Klementyna Mańkowska

Andrzej and Klementyna Mańkowski died respectively in 2001 and 2003. They both died at Sermoise near Nevers in central France.

By 1997, which is when Günter Blaurock, the German consul general in Lyon presented Mańkowska with the Order of Merit (Bundesverdienstkreuz Erster Klasse) on behalf of President Herzog, in respect of her wartime exploits, the ceremony took place in the presence of the Polish ambassador and Prince Bismarck at Mańkowska's home, the Château de Sermoise, near Nevers. (The Mańkowski's daughter married a French aristocrat in 1970.) Her story had become better known to younger generations as a result of the publication of her autobiographical work Espionne malgré moi, prefaced by Michel Poniatowski, in May 1994 (published the next year in German as Odyssee einer Agentin). The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, in a book review, described her life story as "too fantastic for a novel". The work wasn't published in her native Poland until January 2003. There is no English version.

In 1948 the family moved to Congo. There are indications that at this stage they were still legally stateless. Andrzej obtained a well-remunerated job with one of the colonial governments in Africa. The family were evidently accompanied in the Congo by Klementyna's mother who died at Élisabethville (as it was then known) at the end of 1958.

Klementyna Maria Czarkowska-Golejewska was born into a local land owning family in Wysuczka, a small settlement between Lviv and Ternopil in Galicia. This is the where she grew up on her father's family estate, which she later described as "a paradise". Since 1945 the region has been part of Western Ukraine, but at the time of her birth it was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. During the interwar period it was part of Poland which had been restored to independence after the First World War. Klementyna was the second daughter of Cyryl Czarkowski-Golejewski (1885–1940) by his marriage to Izabela Jaxa-Małachowska (1885–1958). She herself married at the start of 1933. She and her husband were both 23 when they married, and her husband, Count Andrzej Mańkowski (1910–2001) was still completing his university studies of law and economics at the nearby university. For Klementyna the marriage meant moving away from her own family, to live in the western part of Poland. Andrzej was content to entrust the management of the Mańkowski family estate at Winna Góra near Poznań to his young wife. By 1939 they were living there with their two sons. The family were well connected both in Poland and internationally. Andrzej Mańkowski had attended the international Benedictine school at Bruges in Belgium between 1922 and 1928, and the staff on the family estate included a German nanny called Teta who took care of the boys.

Klementyna Mańkowska remained in Britain till 1948, but she moved to Edinburgh, far from London and far from the Polish government in exile. Andrzej continued to be based in London where he made himself useful to the authorities, but he was able to visit his wife in Edinburgh at weekends. The couple's two sons attended a British boarding school. Their daughter, Maria, was born in Edinburgh on 20 June 1944. Klementyna worked in an Edinburgh hospital, undertaking translation work for Polish doctors unable to communicate in English. She would never again resume her prewar role as a lady of the manor.

It later turned out that von Scheliha had not consulted with German intelligence before passing files about the planning for the Holocaust to Mańkowska. He had his own agenda, and believed – probably correctly – that passing the information to Mańkowska was tantamount to passing the information to Polish and British intelligence. Over the next few months, his continuing careful documentation of National Socialist atrocities in Poland created one of the most comprehensive records of the subject ever compiled. His own efforts to alert foreign governments to what was going on became increasingly intense and were probably effective. Several times he travelled to Switzerland as part of his mission to warn, but he always returned home to Berlin. In the end it became clear that Rudolf von Scheliha had become identified by the authorities as an "anti-Nazi", and had himself been under surveillance by the German authorities for a long time: sources indicate – without providing much detail – that he had been passing information to "Moscow" since the 1930s. He was detained, given a brief trial and on 22 December 1942 executed by guillotine at Berlin's Plötzensee prison.

On 24 March 1942 at 3.30 in the morning Mańkowska was awakened in her room at the training centre and told to get dressed. Her mission was about to begin. The instruction was not wholly unexpected and she was ready in two minutes. After half an hour her driver delivered her to the little airport where she received her final briefing from "Doctor Alexander": "If things go wrong, please don't take chances. If you feel threatened, your first priority is to look after yourself. You're flying via Nice in "Vichy". There we'll help you to get a legal British visa." Squashed between the front seats of a Ju 52 transport plane, a few hours later she landed at Nice. Somehow Witkowski had found out that the route arranged by the Abwehr to London would include a stop-over in Nice. He arranged for Mańkowska to have a breakfast meeting with Juliusz Kleeberg, who had been one of the most important Polish generals in the fight against the German/Soviet invasion in September 1939. He was one of those Polish ex-military personnel now living in precarious exile in Vichy France. Although Witkowski through his network was well informed on much that happened in countries under German occupation, his information on the situation in London seems to have been relatively sketchy. Kleeberg was able to provide Mańkowska with more up to date background. The leaders of the London-based Polish government in exile, Generals Sikorski and Sosnkowski were at the centre of a small close-knit group of insiders, determined to protect their powerbase for the future, and intolerant of dissent. Their focus was on how they would govern Poland after the war. Kleeberg's words were not encouraging: "Look and listen ... All who stand in their way are little by little eliminated. Witkowski is doing very valuable work for the allies, but Poles cannot forgive him for maintaining direct contacts with the English. Things may end badly for him".

