The Book
Rough Justice – The True Story of Agent Dronkers, the Enemy Spy Captured by the British; David Tremain; Amberley Publishing; The Stroud, Gloucestershire; 2016.
Summary
Johannes Marinus Dronkers was a poor sod of a guy. A Dutchman who struggled to make a living in Nazi-occupied Holland, he was an easy mark for the German spy handlers. Dronkers, and two other Dutchmen, sailed for the English coast in a little boat in the spring of 1942. Their boat ran into difficulties and they were eventually picked up by the British. All three of the men underwent serious interrogations and, eventually, Dronkers caved. On December 31, 1942, Dronkers was hanged at Wandsworth Prison.
It would seem to be an open and shut case on a very minor World War 2 spy but… author David Tremain has conducted some intense research into Dronkers background and delved into the declassified MI5 files at the National Archives. As with many of the ill-fated men who were “recruited” by the Germans to spy against England, there is more to the story than meets the eye.
Review
Rough Justice is meticulously researched and is, therefore, not a book for the first-time espionage reader. However, for someone with a keen interest, in World War 2 espionage, the book makes fascinating reading. I had scanned Dronkers files when I last visited the Archives and had picked out a few things in his interrogations and prosecution that had a bearing on my grandfather’s case (Josef Jakobs). It is very nice to see that someone has taken on the case of Dronkers and written a thorough analysis of the case.
I highly recommend this book for the reader who has an interest in World War 2 espionage. it reminds one that even the “minor” spies of World War 2 have stories to tell that shed light on the bigger picture of the war.
For those who are following the Bella in the Wych Elm theories, Mr. Tremain devotes one paragraph to the theory that Bella was the wife of Johannes Marinus Dronkers:
An even more spurious story which is still persistently circulating on the internet is that Dronkers was connected to the ‘Hagley Wood Mystery’ and the ‘Who put Bella in the Wych Elm’ claim. It has been alleged that ‘Bella’ was a Dutch woman named Clarabella who was a Nazi spy, and may have been Dronkers’ wife, who had been murdered in about 1941 and her body stuffed in a wych elm (really just an elm) in Hagley Wood, part of the Hagley Hall estate, near Kidderminster, in the West Midlands. The story, perpetrated by a number of websites, is so ridiculous that no further discussion is warranted. But whoever she was, she was not Dronkers’ wife.
I wrote about the “Bella in the Wych Elm was Dronkers’ wife” theory in another blog...