Born on May 15, 1895 in Kreis Koschmin (in the province of Posen), Lothar Witzke was educated at Posen Academy. As a seventeen-year-old cadet, he entered the German Naval Academy.
By the beginning of the First World War, Witzke was a lieutenant in the Imperial German Navy on the light cruiser SMS Dresden (which played havoc with Allied shipping and hid from British warships). The boat was the sole survivor of the German Far East Squadron (led by Admiral Count Maximilian von Spee) after the loss in the Falkland Islands in December 1914. Witzke suffered a broken leg in the action. Together with other survivors of the crew, he was interned in Valparaíso, Chile. The SMS Dresden was eventually scuttled only three months later off the island of Juan Fernandez.
Early in 1916, Witzke escaped… and under an assumed name, he succeeded in reaching San Francisco in May as a seaman onboard the SS Calusa. In California, Witzke reported to German Consul General Franz von Bopp… who put him in touch with another saboteur (Kurt Jahnke) based in Mexico City. At this time, the American authorities knew nothing of the pair’s surreptitious activities. Both showed special aptitude for secret service work, and they were of a caliber far superior to Bopp’s other agents. Witzke and Jahnke cleverly covered their tracks, and they were never deemed as suspects during the period of American neutrality!
In addition to their work on the West Coast, Witzke and Jahnke made frequent trips east on sabotage missions. After Bopp was arrested, the two men gradually shifted their operations to the industrial eastern seaboard. Double agents of the U.S. Military Intelligence Corps connected Witzke to the March 1917 munitions explosion at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard in San Francisco. Later, Witzke himself implied that he had taken part in the massive Black Tom Island explosion in New York Harbor on July 30, 1916, killing seven people. The blast, felt as far away as Philadelphia and Maryland, rocked the harbor, shattered skyscraper windows, and pelted the Statue of Liberty with shrapnel!
Lothar Witzke was arrested at the Mexican border on the morning of January 18, 1918 near Nogales, Arizona. He possessed a Russian passport and claimed to be a Russian-American named Pablo Waberski. Also, a 424-letter cryptogram was found sewn into the left upper sleeve of his jacket. Several months later, the cryptogram was broken by John Matthews Manly, who worked with Herbert Yardley at the fledgling MI-8 and identified the bearer to the “Imperial Consular Authorities of the Republic of Mexico”.
Witzke was convicted via court martial at Fort Sam Houston and sentenced to death. He managed to escape, but was caught the same day emerging from a Mexican shack. On his return to prison, a razor blade was found in his cell, and since suicide was feared, Witzke’s top clothes were removed.
On November 2, 1918 Witzke’s sentence was approved by the department commander. But nine days later, the signing of the armistice at Compiegne put an effective end to the fighting, and his death sentence was never carried out.
On May 27, 1920, President Woodrow Wilson commuted Witzke’s death sentence to life imprisonment, and he was transferred to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. But German officials were soon pressing for his release. On April 30, 1923, the German Ambassador asked for Witzke’s release on the grounds that other countries, including Germany, had released all prisoners of war, including spies. At the same time, a prison report showed that Witzke had heroically prevented a disaster by entering a prison boiler room after an explosion. On that basis, Witzke was pardoned by President Calvin Coolidge and released on September 26, 1923. He was promptly deported to Berlin.
On his return home, Lieutenant Witzke was decorated with the Iron Cross, First and Second Class. He eventually joined the Abwehr… and after the Second World War, Witzke resided in Hamburg. He later served in the Hamburg Parliament from 1949 to 1952.
Lothar Witzke died on January 6, 1962 at the age of sixty-six.