Frederick "Fritz" Joubert Duquesne ( ; sometimes Du Quesne; 21 September 187724 May 1956) was a South African Boer and German soldier, big-game hunter, journalist, and spy. Many of the claims Duquesne made about himself are in dispute; over his lifetime he used multiple identities, reinvented his past at will, claimed family ties to aristocratic clans and famous people and even asserted the right to military titles and medals with no third-party verification.
Duquesne fought on the side of the Boers in the Second Boer War and as a secret agent for Germany during both World Wars. He gathered human intelligence, led spy rings and carried out sabotage missions as a covert field asset in South Africa, the United Kingdom, Central and South America, and the United States. Duquesne went by many aliases, fictionalized his identity and background on multiple occasions, and operated as a con man. As a Boer spy he was known as the "Black Panther", in World War II he operated under the code name DUNN, and in FBI files he is frequently referred to as "The Duke". He was captured, convicted, and escaped from several prisons.
During the Second Boer War, Duquesne was captured and imprisoned three times by the British and once by the Portuguese, and each time he escaped. On one occasion he infiltrated the British Army, became an officer and led an attempt to sabotage Cape Town and to assassinate the commander-in-chief of the British forces, Lord Kitchener. His team was given up by an informant and all were captured and sentenced to death. He later became known as "the man who killed Kitchener" since he claimed to have guided a German U-boat to sink HMS Hampshire on which Lord Kitchener was en route to Russia in 1916, although forensics of the ship do not support this claim.
After a failed attempt to escape prison in Cape Town, Duquesne was sent to prison in Bermuda, but he escaped to the US and became an American citizen. In World War I, he became a spy and ring leader for Imperial Germany, sabotaging and destroying British merchant ships in South America with concealed bombs. After he was caught by federal agents in New York in 1917, Duquesne feigned paralysis for two years and cut the bars of his cell to make his escape, thereby avoiding deportation to Britain where he faced murder charges for the deaths of British sailors.
In 1932, Duquesne was again captured in New York by federal agents and charged with both homicide and for being an escaped prisoner, only this time he was set free after the British authorities declined to pursue his wartime crimes. The last time Duquesne was captured and imprisoned was in 1941, when he and thirty-two other members of the Duquesne Spy Ring working for Nazi Germany were caught by William G. Sebold, a double agent with the FBI who half-pretended to be spying for the Germans. Duquesne was later convicted in the largest espionage conviction in American history.
Between wars, Duquesne served as an adviser on big-game hunting to US President Theodore Roosevelt, as a publicist in the movie business, as a journalist, as a fictional Australian war hero and as head of the New Food Society in New York. During the Second Boer War he had been under orders to kill Frederick Russell Burnham, Chief of Scouts in the British Army, but in 1910 he worked with both Burnham and then Rep. Robert Broussard to lobby the United States Congress to fund the importation of hippopotamuses into the Louisiana bayous to solve a severe meat shortage.
Early life Frederick Joubert Duquesne was born to a Boer family of French Huguenot origin in East London, Cape Colony, in 1877. He later moved with his parents, Abraham Duquesne and Minna Joubert, to Nylstroom in the South African Republic, where they started a farm. Abraham made his living as a hunter who also frequently traveled to sell skins, tusks and horns, and he hired local indigenous peoples to work the farm. He had two younger siblings, his sister Elsbet and his brother Pedro. He was a descendant of the French Huguenot naval commander Abraham Duquesne (1610–1688) and claimed his uncle was Piet Joubert (1831–1900), a hero in the First Boer War and Commandant-General of the South African Republic, although his family relationship is disputed.
As a youth, Duquesne became a hunter like his father. His hunting skills proved useful not only in the African veld, but also later in life when he would publish articles about and give lectures on big-game hunting. It was during one of his early hunting trips that Duquesne became interested in panthers. He observed a black panther patiently waiting motionless for the perfect time to strike while a cautious African buffalo approached and drank from a nearby water hole. The panther became his totem and its hunting style also became his. In the Second Boer War, Duquesne became known as the "Black Panther", and as a spy in the 1930s he stamped "all of his communiques to Germany with the figure of a cat, back arched and fur raised in anger."
At age 12, Duquesne killed a Zulu who attacked his mother. He used the man's assegai short sword to stab him in the stomach. Not long after the killing, a war party from a Bantu-speaking tribe attacked the area near Nylstroom, and the Duquesne family was forced to retreat to the nearby river. The family, along with six other settler families, fought a long gun battle against the Impi and Duquesne shot and killed several. When the fighting ended, his uncle Koos, his wife and their baby were all dead.
When he was aged 13, Duquesne was sent to school in England. After graduation, biographer Clement Wood states that Duquesne went to Oxford University for a year and then attended the Académie Militaire Royale in Brussels; however, his attendance records at these two institutions have never been found. Also, Duquesne himself writes that after he finished school in England he was sent to Europe to study engineering, but on the ship he met an embezzler named Christian de Vries and the two decided to take a trip around the world.
