Was this the real Goldfinger?

Was a namesake of mine the inspiration for Ian Fleming’s best-seller, Goldfinger?

Prior to the outbreak of WW1, the head of the British section of the German Admiralty's intelligence service, the Nachrichten-Abteilung or ‘N’ division, was one W Lewis, but his real name was Gustav Steinhauer.  He had many other aliases, including the one to which I refer in my second novel, Now the Darkness Gathers, Mrs Reimers. He was a German naval officer who had been trained by the Pinkerton Detective Agency for his intelligence duties and he spoke fluent English.  Conversely, the United Kingdom had no single organisation responsible for counter-intelligence. However, in response to many scare stories of dastardly deeds being plotted by the Germans against Britain, largely stirred up by The Daily Mail and the novelists William Le Queux and Erskine Childers, the government set up the new Secret Service Bureau, the SSB, in 1909.  An army officer took responsibility for the Home Section, working with existing channels in Special Branch for counter-intelligence (later to become MI5) and a naval officer the Foreign Section, primarily charged with gaining intelligence on the Imperial German Navy and when Germany might go to war (becoming the Secret Service and MI6). I describe all this in Now the Darkness Gathers.

Steinhauer was well known to the SSB as he had co-operated closely with Special Branch during Queen Victoria's funeral to help foil an attempt by Russian anarchists to assassinate the Kaiser.  However, he had nefarious objectives once war with Germany broke out.  He devised a plot to blow up the Bank of England.  Fortunately, the plot was uncovered, but had it been executed, it would have destroyed Britain's economic ability to prosecute the war and changed history.  Ian Fleming was the assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence during WW2 and may well have come across the story.  Might Auric Goldfinger’s plot to put out of circulation the US gold reserves at Fort Knox been based on actual history?  For my novel, I came up with the plot to destroy the naval magazines in Kent and with it, the Royal Navy’s entire stock of cordite, a danger to which Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, was alert.

Like Ian Fleming, 'Everything I write has a precedent in truth.'

Gustav Steinhauer