The Greatest Traitor Read online

  Tens of thousands chose to make a run for it, mothers pushing prams, husbands wheeling handcarts with the few belongings they had time to snatch on the way out of their collapsing homes, and children laden with backpacks. The sky was alternatively red with fire, and dark and grey from smoke, and all around the city people wandered around caked in dust, looking like ghosts.

  Seventeen-year-old machinist Roos Molendijk, who had been hiding in a shelter near her home in Goudsesingel, fled through the streets with her mother and two young sisters when there was a brief lull in the bombardment: ‘Everyone was focussed on leaving the city. We were holding our hands to our heads because of the heat of the fires. There was no conversation with anyone else, it was all about yourself. I remember the sound of people fleeing as a strange, incessant mumbling noise.’ They found refuge in nearby Kralingen. The next day her father tried to return to the family home – only to find it had been completely destroyed. ‘He came back with burned feet – the city was still burning,’ Molendijk recalled.

  George Behar was sitting down to lunch with his Aunt Truss and his grandmother when the German aircraft struck. All three crouched down under the dining-room table with kitchen pans over their heads, waiting for the raids to finish. When they finally emerged, less than half an hour later, their house on Burgemeester Meinesz Plein had sustained only minor damage – one of the few that had remained largely intact amid all the wreckage.

  ‘The streets were full of people fleeing from the burning hell . . . many were injured, dazed or crying,’ he remembers. ‘In a nearby church an emergency hospital was immediately set up to deal with the casualties. I worked there all night, together with many other people from our neighbourhood. We felt both grateful and guilty that we should still have a roof over our heads.’

  But on this day, when it felt as if Armageddon had truly arrived, around 80,000 citizens of a bustling, dynamic city of 600,000 no longer had homes to return to. In just twenty-five minutes, Göring’s bombers had reduced Rotterdam to a smoking mass of rubble. Between 800 and 900 people died that day. For many months – indeed years – afterwards, Allied propaganda put the figure much, much higher, at around 25,000 to 30,000. In London, the bombardment dispelled any qualms the War Office and Bomber Command had over incurring civilian casualties in Britain’s planned attacks on Germany’s industrial centres.

  Not only had Rotterdam fallen that afternoon, but by nightfall the nation as a whole – with the exception of the province of Zeeland – had capitulated. General Henri Winkelman, commander-in-chief of the Dutch forces, felt he had no alternative as the Germans were threatening to mete out similar treatment to other major cities like Utrecht and Amsterdam. He signed the official articles of surrender the next day in the village of Rijsoord.

  Later that week, as some semblance of temporary order was being established in Rotterdam, George decided to travel to Scheveningen to find out how his mother and sisters were faring. He was taken aback when his knock on the door went unanswered and, on entering, he found the villa empty. All that remained were some unwashed teacups on the kitchen table, which was most unlike his tidy, meticulous mother. The story of their disappearance soon unfolded after conversations with neighbours. Catherine, Adele and Elizabeth had left in a hurry before the bombing. They were, in fact, one of the very last groups to board a ship and flee their country for England.

  The evacuation of Holland’s great and good had begun in earnest on Monday, 13 May. Queen Wilhelmina and her entourage left Dutch shores from the Hook of Holland at midday, aboard HMS Hereward and accompanied by the destroyer HMS Vesper. Not without a scare or two from nearby enemy planes, they docked at Harwich five hours later.

  On that same day, Mrs Behar was phoned by a friend and told that she had until 5 p.m. to report to the British Consulate, if she wanted to take up a berth on board a Royal Navy ship with her family. Catherine was assured that this offer – and the time constraint that accompanied it – would also have been relayed to her son in Rotterdam. But there was no way of knowing whether he would join them as Grandmother Beijderwellen had no telephone, and it was too dangerous to make the trip to pick him up, even if there had been time. Catherine could only hope that he would be at the quayside at the Hook of Holland that evening.

  In the mid-afternoon, the Behar family gathered up what belongings they could and made the ten-mile journey along the coast. It was an anxious, frightening experience for all those descending on the Dutch port. Of the six Royal Navy destroyers at the pier, HMS Windsor was the first to depart, carrying the most important cargo – Prime Minister Dirk Jan de Geer, his Cabinet and the rest of his Government. Then, in the following four to five hours, HMSs Janus, Malcolm, Vivien, Mohawk, Janus and Versatile lined up to take the remaining refugees. Disaster struck the last of these – Versatile was hit by a bomb and seven sailors were killed, thirteen injured. With her engine room out of action she could neither steer nor steam, but she was towed successfully out of the harbour and somehow managed to limp across to England by the following evening. Mrs Behar and her daughters docked safely at Southend early in the morning of Tuesday, 14 May.

  When George was able to piece together what had happened after his visit to the empty villa, he was relatively unperturbed. ‘In the frame of mind I was in, I would not have left even if I had received a warning,’ he would later reflect. ‘In my eyes that would have meant abandoning the sinking ship. Besides, I would not have left my grandmother alone in those dangerous times.’

