At the height of the Second World War, under the cover of darkness, a Nazi U-Boat surfaced in the Bay of Fundy and dropped off a lone spy on Melvin’s Beach near St. Martins, New Brunswick.
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The Nazi spy’s mission was to go to Halifax, one of the busiest ports in the Atlantic at the time. There he was to learn about shipping routes and times, and transmit that information to U-boats waiting at sea who would intercept and destroy the ships on their perilous journey to the UK.
The U-Boat, U-213, had previously hunted Allied shipping in the Atlantic before being recalled to Occupied France for its unusual special mission. A single well-trained German spy, Lieutenant Alfred Langbien of the Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence unit, boarded the submarine. On April 25th, 1942, the U-boat departed for Canada’s East Coast.
Seventeen days later, the U-Boat arrived off Grand Manan, New Brunswick. Its commander was anxious.
The Bay was heavy with a thick fog, and he quickly realized that the map of the coast he had been given was not accurate. He had also not been adequately forewarned about just how strong the tides were; the Bay of Fundy has the highest tides in the world.
Nonetheless, the captain pressed on. He took a full day to cross the Bay, staying close to the shore and recording every light he came across.
He recorded shipping navigation lights, which still operated even during the war. As he drew close to Saint John, he recorded powerful search lights sweeping across the dark waters, looking for submarines such as his.
The U-Boat stopped off the coast of St. Martins the next day, parking off Quaco Ledge, and through the periscope, the German spy watched the tiny little fishing village until nightfall.
That night, the U-Boat moved onwards, past St. Martins, to Melvin’s Beach, an isolated, long, flat open area surrounded by towering cliffs, which was deemed a good place for the spy to land.
As the U-boat moved into position, the German spy put on his full uniform. The punishment for being caught as a spy would have meant being shot, but if he was captured in his uniform, the Canadians would have to treat him as a prisoner of war.
Just what “the highest tides in the world” meant became all too clear to the Germans when they launched a dinghy from the submarine to drop the spy on the shore – what had been expected to be a short jaunt turned into a four-hour ordeal.
The sailors eventually made it to the beach, dropped off the spy, and rowed back to their U-Boat. It soon dipped below the dark surface and disappeared.
The U-Boat had been ordered to not leave the Bay of Fundy until it sank a ship outside of Saint John. However, once again beset by bad fog and increasingly perplexed and annoyed by the enormous tides, the U-Boat commander departed the Maritimes without sinking anything.
Now completely alone on a cold May night in a strange land, the spy changed into civilian clothes and burned his uniform on Melvin’s Beach.
He buried the charred remains amid its pebbles.
That night, the spy walked the two and a half hours through the dark from the isolated beach near what is now Fundy Trail Parkway to the nearby fishing village of St. Martins, which the spy had earlier watched through the U-Boat’s periscope.
When he finally arrived in St. Martins, he ventured into the first shop he saw, Huttge’s General Store.
There, the spy introduced himself as “Alfred Haskins from Toronto.”
Far from being questioned about being an outsider, the spy found he was warmly welcomed. There met several local people and found they were surprisingly friendly to an outsider such as himself.
Meanwhile, the locals were quite surprised and perhaps a little entertained to learn that this mysterious “Torontonian” was asking where to find public transit to Saint John. There was no public transit to the small fishing village.
Instead, the helpful people of St Martin's offered to drive the spy all the way to Saint John.
The German spy purchased a hat at the General Store before he left, leaving his own behind at the shop. Nobody at the store questioned him about his out-of-date Canadian money.
Despite being a high-ranking and well-trained Nazi spy, Lieutenant Langbien decided sometime before he reached Saint John against completing his mission.
He took his transmitter and his papers and buried them.
Once in Saint John, he made his way to the train station. According to his orders, he was supposed to make his way to Halifax.
Instead, he bought a ticket to Montreal.
He had decided to start a new life in Canada.
The spy seemed to have done the exact opposite of lying low; he travelled Canada, making it all the way West to Flin Flon, Manitoba, before returning back East, eventually settling in Ottawa.
In 1944, he ran out of money and surrendered to Canadian authorities.
The RCMP were initially skeptical of his story about being a secret German agent. It was only when he led them to the charred remains of his uniform on the St Martins Beach they were finally convinced he was a Nazi spy.
The RCMP investigation told a story that began with the charred ashes of an enemy uniform on an isolated New Brunswick beach, a buried transmitter near a small fishing village, a remarkable amount of bar patrons all the way from Montreal to Manitoba talking about a friendly character who had explored Canada not as a spy but as a tourist, and a man who settled down and lived a quiet life in Ottawa.
Deeming that he did not actually do anything, the Canadian authorities chose not to prosecute Lieutenant Langbein for being a Nazi spy.
He spent the last year of the war in a prisoner of war camp and was then released.
This story is included in the book Backyard History: Forgotten Stories From Atlantic Canada's Past
