Nothing is not what it seems in Barcelona in the 1940s. Neither did Albertina Cottrell Ullmer, a Dane in her eighties. The apartment she rents at number 240 Consell de Cent Street is not the retreat of an educated widow who has been living in the city for half a century, but a cover. Maria Betty Mayerhofer, a Munich woman in her fifties, wife of Ludwig Kopp, agent of the Nazi intelligence service, lives there with her.
The Bavarian is not just anyone. He is Gottfried Paul Taboschat’s right-hand man. Movie character. Berliner, in his forties, 1.85m tall, slender, with a scar on his right cheek. Don Pablo, for his friends, arrived in Madrid in the 1930s as manager of a lighting company and soon a member of the German high command.
In 1944 Paul Taboschat became head of the Nazi spy service in Barcelona. And where is his school of encryption, codes and invisible inks? Yes, they sense it well. In the Danish Cottrell’s apartment. The German network of informants operates from the Consell de Cent, while Don Pablo and his Cuban lover, María Teresa Pendas, traffic with the money that arrives from Germany and France.
Readers already know Pierre Lottier, one of the characters who are part of the money and art laundering networks, because La Vanguardia discovered the goings-on of the Gestapo dealer in Barcelona based on the biographical investigation that Xavier Juncosa published in January. Now the newspaper offers you a new work by the historian. A 400-page volume with a thousand biographies of Nazi agents, Francoists, fascists and French collaborators.
In the Diccionari d’espías (Nèmesi Història) a vast network of names and hidden relationships emerges, of shady figures, who moved through Spain, France, Italy and Germany during the Second World War and acted as informants for their totalitarian regimes. Thousand antennas. The 25,000 documents about Spain that Juncosa photographed in the spring of 2019 in the French archive of the Service Historique de la Défense de Vincennes, belonging to the military and police documentation of the Vichy period and which are today reclassified, allow us to reconstruct this underground Barcelona.
One afternoon, a man enters Hugo Vinçon’s glass and porcelain gift shop on Paseo de Gràcia, 96. He goes to the back room and leaves an envelope. A while later, a woman picks her up without needing to explain. French counterintelligence knows well that Vinçon is a mailbox for Nazi intelligence agents. The owner imports Bohemian pieces confiscated by the Germans in Czechoslovakia, under occupation since 1939. The store is also a meeting place for Nazi agents based in Barcelona.
The establishment is not the only thing that does this double function. The Bauer jewelry store, at 270 València Street, is also a contact point for Nazi informants in the city, in relation to the services that operate in Lisbon. In addition, large quantities of diamonds from Nazi looting from Antwerp are bleached and sold in the store. The jeweler, Rudolf Bauer, is a short, red-haired, athletic-looking man, and his business is closely related to the Reich consul in Barcelona, ??Friedrich Rueggeberg, who coordinates regional information services.
The women’s clothing store Ekamoda, at Rambla de Catalunya, 100, is run by Swiss Edith Keller. Blonde, in her thirties, she likes to wear a black turban. Along with her husband, Erwin Keller, she is also an informant. The same as her friend Lolita Haesse, whom she often meets in a bar near the establishment. “With the data and addresses that I provide, a tourist route of Nazi Germany could soon be organized in Barcelona,” Juncosa explains to this newspaper.
Spaniards also work for the Nazi information services. Ubaldo de la Fuente Ramos, in his fifties, is the head of orderlies and the concierge of the Ritz Hotel, the most important meeting point for high-ranking German spies in the city. At the same time, an enigmatic twenty-five-year-old Argentine agent, dark-haired, slant-eyed, elegant, works for him. She calls French counterespionage America and she is in charge of identifying and monitoring the movements of the French at the Ritz.
The Frenchman Albert Bertie Köpke is in charge of recruiting Spaniards who will dedicate themselves to passing Germans and goods across the Pyrenean border. Ros, with a round face and blue eyes, is the husband of Carmen Taboada Montserrat from Sabadell. He acts as a passerby, for example, for Joan Macau Pagès, and also the German Hans Vogler, who is dedicated to smuggling from Puigcerdà. On one occasion he brings in 400,000 meters of photographic film, a suitcase full of watches and one with jewelry.
The majority of the spies, a large 60%, are of German nationality, but there are also Hungarians, North Africans, Italians, Russians… And Belgians, like Henri Masuy who, in his thirties, with straightened black hair and an aquiline nose, heads a network of laundering of works of art that connects Barcelona with San Sebastián and that collaborates with Catalan antique dealers, who act as a cover in exchange for a percentage.
There are also Austrian informants such as Ludwig Losbichler, who acts as a liaison between Barcelona and Tangier and deals with propaganda in the Arab circles of the city. He is even of Corsican origin, like a French hero of the First World War. After dedicating himself to politics in Marseille, Simon Sabiani arrives in Barcelona and organizes his own criminal gang with Marseille thugs who also work for the Nazis.
Juncosa’s thousand minibiographies will be a must-see for studying the period and complement his volumes on French counterespionage in Barcelona and Madrid, 1943-1945 (2020, 2021) and the biographies of the collaborationist and journalist Fernand-Joseph Sautès (2023) and Pierre Lottier (2024). The personal records in the spy dictionary are linked to each other and to other names up to a total of 2,500, most of which remained anonymous after the Second World War. The feeling you get when consulting them is that you will suddenly collide with a well-known name. If the book reaches Germany, many will find their grandparents.
