Paul Fackenheim, alias Koch, was a German Jew who became a spy for the Nazis during World War II. Although he did not do it of his own free will but to get rid of a worse fate and try to save his family from him.
Fackenheim was a World War I veteran decorated for his bravery in combat, and a staunch German patriot, as well as a friend of Hermann Göring. That didn't help him much when the Nazis put him in the Dachau concentration camp in 1939 .
In those circumstances and having infected a wound on his back, he went to the infirmary, even knowing that it could be his last day, since it was normal for prisoners not to be treated for infections, rather they got rid of them. To his surprise, not only was he treated for his injuries, but he stayed there until he was recovered.
He was then led into a room where two men in civilian clothes received him kindly. They were from the Abwehr , the German intelligence service. They knew of his participation in the previous world war, and they asked him if he wanted to do something for his country again and gain freedom along the way. In exchange, they promised him that nothing would happen to his wife and his son, who lived in Frankfurt. Unable to do anything else, Fackenheim agreed.
The Nazis needed a Jewish spy because they were convinced that Rommel would make his way through Egypt to Palestine at any moment. And it was essential to create a network of spies and saboteurs in the territory administered by the British that, they imagined, would become the next battlefield. Someone who could pass for local. Fackenheim had family in Palestine, spoke Hebrew, had been in the military, and was loyal to Germany, so he fit the bill.
Over the next few months, opposed by the SS and the Gestapo, who did not get along very well with the Abwehr (most intelligence officials were anti-Nazi, including its director Wilhelm Canaris), they trained him, taught him how to use the radio and to encrypt and decrypt messages using encryption codes.
On the night of October 10, 1941 he was dropped by parachute from a Heinkel 111 bomber over Palestine. He had to pose as a refugee, claiming to have escaped from Germany through Greece in a small boat. His first objective was to get false documentation and a job that would allow him to move around the area and spy on troop movements and the Haifa naval base.
But he was unlucky and his parachute drop had been leaked to the British by Himmler's agents to discredit Canaris and get the Abwehr closed. Persecuted for several days, he finally turned himself in and confessed that he had accepted the mission only to save his family, and suggested to the British authorities that they make him a double agent. But upon checking the false documents he was carrying in the name of Paul Koch, they mistook him for Erich Koch, an SS general, and took him to Cairo to stand trial for espionage. There, the lawyer who defended him managed to find a local Jewish woman who had known him before the war in Germany and she was able to correctly identify him.
However he spent the rest of the war in a prison camp . At the end of the conflict he was released and returned to Frankfurt, where he found that his wife and son had been murdered.
It was not the only case in which a Jew spied for the Nazis. At the same time as Fackenheim, several Armenian Jews and a Pole were also sent, with the same mission. But it was one of the few cases of Jews released by the Nazis from a concentration camp.
Michael Bar Zohar told the story of him in his 1971 book Koch, Hitler's Jewish Spy. Ernst Paul Fackenheim's record can be found at the British National Archives.