Meanwhile, German intelligence, convinced of Klementyna Mańkowska's pro-German sentiments, selected her as a potential agent. In June 1941 she started a new job, based in Berlin and working at the Foreign Ministry. It was the first stage in her training. While she was in Berlin she remembered a card that had been delivered for her attention a few months earlier care of her coursin Teresa Łubieńska. Harold von Hoepfner was still alive and he was in town. At dinner, with the same casual boasting that he had employed to give her advance notice of the French invasion in May 1940, he openly talked of his imminent posting as part of the vast army that would shortly be invading the Soviet Union. Mańkowska had been welcomed into the Hoepfner family's Berlin apartment as a longstanding family friend. It was important, von Hoepfner, pointed out, that the invasion of Russia should be launched soon so that they did not get caught out by the Russian winter like Napoleon. Later the name of Rudolf "Dolf" von Scheliha came up in conversation. Von Scheliha had worked as a German diplomat in the Warsaw embassy between 1932 and 1939. He had regularly participated in hunting parties at aristocratic estates in the vast Polish countryside. He was, it turned out, a mutual friend. Mańkowska would love to meet up with him again. Von Hoepfner disappeared to make a few 'phone calls. He returned with good news. Von Scheliha was working for the Foreign Ministry, and just now he was in town. Harold von Hoepfner jotted down a telephone number and handed it over.

During her internship with the Foreign Ministry in the middle part of 1941 Klementyna Mańkowska had to take a few days off work and stay home with acute food poisoning. That, at least, is what she told management. She travelled to Warsaw in order to discuss with Stefan Witkowski the rich possibilities that had been opened up through her recruitment by German intelligence. A career as a double agent beckoned. The first visitor she received at Teresa Łubieńska's Warsaw apartment was not Witkowski, however. A short plump Polish civilian knocked on the door while she was taking a cup of tea with her cousin. Uninvited, the new visitor installed himself in an armchair and introduced himself as "Witold". He enquired directly about the well-being of "Stewit" (Witkowski) and his network of "agents scattered all over Europe". He urged Mańkowska not to worry, insisting that he and she were on the same side. "Adolf nicht gut". Mańkowska was unsure what to make of the visitor and his message, the oblique delivery of which suggested that he was on a mission, probably, on behalf of British intelligence. He certainly did not appear to be operating according to the Gestapo rule book, and she could think of no reason why the German intelligence services should bother to follow her all the way to Warsaw just to convey a gratuitously opaque message that they knew she was not staying home with food poisoning.

The "Muszkieterowie" recruited mainly from the Polish nobility. Klementyna Mańkowska joined. She was a talented linguist and her activities were focused on "courier services": she smuggled documents, microfilms and messages concealed in rolls of toilet paper to France and Britain. However, that was very far from the full extent of her involvement. The "Muszkieterowie" were led by Stefan Witkowski an engineer-entrepreneur believed to have had long-standing connections with British intelligence. Details of his contacts are uncertain and remain, eighty years later, controversial: they were conducted independently of the (till June 1940 Paris based) Polish government in exile, and British public archives covering the relationship remain firmly closed to researchers. Witkowski very soon recognised Mańkowska's potential and put her in touch with resistance activists Aleksander Wielkopolski and Karol Anders. After this she was included in discussions on the importance of surveillance and of setting up an espionage network. One incident, in particular, convinced Wielkopolski of Mańkowska's talent for espionage. The high-ranking German officer Harold von Hoepfner, returning from Milan, turned up unexpectedly in Warsaw to see Klementyna Mańkowska. He arrived, en route to Berlin, with flowers, wine, and cheesecake. Listening from an adjacent broom cupboard, Witkowski and Wielkopolski were amazed to hear the brazen combination of grace and charm that Mańkowska applied to extracting information from her German friend about an end to the "Sitzkrieg" in the west, and the forthcoming German invasion of France. (They may or may not have been aware already that von Hoepfner and Mańkowska had almost certainly, briefly, been lovers during the early weeks of the war.) The German officer's information had been precise in respect of dates, though he seems to have kept to himself any knowledge he might have had about strategic detailed planning for the invasion. Witkowski nevertheless took the decision to hand over the information he had on the German plans for the invasion of France to British intelligence.

