Jan Willem Ter Braak

Jan-Willem van den Braak wrote a biography of Ter Braak in 2017, named 'Spion tegen Churchill', which was translated and published in 2022. He found out many things about his youth and recruitment in Noordwijk aan Zee, also with the help of family members of Ter Braak and his fiancée and some Dutch files in the National Archive in The Hague. The only English authors who describe Ter Braak's recruitment in Noordwijk and his life in Cambridge in more than one page are Joshua Levine in 'Operation Fortitude' (2011) and James Hayward, in 'Double Agent SNOW' (2013).

In 1956 Neeltje van Roon married a man from Rijnsburg, a village nearby, never had children and died of a heart attack in 1995. She never talked about the fate of her former fiancé, this being the reason his story remained completely unknown to his family and all inhabitants of Noordwijk aan Zee.

Ter Braak's story was suppressed at the time. An inquest was held in camera; its findings were released, along with other information about him, on 8 September 1945.

In January 1941, Ter Braak was contacted by the Food Office about his ration card, which its records showed had been issued to a man named Burton, living in Homefields, Addlestone, Surrey. The card had been supplied by the Abwehr that had been given false numbers by the double agent SNOW (Arthur Owens). Ter Braak evidently suspected that he would be detected, and told his landlady that he had to leave for London. However, he relocated to Montague Road 11.

MI5-file KV2/114, which became public in 1999 gives a good impression of his life in Cambridge and how MI5 tried to find out more about his spying activities. Historian Winston Ramsey conducted research in 1976 about the days that Ter Braak was found dead and was buried nameless (1-8 April 1941).

In May/June 1940 Holland, Belgium and France were occupied by the Germans. In July 1940 the Hitler regime decided to send spies to England to prepare the invasion (Operation Sea Lion), which was planned for September. The Abwehr office (Ast) Hamburg (Herbert Wichmann and Nikolaus Ritter) became responsible for this so-called Operation Lena, in cooperation with Ast Brussels, especially for the spies who would land by boat on the shore of England.

Ter Braak arrived by parachute on a night between 31 October and 2 November 1940, landing near Haversham in Buckinghamshire. His parachute was discovered on 3 November but Ter Braak was not found. He had in fact made his way to Cambridge, where he arrived on 4 November.

He left his office in December 1940. He had installed his suitcase transmitter in his room in St Barnabas Road but around Christmas the batteries had been running down, so since then he could only communicate with the Abwehr in Hamburg by letters, written with invisible ink.

In 1939 he met a young woman who became his fiancée, and he was financially supported by her family since that time.

His father died in December 1934 and he had to start working for his money. He got a job as an insurance agent in The Hague but after half a year he did not pay the customer's premiums to his employer and was arrested for fraud. He received a sentence of three months. After that he worked as a journalist with the weekly Noordwijker paper and probably also Leidsch Dagblad (a newspaper from the city of Leiden) but in 1937 he had to return to jail for six months because he had not fulfilled his obligatory duties towards the Reclassification authorities. He was thrown out of the NSB and became unemployed. He lived in several rooms in Noordwijk.

Engelbertus Fukken went to the Zeevaartschool in The Hague in 1930. He was interested in politics and became a supporter of Nazi Party of Adolf Hitler (NSDAP), which came to power in 1933. In 1934 he became member of the Dutch National Socialist Movement (NSB).

MI5 had found a picture of a young woman in his suitcase with the address of the photoshop in Noordwijk aan Zee. After the information release, the Dutch police found his fiancée, Miss Neeltje van Roon (born 1922 in Noordwijk aan Zee) in November 1946 and told her about his death. In 1947, the Dutch Government asked MI5 if they could have an official statement on the death on Engelbertus Fukken, as his fiancée wished to make a claim for his life insurance policy, which he had put on her name when he left Noordwijk in August 1940. It is thought she never received the money since she had stopped paying the premiums in 1944 and he had committed suicide.

Jan Willem Ter Braak (28 August 1914 – 30/31 March 1941) was a Dutch espionage agent working for Germany who operated for five months in the United Kingdom. Ter Braak, whose original name was Engelbertus Fukken, is believed to have been the German agent who was at large for the longest time in Britain during the Second World War, despite his short period of activity. When he ran out of money, Ter Braak committed suicide in a public air raid shelter.

Engelbertus Fukken was born on August 28, 1914 in The Hague (Van Boetzelaerlaan 140). His parents were Willem Briedé (1865 Amsterdam) and Elizabeth Johanna Fukken (1886 Rotterdam), who were not married because Willem's first wife refused to divorce him. In the end he had three brothers and three sisters. His father was a trader in cereals and later became an accountant. The family moved in 1917 to Noordwijk aan Zee, where they rented a villa at Duinweg 7. His mother died in 1920 of her eighth pregnancy.

Rittmeister Kurt Mirow from Ast Brussels went to Holland to recruit spies. After having found three spies in Amsterdam, he traveled to The Hague and Noordwijk aan Zee around 25 July. In Noordwijk he had a good relation: Dieter Tappenbeck (1912), who was a cousin of Rudolf Tappenbeck, the director of the famous Grand Hotel Huis ter Duin. Dieter was a brilliant young man, he had studied geology, had worked for the Dutch Press Office, was a real Nazi and worked at that time for one of the German Ministries in Berlin. But in July/August he was back in the Netherlands for propaganda work in the Reichskommissariat of Seyss Inquart in The Hague.