Jan Willem Ter Braak (28 August 1914 – 30/31 March 1941) was a Dutch espionage agent working for Germany who operated for five months in the United Kingdom. Ter Braak, whose original name was Engelbertus Fukken, is believed to have been the German agent who was at large for the longest time in Britain during the Second World War, despite his short period of activity. When he ran out of money, Ter Braak committed suicide in a public air raid shelter.
Youth
Engelbertus Fukken was born on August 28, 1914, in The Hague (Van Boetzelaerlaan 140). His parents were Willem Briedé (born 1865 in Amsterdam) and Elizabeth Johanna Fukken (born 1886 in Rotterdam), who were not married because Willem's first wife refused to divorce him. In the end he had three brothers and three sisters. His father was a trader in cereals and later became an accountant. The family moved in 1917 to Noordwijk aan Zee, where they rented a villa at Duinweg 7. His mother died in 1920 of her eighth pregnancy.
Engelbertus Fukken went to the Zeevaartschool in The Hague in 1930. He was interested in politics and became a supporter of Nazi Party of Adolf Hitler (NSDAP), which came to power in 1933. In 1934 he became member of the Dutch National Socialist Movement (NSB).
His father died in December 1934 and he had to start working for his money. He got a job as an insurance agent in The Hague but after half a year he did not pay the customer's premiums to his employer and was arrested for fraud. He received a sentence of three months. After that he worked as a journalist with the weekly Noordwijker paper and probably also Leidsch Dagblad (a newspaper from the city of Leiden) but in 1937 he had to return to jail for six months because he had not fulfilled his obligatory duties towards the Reclassification authorities. He was thrown out of the NSB and became unemployed. He lived in several rooms in Noordwijk.
In 1939 he met a young woman who became his fiancée, and he was financially supported by her family since that time.
Recruitment by the Abwehr
In May/June 1940 Holland, Belgium and France were occupied by the Germans. In July 1940 the Hitler regime decided to send spies to England to prepare the invasion (Operation Sea Lion), which was planned for September. The Abwehr office (Ast) Hamburg (Herbert Wichmann and Nikolaus Ritter) became responsible for this so-called Operation Lena, in cooperation with Ast Brussels, especially for the spies who would land by boat on the shore of England.
Rittmeister Kurt Mirow from Ast Brussels went to Holland to recruit spies. After having found three spies in Amsterdam, he traveled to The Hague and Noordwijk aan Zee around 25 July. In Noordwijk he had a good relation: Dieter Tappenbeck (1912), who was a cousin of Rudolf Tappenbeck, the director of the famous Grand Hotel Huis ter Duin. Dieter was a brilliant young man, he had studied geology, had worked for the Dutch Press Office, was a real Nazi and worked at that time for one of the German Ministries in Berlin. But in July/August he was back in the Netherlands for propaganda work in the Reichskommissariat of Seyss Inquart in The Hague.
He suggested to Mirow that he ask his old friend Engelbertus Fukken to become a Lena-spy. (As children Dieter and Engelbertus had been pupils at the same school in Noordwijk.) Mirow did so, Fukken happily agreed and was turned into Jan Willem ter Braak. He chose this forename because of his admiration for chief editor Jan Willem Henny of the Leidsch Dagblad. The last name he cynically derived from the famous journalist Menno ter Braak, who published many articles against the Nazi policies.
Ter Braak left Noordwijk and his fiancée on August 1, came back on August 12 for a few hours to say goodbye and to give a present to his fiancée, and then disappeared to "go to France for work" as he told her. It is also possible that he first worked for a few months for the Dutch Reichskommissariat and was only turned into a spy in October, when Dieter returned to Berlin.
It is not clear where he was trained as a spy, although it is believed to have been Germany (Berlin and Hamburg). After his death, MI5 found boots and some of his clothes which were bought in Brussels, which would signify he stayed there for a while.
Arrival
Ter Braak arrived by parachute on a night between 31 October and 2 November 1940, landing near Haversham in Buckinghamshire. His parachute was discovered on 3 November but Ter Braak was not found. He had in fact made his way to Cambridge, where he arrived on 4 November.