Uruguay-born World War I spy Augusto Alfredo Roggen was shot in the Tower of London on this date in 1915.

Like most German-on-British agents during the Great War — at least, the ones we know about! — he didn’t have much of a run. Although this son of a German national did it by the book by arriving legally and properly registering as a foreigner, he whistled on the security services’ frequency by sending a couple of postcards to a known-to-be-suspect address in the wartime espionage hub of Rotterdam.* The cards were copied and their sender was flagged.

After a few weeks of quietly monitoring his movements, British cops raided his hotel room while Roggen was on “holiday” at Loch Lomond. He had in his possession a revolver and equipment for writing in invisible ink; apparently he’d been intending to photograph facilities at Arrochar Torpedo Range.

Instead, he was tried at Middlesex Guildhall where he gave no evidence and made no defense. The intervention of the Uruguayan embassy on behalf of its national was to no avail.

* The Netherlands’ wartime neutrality made Dutch citizens — who could travel throughout Europe — natural spy recruits. The best-known monument of that era is the executed exotic dancer Mata Hari, who was actually a Dutchwoman named Margaretha Zelle.

On this day..

• 1943: The officers of the 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Handschar, during the Villefranche-de-Rouergue mutiny
• 1682: Ivan Khovansky
• 1524: Caspar Tauber, Protestant protomartyr of Vienna
• 1858: Preston Turley, drunkard preacher
• 1811: Anna Maria Zwanziger, "once beautiful, exceedingly beautiful"
• 1971: Victor Apaza Quispe, Arequipa folk saint
• 1814: Vicente Salias, Venezuelan national anthem author
• 1895: The Vegetarian perpetrators of the Kucheng Massacre
• 1912: Bertram Spencer
• 1773: David Reynolds, colonial counterfeiter
• 1961: Adnan Menderes
• 1938: Nikolai Kondratiev, purged economist