DID WAR WORLD 1 HAVE A SPY NETWORK HOW TO

The Germans then asked Martha to spy for them but she refused. Martha’s dedication earned her the German Iron Cross which was presented to her by the King of Würtemburg.

DID WAR WORLD 1 HAVE A SPY NETWORK HOW TO

No-one knew how to help these poor gassed men but she worked round the clock doing whatever she could. On 22nd April 1915, both German and Allied casualties of the first gas attack flooded in to her hospital. Martha describes how she had “wandered along an endless street of smoking ruins where the way was strewn with mangled corpses whose glassy eyeballs watched me accusingly.” In spring 1915, thanks to her information, the Allies bombed the station. She was told to gather information about troop movements around Roulers station, an important railhead for the Germans. It has been estimated that Elisabeth sent over 100 female agents into France (20 were caught) and at least four times as many men.ĭuring the summer of 1914 Martha was training to be a doctor, and so after Germany invaded Belgium she was conscripted to work as a nurse at a German Military Hospital near her home in Roulers, Belgium.Ī British spy master approached Martha to be a spy to which she agreed out of a sense of loyalty to Belgium. One of her best was a florist who couldn’t read or write but was brilliant at remembering what he had seen, he had a ‘photographic memory’.

If someone dangerous approached they just lit up and puffed away!Įlisabeth didn’t care if her spies were men or women, all that mattered was their ability and found excellent spies in unlikely places. Messages were hidden in accessories such as umbrellas, in shoe heels, hollowed-out vegetables, rolled into tiny packages or enclosed in small pieces of inflammable materials stuffed inside a cigar or cigarette. Elisabeth organised a spy school to teach recruits these skills and how to develop secret codes, create invisible ink and miniature handwriting. Elisabeth was tasked with the important job of recruiting and training spies to be sent throughout France. To begin with, Germany wasn’t convinced Elisabeth could be useful but eventually the military authorities sent her to Antwerp in German-Occupied Belgium. Elisabeth Schragmüller - AKA Fraulein Doktor (1887-1940)Ĭode-named Fraulein Doktor, in August 1914, like thousands of women on all sides, Elisabeth was desperate to ‘do her bit’ for Germany’s war effort.

Did war world 1 have a spy network