The Dunera Boy Who Never Made It Home
A chambermaid knocked on the door. No answer. She knocked again. Silence. When she finally entered, she found a man dead in bed, a note beside him, she told the manager and the Police were called
The dead man's name was Tibor Kaldor. He was 44 years old. And he had died thirteen days after the Somerton Man was found on a beach just kilometers away.
But Tibor Kaldor's story didn't begin in Adelaide. It began a decade earlier, in a city on the brink of catastrophe.
Austria, 1938
According to the records we have, Tibor was 34 when he fled Austria. Born Tibor Schön in Kaposvár, Hungary in 1904, he'd lost his father at age two. His mother remarried, and in 1910, the family moved to Graz, Austria, where young Tibor took his stepfather's surname: Kaldor. He studied languages at Graz University, became fluent in multiple tongues, and built a life teaching German and working in clerical positions.
Then came 1938. The Anschluss. Nazi Germany annexed Austria, and Jewish intellectuals like Tibor knew what was coming. He fled west, Auatria to Italy to London, arriving in Britain as a refugee with whatever he could carry. He had no documentation.
In London, he found work as a clerk and tried to rebuild. He advertised himself as "Dr. Tibor Kaldor, PhD from Vienna University", credentials that would later prove impossible to verify. Vienna University had no record of him. Neither did any other institution in that city. Whether this was protective deception or simple resume inflation, no one knows. We did some digging and found that he had in fact attended Graz University and not Vienna.
What is certain is that when war broke out in September 1939, Tibor made a choice that would define the rest of his life: he refused to join the British military. To the authorities, this made him an "undesirable alien." And in July 1940, that designation put him on a ship bound for the other side of the world.
(Worth considering is that it wasn't that long before that the Spanish Civil War was ended. The Soviets who were anti Fascists, recurited and trained men to fight Franco on behalf of the people. As a matter of course, the Soviets took possession of the passports of volunteers. If the owners were killed in action or simply missing, the Soviets acquired hundreds if not thousands of identities that they would later make good use of.)
The Hell Ship
Eight days after the troopship Arandora Star was torpedoed en route to Canada—taking 805 internees to their deaths—Tibor was teken from Huyton Internee camp which he shared with luminaries like Klaus Fuhs, and boarded HMT Dunera at Liverpool.
The ship was designed to carry 1,600 passengers. On July 10, 1940, it departed with 2,542 souls crammed aboard: roughly 2,000 men and boys, Jewish refugees and anti-fascists like Tibor, mixed with 200 Italian POWs, 251 German POWs, and a handful of actual Nazi sympathizers. Guarding them were 309 British soldiers, many of whom had barely finished training.
The voyage lasted 57 days. There were ten toilets for over 2,500 men. The heat below decks was suffocating. Guards beat internees daily, confiscated medications, and threw possessions overboard, books with names inscribed, documents, personal effects, even false teeth. Some believed this was simple cruelty. Others wondered if the floating debris was meant to signal any prowling U-boats: Germans aboard. Don't sink.
Whether by design or luck, the Dunera wasn't torpedoed. But for Tibor, watching his belongings disappear into the Atlantic, the lesson was clear: to Britain, he was expendable.
On September 6, 1940, the ship finally reached Sydney. Australian medical officer Alan Frost boarded and was appalled by what he found. His report would eventually lead to courts-martial for the ship's commanders. But for the exhausted internees, some in heavy overcoats, others in summer clothes having lost everything else, justice didn't matter as much as solid ground.
Tibor was sent to Camp 7 at Hay, in far western New South Wales. Later, he was transferred with all others to Tatura in Victoria, they were making room for POWs. And in those camps, something remarkable happened.
The University Behind Barbed Wire
The Dunera Boys refused to be broken. At Hay, they created the "Collegium Hayense", an informal university offering 113 lectures per week to over 700 students. They taught mathematics, languages, philosophy, art. They staged theatrical productions. They created their own currency, designed by George Adams Teltscher, complete with sophisticated micro-writing techniques that would later appear in SOE intelligence manuals.
Tibor thrived there. A man who spoke multiple languages, who understood codes and ciphers, who had survived both the Nazis and the Dunera, it is likely that he found purpose teaching others.
In January 1942, he was released. Most Dunera Boys eventually returned to Britain. Many joined the military or were recruited into intelligence services. Some boarded ships heading back across those same dangerous waters.
And that's where this story takes a darker turn.
The Intelligence Disaster
In October 1942, the MV Abosso departed Australia carrying former Dunera internees. These weren't random refugees heading home. These were multilingual men with intelligence training, heading to Britain for SOE (Special Operations Executive) work.
The ship was torpedoed in the Atlantic.
