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Fanny, the Jewish Spy for Germany in World War I

(Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs) Lenny Ben-David - Fanny (Mina Weizmann) was a Berlin-trained doctor who immigrated to the Jewish homeland from Russia in 1913. Curt Prufer, a German diplomat, was also the head of German intelligence in Palestine, and he recruited Fanny to spy against the British. The British were allied with Czarist Russia, and Fanny was an anti-czarist socialist. Prufer dispatched his new recruit to Egypt in May 1915, where she was welcomed as a doctor at the overcrowded British military hospitals. To report to her spymasters, Fanny accompanied a wounded French soldier to Rome, then went to the German embassy in Italy. The embassy was under British surveillance. Weizmann was arrested and taken back to Egypt for trial, then was deported to Russia. After the war Fanny returned to Jerusalem where she married a British Mandate official. She practiced medicine until her death from disease in 1925 at the age of 35. Fanny was the youngest sister to Zionist leader and pro-British scientist Chaim Weizmann, who would become Israel's first president.
2023-01-26 00:00:00
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