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LIBERATORS spy ring and the psychiatric expertise that Hans Hoff had
volunteered when one of the German parachutists of the ill-fated
MAMMUT mission had experienced a mental breakdown while in British
captivity in Egypt and had attempted suicide with a blunt razorblade.^17 In
the latter case, one should remember that, for all his military bluffness, in
civilian life Wood was a hospital administrator: a caring man used to work-
ing with veterans of the Great War who had suffered terrible disfiguring
injuries. As a result of Hoff ’s intervention at Wood’s request, the 32-year-
old German prisoner Friedrich Hoffmann was released from solitary con-
finement at CSDIC Maadi and paired with a fellow parachutist, Georg
Konieczny, with whom he could converse in German or Farsi, as both men
had served together in the Brandenburgers’ interpreters training unit.
Hoffmann’s mental health immediately improved.^18
Another unrelated instance of solitary confinement also serves to illus-
trate Doc Hoff ’s genuinely humane approach to espionage. During the
course of his cover activities, Hoff discovered a young German engineer
named Walther Le Mang lying in chains in a cell after a year spent at the
Baghdad insane asylum. Le Mang had originally been seized while attempt-
ing to cross the Persian border without papers and had subsequently
escaped at least three times from internment camps in Iraq and by jump-
ing from a train. Describing him as ‘daily growing more like a wild animal
in hatred of surroundings and people,’ Hoff prevailed upon the Swiss con-
sul as an intermediary to get the highly intelligent young man out of
chains and the dungeon he was inhabiting, so that he could be offered
some hope in return for intelligence information. Hoff was successful, and
what consequently emerged was the interesting, tragic story of Le Mang’s
eventful, though solitary, life. Le Mang, a qualified lawyer who had never
practised, was born in Berlin in 1907 and studied at the universities of
Berlin, Leipzig, Halle, and Vienna. He was in fact the son of the distin-
guished educationist and author Richard Le Mang. While at Halle he
joined the so-called Strasserist, anti-Hitler, left wing of the Nazi move-
ment (named for its leaders Georg and Otto Strasser), becoming a mem-
ber of the Kampfgemeinschaft Revolutionärer Nationalsozialisten
(Combat League of Revolutionary National Socialists [KGRNS]),^19 which
led to his arrest and internment in Dachau concentration camp. After six
weeks, in early 1933, Le Mang succeeded in escaping from the camp to
nearby Munich, whence he made his way to Vienna. While there, he heard
from a friend in the Vienna police that they had received extradition papers
from Germany charging Le Mang with murder and high treason. After
OH SO SOCIAL