Of the 44 former Dunera internees aboard heading for SOE training, 41 died. A 92% casualty rate.
Six months later, in April 1943, the SS Waroonga left port. Again, former Dunera Boys were aboard, 11 men returning to contribute to the war effort.
The ship was torpedoed.
Six of those 11 men drowned in the icy North Atlantic. A 54% casualty rate.
Two ships. Fifty-five former internees and Intelligence recruits. Forty-seven dead.
U-boats didn't target specific ships by accident. German naval intelligence didn't randomly sink vessels carrying precisely the men being recruited for British intelligence operations. The statistical probability of these sinkings being coincidental is essentially zero.
It is highly likely that someone in Australia, or South Africa, was reporting Dunera Boy SOE recruits movements to German intelligence.
The network was compromised from the beginning.
And Tibor Kaldor, who had been released in January 1942, just nine months before the Abosso went down, stayed in Australia. He didn't board those ships. He didn't join his fellow internees heading back to Britain.
Why?
The Question
Tibor settled in Windsor, Melbourne, at 10 The Avenue, boarding with a music teacher named Miss C. Brown. He advertised as a language instructor. He worked as an insurance clerk. He applied for British citizenship which was granted on November 9, 1948, just one month before his death.
And then, on Monday, December 6, 1948, he walked into the South Australian Tourism Commission office in Melbourne and purchased an accommodation voucher for the Victoria Hotel in Adelaide, a full days travel by train from Melbourne.
Five days later, he was on such a train train heading west.
By Sunday, December 12, he'd checked into Room 3, a first-floor room accessible via the front desk and also via a side staircase from an alley, allowing entry without passing through the main lobby.
Three days later, he was dead.
The Scene
The Victoria Hotel stood at 89 Hindley Street, coincidentally just 100 meters from 200 Hindley Street, where Prosper and Jestyn Thomson operated their business, Clinic Distributors.
The same investigation team that had processed the Somerton Man's death two weeks earlier now processed Tibor's: PC Sutherland, Mr. Cowan, Mr. Cleland, and Dr. Dwyer. Detective Canney took possession of the notes Tibor left behind.
Dr. Kneebone at Royal Adelaide Hospital pronounced life extinct. The body was transported to the City Mortuary, where it joined one other male body already there: the Somerton Man.
Tibor would remain in that mortuary until February 23, 1949, when he was finally buried in West Terrace Cemetery, the same cemetery where the Somerton Man would eventually be laid to rest.
The police report listed his occupation as "process worker." His autopsy revealed a thyroid "the size of a tennis ball", an extreme abnormality never explained. The official cause of death: barbiturate poisoning. The official conclusion: suicide.
TIn the late 60s early 70s, the Paupers Graves part of the cemetry was destroyed by a a property developer jumping the gun ahead of approval for building permission. No chance of an exhumation for Tibor, then again his last wish was that his body be cremated, an unusual request given that he was Jewish.
But there was a problem.
The Last Letter
Tibor's suicide note was polite, apologetic, carefully structured. He asked that his body be donated to the university for research or cremated. He left his belongings to the Red Cross. He enclosed money for the hotel and specifically set aside ten shillings for the chambermaid who would find him.
He wrote: "I have informed a friend in London myself." I think that's called 'Iambic Pentameter' very poetic, Shakesperean in fact.
Yet in 1950, the United Jewish Overseas Relief Fund advertised in Melbourne newspapers, searching for Tibor Kaldor, believed to be a lawyer who had lived in London. If he'd informed anyone, why were they still looking?
And why did a man who'd just been granted British citizenship, who'd finally achieved the security he'd fled Austria to find, suddenly decide life wasn't worth living?
These questions might have remained unanswered forever, filed away as just another tragic refugee unable to cope with the weight of survival.
But in 2016, a researcher, Clive Turner, found a newspaper article about the death in the Victoria Hotel. I dug a little deeper and foud the Internee connection. And then i examined the the first paragraph of Tibor's letter and analyzed it jst in case for hidden codes, something extraordinary emerged.
Something that connected Tibor's death to those U-boat sinkings five years earlier? Possibly
Something that proved that a network set up in 1942 was compromised and was still being 'cleaned up' ? in December 1948?
Something that proved Tibor Kaldor hadn't written a suicide note at all.
He'd written an operational report.
Continue reading: PART 2. A HIDDEN CODE, SEVEN LETTERS REVEALED A MURDER? Next Week...
Note: This is an excerpt from the forthcoming book on the Somerton Man case. For the complete academic analysis with full timeline, sources, and forensic details, read the peer-reviewed paper: "The Tibor Kaldor Case: Intelligence Tradecraft Signatures in a 1948 Suspicious Death" available on Academia.edu coming soon..
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