What was Nazi professor really doing at Weydale in 1938? Racially profiling Caithness travellers or spying for the Third Reich?

After our recent article highlighting state collusion with a Nazi professor racially profiling Caithness travellers, further evidence shows that he may have been spying for the Third Reich before the outbreak of World War Two.

Dr Lynne Tammi (68) has been researching the British government’s forced assimilation programme, known as 'The Tinker Experiment', and found that one of Nazi Germany's top anthropologists visited Caithness in 1938 and was aided by state officials, a children’s charity and local police as he made attempts to racially profile the county’s indigenous gypsy community, often referred to in a derogatory manner as “tinks” or “tinklers”.

“I’m going to continue with my research and have gathered screeds of data, making connections with academics in Germany who’ve provided me with lots of information,” said Dr Tammi, who is from a traveller background.

She said she is “dripfeeding” the latest research through her online blog and says that though she is happy to share this information, she has found that some less scrupulous individuals copy her work without giving proper citation.

An earlier chapter of her blog concerned the journey of Professor Wolfgang Abel to Caithness in 1938 and how he was able to carry out research for the Third Reich on the travelling communities of Caithness. Abel carried out anthropological research, focussing on situating gypsies and travellers as enemies of the Reich and a “danger to the purity of the Aryan race”.

Dr Tammi says she has found details that will be embarrassing to the Scottish government, such as the references to Wolfgang Abel’s links to leading figures in the British establishment and the Royal Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (RSSPCC), the charity now known as Children First.

Professor Abel had expressed an interest in carrying out scientific research on “gypsies, primitives and cave dwellers” and an RSSPCC inspector directed him to Caithness where local police guided him to traveller camps.

He paid a few pennies for any of the people who would be willing to have their heads measured as part of the now discredited scientific study called eugenics. This ideology historically led to harmful practices like forced sterilisation and discriminatory policies based on race and disability.

“There is still a narrative going around about gypsies and travellers being inferior and we all know where that leads to. It might not be eugenics and eradication, but when you treat a group as ‘lesser than you’, we need to be careful,” said Dr Tammi.

Her latest chapter comes after she was contacted by retired teacher Eleanor Leishman, who said she had some interesting information to share. “I swiftly made contact with Eleanor, who informed me that she was the niece of Ina Baikie, a schoolteacher at Weydale School in 1938.”

Returning to school after the summer break on August 23, 1938, Ina was greeted by two large caravans parked up in the playground area. The occupants, who informed her that they had the permission of the Education Authority to use the grounds as a base during their time in Caithness, were Wolfgang Abel, his wife and their research assistant.

The small primary school at Weydale, which was created more for a local gypsy settlement, who, up until the early 1900s, were banned from entering Thurso and settled at a quarry in the area. By the 1930s, Weydale was listed as a rural school open to all children aged 5-14 who lived in the catchment area.

Dr Tammi added: “It would be a further three days before Abel and his team began profiling the pupils of Weydale school. Despite her misgivings, and given that they had the blessing of the Education Authorities, Ina had no option but to facilitate the process. She ensured the visit was recorded in the school log.”

However, when Abel tried to interview some of the travellers at their camp close by, he was given short shrift. “A lot of travellers who were living at Weydale quarry were not happy.

“Some of the men had fought in the First World War and would have no dealings with the Germans. One of them produced an old rifle and threatened the Germans with grievous bodily harm if they didn’t go back to the Fatherland.

“Wolfgang immediately went to the police and asked for protection against their threatening behaviour, non-co-operation and illegal use of firearms. It was surely ironic that a police car escorted these Germans to every camp, and the tinkers complied, under duress, to have their photos taken, skulls measured, families indexed – all for sixpence as payment for their compliance.

“So there’s your collusion,” added Dr Tammi.

The John O’Groat Journal picked up on the story at the time, and a contemporary article questioned the motives of Abel a year before the Second World War broke out.

“However, as the John O’Groat Journal’s piece alludes to, there was much suspicion and indeed alarm at the local level. For, whilst Abel’s publicly stated objective was ‘to photograph and measure the physical characteristics of Gypsy travellers’, Ina, and indeed others, quickly came to suspect that it was not only [this] community that he was studying.”

One morning, while on her way to the school, Ina was stopped by a gypsy traveller elder named Charlotte who had been closely observing Abel and his team and concluded that their visit to Caithness had more than one purpose.

“Miss, they are spies. Will you tell the police? Nobody will listen to us, and if we don’t cooperate, they will charge us with poaching or frame us in another way,” she said.

Charlotte said that the Germans had “hidden maps and papers” inside the tyres of their vehicles and were asking questions about tidal patterns and other aspects of the local geography.

“Ina passed on what Charlotte had told her to the authorities, but they dismissed them as the rantings of a senile and shiftless woman.”

Abel was permitted to continue his racial studies of the Caithness traveller community and received help from the police to locate various camps. After war broke out, the Nazis embarked on a Europe-wide plan to eradicate Jews, gypsies and others deemed inferior.

Dr Tammi believes that Professor Abel’s studies of Caithness travellers would have ended with a plan of action leading directly to death camps had Britain been defeated.

She notes that the Germans were “clearly well informed” on the topography of the region after Caithness was attacked from the air, which included the first recorded daylight bombing of Britain at Bank Row in 1940.

“Perhaps, as Ina notes, old Charlotte was right all along.”

Another aspect of collusion involves Professor Abel’s wife’s aunt, whose husband worked with a major oil company and helped bankroll his foreign trips. Abel was also invited to meet the British ambassador to Germany and the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Dr Tammi added: “We will never know if Wolfgang Abel’s racial studies were used as a cover for espionage. What we can say, though, is that given his close friendship with Albrecht Haushofer [a man long suspected of spying], it would not have been difficult for him to gain access to an area of interest with few questions being asked.

“This, combined with the fact that he travelled onward from Caithness by sea to Norway, a route that German bombers and U-boats would take during World War Two, suggests that some sort of topographic scoping exercise was undertaken before Britain entered the war.

“With Abel and his team long gone and Reich records destroyed we cannot definitively state that Abel lived a double life of academic and spy – that said, I’m not a great believer in coincidences so my money would be on Charlottes conclusions – hat’s off to her for her keen eye and smart thinking.”

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