Max Victor Wenner (15 April 1887 – 4 January 1937) was a Briton of Swiss ancestry, textile business heir, country squire, wildlife photographer, citizen scientist (usually publishing as M.V.

[2] The exact circumstances of Wenner's death remain poorly understood but suggestions of Nazi involvement began shortly after the discovery of his body and have continued to the present day.

[21] Wenner's "Notes on Birds" journal from 1909–15 is held in the Alexander Library of the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology at the University of Oxford.

[6] Max's brother Alfred Wenner was a lieutenant of the Cheshire Regiment during World War I, ending his military career—due to ill health from wounds received—as a captain in October 1919.

[31] In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Max and Dolly were residents of Garthmeilio Hall [d], Corwen, Merionethshire[32] (now Llangwm, Conwy) in northern Wales, which has been a Grade II listed building since 1967.

[34] Also in 1931, Max V. Wenner, age 45 of England, UK, height 5 ft 7 in (170 cm), light complexion, brown hair, crewed the SS Pan America of the Munson Steamship Line traveling round trip from New York to Hamilton, Bermuda as one of 15 waiters (et al) listed on a supplementary manifest.

"[32] According to a New Zealand paper arguing the position that Wenner committed suicide due to overwhelming grief over his wife's death, the couple "enjoyed ideal happiness" at Batchcott Hall until Dolly was diagnosed with an unnamed serious illness.

However, when it came time for Wenner's habitual summer fishing trip to Iceland "where he owned a river" he initially wanted to forgo it and stay with Dolly.

[43][44] Max was the principal beneficiary of his late wife's estate, reportedly worth £90,000, but he was already a "very wealthy" man and was said to have given "large sums" to charity in the months leading up to his death.

He was reserved and uncommunicative and it was believed that he chose to live at Batchcott Hall because of its remoteness...There was one mysterious thing in Max Wenner's life—a room in his Shropshire mansion to which servants were denied access.

[9] The author of the 2004 countryside memoir The Prince of Poachers—whose father was the Long Mynd gamekeeper based at Manor Cottage in Ratlinghope—mentioned Max Wenner in his book:[45] One gets some fantastic winds up on the open moor.

I remember seeing a gun in the shape and size of a fountain pen that fired a three-sided bullet.A 2012 letter to The Daily Mirror in response to an article about the misadventures of murder suspect Lord Lucan brought up the tale of Max Wenner.

The writer, a resident of Church Stretton, stated, "It was rumoured Wenner was flying wealthy Jews out of Germany for gold and that German foreign minister Ribbentrop was involved.

On the morning of his death she kissed him goodbye at Essen Station and then, at his request, telephoned Cologne Airport, asking them to delay the departure of the Croydon airliner until he arrived.

[42]At the time of Wenner's death Olga was reportedly a private secretary of a director at a large factory of weapons and machines in the Ruhr area.

"[4] John Vincent Cain was a British pilot and petty criminal who would later claim to have delivered weapons and planes in early 1937 to Francisco Franco's Nationalists and other factions of the ongoing Spanish Civil War.

and Mrs. Cain or other informants had readily on hand the names of other inexplicable mid-air suicides, such as the "beautiful American sisters Jane and Elizabeth du Bois, who in 1935 leaped, in each others arms" out of a plane over Essex after the men they loved, a pair of RFC aviators, were killed in a crash.

[32] A contemporary researcher in Church Stretton has surmised that the Max Wenner incident was a copycat crime modeled on the 1928 disappearance of Alfred Loewenstein.

[16] The day after Wenner's disappearance an anonymous source was quoted in the London tabloid newspaper Daily Mirror, He was a gifted man and spoke eight languages.

He was also a good musician, naturalist, and a keen sportsman...I have known him entertain to dinner an English peer, the Prime Minister of Iceland, and officials of the Portuguese government, but he rarely talked about these people.

[14] According to a Belgian newspaper report on 13 January, suicide or accident were both unlikely; the paper speculated that someone familiar with Max Wenner's travel plans had hidden in a compartment in the tail of the plane.

[14] A New Zealand paper testified, "Experiments have been carried out with the airliner from which he fell to see if it were possible to fall accidentally, and these have shown that it is extremely difficult to open an outside door of the aircraft by mistake.

"[14] The coroner determined the cause of death was suffocation but Belgian broadcaster VBT recently interviewed a medical examiner who found that conclusion a bit odd: "Doctor Wim Van de Voorde regularly performs autopsies for the Limburg prosecutor's office.

"[2] Telegraf, a Czech-language weekly newspaper[60] published in the Washington, D.C.–Baltimore metropolitan area in the United States, asserted in February 1937 that there was no mystery: Wenner was pushed.

A nurse from Wenner's hometown of Manchester who had married a Genk townsman spoke at the funeral because it was thought that she would be most able to speak fluently in English at the service.

'"[42] On 10 January 1937, six days after Wenner's final flight, a 22-year-old native of Cologne known as Herr Kruft fell 1,220 m (4,000 ft) to his death from an airliner traveling from Düsseldorf.

It is recalled that it was near this area that the body of Max Wenner, the Shropshire landowner, who fell from a Cologne to Brussels airliner lay for missing for four days in January.

He concluded his military career in April 1945 with the rank of Hauptsturmführer and died 11 Oct 1968.Wenner's community, in the following years and decades, described his demise as a "tragic death" (1938)[20] and an "air accident" (1965).

[73] Wenner's documented observation in 1911 of a tree pipit was recorded in the Proceedings of the Isle of Man Natural History and Antiquarian Society in 1925;[74] in the early 1930s, in the Hungarian bird journal Aquila, Jakab Schenk cited a "lake loon" nest collection made by Wenner in 1914;[75] his photo of a nesting horned grebe appeared alongside a 1951 Icelandic magazine article by Björn J. Blöndal;[76] and his unpublished bird journal was cited in 1968 in an article on health issues of oystercatchers.

The plot involves children evacuated from London during the war and sent to the Shropshire countryside, where they meet Petronella, the lonely daughter of the cantankerous widower who lives at Hatchholt Hall.