Max Wenner
Max Victor Wenner was a Briton of Swiss ancestry, textile business heir, country squire, wildlife photographer, citizen scientist, and possible MI6 agent engaged in European espionage in the interwar period. He fell, jumped or was pushed out of a plane flying over Belgium in 1937. The exact circumstances of Wenner's death remain poorly understood but suggestions of Nazi involvement began shortly after the discovery of his body and have continued to the present day. News articles published in the wake of his death described Max Wenner as a "man of mystery".
Biography
Max Wenner was born 15 April 1887 in Manchester, England to a Swiss family with textile industry, transportation and machinery investments. In 1891 at age four he lived with his parents, seven siblings aged 12 years to 12 months, and a governess, in a home staffed by three servants, on The Hill, near the village of Alderley Edge, in the administrative county of Chester. His father Alfred Wenner listed his work in 1891 as "shipping merchant" and in 1901 as "shipper of Manchester goods & machinery". Alfred Wenner married twice, first to Louise Egloff and then to her older sister Malvine Egloff. Max, along with Alfred Emil Wenner Jr. and Violet Beatrice Wenner, was a product of the second marriage, to Malvine, who was born in Austria but had Swiss residency. Max Wenner spoke eight languages, including fluent German and may have spent part of his childhood in Vienna.Wenner attended Manchester Grammar School from 1900 to 1904, and the College of Technology, Manchester, and was listed as a "non-matriculated student" at Victoria University of Manchester in 1906–07. In 1911, Max lived with his widowed mother and older sister Rose at Bollin Fee, The Gables, and was a groomsman at the wedding of his sister Violet Beatrice Wenner to a young military officer and baron of the Kingdom of Württemberg. Wenner was admitted as a member of the British Ornithologists' Union in 1912, and remained an avid birder for the rest of his life. In 1914 he collected a clutch of three common buzzard eggs from Vienna Forest near Tullnerbach, bird's-nest collection being a then-standard practice of the ornithological subfield oölogy. Wenner's "Notes on Birds" journal from 1909–15 is held in the Alexander Library of the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology at the University of Oxford.
When he was 25 years old, Wenner reportedly "took out one of the earliest flying licenses" at Hendon Aerodrome in 1912. He also served with the Royal Flying Corps during World War I, having obtained Royal Aero Club aviators' certificate 1757 on 17 September 1915 on "Hall Biplane, Hall School, Hendon" as Victor Max Wenner. Circa 1916, he was a "private in the 20th Batt. Royal Fusiliers, subsequently Flight Sub Lieut., Royal Flying Corps," and apparently served with the RFC until the end of the war in 1918. Max's brother Alfred Wenner was a lieutenant of the Cheshire Regiment during World War I, ending his military career—due to ill health from wounds received—as a captain in October 1919.
File:Max Wenner album number 5 Royal Aero Club certificate nos 1480-1900.jpg|thumb|Max Wenner, age 28, Royal Aero Club photo album number five
On 1 November 1922, at the age of 35, Wenner married Martha Alice Spinner, called Dolly or Dollie, at St Martin-in-the-Fields Church on Trafalgar Square, Westminster. Wenner's occupation was listed as ornithologist, Dolly was described as a spinster of full age. Dolly was also from Manchester industrial wealth—she had reportedly inherited somewhere in the vicinity of following the death of her father, "Mr. Ferdinand Spinner, a Manchester shipping merchant." Several of Wenner's nature photographs were published in Thomas Coward's Life of the Wayside and Woodland in 1923. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Max and Dolly were residents of, Corwen, Merionethshire in northern Wales, which has been a Grade II listed building since 1967. Wenner's photographs were again used to illustrate a T.A. Coward book, Bird and Other Nature Problems, published in 1931.
Also in 1931, Max V. Wenner, age 45 of England, UK, height, light complexion, brown hair, crewed the of the Munson Steamship Line traveling round trip from New York to Hamilton, Bermuda as one of 15 waiters listed on a supplementary manifest.
The year 1933 saw him on an epic fishing trip to Iceland with his brother; the pair caught 77 salmon between them. The article about the 1933 fishing at Kjarrá mentions that Max could be irritable and had experienced intermittent depressions since his service in the Great War.
