‘A valuable man in the right place’: the untold story of Fritz Fenthol and the Belmonte letter

ABSTRACT In June 1941, British intelligence agents claimed to have foiled a Nazi-orchestrated coup in South America by intercepting the so-called Belmonte letter from a German courier named Fritz Fenthol. Years later the letter and the coup plot were exposed as fabrications, and published accounts since then have cast Fritz Fenthol as an imaginary figure invented by British spies to better sell the lie. But Fenthol was a real person, and his alleged involvement in the Belmonte letter affair led to real consequences: namely, his arrest and internment in a Brazilian concentration camp from April 1942 until May 1945. This article tells the story of Fenthol’s entanglement in the Belmonte letter affair for the first time based on exhaustive research at 31 archives across seven countries. The mystery surrounding Fenthol, as it turns out, is as much a consequence of his own complexities as it is the contrivances of British spies. The Belmonte letter affair of 1941 was not Fenthol’s debut as an agent of fate, but rather a fitting denouement. He emerges, in the final analysis, as a casualty of deception doubly over, as his own subterfuge became fully intermingled with that of British and American officials in Latin America.