LIZIUS, BERNHARD. One of the most prized informers working
for the Mainzer Informationsbüro (MIB), Bernhard Lizius was
originally a law student in Aschaffenburg and editor of the opposi-
tion newspaper Bayerisches Volksblatt. On 2 April 1833 he, along
with some 40 other students, participated in the Frankfurter Wachen-
sturm, the storming of the watchtower and police headquarters in
Frankfurt am Main. Their plan to seize the treasury of the German
Confederation in order to finance a revolution went awry, and most
were arrested. Although sentenced to life imprisonment, Lizius, with
the assistance of sympathetic prison guards, escaped on 31 October
1833 and fled to Strasbourg. After resettling in Bern, Switzerland, he
began to work for the liberal newspaper Schweizer Beobachter.
In July 1836, Lizius conveyed to the Austrian mission in Bern
his willingness to work as an undercover agent, stressing his knowl-
edge of secret associations in Germany and Switzerland as well as
his professional connections to Bavarian and Rhenish newspapers.
Austrian chancellor Klemens von Metternich directed him to the
MIB, the main foreign intelligence collection office for the Habsburg
monarchy. Assigned the code name schäfer, he submitted copious
reports from Switzerland, France, Belgium, and England regarding
revolutionary organizations and the exile press. Metternich bestowed
particular praise on Lizius’s political acumen, noting that he knew
how “to separate the grain from the chaff.” His activities ended in
1848 with the dissolution of the MIB. Afterward, Lizius moved to
Frankfurt and established a publishing house.
LODY, CARL HANS (1877–1914). The first wartime German spy to
be executed in Great Britain, Carl Hans Lody was born in Berlin on
20 January 1877, the son of an old Prussian family of government
officials and military officers. After attending the navigation school
at Geestemünde and serving one year in the imperial navy, he found
employment as a tour guide with the Hamburg-American Line. His
brief marriage to a German-American woman in Nebraska ended in
1913, and he returned to Germany. Already known to German naval
intelligence (or “N”), Lody received an invitation to join its ranks
from its director Fritz Prieger in May 1914. He was first posted to
southern France but in August received a new assignment to Britain.
Based in Edinburgh, he was to report on enemy naval activity in the
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