Max Wenner

Max Victor Wenner (15 April 1887 – 4 January 1937) was a Briton of Swiss ancestry, textile business heir, country squire, wildlife photographer, citizen scientist (usually publishing as M.V. Wenner), and possible MI6 agent engaged in European espionage in the interwar period. He fell, jumped or was pushed out of a plane flying over Belgium in 1937. The exact circumstances of Wenner's death remain poorly understood but suggestions of Nazi involvement began shortly after the discovery of his body and have continued to the present day. News articles published in the wake of his death described Max Wenner as a "man of mystery". or Didsbury, Manchester to a Swiss family with textile industry, transportation and machinery investments. In 1891 at age four he lived with his parents, seven siblings aged 12 years to 12 months, and a governess, in a home staffed by three servants, on The Hill, near the village of Alderley Edge, in Cheshire. His father Alfred Wenner listed his work in 1891 as "shipping merchant" Alfred Wenner married twice, first to Louise Egloff and then to her older sister Malvine Egloff. Max, along with Alfred Emil Wenner Jr. and Violet Beatrice Wenner, was a product of the second marriage, to Malvine, who was born in Austria but had Swiss residency. Max Wenner spoke eight languages, including fluent German and may have spent part of his childhood in Vienna.

Max Wenner and his sister Violet Wenner, presumably 1890s (Archive of Canton St. Gallen) Wenner attended Manchester Grammar School from 1900 to 1904, and the College of Technology, Manchester, and was listed as a "non-matriculated student" at Victoria University of Manchester in 1906–07. In 1911, Max lived with his widowed mother and older sister Rose at Bollin Fee, The Gables, Wenner was admitted as a member of the British Ornithologists' Union in 1912, and remained an avid birder for the rest of his life. In 1914 he collected a clutch of three common buzzard eggs from Vienna Forest near Tullnerbach, bird's-nest collection being a then-standard practice of the ornithological subfield oölogy. Wenner's "Notes on Birds" journal from 1909–15 is held in the Alexander Library of the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology at the University of Oxford.

When he was 25 years old, Wenner reportedly "took out one of the earliest flying licenses" at Hendon Aerodrome in 1912. Circa 1916, he was a "private in the 20th (3rd Public Schools) Batt. Royal Fusiliers, subsequently Flight Sub Lieut., Royal Flying Corps," and apparently served with the RFC until the end of the war in 1918.

On 1 November 1922, at the age of 35, Wenner married Martha Alice Spinner, called Dolly or Dollie, at St Martin-in-the-Fields Church on Trafalgar Square, Westminster. Wenner's occupation was listed as ornithologist, Dolly was described as a spinster of full age. Several of Wenner's nature photographs were published in Thomas Coward's Life of the Wayside and Woodland in 1923. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Max and Dolly were residents of , Corwen, Merionethshire Wenner's photographs were again used to illustrate a T.A. Coward book, Bird and Other Nature Problems, published in 1931.

The year 1933 saw him on an epic fishing trip to Iceland with his brother; the pair caught 77 salmon between them. The article about the 1933 fishing at Kjarrá mentions that Max could be irritable and had experienced intermittent depressions since his service in the Great War.

He became a resident of Shropshire, when he purchased the 17th-century home Batchcott Hall (Sometimes misspelled Bathcote Hall The total extent of his lands was .) Wenner apparently "entertained many shooting parties but rarely took part in them himself." Max was the principal beneficiary of his late wife's estate, reportedly worth £90,000, but he was already a "very wealthy" man and was said to have given "large sums" to charity in the months leading up to his death.

A 2012 letter to The Daily Mirror in response to an article about the misadventures of murder suspect Lord Lucan brought up the tale of Max Wenner. The writer, a resident of Church Stretton, stated, "It was rumoured Wenner was flying wealthy Jews out of Germany for gold and that German foreign minister Ribbentrop was involved. Wenner lived at Batchcott Hall, Leebotwood, Shropshire, and it's said that Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax accompanied him shooting." In 2015, Max's nephew, , a World War II veteran and retired British diplomat living in Houston, Texas, told a news writer that he had never heard anyone in the family mention Max Wenner meeting with Joachim von Rippentrop. Described as "an attractive brunette", she was said to live in a "small but comfortably furnished house with her aged parents and married sister." but "extensive research in German newspapers could not identify the existence of a Swedish consulate or consul in the city of Düren (which is closer to Aachen than Cologne). There were Swedish consuls-general in Aachen during the time under review (Fritz Mohren, a commodity trader) and Cologne (Richard v. Schnitzler, a banker and later Kurt v. Schröder, Schnitzler's son-in-law and also a banker)."

In December 1936, Wenner had proposed to her and she had accepted; they were to be married in Switzerland in three weeks. Another said "the lavatory door had been considerably damaged." John Vincent Cain was a British pilot and petty criminal who would later claim to have delivered weapons and planes in early 1937 to Francisco Franco's Nationalists and other factions of the ongoing Spanish Civil War. Wenner's nephew, Michael A. Wenner, described Cain as "possibly a not too reliable witness" in his memoir. Another article mentioned a pair of Swiss lovers jumping out of a plane over Basel in 1935, and a Canadian leaping from a plane over the Toronto airport the same year.

