KURTZ, HARALD• 299their main concern, sogarboreported, was simply self-preservation
in an increasingly hostile country that previously had treated them as
honored guests. Now Ku ̈hlenthal was in isolation, under police sur-
veillance, at his home in Avila, while Knappe-Ratey was under house
arrest in Caldas, apparently as a result of pressure exerted on the
Spanish authorities by the British. Ku ̈hlenthal remained in Spain
until his death in 1975.KURTZ, HARALD.When Harald Kurtz arrived in Britain in 1936,
the 23-year-old was given accommodation by a Quaker agency dedi-
cated to helping refugees. The same organization also had close links
toMI5, which occasionally recruited newly arrived immigrants for
its own purposes. Kurtz was one of those who volunteered to help
the Security Service, and he was run as an informer byMax Knight,
a veteran member of thecounterespionagedivision.
Born in Stuttgart and educated in Switzerland and at Kurt Hahn’s
famous Odenwald School, Kurtz had a distant connection to Queen
Mary, which he mentioned at every opportunity. When he first ar-
rived, he was given a job at the BBC as a translator, but in his spare
time he worked for Knight. Under normal circumstances Kurtz’s
clandestine career would have remained a closely guarded secret,
buried deep in the recesses of MI5’s archives, but the agent’s over-
zealous approach to his work led to his public exposure and litigation
that reached the House of Lords and virtually ruined Knight as MI5’s
agent-runner.
Kurtz’s assignment was to work as a stool pigeon, posing as a Nazi
in civilian internment camps to identify party members, but he oper-
ated independently on the outside, pretending to be a Fascist sympa-
thizer with the intention of entrapping others who expressed pro-Nazi
views. Once reported to MI5, the compromised suspect invariably
became the subject of a detention order made under the Emergency
Regulations. However, in the case of Benjamin Greene, Kurtz, who
was paid by Knight on the basis of each individual he denounced,
overreached himself. Greene, a pacifist member of the famous Berk-
hamsted family and a first cousin ofGraham Greene, was arrested
in May 1940 after an encounter with Kurtz, but instead of meekly
submitting to imprisonment at Brixton, his brother employed the City
solicitor Oswald Hickson to discover the grounds of his internment.