page_title: Fritz Joubert Duquesne
section_title: First World War
hierarchical_section_title: Fritz Joubert Duquesne / First World War
caption_attribution_description: English: A highly decorated Captain Fritz Joubert Duquesne, wearing the Iron Cross he earned in 1916 for his role in sinking the HMS Hampshire and killing Lord Kitchener.
context_page_description: Frederick "Fritz" Joubert Duquesne was a South African Boer and German soldier, big-game hunter, journalist, and a spy.
  He fought on the side of the Boers in the Second Boer War and as a secret agent for Germany during both World Wars. He gathered human intelligence, led spy rings and carried out sabotage missions as a covert field asset in South Africa, Great Britain, Central and South America, and the United States. He went by many aliases, fictionalized his identity and background on multiple occasions, and operated as a conman. As a Boer spy he was known as the "Black Panther", in World War II he operated under the code name DUNN, and in FBI files he is frequently referred to as "The Duke." He was captured, convicted, and escaped several prisons.
  During the Second Boer War, from 1899 to 1902, Duquesne was captured and imprisoned three times by the British and once by the Portuguese, and each time he escaped. On one occasion he infiltrated the British army, became a British officer, and led an attempt to sabotage Cape Town and to assassinate the commander-in-chief Lord Kitchener, only his team was given up by an informant and all were captured and sentenced to death.
context_section_description: After meeting a German-American industrialist in the Midwest around 1914, Duquesne became a German spy. He was sent to Brazil as "Frederick Fredericks" under the disguise of "doing scientific research on rubber plants." As an agent for Naval Intelligence in South America, he was assigned to disrupt commercial traffic to countries at war with Germany. Duquesne received and delivered communiques through German embassies, and he was responsible for numerous explosions on British merchant ships. From his base in Bahia, Brazil, he planted time bombs disguised as cases of mineral samples on British ships and he was credited with sinking 22 ships; among them were the Salvador and the Pembrokeshire. Additionally, one of his bombs killed three British sailors and nearly sank the S.S. Tennyson in February 1916, and another started a fire on the Vauban. After bombing the Tennyson, MI5 (British intelligence) operating in Brazil arrested an accomplice named Bauer who identified Duquesne as both the perpetrator of the crime and the ring leader. Bauer further revealed that Duquesne was operating under his own name and two aliases, George Fordam and Piet Niacud. Niacud is the pronunciation of Duquesne reversed. MI5 confirmed that Duquesne was "a German intelligence officer  ... involved in a series of acts of sabotage against British shipping in South American waters during the war". His cover now blown, Duquesne moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina, and several weeks later placed an article in a newspaper reporting his own death in Bolivia at the hands of Amazonian natives.
  Duquesne evaded British intelligence in South America and returned to New York around May 1916. Using the aliases George Fordam and Frederick Fredericks, he had taken out insurance policies for the cargo he shipped and he now filed claims for the "films" and "mineral samples" lost with the ships he sank off the coast of Brazil, including the British steamship Tennyson. The insurance companies were reluctant to pay and began their own investigations which would go on for another year.
  In his book The Man Who Killed Kitchener, biographer Clement Wood states that Duquesne left for Europe in June 1916 under orders from German intelligence. Duquesne posed as the Russian Duke Boris Zakrevsky and joined Field Marshal Kitchener on HMS Hampshire in Scotland. Once on board, Duquesne signaled the German submarine that sank the cruiser, thus killing Lord Kitchener. Duquesne made his own escape using a life raft before the ship was torpedoed and he was rescued by the submarine. Duquesne was awarded the Iron Cross for this act, and he appears in several pictures in German uniform wearing an Iron Cross in addition to other medals. Captain Louis Botha, son of the former Prime Minister of South Africa General Louis Botha, further writes that "Duquesne was a great friend of the Botha family" and that Duquesne "rose from the status of a Private in the German Army to the rank of Colonel, and received the Iron Cross during the great war." The authenticity of several of these claims has been challenged by modern biographers, and the German records that would confirm or deny at least parts of these accounts are now missing and presumed destroyed during the war.
  The next confirmed appearance of Duquesne is in Washington, D.C., in July 1917, not long after the U.S. declared war on Germany. He had contacted Senator Robert Broussard with whom he had worked on the bill to import hippos into Louisiana. Unaware that Duquesne was now a German spy, Senator Broussard attempted to help him obtain a position with General George Washington Goethals, the acting U.S. Army Quartermaster and former chief engineer of the Panama Canal, but he was not successful. Additionally, Duquesne filed patents for an underwater electromagnetic mine which he then attempted to sell to the U.S. Navy.
  As a covert spy, it was necessary for Duquesne to manipulate people, assume new identities and cover stories. It is known that he was handsome, charismatic, intelligent, fluent in several languages, and as FBI agent Raymond Newki
caption: Capt. Duquesne in German uniform
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