
Frederick "Fritz" Joubert Duquesne (Du Quesne; 21 September 1877 – 24 May 1956) was a South African Boer and German soldier, big-game hunter, journalist, and spy.
Biography[]
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 a British officer and led an attempt to sabotage Cape Town and to assassinate the commander 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 the UK where he faced execution 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 British authorities declined to pursue the 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 and 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.