(updated October 2023)
Having stood as a candidate for Conservative Party leader – effectively a candidate for Prime Minister – now Tom Tugendhat has endorsed Liz Truss as she competes with Rishi Sunak for party members’ support. Many political observers believe he has been promised a top job in the next government – perhaps Foreign Secretary or Defence Secretary. [In fact he ended up as Security Minister but still has ambitions to succeed Sunak.]
Yet for decades the British security service MI5 carried out intensive investigations into Tugendhat’s grandfather, suspecting him of connections to foreign intelligence services and knowing of his links to a cabal of crooked international financiers and arms dealers.
For many years MI5 routinely opened Georg Tugendhat’s mail and listened to his telephone calls, while MI6 monitored his overseas activities, and the predecessor of GCHQ – the Government Code & Cypher School (GC&CS) – inspected his telegrams.
His business partners included Israel’s first president and the founder of Israel’s nuclear weapons programme. This article is a brief introduction to Georg Tugendhat’s life and times.
Last year Tom Tugendhat posted a video online celebrating the centenary of his grandfather Georg’s arrival in England. The ambitious MP (who has Georg as his own second name in his grandfather’s honour) said that his ancestor “saw in the UK then what I see in it today – a land of opportunity that really does reward those who make an effort, and a land that is fair to all, from wherever they have come”.
Only a few years earlier his grandfather had, Tugendhat pointed out, been fighting against Britain as an Austrian officer during the First World War, “and yet he was able to get married and make his life here, to find opportunity, and I hope to contribute.”
Investigators from MI5 and its sister intelligence service MI6 took a more sceptical view of Georg Tugendhat’s motives, according to four volumes of his personal file dating from 1923 to 1948. (Later volumes remain secret.)
During the 1920s senior British officials suspected he was using his work as a journalist to collect intelligence and make connections on behalf of the Austrian and/or German secret services.
Tugendhat’s Jewish family had been prominent industrialists for more than a century, owning woollen mills in what is now the Czech Republic. He was known to be on good terms with Austria’s envoy to London, Sir George Franckenstein (who eventually joined Tugendhat’s business after the Anschluss ended his diplomatic career), and his uncle Felix Heimann was one of Germany’s leading bankers.
In 1928 Tugendhat left England and remained in Berlin for 18 months studying banking: he returned in March 1930 as London representative of the Reichskreditgesellschaft, his uncle’s bank. Perhaps surprisingly he retained this post during Adolf Hitler’s first year in power, and after stepping down at the end of March 1934 joined a firm of Jewish stockbrokers in London, Cohen de Smitt Bierer.
A few months after being forced out of the Reichskreditgesellschaft – and more than thirteen years after his first move to London – Tugendhat became a British citizen on 12th October 1934.
From as far back as 1931 Tugendhat’s closest business connection was with a fellow Jew whom he had known since schooldays, Dr Franz Kind. (Neither the British nor German authorities took much notice of Tugendhat being a Catholic convert: he is routinely referred to in the MI5 files as Jewish.)
By the 1930s Tugendhat and his childhood friend Dr Kind had set up the Manchester Oil Refinery and a web of associated companies across Europe. This network was built on an alliance of prominent German-Jewish financiers and industrialists – notably Theodor Frank, who was a director of Deutsche Bank until being removed in 1933 due to being Jewish.
Kind’s family had been in the oil business for several generations: his grandfather created the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s first oil refinery. The Tugendhat-Kind plan was to set up refineries close to the centres of engineering and related industries. These oil products were mainly related to specialist engineering tasks (some with military applications). Romania was then among the world’s top five oil producers, and several of Tugendhat’s closest associates were Romanian Jewish businessman and intermediaries.
Despite being Jewish, Tugendhat and Kind recruited specialist engineers from National Socialist Germany to instal some of the advanced technical equipment at their Manchester refinery, and in 1935 they opened the Aquila Refinery in Trieste, Italy, with the cooperation of Mussolini’s Fascist Italian government.
Fellow shareholders in the various companies that owned these refineries were mostly exiled Austrian or German Jews (plus a few Romanian Jews) but many did not live in England, and some were interned at the start of the war by the French authorities, which caused additional complications and suspicions.
Though Tugendhat and Kind were frequently denounced to the authorities as possible German spies during the first years of the Second World War, MI5 believed (probably correctly) that these extreme allegations were motivated by business rivalries. The senior MI5 officer in charge of their case – barrister Jim Crauford – concluded:
“It seems to me that the company is run by German Jews, who, although one might prefer not to see them in that position, are at present doing their best to be useful to the Air Intelligence. Therefore, it appears undesirable to disturb them.”
Yet while discounting wilder charges from business rivals, MI5 knew that Tugendhat and Kind’s fundamental loyalties were not to Britain.
Detailed examination of police, security and intelligence files reveals that cosmopolitan financiers before, during and after the Second World War were operating to their own agenda – partly a selfish agenda with links to organised crime, and partly a political agenda linked to the international Zionist movement that saw the war as a potential launchpad for the long dreamed-of State of Israel.
During 1939 and 1940 the risky operations of this network almost caused it to collapse in scandal. Two part-Jewish politicians resigned from the British government after corruption allegations (the details of which remain mainly secret to this day but will be explored in my forthcoming book). One of these ministers was Dr Leslie Burgin, a solicitor and business associate of Tugendhat and Kind.
Later in 1940 another close associate of Tugendhat and Kind was the central figure in a scandal that ended the ministerial career of Robert Boothby, a leading (non-Jewish) Zionist and Winston Churchill’s protégé.
This associate was the crooked financier Richard Weininger. Shortly before his arrest in September 1940, Weininger had been working with Tugendhat and Kind on several international deals, including the exploitation of shale oil reserves in Canada. His political connections failed to save him from internment.
