Carl Hans Lody

Carl Hans Lody, alias Charles A. Inglis, was a reserve officer of the Imperial German Navy who spied in the United Kingdom in the first few months of the First World War. 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. 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. 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 was

About Carl Hans Lody in brief

Carl Hans Lody, alias Charles A. Inglis, was a reserve officer of the Imperial German Navy who spied in the United Kingdom in the first few months of the First World War. 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. 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. 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 was convicted and sentenced to death after a three-day hearing. Four days later, on 6 November 1914, he was shot at dawn by a firing squad at the Tower of London. 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. He became the subject of memorials, eulogies and commemorations in Germany before and during the Second World War, and a destroyer bore his name. The Lody family subsequently moved to Nordhausen, where they lived at 8 Sedanstrasse. Lody’s father served as deputy mayor there in 1882 but died in June 1883 after a short illness and his mother died in 1885. His father was a lawyer in government service who served as mayor of Oderberg in 1881.

He later moved to Hamburg, where he lived in a grocery store at Halle in 1891. He studied at the maritime academy in Hamburg before joining the crew of the ship Sirius as a cabin boy. In 1904 he returned to Geestemünde where he successfully obtained a captain’s licence. He fell ill with what he later said was a very badly abscessed stomach, which he later cured from a typhoid attack on Italy. His ill health forced him to abandon a naval career, but he remained in the naval reserve. In May 1914, two months before war broke out, he agreed to their proposal to employ him as a peacetime spy in southern France, but the outbreak of the World War resulted in a change of plans. In late August 1914 he was sent to the UK with orders to spy on the Royal Navy. He 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. The British counter-espionage agency MI5, then known as MO5, allowed him to continue his activities in the hope of finding out more information about the German spy network. He left a trail of clues that enabled the police to track him to a hotel in Killarney, Ireland, in less than a day. He intended to keep a low profile until he could make his escape from the UK.

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