Oddlet: Eddie Chapman · 1 min read
Aug 9, 2026
The Only Englishman to Win the Iron Cross
What does a Soho safecracker have to do to get personally decorated by the Nazis?
Eddie Chapman was a Soho safecracker with the Jelly Gang, a man who kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about his own crimes and drank with Noel Coward between jobs. In March 1939, cornered by plainclothes police mid-dinner on Jersey, he jumped through a closed dining-room window. He was rearrested that night and was still serving the sentence when the Germans took the island.
From his cell, he wrote to the Abwehr and offered to spy for them.
They took him. They trained him at a villa near Nantes, called him Fritzchen, and parachuted him into Cambridgeshire in December 1942 to blow up the de Havilland Mosquito factory at Hatfield. He landed, buried his radio, walked to a farmhouse, and phoned Scotland Yard. MI5 then faked the sabotage for him, using papier-mâché transformers and tarpaulins painted to look like collapsed walls, and the Luftwaffe's reconnaissance photographs confirmed the ruin. The Germans were so delighted they summoned him to Oslo.
There, in the spring of 1943, a Nazi officer pinned the Iron Cross to the chest of an English safecracker working for MI5. The citation was for outstanding zeal and success. They also gave him 110,000 Reichsmarks, an honorary commission, and a yacht.
No other Briton has ever received one.
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- Wikipedia – Eddie Chapman — Comprehensive overview: birth/death dates, criminal career, Abwehr training under von Gröning, parachute drop, Hatfield deception, Iron Cross, V-1 deception, MI5 dismissal, postwar life.
- MI5 – Eddie Chapman: Agent ZIGZAG — Britain's Security Service's own authoritative page on Chapman, covering his codename, the role of Tar Robertson's B1A section, the Hatfield deception, and Ronnie Reed's role as case officer.
- Wikipedia – Faked sabotage of De Havilland Factory — Dedicated article on the 29–30 January 1943 deception; describes painted tarpaulins, papier-mâché transformers, corrugated-iron mock walls, scattered rubble around Hatfield power plant, and the planted Daily Express story.
- Wikipedia – Dagmar Lahlum — Details the April 1943 meeting in Oslo, the engagement, her 19 May 1945 arrest, and the 1947 treason conviction and six-month sentence she accepted rather than betray Chapman.
- Frank Falla Archive – Eddie Chapman — Detailed timeline of Jersey arrest, escape attempts, deportation to Saint-Denis and Fort de Romainville internment camps, and the Abwehr release on 26 April 1942.
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