  While he waited and hoped for news from England, George was able to resume his education. His school had survived the blitz of Rotterdam virtually intact, and studies continued just a week after the invasion. Summer exams were taken as usual, and he attained excellent marks in all subjects. Factories and offices reopened too, and, on the surface at least, life in the city went back to some semblance of normality.

  On 15 May, the first handwritten Resistance paper, Geuzenactie (Beggars’ Action), appeared. A month later, Bulletin – closer to a real newspaper as regards form and content – followed. In reality, though, in the early summer months of the occupation, there was little by way of serious resistance to the invaders. The people of the Netherlands were still stunned by events, struggling to understand what sort of country they were now living in and what the future might possibly hold.

  For their part, the occupiers did not want to alienate the Dutch. Hitler and his associates considered them to be of ‘superior’ Germanic breeding, almost 100 per cent Aryan. Ultimately they had in mind the complete Nazification of Dutch society: the integration of the economy into the German financial system and the elimination of the Jewish population. But at this stage, as long as they were receiving reasonable co-operation from a demoralised and pliant people, they were in no immediate hurry to fulfil these objectives.

  The remaining Beijderwellen family convened and decided it would be best if George spent the summer holidays far away from the horrors of the bombing with his Uncle Tom, a grain merchant who lived in the village of Warnsveld, not far from the town of Zutphen in the central province of Gelderland. Young George had always enjoyed his trips to this area, walking the hills and visiting the old castles and grand country houses. He also liked to accompany his uncle in his car when he made work calls on neighbouring millers and farmers.

  A fortnight into his holiday, however, this idyllic interlude was brought to an abrupt end. An elderly village constable knocked on the door and informed Uncle Tom that he was taking the boy into custody: young George was a British subject and, following instructions from the German authorities, would have to be interned along with the other Britons trapped in the Netherlands following the invasion.

  The shock was profound. George and his family had grown so accustomed to thinking of him as an ordinary Dutch schoolboy that they had long banished from their minds the inheritance of his father’s nationality.

  He was duly escorted on the train to the Rotterdam Police headquarters, where he spent a night in a cel
l. Aunt Truss arrived the next day to protest on his behalf, furiously berating the Dutch officials for locking up a teenage boy on the say-so of the hated invaders. Her indignation was to no avail. The following day, George was taken by two detectives to a camp on the sand dunes at Schoorl, a small village on the coast just north of Amsterdam.

  It was surely an alarming experience for a 17-year-old boy to be whisked away from his family and incarcerated in a detention centre overseen by the dreaded Waffen SS. At this time, however, life in Kamp Schoorl was a relatively benign experience. The commander, SS-Untersturmführer Arnold Schmidt, was well aware that thousands of his own countrymen had been interned by British authorities throughout the world and, at this early stage of the war, seemed content to observe the rules of international law. The food was prepared by a local cook who lived in the nearby village, and prisoners enjoyed the same menu as their prison guards from the German Ordnungspolizei. The inmates’ days were spent exercising vigorously, scrubbing the huts and keeping the rest of the compound clean.

  The camp consisted of French and British subjects, many of them young. On 22 June the morale of the former took a turn for the worse when the fall of France was announced. The German guards then lost no time in taunting George and his fellow Britons that they would be next, that the German army would be landing in England any time soon.

  George’s heightened sense of adventure and the self-reliance developed on his travels to Egypt ensured that his time at Kamp Schoorl was not entirely miserable though, and he had mixed feelings when, two weeks after the French capitulation, he was informed he was free to go. He and four others were allowed to leave. All were told it was because they were not yet of age to undertake military service. The Germans clearly felt the war was almost over and there was little prospect of these teenagers ever donning uniform. ‘I was by now accustomed to camp life and had begun to make good friends with my fellow prisoners. Though thrilled at the unexpected prospect of freedom and of seeing my family again, I felt sad to leave my new friends to an uncertain fate,’ George recalled.

  All the French were released a week later, but the remaining British prisoners were transferred to a German camp, Gleiwitz, in September, where they remained until liberated by the Russians in 1945.

  Throughout the summer, the speeches of Winston Churchill on the BBC provided a source of comfort and inspiration to the beleaguered Dutch. George was as enthralled as any listener, and his resolve to resist the invaders was only strengthened by these words from the Prime Minister on 14 July:

  All depends now upon the whole life-strength of the British race in every part of the world and of all our associated peoples and of all our well-wishers in every land, doing their utmost night and day, giving all, daring all, enduring all, to the utmost, to the end.

  Back in Rotterdam, young George was welcomed as a conquering hero. To be imprisoned by the hated Germans was something of a rarity in those early days of the war, and his schoolmates and neighbours wanted to hear every last detail.

  But the prospect of re-internment in November, when he turned eighteen, was now very real. At the same time, he had no news of the whereabouts of his mother and sisters and, in fact, had learned that a British destroyer had been attacked at the Hook of Holland. In his bleaker moments, he feared the worst. He certainly felt there was little to lose in fleeing from Rotterdam and so headed back to Zutphen, arriving on 16 October, and stayed for a while with Uncle Tom. Knowing that it was the first place the Germans would come looking for him, however, his uncle arranged for him to hide out with a farmer named Boer Weenink, who lived in a small hamlet called Hummelo, twenty miles from Zutphen, in the depths of the countryside. Another friend of Tom’s provided George with a fake identity card in case he was being sought by the authorities.