Discovery On 8 January, Wenner's body was discovered "in the forests of in Genk" According to the article written by Belgian researcher Alex Marut, Wenner's body was found at : A single lantern lit the way of the searchers for what might have been a badly battered corpse. And then it suddenly lay before us, as in a quiet sleep: the eyelids half open, the arms stretched out beside the body, the garments thrown a little from the body, but in no way torn or soiled. The lantern-light shone miserably on the somewhat pale but clean-shaven face of the well-dressed fifty-year-old Englishman. He was neatly clothed in a greyish sports suit, modern brown shirt with white collar, brown silk scarf, colored socks and shiny black shoes. Nothing was damaged on the clothing. Only the buttons of the coat had been torn off, and the collar seemed to have torn slightly loose...On Saturday, January 21, 2012, Gerard Vanalken had a conversation with Louisa Bijnens Terboekt, about the incident 75 years ago: 'I still remember well how in January 1937 a horse with a cart and thereupon a coffin came from the Terboekt woods. It was a cold winter and the unpaved dirt road was hard and frozen...A certain Konings would later find a box with a ring.' Another report said it was £65 and two letters, "one of which had not been completed." Per the Belgian researchers, Wenner's papers included a marriage permit. According to Belgian authorities there was no evidence of wounds received prior to the body falling through the tree cover and landing in the woods. In favor of a suicide theory, Wenner's cook-housekeeper Miss E.C. Humphrey told a newspaper that Wenner had been unwell since the death of his wife and that "for some time his nerves had been bad." published in the Washington, D.C.–Baltimore metropolitan area in the United States, asserted in February 1937 that there was no mystery: Wenner was pushed. According to a newspaper report, Wenner's estate was worth . Wenner left the manor of Church Stretton to his "friend and agent William Humphrey, of Stiperstones and later of Walcot" and from Humphrey's estate the land—recognized as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB)—was ultimately conveyed to the National Trust in 1965. (William Humphrey was the father of Wenner's cook-housekeeper Miss E.C. Humphrey.)

Burial Max Wenner, age 49, was buried in the municipal cemetery of Genk. Agricultural workers observed the body of Kruft falling out of the sky; his remains were found outside of the city. It was noted that means bad luck in German.

Wenner's death was reported 10 days after the fact in the Icelandic newspaper Fálkinn, with a headline that translated to "A British friend of Iceland has died":

For the past 5 years, Wenner has been here on land fishing for salmon, either in or at Stórhöfði in Borgarfjörður, which he rented. He was known all over the country for his skill with salmon and was one of the best sportsmen in Britain. He loved this country and people very much and wanted to do everything for Icelanders. Many people in this country will miss a friend instead...he had two good Icelandic horses on his farm, which he used daily. Mr. Wenner had planned to come here this summer, as he had done recently. There is still no information on how this tragic accident happened."

According to the Belgian researchers, "It is also strange that the Sabena aircraft Savoia-Marchetti S.73 with registration number OO-AGP, shortly after the German invasion of Belgium, was dismantled by the Germans on 16 May 1940 and taken away to an unknown destination. After the war, in 1946 Sabena had to have the registration of the aircraft canceled because the aircraft could not be found." The Flight Safety Foundation citing World Airline Crashes (1996) by Terry Denham says it was "damaged on the ground...destroyed to avoid capture by German forces" on 14 May 1940.

Belgian researcher Alex Marut also writes about the pilot of the flight, Albert Lassois:

Legacy Wenner's community, in the following years and decades, described his demise as a "tragic death" (1938) as well as at least one article published in the sporting magazine The Field, on the behavior of stoats. Wenner's documented observation in 1911 of a tree pipit was recorded in the Proceedings of the Isle of Man Natural History and Antiquarian Society in 1925; in the early 1930s, in the Hungarian bird journal Aquila, Jakab Schenk cited a "lake loon" nest collection made by Wenner in 1914; his photo of a nesting horned grebe appeared alongside a 1951 Icelandic magazine article by Björn J. Blöndal; and his unpublished bird journal was cited in 1968 in an article on health issues of oystercatchers.

In 1943, Malcolm Saville published Mystery at Witchend, the first book in what would become the long-running Lone Pine juvenile fiction series. The plot involves children evacuated from London during the war and sent to the Shropshire countryside, where they meet Petronella, the lonely daughter of the cantankerous widower who lives at Hatchholt Hall. Together the children explore the wilds of the Long Mynd and ultimately confront Nazi saboteurs. According to the history of Batchcott Hall, the tale of Max Wenner may have been a partial inspiration for the plot of Mystery at Witchend. and his sister Violet B. Wenner died in 1970. Max Wenner's nephew, Michael A. Wenner (1921–2020), son of Alfred E. and Simone Marguerite (Roussel) Wenner, included some biographical detail on Max in his own 1993 memoir So It Was. Michael Wenner was a "scholar, paratrooper, commando" and diplomat who served as British ambassador to El Salvador; he was also the last surviving veteran of the 151/156 Parachute Battalion of the British Army of World War II.