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

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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

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could have been

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's inspiration for the character and plot of

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Footnotes

{{DEFAULTSORT:Steinhauer, Gustav Spymasters Imperial German Navy personnel of World War I World War I spies for Germany 1870s births 1930 deaths