Betrayal. Jonathan Ancer
He and his fellow students faced hostility from children from nearby schools who called the German pupils names like ‘bloody Jerry’ and shouted at them to ‘go back to Germany’. The German children had to be ready to fight; it was a question of survival. For young Gerhardt, this was an environment in which he had to dissemble all the time. One of Gerhardt’s earliest memories was of being invited to a birthday party. He arrived at the child’s house and handed a present to the birthday boy, who took it and then told the ‘dirty little Kraut’ to go home.
Gerhardt was very close to his mother. With her husband away in custody, she was left with no income and battled to care for Gerhardt and his older brother. She turned the family Blackwood Street home into a boarding house.9 Many of the lodgers were short of money and Julia, whom everyone called Mutti (‘mother’ in German), was sympathetic and often let them off paying rent when they couldn’t afford it.
After the war ended Alfred returned home from the camp an extremely bitter man. He may not have been a Nazi when he went into the camp but he was one when he came out. Gerhardt Senior became chronically moody. He drank heavily and blamed everyone for his misfortunes, especially the hated British. He also turned on his family and started becoming emotionally and, at times, physically abusive.
Shortly after their third son was born, Alfred and Julia divorced. Subsequently Gerhardt did not have much contact with his father, who by then had secured a job as a civilian architect for the South African Defence Force (SADF), designing plans for defence buildings and units. It was a difficult time in the teenager’s life. He had street smarts and was physically tough but he ran wild and got into trouble with the authorities. When Gerhardt was 15 he and a friend, the son of the American military attaché, took a government jeep on a joyride. They were caught and charged, not with stealing, but driving a vehicle without the owner’s consent. Alfred intervened, and instead of being sent to a reformatory, Gerhardt received ‘six strokes of the cane’.
Gerhardt didn’t finish school but when he was 16 enlisted as a boy seaman in the navy. He was sent to the Naval Gymnasium in Saldanha Bay, a seaside village on the West Coast. Here Captain (later Rear Admiral) Chips Biermann took Gerhardt under his wing and became his role model.10
After the Afrikaner nationalists took power in 1948, they began muscling out English-speaking South Africans in key positions in the army and navy and replacing them with Afrikaners. Gerhardt was never an Afrikaner nationalist, but was considered an Afrikaner partly because he was not of English descent but also because of his father’s influential connections from his time in the Koffiefontein camp. From early on, Gerhardt was earmarked for a senior position in the South African Navy.
Gerhardt idolised Biermann, who encouraged him to complete his schooling. He used his second year at the Gym, where he was also a signals instructor for the new intakes, to study for his matric by correspondence. In 1954, after completing his cadetship and matriculating, the seaman was selected to join eight others to take part in a course for midshipmen – the grade above naval cadet and below sub-lieutenant. The course involved eighteen months of intensive naval training.
Rear Admiral Peter Bitzker was another member of the group. He was a German who had been repatriated during the Second World War and had returned to South Africa in 1948. According to Bitzker, the nine seamen composed the first unit of midshipmen to be trained after the end of the war. ‘Gerhardt was a large fellow with a prominent nose, which is why we nicknamed him Jumbo … after the elephant,’ recalls Bitzker. Gerhardt was also nicknamed ‘the Brain’, because he was extremely bright.
The seamen spent the year and a half at the Naval Academy in Saldanha Bay and did everything together – eat, sleep, train and socialise. They became a band of brothers. The weekends were spent diving for kreef (crayfish), playing rugby (Gerhardt was flank and lock) and getting up to no good. ‘The nine of us were very close and Dieter was a good mate. I remember one occasion when he was still in a sailor’s uniform, before he became an aspirant officer, he went to a funfair. He’d had too much to drink and on one of these swings he was overcome with vomit. He threw up diced carrots and peas on the spectators below.’
After eighteen months of training, the nine men qualified as sub-lieutenants. Gerhardt turned out to be a first-rate sailor, winning the sword of honour, the prize for the best midshipman. Although they then went their separate ways, they remained close: their paths often crossed over the years. Bitzker went into the executive, the fighting arm, of the South African Navy and Gerhardt went into the engineering branch and was sent to England to study at the Royal Naval Engineering College in Plymouth. It was a time of close military cooperation between South Africa and Britain. The British Navy helped train South African naval officers, and the two navies worked together on designs of warship and weapons systems.
In England, Gerhardt learnt about ship construction and qualified as a marine engineer, which was rare in those days. He also forged strong friendships with the multiracial group of students whom he lived with at Plymouth. While he was in England, Gerhardt met Janet Coggin at a wedding. He was 23, and she was 21 and was working in a refugee camp in Peterborough. She thought he was ‘terrific fun’ and ‘terribly attractive’.11 He fell for her immediately. She was ‘an English rose, with a peaches-and-cream complexion and a stunning figure’. She had blue eyes and a rich crop of auburn hair.12 ‘Her figure, too, was extremely well proportioned. A most attractive person – in fact, in my eyes breathtakingly beautiful. Her personality was warm and loving,’ Gerhardt once wrote.
Janet had been raised by her father, Maurice, a true English eccentric, who had been jailed as a conscientious objector during the Second World War. She was a dreamer, a gentle and reserved member of the country set. Gerhardt, on the other hand, was rough and ambitious, and his interests were centred on the sea. Despite their very different backgrounds, they hit it off from the start and, four months after they met, they were married at St Budeaux Roman Catholic Church in Plymouth. Maurice, a pacifist, was not happy about losing his daughter to a military man but he put on a brave face at the wedding ceremony, and gave them £5,000 worth of shares and the use of one of his three old Rolls-Royces.
Shortly after they were married Janet fell pregnant and the couple’s first child, Annemarie Julia, was born. They had been married for two years when they came to live in South Africa. At first they stayed in the naval quarters in Simon’s Town but Janet was miserable living among the naval families and they bought a house called Fiddler’s Green in Noordhoek, a scenic coastal suburb of Cape Town, about thirty kilometres by road from the Simon’s Town naval base.
Gerhardt was appointed the engineer officer of the SAS Natal, the navy’s survey vessel, and spent a lot of time at sea. Janet fell pregnant again and their second daughter, Ingrid, was born in 1960. While Gerhardt was spending twenty-five days a month at sea, Janet spent her time looking after her daughters, some cats, dogs and horses, which she rode on the white sands of Noordhoek Beach. But she wasn’t happy: she did not fit in with the other naval wives and, more importantly, South Africa’s unjust race laws didn’t sit well with her liberal outlook. At that point in their marriage, Gerhardt was an affectionate husband, keen on family outings and holidays and, to his wife, he seemed so ‘normal’.13
In 1963 Gerhardt returned to England to study advanced weapons and radio courses with the Royal Navy at the Maritime Warfare School. It was during this stay that he boarded the train to London to offer his services to the Soviets.14
What drove Gerhardt to spy? And why for the Russians? Unpuzzling the different possibilities of a spy’s motives is complex and there are usually multiple reasons why people become spies. Two possible motives that have been suggested for Gerhardt involve his father. The first is that Gerhardt became a spy as a form of retribution for the way his father was treated during the Second World War. This doesn’t ring true because he was interred by Jan Smuts’s United Party government, not the National Party. The second is that Gerhardt was not seeking revenge for his father but was, in fact, rebelling against him: he embraced left-wing politics because of his father’s right-wing views.
However, General Herman Stadler, the security policeman who led the Gerhardt investigation, believed his motive had nothing