Lisa von Pott

Lisa Louisa Elisabeth von Pott (18 February 1888 – ?) was an Austrian espionage agent, sculptor, secretary to the poet Rabindranath Tagore in the 1920s and 30s, and in 1928 the first instructor in sculpture at Kala Bhavana in Bengal. With the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 she was interned in India as an enemy alien, and in 1940 repatriated to Austria.

She was the organiser of a Nazi espionage group in Vienna, later known to the British security services as the "Von Pott Group". The group was in the pay of Dr Robert Wagner, an S.S. or S.D. officer, and spied on anyone in the city suspected of helping the Allies or having pro-British views. According to a witness, von Pott later admitted to the Russians that she had denounced to the Gestapo the members of a dinner party she had attended, resulting in them all being arrested and several being sent to concentration camps. She was last recorded as having left Vienna in 1945, possibly heading for Switzerland, and to be staying at the castle of a friend in an Alpine town.