A hero or a conman? Unravelling the mystery of my grandfather’s life

William Cook has spent decades tracing the story of his grandfather, who he grew up being told was the type of man nobody should aspire to be. But then he found out about an act of true human kindness

Werner von Biel with his children (left), Schloss Zierow, and Manfred Alexander (right) (Supplied)

My grandfather, Werner von Biel, was born in a huge white house called Schloss Zierow on the Baltic coast of Germany, a few years before the First World War. I never met him. When I was growing up, his name was rarely mentioned, and only ever in the past tense, so I assumed he must have died before I was born.

Later, I learned that when I was a child, he was actually still alive. Yet by the time I made that discovery he really had died, suddenly, in another country far from home. He fell out of a train in Switzerland. The police said it was an accident, but my grandmother believed he might have been murdered. This is his story, or rather the story of the things that I now know.

Werner was the seventh and youngest child of Karl von Biel, the Freiherr (or baron) of a rural estate in Mecklenburg, one of the remotest parts of Germany. Bismarck said when the world ended, he’d go to Mecklenburg, because in Mecklenburg everything happens a hundred years later. As a fairly frequent visitor to Mecklenburg, I can confirm that his quip still holds true.