Even as war approached in summer 1939, Weininger, Tugendhat and Kind were cooperating with the German authorities who by now controlled formerly Czech territories. They agreed that Czech machinery could be exported for the creation of a new Tugendhat-Kind refinery in Ireland.
Throughout this period one of the Tugendhat-Kind companies was a partnership with the industrial chemist and Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, who was desperately trying to repeat his successful trick from the First World War and make himself indispensable to the British Empire.
One of Weizmann’s schemes (in cooperation with Tugendhat) was to carry out “special work for the government” via a company called Petrocarbon Ltd, based in Manchester. This was jointly owned by Tugendhat, Weizmann and the German-Jewish scientist Dr Ernst Bergmann, one of the fathers of Israel’s nuclear programme.
This “special work” involved a secret process for manufacturing toluene for aviation fuel: Weizmann persistently lobbied Churchill about this, as part of his efforts to enhance the status of Zionist Jewry in the British war effort and guarantee postwar British support for a Zionist state.
My later articles and book chapters will give further details on Weizmann’s efforts to mobilise a specifically Jewish contribution to Britain’s secret war effort, whether financial, scientific, or in the fields of espionage and subversion.
Postwar, Tugendhat secured millions of pounds in official government support for a venture – again based in Manchester – that promised to put Britain at the forefront of the latest technical developments in the dye industry. Yet within a few years this ran into difficulties, and in October 1958 Tugendhat was dismissed by the company he had co-founded. Millions of pounds in British government funds were sunk into this failed venture, but Tugendhat eventually secured £38,000 compensation for breach of contract.
Another effort to gain British government backing failed in 1951: this was a further example of Tugendhat’s dual loyalties.
Gen. Sir Nevil Brownjohn – Vice-Chief of the Imperial General Staff – reported in August 1951 that Tugendhat, whom he described as having “close ties with governmental circles in Israel”, had lobbied him seeking British support for a proposed oil pipeline across Israel, running from the Gulf of Aqaba to Haifa.
This was designed to save Israel millions of dollars per year and enhance its energy security, at a time when Egypt refused to allow oil tankers heading for Israel to pass through the Suez Canal. Some Arab countries including British-protected monarchies Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar – plus the Shah’s Persia (now Iran) – were in 1951 prepared to supply Israel with oil, but this could only be delivered economically if a pipeline were constructed.
Tugendhat tried to persuade the British that this would also be strategically advantageous from London’s point of view, but military and civil service advisers rejected the idea. Eventually in 1968 the pipeline (ending at Ashkelon rather than Haifa) did get built, thanks to a deal between Israel and the Shah of Iran backed by international criminal Marc Rich, but a decade later the new Iranian government ceased supplying Israel.
Since 2003 the pipeline (operated by what the Financial Times calls “Israel’s most secretive company, the Eilat Ashkelon Pipeline Company”) has flowed in the opposite direction, after a deal between Putin’s Russia and Israel, carrying Russian oil destined for Asian markets. It is now also an important part of Israel’s developing ties with Arab monarchies, promoted during Donald Trump’s presidency.
By the end of the war Tugendhat had been cleared of allegations that he was any sort of German spy. It helped when invading Allied forces captured German intelligence records that showed the Third Reich’s investigators suspected him of working as an Allied agent – in other words both London and Berlin had simultaneously viewed him with suspicion!
But his family ties to another Central European Jewish business dynasty – the Löw-Beer family – raised concerns that despite his ultra-capitalist outlook, Tugendhat and some of his friends might at times have been prepared to collaborate with communist bloc agencies.
Undoubtedly his relative Paul Löw-Beer and some others of that family were important communist agents, even playing a role in obtaining atomic secrets from the USA.
Yet the safest verdict on Georg Tugendhat is probably that of the eminent British banker and MI5 officer Sir Edward Reid (himself part of the Baring banking family), who wrote this assessment in July 1940:
“He is really anti-German rather than pro-British, and in fact at heart he is pro-Tugendhat and nothing else. …I should think that if he were to stray from the straight and narrow path it would be more likely to be in the direction of some complicated deal involving trading with the enemy (which he would be able to justify to himself by specious arguments).”
Whether one regards it as “straying from the straight and narrow path” is a matter of opinion, but there can be little doubt that Georg Tugendhat’s loyalty was at least partly to the State of Israel rather than to the United Kingdom.
No one could reasonably say that about his grandson, who has served in the British Army’s Intelligence Corps in both Iraq and Afghanistan. In any case, the Conservative Party generally is almost 100% devoted to Israel: often gentiles such as Priti Patel are even more pro-Israel than Jews or semi-Jews such as Tugendhat.
Yet the Conservative Party leadership contest of 2022 – widely praised for its “diversity” – does raise some uncomfortable questions about national loyalties. Are we all now – including Conservative politicians – “citizens of the world”? Or does that mean (as former Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May herself put it) that one is a “citizen of nowhere”?
Public understanding of the changing face of Britain would be greatly enhanced if the British government agreed to release further documents about investigations into the alleged dual loyalties of prominent figures in the 20th century.
To give just a few examples – MI5 certainly had files on Chaim Weizmann and many of his British friends; on the fraudster Robert Maxwell; and on the cosmopolitan businessmen who surrounded Britain’s most pro-Zionist Prime Minister, Harold Wilson.
If we are to see men like Georg Tugendhat in their proper context – to assess whether they were essentially self-interested, or British patriots, or devoted Zionists – it is surely in the public interest for freedom of information to defeat official secrecy.
Today’s article is just a brief introduction to a complex topic, which will be explored more fully in later articles.