He became a resident of Shropshire, when he purchased the 17th-century home Batchcott Hall in the hamlet of Betchcott. In 1934 he bought the manor of Church Stretton and "had a third share in the Long Mynd. He improved the hall, adding a bird sanctuary, fishing lake and ponds." The total extent of his lands was. In 1935, he sued "the Midland Gliding Club, who acquired certain rights on the Long Mynd" and Flight magazine reported, "Mr. Max Wenner, of Batchcott Hall, Leebotwood, was granted by Mr. Justice Crossman an injunction against Mr. C. E. Hardwick and Mr. Alfred Morris to prevent gliding flights from the latter's sheepwalk on the brow of the hill, on the grounds that the gliding interfered with Mr. Wenner's sporting rights and spoiled the grouse shooting." Wenner apparently "entertained many shooting parties but rarely took part in them himself." According to a New Zealand paper arguing the position that Wenner committed suicide due to overwhelming grief over his wife's death, the couple "enjoyed ideal happiness" at Batchcott Hall until Dolly was diagnosed with an unnamed serious illness. She received excellent medical care at home and "for three months Mr Wenner nursed his wife night and day." However, when it came time for Wenner's habitual summer fishing trip to Iceland "where he owned a river" he initially wanted to forgo it and stay with Dolly. She insisted, and he went, but she grew rapidly sicker after his departure. She had lapsed into unconsciousness before his return and died shortly after he arrived. According to the newspaper, "Mr Wenner never recovered from that blow, and he continually reproached himself for leaving his wife at such a critical time. He grew lonely and morose, and acquired the reputation in the neighbourhood of a man of mystery. He made himself very unpopular in the district by shooting foxes and ordering hounds off his land." Wenner's wife Dolly, said to have been an "invalid", died 27 July 1936. Max was the principal beneficiary of his late wife's estate, reportedly worth £90,000, but he was already a "very wealthy" man and was said to have given "large sums" to charity in the months leading up to his death.
A Limburg paper reported that Wenner was thought to be "secretive and sometimes strange" and that he frequently traveled by air, to "Iceland and Switzerland repeatedly, but especially Germany." Writing in March 1937, a New Zealand paper reported, "In the neighbourhood he had the reputation of a man of mystery. He was reserved and uncommunicative and it was believed that he chose to live at Batchcott Hall because of its remoteness...There was one mysterious thing in Max Wenner's life—a room in his Shropshire mansion to which servants were denied access. A kind of attic, it was always locked. It is believed to have contained cases and boxes in which Wenner's private papers were stored."
According to the history of Batchcott Hall, now on offer as a holiday-house rental property:
The Batchcott Hall history asserts that there was at least one landing strip near the hall, "on the site of the original Midland Gliding Club or on the lower fields below Batchcott Hall." Both the Batchcott runway and the Asterton runway were demolished in 1939 at the outset of World War II to prevent them from being used by invading aircraft. The author of the 2004 countryside memoir The Prince of Poachers—whose father was the Long Mynd gamekeeper based at Manor Cottage in Ratlinghope—mentioned Max Wenner in his book:
A 2012 letter to The Daily Mirror in response to an article about the misadventures of murder suspect Lord Lucan brought up the tale of Max Wenner. The writer, a resident of Church Stretton, stated, "It was rumoured Wenner was flying wealthy Jews out of Germany for gold and that German foreign minister Ribbentrop was involved. Wenner lived at Batchcott Hall, Leebotwood, Shropshire, and it's said that Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax accompanied him shooting." In 2015, Max's nephew,, a World War II veteran and retired British diplomat living in Houston, Texas, told a news writer that he had never heard anyone in the family mention Max Wenner meeting with Joachim von Rippentrop.
At the time of his death in 1937, Max Wenner had a 34-year-old German fiancée, Olga Büchsenschütz from the district of Essen. Described as "an attractive brunette", she was said to live in a "small but comfortably furnished house with her aged parents and married sister." When they first met, apparently skiing at Lenzerheide in the Plessur Alps in Switzerland. An Australian newspaper claimed Büchsenschütz had been working as the secretary of the Swedish Consul-General at Düren, but "extensive research in German newspapers could not identify the existence of a Swedish consulate or consul in the city of Düren. There were Swedish consuls-general in Aachen during the time under review and Cologne."
In December 1936, Wenner had proposed to her and she had accepted; they were to be married in Switzerland in three weeks.
In March 1937, Büchsenschütz recounted their relationship to a New Zealand newspaper:
At the time of Wenner's death Olga was reportedly a private secretary of a director at a large factory of weapons and machines in the Ruhr area. Another account claimed that she was "private secretary to a well-known artificial silk manufacturer, and has made many trips with him in this capacity to Switzerland and other countries." At the time of his death, Wenner was said to have investments in spinning mills and other cotton manufacturing enterprises.