Vivian Stranders

We've been writing this website for 19 years, which means that we sometimes can't remember who this or that profilee is. Benjamin Eisenstadt? Well, he invented a sugar substitute. That seems important...

So we guarantee that once Vivian Stranders' name pops up under "Archive Profile" or is encountered during one of our deep dives, we will not remember who she was. We say so because she's been in our queue for months, and every time we see her name, we need to look her up... And why does she have that very disturbing mustache?

That worrisome mustache is actually a hint, and not only to Vivian's gender. (Obviously, this Vivian is a man, a victim of the name becoming feminized during the second half of the 20th century.) Stranders was a British air force officer turned German spy turned Nazi propagandist. Stupid mustache.

Stranders spied for the Germans in the 1920s, was caught, convicted of espionage, served jail time, and retreated to Germany. There, despite being Jewish, he joined the Nazi party and served as an English-language propagandist. When the war was over, the Brits couldn't even charge him with treason, because he let go his original citizenship and became German!

Are we sure we want to remember him?