Researching Carl Lody

He grew up in Nordhausen in central Germany and was orphaned at an early age. After embarking on a nautical career at the age of 16, he served briefly in the Imperial German Navy at the start of the 20th century. His ill health forced him to abandon a naval career, but he remained in the naval reserve. He joined the Hamburg America Line to work as a tour guide. While escorting a party of tourists, he met and married a German-American woman, but the marriage broke down after only a few months. His wife divorced him and he returned to Berlin.

In May 1914, two months before war broke out, Lody was approached by German naval intelligence officials. He agreed to their proposal to employ him as a peacetime spy in southern France, but the outbreak of the First World War on 28 July 1914 resulted in a change of plans. In late August, he was sent to the United Kingdom with orders to spy on the Royal Navy. He posed as an American – he could speak English fluently, with an American accent – using a genuine U.S. passport purloined from an American citizen in Germany. Over the course of a month, Lody travelled around Edinburgh and the Firth of Forth observing naval movements and coastal defences. By the end of September 1914, he was becoming increasingly worried for his safety as a rising spy panic in Britain led to foreigners coming under suspicion. He travelled to Ireland, where he intended to keep a low profile until he could make his escape from the UK.

Lody had been given no training in espionage before embarking on his mission and within only a few days of arriving he was detected by the British authorities. His un-coded communications were detected by British censors when he sent his first reports to an address in Stockholm that the British knew was a postbox for German agents. The British counter-espionage agency MI5, then known as, allowed him to continue his activities in the hope of finding out more information about the German spy network. His first two messages were allowed to reach the Germans but later messages were stopped, as they contained sensitive military information. At the start of October 1914, concern over the increasingly sensitive nature of his messages prompted to order Lody's arrest. He had left a trail of clues that enabled the police to track him to a hotel in Killarney, Ireland, in less than a day.

Lody was put on public trial – the only one held for a German spy captured in the UK in either World War – before a military court in London at the end of October. He did not attempt to deny that he was a German spy. His bearing in court was widely praised as forthright and courageous by the British press and even by the police and officers who had tracked him down. He was convicted and sentenced to death after a three-day hearing. Four days later, on 6 November 1914, Lody was shot at dawn by a firing squad at the Tower of London in the first execution there in 167 years. His body was buried in an unmarked grave in East London. When the Nazi Party came to power in Germany in 1933, it declared him a national hero. Lody became the subject of memorials, eulogies and commemorations in Germany before and during the Second World War. A destroyer bore his name.