Historical Dictionary of British Intelligence

(Michael S) #1
PANTCHEFF, THEODORE X. F.• 409

hands until a week after the official German surrender, and soon af-
terward Pantcheff arrived to conduct his inquiry. He estimated that
he interviewed some 3,000 prisoners of war to piece together the ap-
palling story of the Nazi concentration camp known as Sylt that had
been built at the southern end of the island.
After the war, Pantcheff was attached to a War Crimes Investiga-
tion Unit and collected the evidence against Willy Herold, a Luft-
waffe corporal who adopted the identity of an officer during the last
days of the war and was responsible for a reign of terror at a labor
camp in Emsland, near the Dutch frontier, in which dozens of prison-
ers were butchered. Herold and five confederates were tried by the
Allied military government at Oldenburg and executed by guillotine
in November 1946. This extraordinary story is told by Pantcheff in
his paperback,The Emsland Executioner, which was published in
Holland in 1987.
Pantcheff transferred from the Control Commission’s Intelligence
Division to theSecret Intelligence Service(SIS) in 1951 and re-
mained in Germany for a further five years. In 1958, much to his
astonishment, he was sent to Lagos, Nigeria, as head of station and
three years later served in Le ́opoldville in the Congo. He returned to
London in 1963 as controller, Africa, and then director of counterin-
telligence, and in 1969 went back to Germany to runMI5’s local
security apparatus.
Pantcheff is identified byPeter WrightinSpyCatcheras the
counterintelligenceexpert in SIS who successfully extracted a par-
tial confession of espionage from his Australian-born colleagueDick
Ellis. Pantcheff had been assigned to a joint MI5-SIS investigation of
Ellis in 1965 and had interrogated the retired SIS officer with Wright.
Together the two inquisitors had cornered Ellis, who although sup-
posedly in retirement had been invited back to SIS headquarters to
participate in routineweedingof files, the removal and destruction
of redundant records. The exposure of Ellis as a prewar traitor work-
ing in the German interest opened suspicions that he may have be-
trayed SIS to theKGBafter the war. According to Wright, Pantcheff
shared his opinion that Ellis had been skillfully manipulated as a
high-level penetration by the KGB but this was an issue that was
never fully resolved.
In 1981, four years after his retirement from SIS, Pantcheff pub-

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