Nothing is what it seems in 1940s Barcelona. Albertina Cottrell Ullmer, an eighty-year-old Dane, is no exception. The apartment she rents at number 240 Consell de Cent Street is not the quiet retreat of a well-mannered widow who has been living in the city for half a century, but a front. Living with her is Maria Betty Mayerhofer, a woman in her fifties from Munich, the wife of Ludwig Kopp, a Nazi intelligence service agent.
The Bavarian is no ordinary man. He is Gottfried Paul Taboschat’s right-hand man. A movie character. A Berliner in his forties, 1.85m tall, slim, with a scar on his right cheek. Don Pablo, as he is known by his friends, arrived in Madrid in the thirties as the manager of a lighting company, soon becoming a member of the German high command.
In 1944, Paul Taboschat becomes the chief of the Nazi espionage service in Barcelona. And where is his school for encryption, codes, and invisible inks? Yes, you guess it right. In the apartment of the Danish Cottrell. From Consell de Cent, the German informant network operates, while Mr. Pablo and his Cuban lover, María Teresa Pendas, traffic with the money that arrives from Germany and France.
Readers are already familiar with Pierre Lottier, one of the characters involved in money laundering and art networks, as La Vanguardia uncovered the dealings of the Gestapo dealer in Barcelona based on the biographical research published by Xavier Juncosa in January. Now the newspaper previews a new work by the historian. A 400-page volume containing a thousand biographies of Nazi agents, Francoists, fascists, and French collaborators.
In the Diccionari d’espías (Nèmesi Història) a vast network of hidden names and relationships emerges, of shady figures who operated in Spain, France, Italy, and Germany during World War II and acted as informants for their totalitarian regimes. A thousand antennas. The 25,000 documents on Spain that Juncosa photographed in the spring of 2019 at the French archive of the Service Historique de la Défense in Vincennes, belonging to the military and police documentation of the Vichy period and now reclassified, allow for the reconstruction of this underground Barcelona.
One afternoon, a man enters Hugo Vinçon’s crystal and porcelain gift shop at Paseo de Gràcia, 96. He goes to the back room and leaves an envelope. A little while later, a woman picks it up without the need for explanations. The French counterintelligence knows well that Vinçon is a liaison mailbox for Nazi information agents. Its owner imports pieces from Bohemia confiscated by the Germans in Czechoslovakia, under occupation since 1939. The store is also a meeting place for Nazi agents established in Barcelona.
The establishment is not the only one that serves this dual function. Also, Bauer Jewelry, located at 270 València Street, serves as a liaison point for Nazi informants in the city, in connection with the operations in Lisbon. Additionally, in the store, large quantities of diamonds looted by the Nazis from Antwerp are laundered and sold. The jeweler, Rudolf Bauer, a short man with red hair and a athletic appearance, is closely linked to the Reich Consul in Barcelona, Friedrich Rueggeberg, who coordinates the regional intelligence services.
The women’s clothing store Ekamoda, located at 100 Rambla de Catalunya, is owned by Swiss national Edith Keller. In her thirties, blonde, she likes to wear a black turban. Along with her husband, Erwin Keller, she is also an informant, just like her friend Lolita Haesse, whom she often meets at a bar near the store. “With the information and addresses I provide, a tourist route of Nazi Germany in Barcelona could soon be organized,” Juncosa explained to this newspaper.
In the information services of the Nazi regime, there are also Spanish individuals working. Ubaldo de la Fuente Ramos, in his fifties, is the head of orderlies and concierge at the Hotel Ritz, the most important meeting point for high-ranking German spies in the city. Working for him is a mysterious twenty-five-year-old Argentine agent, brunette, with slanted eyes, and elegant. The French counterintelligence refers to her as América, and she is responsible for identifying and monitoring the movements of the French at the Ritz hotel.
The recruitment of Spaniards who will be in charge of smuggling Germans and goods across the Pyrenean border is managed by the Frenchman Albert Bertie Köpke. Ros, with a round face and blue eyes, is the husband of Carmen Taboada Montserrat from Sabadell. He acts as a smuggler, for example, for Joan Macau Pagès and also for the German Hans Vogler, who is involved in smuggling from Puigcerdà. On one occasion, they managed to smuggle in 400,000 meters of photographic film, a suitcase full of watches, and another one with jewelry.
Most spies, a whopping 60%, are of German nationality, but there are also Hungarians, North Africans, Italians, Russians… and Belgians, like Henri Masuy, in his thirties, with slicked-back black hair and a Roman nose, who runs a network for laundering art pieces that connects Barcelona to San Sebastián. He collaborates with Catalan antique dealers who act as a front in exchange for a percentage.
There are also Austrian informants like Ludwig Losbichler, who acts as a liaison between Barcelona and Tangier and is involved in propaganda in Arab circles in the city. Even of Corsican origin, like a French hero of the First World War. After being involved in 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-read to study the period and complement his volumes on French counterespionage in Barcelona and Madrid, 1943-1945 (2020, 2021), and the biographies of the collaborator and journalist Fernand-Joseph Sautès (2023) and Pierre Lottier (2024). The personal files in the spy dictionary are interconnected with each other and with other names, totaling 2,500, most of whom remained anonymous after World War II. The feeling when consulting them is that you will suddenly come across a familiar name. If the book reaches Germany, many will find their grandparents.
