Gustav Steinhauer was born in Berlin c. 1870. He was an officer of the Imperial German Navy who in 1901 became head of the British section of the German Admiralty's intelligence service, the
Nachrichten-Abteilung, ('N'). He had trained at the
Pinkerton Detective Agency
Pinkerton is an American private investigation and security company established around 1850 in the United States by Scottish-born American cooper Allan Pinkerton and Chicago attorney Edward Rucker as the North-Western Police Agency, which lat ...
in
Chicago
Chicago is the List of municipalities in Illinois, most populous city in the U.S. state of Illinois and in the Midwestern United States. With a population of 2,746,388, as of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, it is the List of Unite ...
and spoke fluent English with an American accent.
Steinhauer had been part of
Kaiser Wilhelm II
Wilhelm II (Friedrich Wilhelm Viktor Albert; 27 January 18594 June 1941) was the last German Emperor and King of Prussia from 1888 until his abdication in 1918, which marked the end of the German Empire as well as the Hohenzollern dynasty ...
's bodyguard at the funeral of
Queen Victoria
Victoria (Alexandrina Victoria; 24 May 1819 – 22 January 1901) was Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 20 June 1837 until Death and state funeral of Queen Victoria, her death in January 1901. Her reign of 63 year ...
in 1901. During the visit Steinhauer foiled an assassination plot by a group of Russian anarchists on the Kaiser's life, working alongside British detective and spymaster
William Melville.
Steinhauer was responsible for the creation of a network of German spies in Britain in the period before the war. Steinhauer had mostly recruited his agents through writing to German businessmen resident in the UK inviting them to work for him.
MI5
MI5 ( Military Intelligence, Section 5), officially the Security Service, is the United Kingdom's domestic counter-intelligence and security agency and is part of its intelligence machinery alongside the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), Gov ...
soon clocked onto this activity and began intercepting the correspondence between Steinhauer and his agents, between 1911 and 1914 MI5 intercepted 1,189 letters relating to such German espionage.
In late July, the week before the declaration of the
First World War
World War I or the First World War (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918), also known as the Great War, was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War I, Allies (or Entente) and the Central Powers. Fighting to ...
, Steinhauer toured Britain under the alias 'Fritsches' to make contact with elements of his agent network, although MI5 knew he was present in the country they did not have the resources to mount sufficient surveillance to apprehend him.
Vernon Kell, head of MI5, claimed to have ordered the arrest of 22 of Steinhauer's agent ring at the outset of war, leaving no significant German spies in Great Britain; but modern research has exploded this claim, which appears to have been made to promote the hasty passage of the
Aliens Restriction Act of August 1914.
Steinhauer later recalled the Kaiser's fury at the seeming obliteration of German surveillance of the British Navy screaming 'Am I surrounded by dolts? Who is responsible? Why was I not told!?'
Trivia
Historian Andrew Cook has suggested that Steinhauer's plot to blow up the
Bank of England
The Bank of England is the central bank of the United Kingdom and the model on which most modern central banks have been based. Established in 1694 to act as the Kingdom of England, English Government's banker and debt manager, and still one ...
could have been
Ian Fleming
Ian Lancaster Fleming (28 May 1908 – 12 August 1964) was a British writer, best known for his postwar ''James Bond'' series of spy novels. Fleming came from a wealthy family connected to the merchant bank Robert Fleming & Co., and his ...
's inspiration for the character and plot of
Auric Goldfinger
Auric Goldfinger is a fictional character and the main antagonist in Ian Fleming's 1959 seventh ''James Bond'' novel, '' Goldfinger'', and the 1964 film it inspired (the third in the ''James Bond'' series). His first name, Auric, is an adjective ...
.
Footnotes
{{DEFAULTSORT:Steinhauer, Gustav
Spymasters
Imperial German Navy personnel of World War I
World War I spies for Germany
1870s births
1930 deaths