Jessie Jordan
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Jessie Jordan | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 23 December 1887 Glasgow, Scotland |
| Died | 1954 (aged 66–67) Hamburg, West Germany |
| Occupation | Hairdresser |
| Known for | Spying for Germany |
| Spouses |
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| Children | 2 |
Jessie Jordan (23 December 1887 – 1954) was a Scottish hairdresser who was found guilty of spying for the German Abwehr (military intelligence) on the eve of World War II. She had married again after her German husband died fighting for Germany, before she became a spy in Scotland. She was imprisoned and deported to Germany after the war ended.
Jordan was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1887, the daughter of Elizabeth Wallace, an unmarried domestic servant.[1] Later in her life, Jordan claimed that her father, a William Ferguson, had abandoned her mother to go to Canada,[2] but there is no name on her birth certificate. Her mother married widower John Haddow, with whom she had five more children. For a time, Jordan lived with her mother and stepfather in Lanark and later at 23 Friar Street in Craigie, Perth, Scotland.[3][2] By the 1901 census, she had adopted her stepfather's surname, Haddow. At the age of 16, she ran away from home and found work as a maid in a number of towns in Scotland and England.[3] In 1907, she met a German waiter, Frederick Jordan, whom she married in 1912. Jordan lived in Germany almost exclusively until 1937, becoming a German citizen by marriage. She returned to Perth briefly in 1919 after her husband was killed on the Western Front in 1918. In 1920, she was back in Germany, where she married her husband's cousin Baur Bamgarten.[1] By 1936, that marriage had ended in divorce, at which time she returned to Scotland.[4]
Jordan had two children: a son, Werner Tillkes; and a daughter, Marga.[3] Marga became an actress and singer. She married Hamburg merchant Hermann Wobrock.[3]
Return to Scotland
Several causes have been attributed to Jordan's decision to return to Scotland. Her marriage had failed and she saw herself as an "unwanted child" of Scotland as well as Germany,[5] and as her legal counsel would later claim during her trial, "the name of Jordan had in Germany a Jewish significance."[3] In her 2014 article on Jordan, Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones noted that the hairdressing business that Jordan ran in Hamburg was suffering owing to the predominance of Jewish customers.[3] The implementation of the Nazis' New Order caused another contributing factor to Jordan's move back to Scotland: when her daughter Marga attempted to return to her acting career she was required by German authorities to provide proof of an "Aryan" descent on her mother's side.[3] In July 1937, Jordan told the Glasgow Police Alien Registration Department that she was returning to Scotland to reconnect with her family and to find proof of Marga's Aryan descent.[3]