  In the meantime the boy helped out in the dairy and the cowsheds. He continued to go to church and, if he pondered his future after the war at all, it was to envisage himself as a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church. A religious calling had always attracted him from his early days in the thrall of the Children’s Bible. But his mind was really on the horror of here and now – the humiliation his country had suffered and the certainty of darker days to come. He wanted to play his part in the fight-back and ironically, given his religious instincts at that time, it was a priest who would set George Behar on the path of resistance and, ultimately, to espionage.

  Fifty-four-year-old Dominee Nicolaas Padt was a tall, slim, inspiring preacher with strong left-wing views, who belonged to an organisation called Kerk en Verde (Church and Peace), one of several active Christian pacifist organisations to emerge after the First World War. In 1938, he had felt America, France and Britain should take at least an equal share of the blame for the looming crisis in Europe and, though he still held that view eighteen months later, having observed the evils of Nazism, he was now preaching against it from his pulpit, week after week. On 28 June 1940, he was the first Reformed minister to be arrested, accused of criticism of the occupation on the basis of reports of his sermons. Reverend Padt spent six weeks in a cell in the German city of Emmerich before being released.

  George attended his confirmation classes and, as their friendship grew, was invited to the minister’s house for tea and to meet the family. It was widely known in the district that Dominee Padt had links to the underground movement, so in the spring of 1941 George asked his advice on joining a resistance group. The minister listened to his request, saying only at this stage that he would reflect on it and make contact later. A week passed by, then he asked George to join him on a visit to Deventer, a sizeable provincial town some thirty miles north of Zutphen.

  It was there, at a café in the central square, that George was introduced to a friend of Dominee Padt’s, a bearded, middle-aged man who gave his name as ‘Max’. After listening carefully to the teenager’s story, examining his British passport and analysing his motivations, Max said he needed an assistant to carry messages and parcels the length and breadth of the country. Would the youngster be interested? George needed little persuading, so there and then he was given his first assignment; he was to travel the following Monday to Heerde, a village some twenty miles north of Deventer, where he was to liaise with the local grocer. He was to say he had come from ‘Piet’ to collect the groceries and then wait for further instructions. The boy with a taste for adventure was about to take his first steps in a clandestine world that would become his life. He did so with some trepidation, but also with a sense of mission.

  Geographically, topographically and demographically the Netherlands was utterly ill-suited to a war of resistance. The country is small (little more than 30,000 square kilometres), flat (no mountains and very little forest to provide cover for partisans) and densely populated (nine million people at that time, the highest recorded population density in the world). Even the excellent transport links militated against any effective underground movement: Holland had an extensive and efficient railway system and roads of excellent quality, which enabled the German garrison of three infantry divisions and several regiments of the Ordnungspolizei (Order Police) to move around the country swiftly and maintain maximum control.

  Then, of course, there was the sheer isolation of the country in 1940. To all intents and purposes, Holland did not share a border with a neutral country. It was blocked off on its eastern border by Germany, faced occupied Belgium to the south, and had no links to the north, either, where Hitler’s troops stood vigilant in his Scandinavian satellites. On its western border, Holland faced England across the North Sea, but this coastal area – mainly dunes and beaches – was closely guarded by the Germans, both on land and by patrol boats in the waters.

  As a result, the organisation of any lasting resistance group along the lines of the French Maquis was a practical impossibility, even if the Dutch Resistance had possessed a stock of working weapons, which they did not until well into 1942.

  Instead little acts of defiance marked the opening months of the occupati
on, mainly centred around the Queen, with the Dutch showing renewed nationalist spirit. This symbolic opposition was demonstrated through growing flowers in the national colours, naming newborn babies after living members of the Royal Family, and wearing pins made of coins bearing the picture of Queen Wilhelmina. On 29 June 1940, the birthday of Prince Bernhard, people all across the country flew the national flag in defiance of a German ban. They also stopped work and took to the streets wearing carnations, the Prince’s favourite flower, in their buttonholes. The occasion would be remembered as Anjerdag (Carnation Day).

  All this was merely irksome for the invaders. What was more serious, and brought the ‘honeymoon’ period well and truly to an end, was the nationwide strike in February 1941. The Communist Party of Holland (by now illegal) printed leaflets and put the word out for the capital’s citizens and the rest of the nation to down tools in protest. Not only did Amsterdam workers join the strike, but also whole factories in Zaandam, Haarlem, Ijmuiden, Weesp, Bussum, Hilversum and Utrecht, with some 250,000 people taking part. It lasted a couple of days, during which occupying troops fired on unarmed crowds, killing nine people and wounding many more. Around 200 of the leading activists were arrested and locked up in Scheveningen prison, which came to be known popularly as the ‘Orange Hotel’. They were the first of several thousand resistance fighters who would find themselves incarcerated there in the next five years. Most were tortured and twenty-two were sentenced to death.