Early in September 1939 war arrived from the west and, sixteen days later, from the east. An early taste of war came to Winna Góra later that month when Lieutenant Andrzej Mańkowski (as her husband had by now become) was seriously shot and for the time being immobilised by his own subordinates because he had angrily upbraided a group of Polish soldiers for mistreating a captured German officer in ways that would have offended his own conscience and breached the Geneva Conventions. The German prisoner had been stabbed in the eye with a bayonet. At this stage they were playing host to two "old school" German officers who had arrived on a couple of motor bikes six days after the launch of the German invasion, and who were surprised to find Klementyna Mańkowska and her children ensconced in the castle. Others, elsewhere in the area, had already fled. Beyond the estate, the village was deserted. The officers assured the Mańkowskis they would need only one of the three floors of the castle, modestly furnished. There are powerful indications of a brief but intense romance involving one of them. A month later the Gestapo arrived and the family were thrown out of their home at Winna Góra. The castle had been selected as a present/trophy for Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel.

One of the German officers, Harold von Hoepfner, proposed a joint trip to Italy in order to protect Klementyna. However, her husband had been badly injured when shot by a Polish soldier under his command, and was still critically ill, by now in a hospital somewhere near Kutno. She turned down von Hoepfner's invitation: "I do not think the Wehrmacht officer would want me to give up, for him, a man who stood up heroically in defence of the German soldier". Klementyna had resolved to stay with Andrzej, but there was no longer any place for them in their home, so they moved with their children to Warsaw where they stayed with the ballerina Olga Sławska, a family friend. In early October 1939, the Germans captured Warsaw and the Mańkowskis moved on to stay with a cousin, Teresa Łubieńska whose spacious apartment home at "ulicy 6 sierpnia" ("6 Sierpnia Street") in the city centre, close to Zbawiciela Square, had become a refuge for well-connected Poles dispossessed by the war. It pulsated with social gatherings. But it quickly became clear that the men who arrived at Cousin Teresa's apartment several evenings each week were not simply party goers. They were members of a newly formed anti-Nazi grouping known as the "Muszkieterowie" ("Musketeers"), identified variously as a "resistance group" ("Widerstandsgruppe ") or as an "intelligence organisation" ("Nachrichtendienstorganisation").

That evening Witkowski came round. He was very happy that Mańkowska had been recruited by German intelligence but he did not hesitate to let her know how this added to his problems. There was an inherent rivalry between the "Muszkieterowie", with their longstanding direct links to British intelligence and the "Dwójka", till 1939 the Polish Military Intelligence agency, and since the Fall of France in 1940 represented in significant numbers by political exiles living in London alongside members of the Polish government-in-exile. In London, the "Dwójka" struggled jealously for recognition as the only credible Polish anti-Nazi espionage organisation, while Witkowski was convinced that much of the intelligence they picked up through their various connections was less directly sourced and more out of date than information that the "Muszkieterowie" could provide using their own network. Witkowski admitted that Mańkowska's work as a double agent was going to be affected and possibly compromised by the intensifying rivalry between two very differently configured Polish intelligence organisations. "For them, you are an internal enemy, just like me. When is this Alexander fellow going to send you to Great Britain?"

A few days earlier Mańkowska had received a visit from someone whom "Doctor Alexander" identified simply as "my boss". His uniform was faded, and his sweater was patched. Wilhelm Canaris served as head of German military intelligence between 1935 and his spectacular fall from grace early in 1944. His loyalties may already have been more conflicted than the German government appreciated. It is believed by some that there were aspects of National Socialist Germany that horrified him. He sat down beside Mańkowska and shared his thoughts: "You do not have to go. We are wondering whether to take this risk. You are prepared, but it is not clear whether the need exists to launch this mission." There was no direct answer to Mańkowska's question, "Then why have I been trained?". "But if you do go, do you have any wishes before the trip? It might end in tragedy." Mańkowska replied that she would like to see Warsaw again, and a two-day holiday to the city was duly arranged. There is speculation that Mańkowska's true mission, from the point of view of the Abwehr, was to be available in England as a backup in case of a failure by Halina Szymańska's espionage mission. Halina Szymańska was another spy of Polish provenance, who at different stages seems to have been working for more than one national intelligence agency at a time. By the time of Mańkowska's proposed mission to London, Szymańska's close connections to Wilhelm Canaris already went back several years.

Klementyna Mańkowska (born Klementyna Czarkowska-Golejewska on 1 August 1910; died 4 January 2003 in the Château Sermoise, Nevers) was Polish aristocrat, who was a member of the Polish resistance and agent of Polish and British intelligence services during World War II.