Second Boer War
When the Second Boer War broke out in 1899, Duquesne returned home to join the Boer commandos. Commissioned at the rank of lieutenant, he was attached to the general staff of Commandant-General Piet Joubert in Pretoria. Duquesne was subsequently wounded by a British bullet that went through his right shoulder at the siege of Ladysmith, and was later promoted to the rank of captain in a Boer artillery unit. Duquesne was captured by British troops at the Battle of Colenso, and was taken to Durban where he managed to escape.
After British forces began an offensive aimed at capturing Pretoria, a portion of the gold reserve in the city's central bank and national mint was sent by train to the small town of Machadodorp, then by road to the neutral harbor of Lourenço Marques in Portuguese Mozambique to be shipped to the Netherlands for the use of President Paul Kruger and other Boer exiles who had fled from Africa. A final tally showed about 1.5 million pounds (680,000 kilos) of gold bullion was removed from the central bank and national mint between 29 May and 4 June 1900.
Duquesne was in command of a shipment of gold bullion being sent by wagon to Portuguese Mozambique; however, it never made it to Lourenço Marques. While in the bushveld of Portuguese Mozambique, a violent disagreement broke out among the shipment's escort. This resulted in a violent confrontation that left only three wounded Boers (including Duquesne) and several indigenous porters alive. Duquesne ordered the porters to hide the gold in a nearby cave for safekeeping, along with burning the wagons and killing any wounded they found. He gave the porters all the oxen, except for one which he rode away on. Historian Art Ronnie argued that the buried gold, commonly referred to as "Kruger's Millions" is only a legend; however, in 2001 and 2013 there have been news reports about possible discoveries of the missing gold.
Duquesne rejoined the Boer forces in time for the Battle of Bergendal, but his unit was forced to fall back to Portuguese Mozambique. Many members of the unit, including Duquesne, were captured by Portuguese forces and sent to an internment camp in Caldas da Rainha, Portugal. For Duquesne, this would become a watershed event, as Ronnie noted "life would never be the same for him... In a few months, he would be launched on a forty-year career as a professional spy and counterfeit hero– a man who would constantly reinvent himself to suit the needs of the moment."
At Caldas da Rainha, Duquesne charmed the daughter of one of the camp's guards, who helped him escape to Paris. From there, he went to Aldershot, Hampshire and infiltrated the British Army. In 1901, Duquesne was posted to South Africa in 1901 as an officer. There, he passed through his hometown of Nylstroom, discovering that his parents' farm had been destroyed by British forces as part of scorched earth policies implemented by Lord Kitchener. Duquesne also discovered that his sister had been raped and killed, and his mother interned in the Nylstroom concentration camp. Ronnie writes: "the fate of his country and of his family would breed in him an all-consuming hatred of England" and "would turn him into what (a biographer of Duquesne) Clement Wood called: a walking living breathing searing killing destroying torch of hate".
Duquesne returned to Cape Town with secret plans to sabotage British installations and assassinate Kitchener. He recruited twenty Boers for his plans, but the group was betrayed by the wife of one. On 11 October 1901, while attending a dinner with Sir Walter Hely-Hutchinson, the governor of the Cape Colony, Duquesne was arrested for criminal conspiracy and espionage. He was court-martialled and sentenced to be executed along with his co-conspirators. The other members of his team were executed by firing squad, but as a plea bargain, Duquesne's sentence was reduced to life in prison. In exchange, Duquesne agreed to divulge secret Boer codes and to translate several of their dispatches. According to Ronnie, "for the rest of his life he swore he never betrayed the Boer cause but actually created new codes that would mislead the British." Duquesne was imprisoned in the Castle of Good Hope in Cape Town, a fortification built by the Dutch East India Company in 1666. The walls of the castle were extremely thick, yet night after night, Duquesne dug away the cement around the stones with an iron spoon. He nearly escaped one night, but a large stone slipped and pinned him in his tunnel. The next morning, a guard found him unconscious but uninjured.
Duquesne was one of many Boer prisoners sent to the British colony of Bermuda, an archipelago known for its frequent storm-wracked conditions, shark infested waters and dangerous reefs. According to Ronnie, Bermuda was an "impossible, hopeless, and impregnable prison of pink beaches and sunlit waters from which no prisoner could escape – or so believed the British." Duquesne escaped from several other prisoner-of-war camps, and on the night of 25 June 1902, he slipped out of his tent, climbed a barbed-wire fence, and swam 1.5 miles (2.4 km) past patrol boats and bright spot lights. He used a distant lighthouse for navigation until he arrived on the main island. Duquesne then went to the home of Anna Maria Outerbridge, a leader of a Boer Relief Committee. Outerbridge helped him escape to the port of St. George's, Bermuda, where another Boer Relief Committee member, W. E. Meyer, arranged for his transportation off the island. Within the week, Duquesne was a passenger on a ship heading to the United States.
In the United States