Jan Willem Ter Braak (28 August 1914 – 30/31 March 1941) was a Dutch espionage agent working for Germany who operated for five months in the United Kingdom.
Ter Braak, whose original name was Engelbertus Fukken, is believed to have been the German agent who was at large for the longest time in Britain during the Second World War, despite his short period of activity.
After that he worked as a journalist with the weekly Noordwijker paper and probably also Leidsch Dagblad[citation needed] (a newspaper from the city of Leiden) but in 1937 he had to return to jail for six months because he had not fulfilled his obligatory duties towards the Reclassification authorities.
In July 1940 the Hitler regime decided to send spies to England to prepare for the invasion (Operation Sea Lion), which was planned for September.
In Cambridge he found lodgings with a couple named Sennitt at 58 St. Barnabas Road, who accepted his story of having come from the Netherlands during the Dunkirk evacuation, having lived after that in two other places in South-England.
He had installed his suitcase transmitter in his room in St Barnabas Road but around Christmas the batteries had been running down, so since then he could only communicate with the Abwehr in Hamburg by letters, written with invisible ink.
He made daytrips by bus or train to small cities in the neighbourhood, such as Bedford, and travelled several times to London, where he is believed to have inspected the effects of the bombardments on buildings and the citizens.
[citation needed] In January 1941, Ter Braak was contacted by the Food Office about his ration card, which its records showed had been issued to a man named Burton, living in Homefields, Addlestone, Surrey.
He is thought to have travelled to somewhere around Cambridge, where he expected an aeroplane to help him out or provide him with further money, because he wore several layers of clothes in order to protect himself against the cold.
After the information release, the Dutch police found his fiancée, Miss Neeltje van Roon (born 1922 in Noordwijk aan Zee) in November 1946 and told her about his death.
In 1947, the Dutch Government asked MI5 if they could have an official statement on the death on Engelbertus Fukken, as his fiancée wished to make a claim for his life insurance policy, which he had put on her name when he left Noordwijk in August 1940.
Historian Winston Ramsey conducted research in 1976 about the days that Ter Braak was found dead and was buried nameless (1–8 April 1941).
He found out many things about his youth and recruitment in Noordwijk aan Zee, also with the help of family members of Ter Braak and his fiancée and some Dutch files in the National Archive in The Hague.
The only English authors who describe Ter Braak's recruitment in Noordwijk and his life in Cambridge in more than one page are Joshua Levine in 'Operation Fortitude' (2011) and James Hayward, in 'Double Agent SNOW' (2013).