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Fanny Weizmann - Chaim Weizmann's Sister - Spied for Germany in World War I

(Jewish Policy Center) Lenny Ben-David - Zionist leader and pro-British scientist Chaim Weizmann's youngest sister Minna ("Fanny") was a Berlin-trained doctor who immigrated to the Jewish homeland from near Pinsk in Russia in 1913. A German diplomat, Curt Prufer, the head of German intelligence in Palestine, charmed Fanny into becoming one of his spies against the British. The British were allied with Czarist Russia, and it probably wasn't hard to turn Fanny, an anti-czarist socialist. Prufer dispatched his recruit to Egypt in May 1915, where she was welcomed as a doctor at the overcrowded British military hospitals. To deliver her information to her German spymasters, she crossed the Mediterranean and went to Rome to see the German ambassador to Italy, not aware that the embassy was under British surveillance. Weizmann was arrested and taken back to Egypt for trial. She was deported to Russia in the fall of 1915. After the war, Weizmann re-emigrated to Palestine where she worked in the Hadassah-Rothschild Hospital. Dr. Minna Weizmann practiced medicine until her death in 1925 at the age of 35. This is an excerpt from the writer's forthcoming book, Secrets of World War I in the Holy Land, Revealed in Photographs.
2019-07-19 00:00:00
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