thorities, he and his three associates were arrested in March 1942 as
part of a massive spy roundup throughout the country. Sentenced to
25 years in prison on 6 October 1943, Kempter was released as part
of a general Christmas amnesty five years later.KEMRITZ, HANS. A Berlin attorney and controversial multiple
agent, Hans Kemritz joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and was an
Abwehr major during World War II. Captured and interrogated by
Soviet forces in 1945, he secured his release by agreeing to help the
NKVD (Soviet People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs) locate and
turn former colleagues and acquaintances. Invited to “business meet-
ings” at his East Berlin law office, they were confronted afterward by
Soviet officers and given the choice of cooperation or arrest. Kemritz
(code name savoy) was further pressured by the U.S. Counterintel-
ligence Intelligence Corps (CIC) to become a double agent in order
to thwart the NVKD’s recruitment scheme.
When Kemritz’s situation began to threaten another CIC double
agent, he was resettled in Bad Homburg (Hesse) in 1947. On 4
November 1950, authorities in the Federal Republic of Germany ar-
rested him for having assisted in the kidnapping of at least 20 people
who had been incarcerated in Soviet camps. U.S. officials, however,
provoked a serious rift with the FRG by insisting that a person could
not be prosecuted for having obeyed the instructions of an occupying
power. Two years later, Kemritz was brought to the United States and
eventually resettled in Uruguay.
KENT, TYLER (1911–1988). An American embassy code clerk in
London who passed on secret information in the hope of a negotiated
peace with Nazi Germany, Tyler Kent was born in Manchuria on 24
March 1911, the son of the U.S. consul. After completing his studies
at Princeton and the Sorbonne and showing a remarkable aptitude for
languages, he entered the U.S. State Department and was assigned to
the Moscow embassy under William C. Bullitt, the first American
ambassador to the Soviet Union.
In October 1939, Kent was transferred to the London embassy.
Within days, MI5 spotted him with a suspected German agent. He
also became associated with the extremist Right Club, founded by
a member of parliament, Archibald Ramsay, whose main targets
KENT, TYLER • 227