GERMAN WOMAN SPY

Taranaki Daily News, 25 July 1929, Page 14

GERMAN WOMAN SPY

A GREAT RINGLEADER.

NOW IN ASYLUM.

A comparatively young and beautiful German woman, who did great damage as a spy to the cause of the Allies during the war, has just been interned in a lunatic asylum in a .town on the Rhine by the German authorities, according to the Tribune of Geneva, after she had become insane from the effects of cocaine and morphine poisoning. Her tools in war-time were many, chiefly officers and soldiers who had deserted from the Allied armies, writes the Geneva correspondent of the New York Times. The British Intelligence Department knew the woman as Mrs. Heinrichsen. The French and Swiss Departments named her “Mlle, le Docteur.’’ Geneva and Antwerp were her chief spy headquarters. In these towns she employed a large permanent staff. „ For her employees “Mlle, le Docteur procured false passports, dealing out to them large sums of money supplied by the German etat-major, “to travel and investigate in hostile countries.’ 1 has been stated that 300 of her spies were discovered and shot or imprisoned by the Allies, but the woman ringleader was never caught, continuing pitilessly to the end. Once she narrowly escaped arrest near the Faucille Pass in the Jura Mountains above Geneva. She had climbed the pass alone from France wit i the obpject of visiting her confederates m Geneva, and was passing through a fir forest, oil the ordinary route, when two French soldiers ordered her to stop and present her passport. In reply “Mlle, le Docteur” fired several shots from her revolver at the French soidrers, severely wounding them, and ran across the frontier into Switzerland. She le this country hastily, however, when her exploit was reported to the Swiss authorities and a warrant had been issue for Her arrest. Among her various methods of communication were the use of ordinary postcards with ordinary seeming messages in ordinary ink, but with secret code messages between the lines in invisible ink made from lime-juice, which becomes visible upon heating. Another method was to split a banknote and introduce a cigarette paper between the two portions of the note, which was then closed. A third way was to empty an ordinary cigarette, place the message in the centre, and refill the cigarette with tobacco. The various intelligence departments, however, did not take long to discover these methods, as the clothes and belongings of “suspects” were minutely examined after an arrest. “Mlle, le Docteur was married when quite young to a German cavalry officer, a member of a high and wealthy family, Captain von S , but deserted him when war broke out.