lojnikoff from appearing and his place was taken by his brother Peter who was defeated on a technical knockout in the sixth round. Paul made a comeback in May 1943 when he won on points over ‘Young George’ in what the Shanghai Times described as ‘a less than thrilling fight’ at the Palastro Galeazzo Ciano (the Italian club named after Mussolini’s son-in-law, the former Italian consul-general in Shanghai, who was now serving as foreign minister).
Paul Lojnikoff also had political interests. He was said to have worked as an informer for the Japanese since as early as 1937.52 He was certainly doing so by mid-1941, when he was employed by the Chung Wo Industrial Company, a front organization or sub-station of the Japanese Gendarmerie. His primary intelligence connection, however, was with the Naval Intelligence Bureau, headed by Commander Otani; and his controller there was Eugene Pick, who used him as his ‘muscle-man’.53 Lojnikoff also acted as a purchasing agent for the Japanese, dealing in scrap iron, copper and industrial diamonds. His method of operation, as described in a post-war American intelligence report, differed somewhat from standard business practice:
He is known to have advertised widely that the Japanese Military desired to purchase certain commodities and these commodities could be sold through him. Individuals who desired to sell the previously mentioned articles contact[ed] Subject who in turn referred them to the proper Japanese authorities. The Japanese requested the individuals to submit lists of the items available, after which they were told to return in a few days for final negotiations. Upon their return these individuals were told that the items offered for sale by them were no longer needed by the Japanese. After this the items listed were usually confiscated and they themselves were often arrested. Subject received bonuses for transactions conducted in this manner.54
Lojnikoff, far from making any secret of these Japanese connections, boasted of them – though he insisted that they were merely of a ‘commercial character’.
Exactly what he meant by that became public knowledge in January 1943 when he, his brother Peter and two others, were arrested in a joint sweep by the French Concession police and the Japanese Gendarmerie. They were accused of having ‘confiscated’ a fortune in diamonds from a Mrs Stenewers, Peter Lojnikoff’s mother-in-law, by posing as Gendarmerie agents. In the ensuing trial the two brothers were acquitted on all charges – except for a $400 fine imposed on Paul for helping to dispose of the jewels. Since he lived in some style in a luxury suite at the Cathay Hotel, he had no difficulty paying the fine. In August that year Paul acquired a further source of income when he married Baroness Ksenia Girard de Soucanton, an eccentric and well-off American socialite.
With the assistance of these and other associates, Pick broadened his realm of activity. While maintaining his criminal empire, his intelligence connections and his interest in the stage, he embarked on a propaganda venture. In April 1943 he was involved with a group of fellow-Russians in establishing a monthly magazine entitled Nakanune (‘On the Eve’). The journal’s objects were described in an application for police registration as ‘propaganda of the ideas of the New Order of Great Eastern Asia amongst [the] Russian emigrants’ colony’. Among Pick’s colleagues in this enterprise was a motley crew of pro-Japanese publicists headed by B.F. Ignatenko, a Harbin-born journalist who was an employee of the Japanese Gendarmerie. Ignatenko had been a member since 1934 of the Russian Fascist Union, where he was ‘head of the agitation branch’. He secured approval for the projected publication from the French police and the Japanese Navy Press Bureau. He also applied to the Municipal Police to register the new journal. Inspector Prokofiev later noted that the magazine had secured the approval of the Russian Emigrants’ Committee but only on condition that it refrain from personal attacks and also from ‘any form of pressure on members of the Russian community in connection with the canvassing for subscriptions and advertisements or in any other manner’. This warning had been necessitated, Prokofiev continued, by virtue of the fact that the main promoters of the publication ‘are known in the community on account of their past and/or present connections with certain organs of the Japanese Intelligence Service. Apparently, it was considered that the possibility was not unlikely of an undue advantage being taken of this fact by the said persons or their sub-agents in order to boost their enterprise.’
Before the magazine made its first appearance, a split took place between Pick and Ignatenko, as a result of which Pick issued a public announcement in the Russian press (signed E. Hovans) that he had ‘nothing whatever to do with the proposed publication’. Publication of the first issue of the magazine was held up in May 1943, pending approval by the Municipal Police Censorship Office. Meanwhile its contents were analyzed by Inspector Prokofiev. He noted that its main thrust was anti-communist. The paper also contained ‘a few rather rude outbursts of a personal character’ directed against local Russian newspapermen. Prokofiev commented:
A number of names are quoted rather unnecessarily in order to illustrate the predominance of Jews amongst the membership of the local Soviet Citizens’ Club. The susceptibility of members of the local German community may be hurt by a few expressions contained in the section devoted to Soviet humour. Otherwise, from the purely police viewpoint, there seems to be nothing objectionable in the declared policy of the magazine, nor in the contents of its issue under review.
Superintendent Yamaguchi commented that ‘the founders are dubious figures’, though he decided to permit publication. But the Japanese ‘Chief of the Fourth Department’, to whom the dossier was submitted for a final decision, forbade the magazine’s appearance.55 Just as Pick’s support seems to have been behind the initial approval given to the publication, so his falling-out with Ignatenko was very likely the main reason for its failure to see the light of day.
Pick’s star, however, was beginning to fade. From early 1943 onwards a change in the political atmosphere began to be discernible in Russian Shanghai. As the meaning of the Soviet victory at Stalingrad sank in, the White Russians lost their happy confidence in the imminent collapse of the hated revolutionary régime. The scent of victory slowly dissipated and a new fear was born: with the USSR’s victory in the west might well come their intervention in the war in the east. The Soviet divisions in Siberia, long stationed in a defensive posture, might move to the offensive and advance south against the Japanese. For the local Russians, as for pro-Axis Shanghai in general, the prospect of a communist conquest of Shanghai slowly shifted from the realm of awful phantasmagoria to dreaded anticipation.
*Andrei Vlasov was a Soviet lieutenant-general who, after capture by the Germans, agreed to lead a ‘Russian Liberation Army’ on the side of the Nazis.
*Gershkovitch’s statements regarding his origins were inconsistent. In one of his postwar declarations he gave Singapore, in another Shantung as his birthplace. The latter claim may have been to pretend he was not a British subject – and therefore not liable for prosecution for treason.