Gestapo spy enjoyed high life

LONDON - Police spent months hanging around London nightclubs and Britain's spies checked sightings from across the country - but they never found the most elusive German agent in the country.

Newly released classified files show a Gestapo spy with a taste for the high life who used the name Wilhelm Moerz, among many others, was the subject of a frantic search during World War II after he was reportedly spotted in central London.

Moerz is believed to be the only German agent in Britain to have escaped capture during the war, according to experts at the National Archives in London which published the documents as part of a programme to release once-secret information.

"He is undoubtedly one of the cleverest secret agents the Germans have at the present time," reads a note, stamped "secret", for London's police chief in 1940.

Variously described in the files as a "thorough scoundrel" and an "affected and somewhat overdressed individual", Moerz first came to the attention of British agents in Prague in the late 1930s.

He was believed to have denounced opponents of the Nazi regime, leading to their arrest or death.

Moerz was suspected of involvement in the capture of two British spies in the Dutch town of Venlo in 1939. He was also reported to have spent time in Britain before the war.

But it was a report that Moerz had been seen getting into a taxi in London's Regent St on May 25, 1940, that set alarm bells ringing. Britain's Security Service, better known as MI5, launched a manhunt and ordered police to check hotels.

Moerz is described as well-dressed, aged about 35, "but looks younger ... slim, even on the thin side" with "very prominent, projecting upper teeth".

The letter to London's police chief said Moerz's arrest would be "a matter of the greatest significance" as he had likely come to lead German espionage efforts in Britain.

Two hotel receptionists and a nightclub hostess recalled encounters with Moerz. He was suspected of being in Edinburgh, Newcastle and Leeds and even on a ship from the Orkney Islands off northern Scotland.

Two policemen scoured London for more than two months.

Some officials came to believe the Regent St sighting had been false, although a hotel register and witness statements suggested Moerz had been in Britain earlier in the year. By 1941, MI5 had officially given up looking for him.

The files offer an intriguing post-script - a letter in a German newspaper in 1955 suggested Werner Mikkelsen, believed to be Moerz's real name, was living in Frankfurt. The file does not record if agents tried again to track down the man who had eluded them 15 years before.

- REUTERS